Tumgik
thepastisalreadywritten · 26 minutes
Text
SAINT OF THE DAY (March 28)
Tumblr media
Not much is known about the history and youth of St. Sixtus, but we do know that he was born in Rome and ascended to the papacy in 432.
As the 44th Pope, he approved the results of the Council of Ephesus and actively protested against the heresies of Nestorianism and Pelagianism.
He restored many Roman basilicas and corresponded frequently with St. Augustine of Hippo.
He died on 18 August 440 of natural causes.
0 notes
Text
Egyptian Pharaoh Ramesses II was issued a passport 3,000 years after his death in order for his mummy to fly to Paris.
Tumblr media
Ramesses II (c. 1303 BC – 1213 BC), commonly known as Ramesses the Great, is often regarded as the greatest, most celebrated, and most powerful pharaoh of the New Kingdom.
His successors and later Egyptians called him the “Great Ancestor.”
Ramesses II was originally buried in a grand tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
He was subsequently moved many times by priests who feared looters. He spent as little as three days in some places, and the priests recorded their actions on wrappings on his body.
Despite his resplendent wealth and power in life, his body was later moved to a royal cache.
With the passage of time, his sarcophagus  was lost to history.
It was re-discovered in a deteriorating condition in 1881. It is now on display in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities.
It was his poor condition that prompted Egyptian authorities to seek help preserving him in the mid-1970s.
They found their experts in France and reluctantly decided to transport the 3,000 year-old mummy to Paris.
In 1975, Maurice Bucaille, a French doctor studying his remains, said that the mummy was threatened by fungus and needed urgent treatment to prevent total decay.
French laws dictated that entry and transportation through the country required a valid passport.
To comply with local laws, the Egyptian government issued a passport to the Pharaoh.
Seemingly, he was the first mummy to receive one. His occupation was listed as "King (deceased)."
The government didn’t want him to get a passport for publicity but believed it would afford them legal protections to ensure his safe return.
As countless artifacts and mummies have been plundered and stolen from Egypt, museums in Europe didn’t always respect Egyptian claims.
In 1976, his remains were issued an Egyptian passport so that he could be transported to Paris for an irradiated treatment to prevent a fungoid growth.
The New York Times reported on 27 September 1976 that the French military aircraft that brought Ramesses' remains from the Cairo Museum was greeted by the Garde Republicaine, France's equivalent of a U.S. Marine honor guard.
“The mummy was greeted by the Secretary of State for Universities, Alice Saunter‐Seite, and an army detachment.
Ramses II, who ruled Egypt for 67 years, received special treatment at Le Bourget Airport.”
It was then taken to the Paris Ethnological Museum for inspection by Professor Pierre-Fernand Ceccaldi, the chief forensic scientist at the Criminal Identification Laboratory of Paris.
During the examination, Cecaldi noted:
“Hair, astonishingly preserved, showed some complementary data, especially about pigmentation.
Ramses II was a ginger-haired ‘cymnotriche leucoderma'” (meaning he was a fair-skinned person with wavy ginger hair).
He is 5 ft '7 inches tall. They found battle wounds, arthritis and tooth abscess.
In ancient Egypt, people with red hair were associated with deity Set, the slayer of Osiris. The name of Ramesses II’s father, Seti I, means “follower of Seth.”
The examination also revealed evidence of previous wounds, fractures and arthritis, which would have left Ramesses with a hunched back in the later years of his life.
In 2007, it was discovered that small tufts of the Pharaoh’s hair were stolen during the 1976 preservation work (published by the BBC).  
A Frenchman named Jean-Michel Diebolt said he had inherited the hair from his late father, a researcher from the team who analysed the mummy.
Deibolt had tried to sell the hair through an online auction for 2000 euros (£1360) but was quickly apprehended by French authorities.
📷 : An artist’s creation of the passport. Image is for representative purposes only. The actual passport is not publicly available.
