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y the end, nightly attendance at the 2,500-seat Civic Theater here — the opera did not have its own hall — had fallen below 70 percent, even with seats discounted to fill the house. Ticket sales dropped to 34,674 last year from 41,355 in 2010.

“Even if we sold out, the tickets are only covering 38 percent of the cost,” Ms. Cohn said. “Our donors are passing away; I don’t know if people are not being raised with opera in the United States any longer, but we are not selling out the operas anymore. Not even close.”

Large-scale opera has had its day, Arts Council England has signalled as its director of music said there was “almost no growth in audience demand”.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg broke one final barrier on Friday, becoming the first woman and the first Jewish American to lie in state in the United States Capitol.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg broke one final barrier on Friday, becoming the first woman and the first Jewish American to lie in state in the United States Capitol.

Denyce Graves, the mezzo-soprano and a friend of Justice Ginsburg’s, performed “Deep River” and “American Anthem” in tribute to the justice’s love of opera.

Located about 10 miles (16 kilometers) southwest of Paris, the palace is beside the settlement of Versailles. The town was little more than a hamlet before becoming the seat of royal power. By the time of the French Revolution, it had a population of more than 60,000 people, making it one of the largest urban centers in France.

France's kings were first attracted to Versailles because of the area's prolific game. Louis XIII, who lived 1601-1643, bought up land, built a chateau and went on hunting trips.

The chateau Louis XIII built was little more than a hunting lodge having enough space to house the king and a small entourage. It was his successor, Louis XIV (1638-1715), the "Sun King," a ruler who chose the sun as his emblem and believed in centralized government with the king at its center, who would radically transform Versailles making it the seat of France's government by the time of his death.

SYDNEY — The Sydney Opera House has reopened. Almost 40,000 spectators attended the city's rugby league grand final. Workers are being urged to return to their offices.

Australia has become a pandemic success story.

The nation of 26 million is close to eliminating community transmission of the coronavirus, having defeated a second wave just as infections surge again in Europe and the United States.

For years, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.

It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion.

Hadn’t we repeatedly lived through previous alarms about other, allegedly imminent, environmental catastrophes that didn’t come to pass, like the belief, widespread in the 1970s, that overpopulation would inevitably lead to mass starvation? And if the Green Revolution had spared us from that Malthusian nightmare, why should we not have confidence that human ingenuity wouldn’t also prevent the parade of horribles that climate change was supposed to bring about?

It is often said that caste is to India what race is to America. Yet, the attitudes of the dominant social class in the two countries couldn’t be more different

Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, continues to thrive after calling the Dalits ‘mentally retarded children’ who gain ‘spiritual experience’ from manual scavenging. The media has little interest or insight into Dalit lives, nor hires low-caste journalists.[11] Major atrocities against Dalits still go unreported. Law enforcement is often indifferent or worse. There is no effective prosecution for discrimination in employment and housing. A Dalit politician can’t get a majority of upper-caste votes even in South Mumbai. Even among those few elites who read books, how many have read a single novel or memoir by a Dalit? In what is perhaps the most diverse country in the world, there is no commitment to diversity in the elite institutions that decide what is worthy art, music, and literature, or what is the content of history textbooks. In book after book of stories for children, both the protagonist and the implicit audience are elite and upper-caste.[12] Much the same is true of sitcoms, soap operas, and commercials on TV. Dalits are invisible from all popular culture that gets any airtime. The Indian army still has many upper-caste-only regiments. There is nothing like an Indian ACLU. Or a Dalit history month on public TV, or exhibits in museums, that seek to educate the upper-castes about a long and dark chapter of their past (and present)

Italy remains a land where complex networks of connections and family ties can still, as in feudal times, count more than merit or position, whether in getting a job or a bank loan. In my experience, Italians have a highly sophisticated understanding of power dynamics, a keen sense of whom you have to say yes to, and with whom you can get away with saying no.

There is also an entrenched Catholic culture of forgiveness. This is, after all, the country whose justice ministry is in fact called the Ministry of Grace and Justice, in that order.

there is no word in Italian for accountability. The closest is “responsibilità” — responsibility — which lacks the concept that actions can carry consequences.

If EU economic policy were a soap opera--and apparently, it is--Greece would be the sultry, irresponsible beauty in a tumultuous love-hate relationship with rigid, authoritarian Germany.  Obviously after years of tumultuous breakups and teary reunions, this is the season finale where he finally beats the hell out of her during a screaming fight over thier impending bankruptcy, and in despair, she drives both of them, and his prize Volkswagen, off a cliff.

The Elements of Trumpism

MAYBE Donald Trump is doing us a favor.

The United States has long been spared a truly authoritarian element in our politics.

If you find human behavior discouraging today, consider what happened a century ago. A Martian might have gazed down upon Europe in 1914 and seen a peaceful, prosperous continent with a shared culture. Pretty much everyone had enough to eat. The English listened to Wagner, Germans savored Shakespeare, Russian aristocrats mimicked the French, Mozart and Italian opera were loved by all. Then, Europe imploded.

And for this, more than 16 million men went to their slaughter, many of them in cruel and creative ways. In trenches that stretched an unbroken 475 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss border, the Germans constructed walls using corpses, so that French troops who captured a trench hung canteens from protruding ankles.

It was a sad, pointless war, for which we’re still paying a price. A hard-hearted peace treaty and a ravaged economy produced a “lost generation” of young Germans and led directly to the rise of Hitler and an even uglier worldwide conflagration

is house was nothing special, a single-story, tree-shrouded home in a middle-class neighborhood in this seaside city. And there the world's most sought-after drug kingpin hid for months until his capture in a deadly shootout.

Neighbors noticed his comings and goings, but without special attention. And then suddenly, the Mexican naval special forces descended Friday.

And with that, Sinaloa cartel commander Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman was captured, in a shootout that killed six of his associates. It was six months after he escaped from Mexico's maximum-security prison through a tunnel he dug under his cell.

now, social media is pushing that spectacle to become continuous, intimate and hyperactive on multiple fronts. Performers gather shards of attention into a multimedia mosaic that’s presented like a soap opera coupled with a surveillance log: evidence of authenticity that can turn forensic.

As the perceived value of recorded music has dropped nearly to zero, people have been willing to pay more and more each year for live concerts — where the music is the main thing in the room, where distractions are minimized

for the top 100 tours of 2018 alone, gross revenues worldwide were $5.6 billion and average ticket prices rose from $84.63 in 2017 to $93.65 this year

the main reason why Germans were more trusted by their neighbors was that they were learning, slowly and painfully, and not always fully, to trust themselves.

elders, in government and the mass media, still voice opinions about the Japanese war that are unsettling, to say the least. Conservative politicians still pay their annual respects at a shrine where war criminals are officially remembered. Justifications and denials of war crimes are still heard. Too many Japanese in conspicuous places, including the prime minister’s office itself, have clearly not “coped” with the war.

unlike Nazi Germany, Japan had no systematic program to destroy the life of every man, woman, and child of a people that, for ideological reasons, was deemed to have no right to exist.