The True Story Behind the War Photographer Biopic Lee

When Kate Winslet set out to try and make a film about the photographer Lee Miller, she knew it couldn’t show everything. 

“She lived such a vast life, it would have been impossible to make a film about all of it,” Winslet told TIME when speaking for a recent profile. 

So Winslet, who produced the film and stars in it, decided to home in on one era in particular for what would become Lee, which premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival and is out in theaters Sept. 27. The movie, directed by Ellen Kuras, mainly takes place during World War II when Miller was on the front lines, taking some of the most iconic photos to emerge from the Blitz, the liberation of Paris, and the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. Winslet portrays Miller as an unapologetic force and pioneer in her field, who is specifically attuned to the suffering of those she captures in images. 

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The screenplay by Liz Hannah, John Collee, and Marion Hume has a flashback structure in which Miller, who was born in 1907 and died in 1977, is being interviewed later in life by a journalist, later revealed to be her son, Antony Penrose, played by Josh O’Connor. It’s an apt detail given that the film is based on a section of Penrose’s 1985 book The Lives of Lee Miller.

Penrose opens his biography by writing: “Lee Miller, fashion model. Lee Miller, photographer. Lee Miller, war correspondent. Lee Miller, writer. Lee Miller, aficionado of classical music. Lee Miller, haute cuisine cook. Lee Miller, traveler. In all her different worlds she moved with freedom. In all her roles she was her own bold self.” By the time we meet the eponymous subject of Lee, she has already lived some of those lives, and has embraced a life behind the camera. 

Hilary Roberts, who wrote a book and curated an exhibition on Miller, once told the New York Times: “She may have belonged to the first generation of women entitled to vote but was well aware she lived in a man’s world. Photography offered Miller an outlet for her personal frustration and a means of taking control.”

Before stepping behind the camera she had been a model for Vogue and a student of as well as muse for the surrealist photographer Man Ray. She had a friendship with Picasso. But the movie actively divorces Miller from some of the more famous men in her life. One of the opening scenes essentially recreates Miller’s photograph “Picnic, Île Saint-Marguerite, Cannes, France, 1937” of her friends on holiday, the women topless and free. But Ray, who is present in that photograph, does not appear as a character in the movie.

“[Kate] wanted to be true to the sensibility of women, that they had a certain kind of freedom, there was a certain laissez faire in their lives,” Kuras says of those early moments. “I also think in juxtaposition to later on you see how remarkably different it was and how everyone came to realize the difference between what was before and what was happening during the war.” 

For instance, we see Miller encounter one of her friends who was present at that party on screen—though not in the photo referenced above—Solange d’Ayen, played by Marion Cotillard, in Paris following the liberation. Solange, formerly glamorous, is now destitute and in despair. 

The movie doesn’t cover much of Miller’s life following the war, which included her marriage to Roland when she was pregnant with Antony. She also grappled with depression, but in her later years found a love of cooking. Penrose wrote that it “appealed directly to Lee’s curiosity about exotic things.”

In the eight years it took to get Lee off the ground, Winslet worked closely with Penrose, the real-life son of Miller and artist Roland Penrose, who followed in his mother’s footsteps to become a photographer. Additionally, she consulted with Miller’s surviving friends, including Bettina McNulty, who worked for Vogue and was a fashion publicist. “When I spoke to her it was very hard to decipher the things that she was saying,” Winslet says. “But she shared things with me that she just didn’t share and I knew that she was sharing it because she could feel that she didn’t have much time left and there were things that she wanted to say.” 

Beyond her eventual husband Roland, portrayed by Alexander Skarsgård, Kuras’ film focuses on two other key relationships during this time in Miller’s career: British Vogue editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) and fellow photojournalist David Scherman (Andy Samberg). Also clear is her hatred for the Vogue photographer Cecil Beaton, played by Samuel Barnett, evident in Antony Penrose’s book and in the film. The catty words between them offer some of the movie’s lighter moments. (“Lee loathed him and found his conceit, his technical incompetence and the flaunting of his antisemitic feelings repugnant,” Penrose wrote.)

It’s with Scherman that Miller experienced the most devastating horrors of the war. He once said, “During the war, Lee and I were mostly inseparable. We were together at the linkup with the Russians, and we were together at Dachau. We moved into Hitler’s headquarters in Munich.” There, they worked together on one of the most indelible images of Miller’s career. At Hitler’s house, Miller stripped naked and got in the bathtub setting up a self-portrait of her washing. Scherman snapped the photo, which acts as a veritable middle finger to the dictator. 

Lee also links Miller’s personal trauma to the abuses she witnessed during the war. When Miller was 7, she was sent to stay with family friends in Brooklyn while her mother was ill. During that time she was sexually assaulted and contracted a venereal disease. In the film, before the extent of her own abuse is revealed, Miller is seen defending a young French girl from harassment and expressing sympathy to a woman whose head was shaved after being accused of collaboration with the Germans. Winslet and Kuras therefore make the case that Winslet’s devastating past made her a uniquely empathetic journalist and artist. 