3 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
This photo, taken on 25 June 1848, is the first in the history of photography ever used to illustrate a news story.
The photograph shows the Rue Saint-Maur-Popincourt in Paris during the June Days Uprising, full of barricades that were used in a battle between government forces and demonstrating workers.
The photo was published as an engraving in L'Illustration, 1-8 July 1848.
5 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
4 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
Just over a decade ago, the late novelist Hilary Mantel (6 July 1952 – 22 September 2022) delivered a lecture to an event at the London Review of Books and triggered national outrage.
In the course of a talk on “Royal Bodies,” which ranged widely across royal women from Anne Boleyn to Marie Antoinette and Princess Diana, she had made what many perceived as disparaging remarks about Kate Middleton, then the Duchess of Cambridge.
The Duchess, she said, appeared to have been “designed by a committee and built by craftsmen, with a perfect plastic smile and the spindles of her limbs hand-turned and gloss-varnished."
Indeed, Mantel said, Kate “seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.”
At this, the newspapers were soon in uproar.
The prime minister David Cameron called the comments “completely misguided and completely wrong” and the Labour leader Ed Miliband agreed they were “pretty offensive.”
Mantel doggedly refused to back down, saying that her remarks had been twisted out of context, and that she was in fact writing with sympathy about the perceptions that are forcefully projected on to royal women, the cage in which they are held to be goggled at.
That was true but also perhaps not the entire truth, for there was still a perceptible trace of authorial vinegar in the portrait:
Which of us would be happy to learn, even in sympathy, that we were held at low risk for “the emergence of character”?
Royals are public as well as private figures, of course, and authors are free to hang intellectual ideas on them to try out, as designers do with clothes.
Yet while much of the lecture was sharply perceptive, I didn’t agree with the portrait of Kate.
That word “selected” had rendered her passive, when in fact her behaviour thus far had suggested both an active intelligence and an unusual degree of self-discipline.
The context of her entry into “The Firm” was different from that of other royal brides.
Unlike Diana, who had barely emerged from the fractured chrysalis of her troubled aristocratic family when she first met the much older, more worldly Prince Charles, Kate was a contemporary of Prince William’s at the University of St Andrews.
Her family background, which appeared warm and supportive, was comfortably middle-class.
She seemed generally cheerful and unruffled, even when the press was at the barbed peak of its “Waity Katie” hysteria, trying to goad Prince William into a proposal or abandonment.
After the wedding, in her approach to royal duties, she clearly took the role she had inherited with marriage seriously.
The royal whose attitude her own most resembled was the late Queen Elizabeth II, who had long understood the essential nature of the job:
To turn up to public events looking the part, intuit precisely what was needed — gravitas, fun, consolation or reassurance — and deliver it while keeping one’s personal emotions on the back burner.
This is what a monarchy demands, and the ability to act as an impeccable interpreter of the public mood, year after year, is a particular and testing art.
A few have a natural aptitude for it, but most of us do not, and would quickly find its scrutiny and restrictions intolerable.
Grace under consistent pressure is an admirable quality.
Were a ballet dancer to execute a string of flawless performances, or a pilot to conduct numerous flights without incident, it would not be deemed evidence of an absence of character: quite the opposite.
Yet in Kate — especially for those who increasingly conduct their lives online — serene self-possession seems to drive a proportion of onlookers insane: what lurks behind it, what dark secret is waiting to destroy it, how best might it be disrupted?
The uncomfortable truth is that what many people deeply crave in a young and beautiful royal wife and mother is not competence, but crack-up.
Tumblr media
The increasingly bizarre treatment of Kate, or the idea of Kate, is connected to the most dominant phenomenon of our age: a cultural prioritising of drama over duty.
The supply of drama has spilled beyond the confines of the novel, theatre, cinema, or television to become a commodity on which our public figures are judged.
When Mantel spoke of Kate’s apparent absence of emerging “character,” she was assessing her primarily through the hungry eyes of a novelist.
