The internal records are detailed in a new investigation published in October, 2015 by InsideClimate News, a Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization covering energy and the environment, ahead of the Climate Change conference in Paris where, after weeks of negotiations diplomats in France unveiled a landmark deal to tackle climate change and reduce greenhouse gases. The accord aims to limit the rise in global temperatures to less than two degrees Celsius.
PARIS — Expectations have been high for the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition that is being mounted at the Louvre to mark the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death. For months, there has been speculation, about which works would travel to the Louvre, about the geopolitical backstory to each potential loan, and about a problematic but fascinating painting known as the “Salvator Mundi,” which sold at auction for more than $450 million to controversial Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman, in 2017. Leonardo da Vinci: 1452-1519 is on view at the Louvre in Paris through Feb. 24, 2020.
Jerome Robbins (Oct 11, 1918 - Jul 29, 1998) made the most freighted political choice of his life at the fraught intersection of career, family, religion and sexuality. The conflict between those forces is unenviable, but telling. If one were looking to identify a quintessentially Jewish American genius of the 20th century, Robbins’s mix of brilliance and neuroses, rebellion and fascination with tradition — along with his struggle to define himself and his work as equally American and Jewish, his broad sympathy for the status of the outsider, and his guilt — would make him a worthy choice.
Scientific examinations of historical accounts suggest that up to 40 percent of Mexico’s population lives along a zone that is more seismically active than suspected. Ash spews from Mexico's Popocatépetl volcano in August 14, 2019 (see above photo). The peak is part of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, a region which seismologists say may present a greater earthquake hazard than anticipated. According to the Anales de Tlatelolco, the earth cracked open in central Mexico on February 19, 1575. The ancient codex, composed around the time the Aztec Empire fell to Spanish conquistadors, features a story of a convulsion that lasted for up to five days, creating landslides and opening up a nearly three-mile-long scar in the ground.