“Lee’s extraordinary acceptance of self has inspired me,” Winslet says. “It inspired me every day I was playing her and has inspired me every single day since.” 

source https://time.com/7022783/lee-miller-movie-true-story/

Cities Are on the Front Line of the ‘Climate-Health Crisis.’ A New Report Provides a Framework for Tackling Its Effects

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that extreme heat kills almost half a million people each year—more than war, terrorism and malnutrition combined. That number is likely to rise as the climate becomes hotter and less predictable.

But the threats to public health posed by climate change go well beyond extreme heat. Historic rainfall and rising temperatures are driving malaria, cholera and dengue outbreaks, and expanding these diseases into new regions. Meanwhile, air pollution from wildfires has been linked to everything from cancer to heart disease. 

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These effects will be felt most acutely by city-dwellers, where concrete absorbs and re-emits heat, and higher population densities allow pathogens to spread more easily. Despite nearly 70% of city leaders recognizing climate-related health threats, and more than 90% reporting economic losses from such events, less than a third of cities have a resilience plan that integrates climate and health, according to a new report produced by the Rockefeller Foundation, shared exclusively with TIME.

Read More: How the Cement Industry Is Creating Carbon-Negative Building Materials

With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Urban Pulse Initiative surveyed 191 city and civil society leaders from 118 cities across 52 countries,as part of a collaboration between Yale University and the Resilient Cities Network.

“While [cities] are particularly vulnerable, they’re also woefully underprepared for what is coming,” says Naveen Rao, senior vice president of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Health Initiative, which led the report’s development in partnership with thinktank Global Nation. The Foundation is committing $1 million to the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a global network of nearly 100 mayors, to support the implementation of the three-pronged climate and health strategy it outlines in the report.

The report highlights individual cities using innovative approaches to minimize climate-driven health risks. These isolated success stories could show a path forward for other cities facing what the report calls a “climate-health crisis.”

“The first prong [of the strategy] is to collaborate the climate/meteorological data with the health data,” Rao says. “There are other agencies that live and die by meteorological data,” explains Rao, citing aviation and agriculture. And while the WHO and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have collaborated closely for roughly a decade, integration at the local level is rare.

Read More: What Wildfire Smoke Does to the Human Body

One city making strides in this area is Rio de Janeiro. By integrating health and meteorological data, Rio developed an early warning system for dengue fever, a mosquito-borne viral disease, nicknamed “bone-break fever” for its debilitating aches. 

During Rio’s winter, when weather is generally cooler and dryer, dengue cases drop. But in 2023—one of Rio’s  mildest winters ever—cases of dengue remained unseasonably high. That September, the city’s Epidemiological Intelligence Center, a team established in 2022 with meteorological support from the city’s municipal government, alerted health authorities that the impendending wet season could create ideal conditions for an outbreak. 

“We were able to see where the number of cases was growing, where they were concentrated,” says Gislani Mateus, who is superintendent of health surveillance at Rio’s municipal health department. The epidemiological modeling, which used weather data, case numbers, and mosquito-population data from a network of over 2,500 traps, was used “to direct efforts to control both mosquitoes, and healthcare,” Mateus says. The strategy would evolve into the Dengue Emergency Operations Center last February, when the city declared a dengue epidemic. 

Though the team didn’t avert the epidemic, their models predicted a spike in dengue cases two months earlier than forecasted by traditional epidemiological models. Consequently, Rio fared better than other cities in Brazil’s southeast, and recorded its lowest ever death rate from a dengue epidemic. Mateus says they are now working with Brazil’s national health ministry to implement the strategy elsewhere.

Read more: Why Mosquitoes Are So Dangerous Right Now

Another city using predictive modeling against dengue is Bangalore, India, where a team used climate and health data to make AI-driven outbreak forecasts at the district level. But the vast majority, 77% of cities, do not use meteorological data in health surveillance systems, and replicating Rio’s success requires more than predictive modeling. 

“With climate change, it’s increasingly important that we have this union between weather and health in our epidemiological analysis,” Mateus says. “But it’s also critical we have public health services with sufficient numbers to attend to the population.”

The report outlines a second crucial prong to city preparedness: ensuring experts in areas such as climate change, health, urban planning, and transport are coordinating proactively before disaster strikes. “A smoke alarm going off makes no sense without a fire engine,” Rao says. Without this collaboration, even the best forecasts will not translate into timely, effective public health interventions.

Another city the report identifies as turning warnings into action is Dhaka, Bangladesh. In 2022, the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society (BDRCS) partnered with other organizations and government agencies to implement a data-driven early action protocol to respond to heatwaves. The protocol sets clear trigger points based on temperature thresholds.

The plan was approved by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, giving the BDRCS access to pre-arranged funding to support rapid response efforts when those thresholds were crossed, says Shahjahan Saju, who is assistant director and project coordinator of the BDRCS’s forecast based financing initiative. 

In April, Dhaka was hit with its longest heatwave in recorded history. But temperature forecasting meant the city was prepared to respond before temperatures reached their peak, with efforts such as distributing 3,500 umbrellas, providing water to 30,000 recipients, and offering respite from the heat to 15,000 people through three dedicated cooling stations, Saju says. The WHO and WMO estimate that scaling a warning system like this could avert almost 100,000 deaths a year.