In books, central female characters often generate dramatic tension by chafing against their circumstances, by the intensifying dazzle of their discontents, something that Kate refused to transmit.
In contrast, Mantel described Diana as a “carrier of myth”: Diana, publicly trapped in the disappointments of her marriage, certainly carried more plot twists than any author had a right to expect.
Unfortunately for her, the final one was her shockingly premature death.
Set against this artistic conception of “character” — distinctive qualities or flaws that, one way or another, deliver drama — is the societal judgement “of good character,” meaning someone who is broadly reliable and respected in relation to their behaviour to others.
Tumblr media
In recent years, the electorate, in line with Neil Postman’s warning in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves To Death, has proved increasingly ready to select the former over the latter, even to the marked detriment of our civic health.
The former prime minister Boris Johnson instinctively understood it as his job not to deliver the detail of workable policy but to satisfy the public’s appetite for story:
“People live by narrative,” he once told UnHerd’s Tom McTague.
In the US, Donald Trump — that relentless generator of low mockery and high fury — is now running for a second term as president, after his first one ended in his supporters storming the Capitol building.
Men are often permitted to survive the frantic generation of drama: it is everyone around them who suffers.
Yet women — in art and life — have a greater tendency to be destroyed by it.
There is no strutting female equivalent of the male “hellraiser,” but rather a woman who, soaked in the crocodile tears of the tabloids, is tragically “causing concern” among friends.
Art and its audiences have always relished the restless struggle and disintegration of female characters who are, or become, unmoored from the harbour of marriage and children.
Flaubert’s Emma Bovary — her imagination inflamed by reading novels — is bored with her marriage and disenchanted with motherhood.
She seeks solace in affairs and excessive spending, the consequences of which hasten her suicide.
Zola’s Nana, a courtesan who ruthlessly captivates Parisian society, has her beguiling face eaten away by smallpox.
Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse, immolated on their blazing talent, are hung posthumously high in the musical hall of fame, next to Sylvia Plath in the poetry section and Marilyn Monroe in cinema.
In Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, a middle-aged English woman called Sasha Jansen, mourning an unhappy marriage and a dead child, finds herself in Paris, a vulnerable drifter seeking solace from stray men.
Rhys herself, who died at 88 after a precarious but surprisingly long life, had much in common with her literary creations.
As the writer and editor Diana Athill crisply put it:
“Jean was absolutely incapable of living, life was just hopelessly beyond her.
When she was young, she floated from man to man in a hopeless way… by the time she was old, she floated from kind woman to kind woman.”
In Rhys’s latter years — hard-drinking, irascible and impoverished — Athill and a small group of female friends formed what they called “The Jean Rhys Committee,” which met regularly to ask “what should we do next?”
Rhys’s claim to such loyalty, I suppose, was the weight of her literary talent, her ability to exert an odd kind of fascination, and the fortunate soft-heartedness of her friends.
The dramatic collided with the dutiful and was kept alive by it.
Tumblr media
From what I can see, the Princess of Wales exists at the opposite end of the feminine spectrum from Jean Rhys.
Pinned firmly in place by her royal obligations, her wealth, her marriage, and three children, she belongs to the realm of the respectable and dutiful rather than the erratic and dramatic.
She is not a “character” in the artistic sense, nor does she desire to be, but both a survivor and upholder of an institution:
Hers is the territory of the prompt thank-you note, the kept promise, the commitment to public service, the uncomplicated pleasure in children, the stoic endurance of difficult times in the hope that better ones will come along soon.
The public senses an emotional solidity in her, and it is partly why she is held in broad esteem.
In this age of insistent self-definition, duty to others might be an unfashionable concept, but it is nonetheless one that keeps families and institutions from chaos and collapse.
With the advent of the internet, however, anyone with a keyboard can become a form of author, with the freedom to insert a toxic form of drama into real-life situations.
What was extraordinary, during the Princess of Wales’s recent health problems, is how speedily and carelessly such speculations overrode the bounds of decency.
