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IT’S A DAY of rest, and you may be in the mood for a quiet corner and a comfy chair.
We’ve hand-picked the week’s best reads for you to savour.
Filmmaker Nancy Myers has written many a great film about older women and their romantic lives. Here, she writes about rebuilding her relationship with her ex-husband, after 20 years.
(New York Times, approx 7 mins reading time)
It was in this year of being “almost 70” that I emailed my ex-husband, Charles, and asked him if he could give me a ride to our younger daughter’s best friend’s wedding in Solvang, just north of Santa Barbara. He and I live in Los Angeles, and I didn’t want to drive to the wedding alone. It was maybe the first time in the 20 years since we broke up that I said out loud that I didn’t want to do something alone.
Questions surround how a young vulnerable woman was killed in Glasgow.
(BBC, approx 16 mins reading time)
Emma differed from many of the other residents because she was still close to her family. She saw her parents twice a week, every week. They didn’t know she was a sex worker. Margaret and Willie collected her laundry on Wednesdays and took her for lunch. Every Sunday they dropped off fresh clothes and brought her back to the family home in Erskine, not far from the city.
Greta Thunberg’s mother talks about her daughter and what she’s experienced over the last few years.
(The Guardian, approx 23 mins reading time)
Greta was 11, had just started fifth grade, and was not doing well. She cried at night when she should be sleeping. She cried on her way to school. She cried in her classes and during her breaks, and the teachers called home almost every day. Svante had to run off and bring her home to Moses, our golden retriever. She sat with him for hours, petting him and stroking his fur. She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning. She stopped playing the piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking. And she stopped eating.
4. My boyfriend’s wedding dress
Emily Halnon found herself tackling her own beliefs around masculinity when she met her boyfriend.
(The Guardian, approx 6 mins reading time)
“Emily!” he cried with victorious glee. “I’ve found the one!” Ian thrust the white garment into the air like a Nascar trophy. Its lace sleeves sashayed from the tapered bodice and fluffy tulle grazed the dirty tiles of the thrift store floor. A smile stretched across Ian’s scruffy face and his blue eyes danced with the giddy excitement of a bride saying, “I do!” “Oh, wow,” I managed to spit out.
Christina Boyer was convicted of murdering a child in 1992. But her supporters believe she is a victim of injustice.
(Atavist, approx 15 mins reading time)
It didn’t take long for locals to blame Amber’s mother, 22-year-old Christina Boyer, for the little girl’s death. Carroll County is in the Bible Belt, and people saw Boyer as the embodiment of everything they claimed to despise: unwed, abusive, sexually promiscuous, ungodly. Boyer, who professed her innocence, went to prison for life.
Can two men sent to prison in 1987 overturn their murder convictions?
(The New Yorker, approx 30 mins reading time)
The police released Smokes and Warren, but arrested them five days later. Smokes watched from the back seat of a police cruiser as detectives brought his friend out of high school in handcuffs. “From the point that we got to his school, the reality of it really hit,” Smokes told me. “He looked at me as a big brother, and I looked at him as my little brother, and there was nothing I could do to help my little brother.” He added, “I couldn’t comfort him in no way except to say that we’re in this together.”
…AND A CLASSIC FROM THE ARCHIVES…
Leslie Jamison writes about an unusual blue whale.
(The Atavist, approx 57 mins reading time)
The whale that Joe George and Velma Ronquille heard was an anomaly: His sound patterns were recognizable as those of a blue whale, but his frequency was unheard of. It was absolutely unprecedented. So they paid attention. They kept tracking him for years, every migration season, as he made his way south from Alaska to Mexico. His path wasn’t unusual, only his song—and the fact that they never detected any other whales around him. He always seemed to be alone.
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That was cheap. If we had arranged and paid no doubt it would have been 2.5 million.
$7.9 million overall? Should have led with that!! Great for the Irish economy all the same – they should run another “Gathering” for politicians and Presidents!
And this is a scandal in the States? This happens on a daily basis here! We’re used to it, we’ve come to accept it as the norm!
Judging by the students reactions below her it looks like Malia is letting off some ripper of a fart.
And never have two young girls been so bored in their lives!
I wonder how many people invite guests to their house and total up what it cost to host them when they leave…
That’s 21c of toilet paper
€2.30 of electricity
€6 breakfast
80c milk and a tea bag
€1.50 for that glass you broke……
Don’t worry I don’t expect you to pay this I’m just making sure you and the whole world knows what my hospitality has cost me.
And where did all that money go seeing as Ireland is in such a ‘bad state’ ?
The culchies in the towns where he visited still have their communion money for fecks sake. No chance of that money being recirculated
Damn culchies. Stopping us all from being rich.
The book Animal Farm by George Orewell comes to my mind when I read about Obama admin and their extravagant lifestyles on US tax payers money.
During a recent trip to China the first family and their staff of about 70 stayed in the presidential suite at the Westin Chaoyang Hotel, which USA Today reports costs about $8,400 a night. Clearly the elite live by a different standard and have for a long time. Obama sure knows how to spend taxpayers money.
Yes he does, 100′s of millions on vacations, 4000 calorie state dinners, the best of everything including medical. Meanwhile the little people struggle with multiple part time jobs, poor quality high cost Obama care and young people not being able to find work after college. But he’s on their side right? What a delusion.
It won’t be too long before Obama will introduce in special powers to ban the very books that were written to demonize Soviet Russia. The tables have turned 180° and Now the United States has become the very same totalitarian Communist state.
The trip this week for our little president
To the uk prob will cost us a million
It’s a state visit, the host country pays.
The gathering or the shakedown with guilt of the diaspora as we all knew it to be.
And the book ” One flew over the cuckoos nest” comes to mind when I read some of these comments
Mike ya must be a dub
And the Govt will still tell you how great they are come the next election
have your say