Read more: How to Know When High Temperatures Are Getting Dangerous.

Early warning systems are a case of “low hanging fruit,” says Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the WMO, noting that many cities already collect the necessary health and weather information.

“It’s about linking those different sources of information in a way that you can put an early warning in place,” she says.

While Dhaka and Rio show how effective early action can be, a key question remains: How do you get millions of urban residents to heed public health advice? Enter the third prong of the report’s strategy: effective communication. The city of Lusaka, Zambia’s sprawling capital, found innovative ways to cut through the noise and deliver life-saving information and services when it mattered most.

In October, the Zambia National Public Health Institute reported an outbreak of cholera in Lusaka, which has been battered by both flooding and drought. By January, the casualty rate had hit 4%, four times the WHO’s threshold. Rachel James, interagency risk communication and community engagement coordinator for the Collective Service, a partnership between IFRC, UNICEF, and the WHO, recalls trudging through the streets in knee-high water. “That’s when it becomes very real.”

The high death rate was, in part, due to inaccurate risk perceptions, misinformation, and barriers to accessing health services. “To better understand what the community perceptions were,” the Collective Service visited communities, “talking to people who had survived cholera, talking to the families of people who died, and just people in the districts where there are a lot of cases,” James says. That information was shared with Zambia’s health ministry and partners to inform how they communicated, contributing to a 100% uptake of cholera vaccines, she adds.

Community engagement also revealed the barriers preventing people from accessing healthcare, such as lack of transport. In response, Zambia’s ministry of health and UNICEF jointly funded seven ambulances. Collection points were also established to provide oral rehydration solutions to those who did not require transport to a healthcare facility, James says.

Read more: How Cities Are Clamping Down on Traffic to Help Fight Emissions

Rather than waiting until the midst of an emergency, the Rockefeller Foundation report underscores the importance of developing “always-on” communication strategies. “It was because of our work that we were already doing with the Rockefeller Foundation in-country that we were able to respond immediately,” says Maureen Mckenna, who is global coordinator for the Collective Service. “We were already working in Zambia, setting up risk communication and community engagement mechanisms to be able to respond immediately to health emergencies.” 

Beyond providing a framework for city leaders and policymakers, the report says interventions that improve the resilience of healthcare systems to climate change carry “immense economic benefits.” Early estimates by research and data analytics consultancy Mathematica, commissioned by the Rockefeller Foundation, found that targeted heatwave prep in Dhaka could yield health benefits nearly seven times the cost in terms of lives saved. Yet less than 5% of climate financing goes towards adaptation, according to the Climate Policy Initiative. Rao says only a fraction of that goes to health-focused initiatives.

“We need to stay focused on mitigation, because we can’t adapt our way out of this problem,” Rao says, noting that those “that have done the least to cause this problem, climate change, are suffering the most.”

Last December, at COP28, governments and other stakeholders committed $1 billion to the climate-health crisis, including $100 million from the Rockefeller Foundation, at the conference’s first ever Health Day. But that is well short of the $11 billion each year Rao says is needed for low- and middle-income countries to adapt to climate and health impacts. “What needs to hold this whole thing together is more funding.”

source https://time.com/7024639/cities-climate-health/

Israel’s Netanyahu Appears to Downplay Hopes For a Cease-Fire as Deadly Strikes Continue in Lebanon

TEL AVIV, Israel — The Israeli prime minister on Thursday appeared to downplay hopes of an imminent truce with Hezbollah after the United States and its allies called for an immediate 21-day cease-fire to “provide space for diplomacy.”

In a statement released as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was en route to New York to attend the U.N. General Assembly, his office said there was only a proposal on the table and that he had not yet responded to it. The statement also denied that there had been any directive to ease up on fighting on the northern border with Lebanon.

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The comments raised questions about a new international initiative to halt increasingly heavy exchanges of fire that have killed hundreds of people in Lebanon and threatened to trigger an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah. The statement was issued as Israel threatens to launch a ground invasion into Lebanon to push the militant group away from the border and after an Israeli strike in Lebanon killed 20 people, most of them from Syria.

Soon after the statement was issued, the TV station of Lebanon’s Hezbollah group reported an Israeli airstrike in a suburb of Beirut. Al-Manar TV did not give details about the strike.

The Israeli military said it carried out a strike south of Beirut without elaborating. Military officials said details will would be released later.

The Israeli foreign minister, Israel Katz, previously said that the country would continue fighting “with all our might until victory and the safe return of the residents of the north to their homes.”

Hezbollah has not yet responded to the proposal for a pause in fighting. Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati has welcomed it, but his government has no sway over the group.

Hezbollah has insisted it would halt its strikes only if there is a cease-fire in Gaza, where Israel has been battling Hamas for nearly a year. That appears out of reach despite months of negotiations led by the United States, Egypt and Qatar.

In its statement, Netanyahu’s office said that “the fighting in Gaza will also continue until all the objectives of the war have been achieved.” Netanyahu is expected to meet with other world leaders on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.

In other developments, a far-right partner in Netanyahu’s government threatened to quit the coalition if a permanent cease-fire is reached with Hezbollah.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, head of the Jewish Power party, threatened to suspend cooperation with the coalition if a temporary deal is reached.

“If a temporary cease-fire becomes permanent, we will resign from the government,” he said.

It was the latest sign of displeasure from Netanyahu’s hard-line government toward international cease-fire efforts.

If Ben-Gvir leaves the coalition, Netanyahu would lose his parliamentary majority and could see his government come toppling down, though opposition leaders have said they would offer support for a cease-fire deal.

Israel launched a massive operation in Gaza after a Hamas-led attack into southern Israel on Oct. 7 in which some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed, and some 250 were taken hostage. More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since then, according to local officials.

Hezbollah began firing rockets into Israel one day after the Oct. 7 attack in support of its Hamas allies, and Hezbollah and Israel have traded fire ever since.

Israeli families of the hostages said they are pushing for a possible cease-fire deal for Lebanon to include provisions for the war in Gaza, especially securing release of the roughly 70 hostages still presumed to be alive and the bodies of some 30 others.

Gil Dickmann, whose cousin Carmel Gat was kidnapped and was one of six Israelis whose bodies were recovered from tunnels in Gaza in August, said the hostages’ families are feeling forgotten as attention shifts to the northern front.

“We know that these things are connected to each other, the northern part and the southern part. They’re all part of the same large situation which we are in from Oct. 7 on, and we’re very worried that if we don’t make the right decisions now, we will miss this amazing opportunity to get the hostages out,” Dickmann said on Tuesday, as hopes for cease-fire deal swelled.

He slammed Netanyahu for missing multiple opportunities to free his cousin and begged him not to miss another chance by agreeing to a truce with both Hezbollah and Hamas that would include provisions for the hostages. Dickmann’s sister-in-law, Yarden Roman-Gat, was released in a weeklong cease-fire deal last November, along with some 100 other hostages.

Israel has carried out days of heavy strikes across Lebanon, targeting what it says are Hezbollah rocket launchers and other military infrastructure. The militants have fired hundreds of rockets into Israel and on Wednesday targeted Tel Aviv for the first time with a longer-range missile that was intercepted.

On Thursday, an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon hit a building housing Syrian workers and their families, killing 19 Syrians and one Lebanese, according to the Lebanese Health Ministry. It was one of the deadliest single strikes in the intensified air campaign against Hezbollah.

Lebanon’s National News Agency said the strike occurred near the ancient city of Baalbek in the Bekaa Valley, which runs along the Syrian border. The news agency initially reported that 23 people were dead.

Hussein Salloum, a local official in Younine, said most of the dead were women and children, and that rescue efforts lasted through the night and into Thursday morning.

“We dug through the rubble with our own hands” until a small bulldozer was brought in, Salloum told The Associated Press by telephone. “We had very limited capabilities.”

The Lebanese Red Cross said it recovered nine bodies, while others were recovered by Hezbollah’s paramedic service and the Lebanese Civil Defense.

Lebanon, with a population of around 6 million, hosts nearly 780,000 registered Syrian refugees and hundreds of thousands who are unregistered — the world’s highest refugee population per capita.

Israel struck 75 sites overnight across southern and eastern Lebanon, the military said. At least 45 projectiles were fired from Lebanon early Thursday, all of which were intercepted or fell in open areas, it said.

Israeli strikes since Monday have killed more than 630 people in Lebanon, according to local health authorities, who say around a quarter were women and children. Several people have been wounded by shrapnel in Israel.

The fighting has killed dozens of people in Israel and driven tens of thousands from their homes on both sides of the border.

Israel has vowed to do whatever is necessary to allow its citizens to return, and it has moved thousands of troops to the northern border in preparation for a possible ground operation.

source https://time.com/7024667/israel-netanyahu-cease-fire-hopes-strikes-lebanon/

Oklahoma Prepares For an Execution After Parole Board Recommended Sparing Man’s Life

OKLAHOMA CITY — Oklahoma was preparing to execute a man Thursday while waiting for Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt to decide whether to spare the death row inmate’s life and accept a rare clemency recommendation from the state’s parole board.

Emmanuel Littlejohn, 52, was set to die by lethal injection for his role in the 1992 shooting death of a convenience store owner during a robbery.

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In six years as governor, Stitt has granted clemency only once and denied recommendations from the state’s Pardon and Parole Board in three other cases. On Wednesday, a spokeswoman for Stitt said the governor had met with prosecutors and Littlejohn’s attorneys but had not reached a decision.

The execution was scheduled for 10 a.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Littlejohn would be the 14th person executed in Oklahoma under Stitt’s administration.

Another execution was set for later Thursday in Alabama, and if both are carried out, it would be the first time in decades that five death row inmates were put to death in the U.S. within one week.

In Oklahoma, an appellate court on Wednesday denied a last-minute legal challenge to the constitutionality of the state’s lethal injection method of execution.

Littlejohn would be the third Oklahoma inmate put to death this year. He was 20 when prosecutors say he and co-defendant Glenn Bethany robbed the Root-N-Scoot convenience store in south Oklahoma City in June 1992. The store’s owner, Kenneth Meers, 31, was killed.

During video testimony to the Pardon and Parole Board last month, Littlejohn apologized to Meers’ family but denied firing the fatal shot. Littlejohn’s attorneys pointed out that the same prosecutor tried Bethany and Littlejohn in separate trials using a nearly identical theory, even though there was only one shooter and one bullet that killed Meers.

But prosecutors told the board that two teenage store employees who witnessed the robbery both said Littlejohn, not Bethany, fired the fatal shot. Bethany was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Littlejohn’s attorneys also argued that killings resulting from a robbery are rarely considered death penalty cases and that prosecutors today would not have pursued the ultimate punishment.

“It is evident that Emmanuel would not have been sentenced to death if he’d been tried in 2024 or even 2004,” attorney Caitlin Hoeberlein told the board.

Littlejohn was prosecuted by former Oklahoma County District Attorney Bob Macy, who was known for his zealous pursuit of the death penalty and secured 54 death sentences during more than 20 years in office.

Because of the board’s 3-2 recommendation, Stitt had the option of commuting Littlejohn’s sentence to life in prison without parole. The governor has appointed three of the board’s members.

In 2021, Stitt granted clemency to Julius Jones, commuting his sentence to life without parole just hours before Jones was scheduled to receive a lethal injection. He denied clemency recommendations from the board for Bigler Stouffer, James Coddington and Phillip Hancock, all of whom were executed.

The executions in Oklahoma and Alabama would make for 1,600 executions nationwide since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

source https://time.com/7024657/oklahoma-prepares-execution-parole-board-recommended-sparing-life/

Former NFL Star Brett Favre Reveals He Has Parkinson’s. Here’s What to Know

Former Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre said that he has been recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

The three-time NFL MVP made the revelation during his testimony before a House committee on federal welfare reform. Favre had previously been implicated for his connections to Mississippi’s welfare abuse scandal involving the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and investments he made in a company that was researching treatments for concussions. The founder of that company pleaded guilty to wire fraud charges and was accused of misappropriating funds received through TANF for personal use. Favre allegedly received TANF money via Mississippi non profit groups for public appearances he did not make, but was not criminally charged. He has paid back some of the money he received, but state auditors say he still owes additional funds to the program.

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“I lost an investment in a company that I believed was developing a breakthrough concussion drug I thought would help others, and I’m sure you’ll understand why it’s too late for me, because I’ve recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s,” he said in his testimony.

Here’s what to know about the disease.

What is Parkinson’s disease?

Parkinson’s is a brain disorder that results in uncontrolled muscle movements and tremors that can affect everything from the extremities to more core body functions such as swallowing and speaking. It generally occurs with age, but can also result from certain genetic changes that are passed down in families, as well as medications, exposure to toxins, and traumatic injuries to the brain. In an interview on Today in 2018, Favre estimated that he suffered from “hundreds, maybe thousands” of concussions during his decades-long NFL career, in which he once played nearly 300 consecutive games. Favre did not indicate whether his history of concussions was directly related to his condition, or provide any additional details about his diagnosis. But since his retirement from the NFL, he has spoken about his concerns about concussions and the dangers of chronic traumatic encephalopathy among football players, and his own experiences with worsening short term memory.

Are there treatments?

Currently, there is no effective treatment that reverses or slows down the progression of Parkinson’s—only medications or surgical interventions that can alleviate some of the motor symptoms by addressing changes in the brain chemical dopamine that contribute to the condition. Patients generally cycle through different medications, which often work for a while, but when the tremors or unpredictable muscle movements return or worsen, doctors can combine or add other medications. For those who no longer respond to available drugs, deep brain stimulation, in which surgeons implant an electrode in the brain to help control tremors, can help. But the implants only address tremors and involuntary muscles movements; they can’t slow other Parkinson’s symptoms, such as cognitive changes or balance issues.

The future of diagnosis and treatment

Researchers are working on novel treatment strategies and are developing new ways to detect Parkinson’s earlier. Most of these target alpha synuclein, a protein that accumulates in patients with the disease. Doctors currently rely primarily on clinical symptoms—like tremors, slow movements, or muscle rigidity—to diagnose the condition. But researchers are developing a new test that looks for alpha synuclein in the spinal fluid, which could be a sign of early Parkinson’s.

Until better treatments become available to address the root cause of Parkinson’s, however, even such tests might not be so useful. “The problem is that at this point, we don’t have any treatment to potentially slow the disease down,” says Dr. Rocco DiPaola, a neurologist at Hackensack Meridian Neuroscience Institute. “But down the road, should those treatments become available, then identifying people who are at risk earlier would be good to know, so we could potentially give them a medication that could either prevent or slow progression of the disease.”

source https://time.com/7024144/brett-favre-parkinsons-disease-explainer/

Biden in Farewell U.N. Address Says Peace Still Possible in Conflicts in Mideast and Ukraine

NEW YORK — President Joe Biden declared the U.S. must not retreat from the world, as he delivered his final address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday as Israel and Hezbollah militants in Lebanon edged toward all-out war and Israel’s bloody operation against Hamas in Gaza neared the one-year mark.

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Biden used his wide-ranging address to speak to a need to end the Middle East conflict and the 17-month-old civil war in Sudan and to highlight U.S. and Western allies’ support for Kyiv since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

His appearance before the international body also offered Biden one of his last high-profile opportunities as president to make the case to keep up robust support for Ukraine, which could be in doubt if former President Donald Trump, who has scoffed at the cost of the war, defeats Vice President Kamala Harris in November. Still, Biden insisted that despite global conflicts, he remains hopeful for the future.

“I’ve seen a remarkable sweep of history,” Biden said. “I know many look at the world today and see difficulties and react with despair but I do not.”

“We are stronger than we think” when world acts together, he added.

Biden came to office promising to rejuvenate U.S. relations around the world and to extract the U.S. from “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq that consumed American foreign policy over the last 20 years.

“I was determined to end it, and I did,” Biden said of the Afghanistan exit, calling it a “hard decision but the right decision.” He acknowledged that it was “accompanied by tragedy” with the deaths of 13 American troops and hundreds of Afghans in a suicide bombing during the chaotic withdrawal.

But his foreign policy legacy may ultimately be shaped by his administration’s response to two of the biggest conflicts in Europe and the Middle East since World War II.

“There will always be forces that pull our countries apart,” Biden said, rejecting “a desire to retreat from the world and go it alone.” He said, “Our task, our test, is to make sure that the forces holding us together are stronger than the forces pulling us apart.”

The Pentagon announced Monday that it was sending a small number of additional U.S. troops to the Middle East to supplement the roughly 40,000 already in the region. All the while, the White House insists Israel and Hezbollah still have time to step back and de-escalate.

“Full scale war is not in anyone’s interest,” Biden said, and despite escalating violence, a diplomatic solution is the only path to peace.

Biden had a hopeful outlook for the Middle East when he addressed the U.N. just a year ago. In that speech, Biden spoke of a “sustainable, integrated Middle East” coming into view.

At the time, economic relations between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors were improving with implementation of the Abraham Accords that Israel signed with Bahrain, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates during the Trump administration.

Biden’s team helped resolve a long-running Israel-Lebanon maritime dispute that had held back gas exploration in the region. And Israel-Saudi normalization talks were progressing, a game-changing alignment for the region if a deal could be landed.

“I suffer from an oxymoron: Irish optimism,” Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when they met on the sidelines of last year’s U.N. gathering. He added, “If you and I, 10 years ago, were talking about normalization with Saudi Arabia … I think we’d look at each other like, ‘Who’s been drinking what?’”

Eighteen days later, Biden’s Middle East hopes came crashing down. Hamas militants stormed into Israel killing 1,200, taking some 250 hostage, and spurring a bloody war that has killed more than 41,000 Palestinians in Gaza and led the region into a complicated downward spiral.

Now, the conflict is threatening to metastasize into a multi-front war and leave a lasting scar on Biden’s presidential legacy.

Israel and Hezbollah traded strikes again Tuesday as the death toll from a massive Israeli bombardment climbed to nearly 560 people and thousands fled from southern Lebanon. It’s the deadliest barrage since the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.

Israel has urged residents of southern Lebanon to evacuate from homes and other buildings where it claimed Hezbollah has stored weapons, saying the military would conduct “extensive strikes” against the militant group.

Hezbollah, meanwhile, has launched dozens of rockets, missiles and drones into northern Israel in retaliation for strikes last week that killed a top commander and dozens of fighters. Dozens were also killed last week and hundreds more wounded after hundreds of pagers and walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah militants exploded, a sophisticated attack that was widely believed to have been carried out by Israel.

Israel’s leadership launched its counterattacks at a time of growing impatience with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah’s persistent launching of missiles and drones across the Israel-Lebanon border after Hamas started the war with its brazen attack on Oct. 7.

Biden has seemed more subdued in recent days about the prospects of Israel and Hamas agreeing to a temporary cease-fire and hostage deal. But he insists that he hasn’t given up.

Biden used his remarks to condemn the “horrors” of the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 and said hostages taken by the group are “are going through hell.” He added, “Innocent civilians in Gaza are also going through hell.” Biden also condemned settler violence against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.

Biden reiterated his call on the parties to agree to a cease-fire and hostage release deal, saying it’s time to “end this war” — even as hopes for such a deal are fading as the conflict drags on.

Biden, in his address, called for the sustainment of Western support for Ukraine in its war with Russia. Biden helped galvanize an international coalition to back Ukraine with weapons and economic aid in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 assault on Ukraine.

“We cannot grow weary,” Biden said. “We cannot look away.”

Biden has managed to keep up American support in the face of rising skepticism from some Republican lawmakers — and Trump — about the cost of the conflict.

At the same time, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is pressing Biden to loosen restrictions on the use of Western-supplied long-range missiles so that Ukrainian forces can hit deeper in Russia.

So far Zelenskyy has not persuaded the Pentagon or White House to loosen those restrictions. The Defense Department has emphasized that Ukraine can already hit Moscow with Ukrainian-produced drones, and there is hesitation on the strategic implications of a U.S.-made missile potentially striking the Russian capital.

Putin has warned that Russia would be “at war” with the United States and its NATO allies if they allow Ukraine to use the long-range weapons.

Biden and Harris are scheduled to hold separate meetings with Zelenskyy in Washington on Thursday. Ukrainian officials were also trying to arrange a meeting for Zelenskyy with Trump this week.

In Sudan, where a humanitarian disaster has been created by a brutal civil war, Biden said “the world needs to stop arming the generals” and to tell them to “stop tearing this country apart.”

source https://time.com/7023958/biden-united-nations-general-assembly/

How Ryan Murphy’s Menendez Brothers Show Has Reignited a Decades-Long Controversy

A lurid story from history, chiseled stars engaging in heinous acts, a tornado of discourse whipped up so fast Glen Powell couldn’t even tame it, and a carousel of famously camp actors. It can only mean one thing—a new Ryan Murphy true crime joint.

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Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story hit Netflix last week, the second installment in an anthology that began with 2022’s Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Like its extremely contentious predecessor, the series recounts a scandalous crime from history in vivid (and not necessarily entirely factual) detail, this time homing in on the 1989 double homicide of Kitty and José Mendendez at the hands of their sons Lyle and Erik. 

Murphy pairs relative newcomers Nicholas Alexander Chavez and Cooper Koch, who play Lyle and Erik respectively, with veterans Chloë Sevigny and Javier Bardem as their parents, for his version of the headline-hitting crime that gripped America at the dawn of the courtroom TV era. What prosecutors presented as a case of two brothers offing their parents for a slice of their multi-million dollar estate was complicated by the siblings’ revelations, on the stand, of decades of sexual abuse perpetrated by their father as their mother looked on, or away, with willful ignorance. They claimed self-defense, arguing that they were convinced their parents were going to kill them, but when the trial came to an end, each one was convicted on two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, where they remain today.

Like Murphy’s Dahmer, the series has beamed a blinding spotlight on a case which had largely receded from regular household discussion in recent decades, though it’s generated interest on true crime podcasts and true crime corners of TikTok. New questions are being raised: Was the jury too harsh on Lyle and Erik? Would the public have more empathy regarding their allegations of sexual abuse if the trial happened today, in our post #MeToo era? How does gender come into play? Is it even ethical to make a series like this when both brothers are alive and still at the mercy of the penal system? And finally, have Ryan Murphy’s deep dives into cases like these veered too far into exploitation? Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story has whipped up these unwieldy questions in just a few short days, and the answers have been far from unanimous.

Read more: The True Story Behind Ryan Murphy’s Menendez Brothers Series

Monsters’ depiction of Erik and Lyle Menendez

At the heart of Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story are the eponymous brothers, played by Chavez and Koch. The series follows them as they plan and orchestrate the murder of their parents with illegally purchased shotguns, get arrested and jailed, obtain legal counsel and eventually get tried in court. All the while they recount the abusive nature of their past, from graphic details of their father’s repeated and violent sexual abuse to ritual humiliation and neglect from their alcoholic mother.

Chavez plays Lyle as the clearly dominant older brother with little remorse, while Koch’s younger, more vulnerable Erik is doe-like and pitiable. From the jump, the relationship between the brothers is presented as close. A little too close, as Nathan Lane, playing Vanity Fair writer Dominick Dunne, presents with a hammy wink that crushes any notion of subtext. Indeed, incest is touched upon in the series, and a possible sexual relationship between the pair is suggested at multiple points in the episodes as well as marketing materials. There’s a brief power-play kiss in the show’s first episode and then a sequence recounted as rumor later in the show that sees Sevigny’s Kitty walk in on the brothers showering together.

As may not surprise those who’ve consumed much of Murphy’s work, the salaciousness at the heart of the story is handled with little delicacy. Opportunities to empathetically explore the recurring nature of trauma are often abandoned in favor of leaning into titillating taboo.

Online discourse has suggested that the series glosses over the horror of what the Menendez brothers have claimed, although that’s not entirely true. The on-screen brothers recount their abuse in vivid detail, often with such candor as to inspire genuine discomfort in the viewer. One standout episode sees Koch command a 37-minute single-shot scene where he plainly speaks about the grimness of his childhood, with the constant sexual abuse treated as a kind of banality of evil under harsh fluorescent lights.

But this is often undermined by the series’ predilection for smut. You could argue that the juxtaposition between how the brothers retell their traumas over and over and the prurience with which they are treated by the outside world is a reflection of how the public treated their case, but when Chavez and Koch are seen soaping each other up in suds in a vanity shot, it’s hard to conclude that the show is prioritizing respect over low-hanging thrills.

Read more: The Story Behind the Therapist Who Played a Key Role in the Menendez Brothers’ Case

Erik Menendez slams Monsters

While many people online, including those who haven’t sat through the series’ 10 episodes, have loud opinions about Monsters, one voice cannot be ignored: that of Erik Menendez himself.

Erik, who is still in prison in California, released a statement about the series via the X account of his wife Tammie, who he married while incarcerated in 1999. “I believed we had moved beyond the lies and ruinous character portrayals of Lyle, creating a caricature of Lyle rooted in horrible and blatant lies rampant in the show,” the statement starts. “I can only believe they were done so on purpose. It is with a heavy heart that I say, I believe Ryan Murphy cannot be this naive and inaccurate about the facts of our lives so as to do this without bad intent.”

He goes on to say: “It is sad for me to know that Netflix’s dishonest portrayal of the tragedies surrounding our crime have taken the painful truths several steps backward—back through time to an era when the prosecution built a narrative on a belief system that males were not sexually abused, and that males experienced rape trauma differently than women.”

He ends the note by asking, “Is the truth not enough? Let the truth stand as the truth.”

The series examines both Lyle and Erik’s nature in order, perhaps, to get closer to discerning that truth. As the real Erik Menendez notes, Lyle is positioned as a cold-hearted yuppie at many points, though his vulnerability is explored in some moments, especially around how he recounts his experience of sexual abuse and the guilt he felt about not being able to protect his brother.

As for Erik, Murphy mostly interrogates the question marks around his sexuality. During the trial in 1993, the prosecution alluded to Erik’s homosexuality as an attempt to discredit his account of sexual abuse by his father. In the series, Erik’s fluid sexuality is explored explicitly in scenes with a fellow inmate in prison, and he tells his lawyer Leslie Abramson (Ari Graynor) that he doesn’t know how to define himself because his father’s abuse has fundamentally broken him. A lot has changed since the early ‘90s, and we understand culturally the valley between consensual gay relationships and abuse at the hands of a male figure. But Murphy is so obviously drawn to the dark allure of a queer villain and, in this case, that propensity can feel uncomfortably presumptuous.

The case for their exoneration

Even some who are critical of the show’s portrayals may be gratified to see that Murphy’s lens on the Menendez brothers’ story has reignited pleas for their exoneration. For a long time, the dominant narrative drawn from the headlines began and ended with the prosecution’s assertion that they were spoiled rich kids looking to remove a barrier to even greater wealth. As such, their case has been met with little cultural sympathy. But the brothers’ grueling testimony about their abuse was presented, in some scenes, almost verbatim in Monsters, leaving many viewers wondering how such little sympathy had been extended to them during their trial.

As the series progresses, it does increasingly convey empathy for the brothers and offers a substantial amount of screen time to excavating the horrors of their abuse, from grim reenactments in flashbacks to the signs of repressed trauma in their adulthood on the stand.

Now, clips from the brothers’ trial have started re-circulating online, both side by side against scenes from Monsters as evidence of the series’ accuracy and on their own as proof of their trauma. Murphy and co-creator Ian Brennan have said that the idea to make the show was inspired by the prevalence of content related to the case on TikTok, which has a booming true crime community, where many have taken up the Menendez brothers’ exoneration as a cause. The popularity of the show will undoubtedly inspire more to consume their content and join in their effort.

Videos of the trial, the police interrogations, and TV interviews are being ripped and uploaded to the platform in the hundreds, some with flashy pop music-style fancam editing to really level up the sense of dystopia with which these content creators view Erik and Lyle’s imprisonment. Digital armchair detectives can help or hinder a case; sometimes, like in the case of Gabby Petito, who was murdered by her boyfriend in 2021, the scrutiny can lead to new discoveries; elsewhere, as in the often misogynistic response to Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s defamation trial, they can propagate harmful biases.

Kim Kardashian visits the brothers

Kim Kardashian has become involved in criminal justice reform in recent years, lobbying the President, making the case to exonerate unjustly imprisoned people, such as Alice Marie Johnson in 2018, and, of course, making a reality show about her efforts against mass incarceration.

TMZ reported that the star, alongside Koch, who plays Erik in the series, dropped by the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, where the brothers are incarcerated. The visit was to talk about a rehabilitation project for prisoners to spruce up prison yards, which has supposedly been spearheaded by the brothers. 

Some may view the visit with skepticism; Kardashian, as well as being active in prison reform, is also a collaborator of Ryan Murphy’s, having appeared in the most recent series of American Horror Story. But whatever the motivations behind the visit, Kardashian’s track record of shining a light on cases that demand to be revisited may ultimately be beneficial to those fighting the cause of exoneration.

Netflix’s spotlight on the case continues

After the enormous success of Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, it’s clear the streamer expected furious interest in the Menendez case after the release of this series. So they have come prepared with a docuseries to follow up the narrative drama. And this one actually has the cosign from the Menendez brothers.

It was announced on Monday, four days after the release of Monsters, that a docuseries featuring audio interviews with the brothers recorded from prison, among interviews with other key figures from the case, will land on the service on Oct. 7. In the trailer, Lyle says, “Everyone asks why we killed our parents, maybe now people can understand the truth.”

Erik then adds: “We were not the ones who told the story about our lives. Two kids don’t commit this crime for money.”

After Erik’s open disappointment with Murphy’s fictional account of their story, Netflix is poised to take viewers’ fascination all the way to the streaming charts. If viewers were horrified by the liberties taken by Murphy, maybe they’ll watch the Menendez-approved show instead. More than likely, people who guzzled up the series will be hitting play on the docuseries as well.

The devil works hard, but Netflix works harder.

source https://time.com/7023423/menendez-brothers-netflix-controversy/