It was already known that she had undergone major abdominal surgery and was taking time to recover.
And yet — egged on by the participation of silly celebrities and malicious US comedians — conspiracy theories about cosmetic surgery and affairs and nervous breakdowns spread like knotweed.
According to social-media researchers, these were also vigorously introduced and amplified by fake accounts set up on Twitter and TikTok, some associated with Russia-linked disinformation eager to spread the termites of mistrust and doubt in Western institutions.
Only the Princess of Wales’s revelation of cancer, which carries a testing drama all its own, served to shut up the majority of them.
Unlike these callous gossips, Mantel recognised her own complicity in dehumanising royalty.
Upon encountering the late Queen, the novelist said: “I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.”
The Queen looked back at her, she said, briefly hurt. Mantel warned of the way in which “cheerful curiosity can easily become cruelty” precisely as it has done in recent weeks.
Her talk concluded with a prescient instruction for those who comprehend monarchy mainly as a source of entertainment: “I’m asking us to back off and not be brutes.”
In the midst of treatment and recovery, the most hitherto stable of royal women could be forgiven a keen sense of injustice:
Her job description, it seems, must now include the ability to weather the online public’s fits of brutish mania for drama.
With its contempt for duty, and its savage appetite for story, it is hungry to chew up far more than just the Princess of Wales.
Tumblr media
NOTE: Additional photos have been included in this article.
7 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
3 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
💙😎💙
6 notes · View notes
Text
TODAY IN HISTORY: MARCH 27
Tumblr media
In 1884, The first long-distance telephone call was made from Boston to New York on 27 March 1884 by Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Watson.
The call lasted 90 minutes, covered 235 miles, and used copper wires instead of galvanized iron.
The copper wire provided greater signal strength than the galvanized iron used in the 1881 connection between Boston and Providence. 
The call was sponsored by the American Bell Company, and the line was built using two hard-drawn copper #12 wires.
The call marked a pivotal moment, underscoring copper's viability over galvanized iron for long-distance communication.
Tumblr media
In 1977, The Tenerife airport disaster occurred when two Boeing 747 passenger jets collided on the runway at Los Rodeos Airport (now Tenerife North Airport) on the Spanish island of Tenerife.
The collision occurred when KLM Flight 4805 initiated its takeoff run during dense fog while Pan Am Flight 1736 was still on the runway.
The impact and resulting fire killed all on board KLM Flight 4805 and most of the occupants of Pan Am Flight 1736, with only 61 survivors in the front section of the aircraft.
With a total of 583 fatalities, the disaster is the deadliest accident in aviation history.
Tumblr media
In 1975, construction began on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, spanning 800 miles (1,300 km).
The oil pipeline cost $8 billion and was completed in 1977.
Tumblr media
In 1998, the drug Viagra from the pharmaceutical company Pfizer was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use in treating erectile dysfunction.
1 note · View note
Text
SAINT OF THE DAY (March 28)
Tumblr media
On March 27, the Catholic Church remembers the monk and bishop, Saint Rupert, whose missionary labors built up the Church in two of its historic strongholds, Austria and Bavaria.
During his lifetime, the “Apostle of Bavaria and Austria” was an energetic founder of churches and monasteries.
He was also a remarkably successful evangelist of the regions, which include the homeland of the Bavarian native, Pope Benedict XVI.
Little is known about Rupert's early life, which is thought to have begun around 660 in the territory of Gaul in modern-day France.
There is some indication that he came from the Merovignian royal line, though he embraced a life of prayer, fasting, asceticism, and charity toward the poor.
This course of life led to his consecration as the Bishop of Worms in present-day Germany.
Although Rupert was known as a wise and devout bishop, he eventually met with rejection from the largely pagan population, who beat him savagely and forced him to leave the city.
After this painful rejection, Rupert made a pilgrimage to Rome.
Two years after his expulsion from Worms, his prayers were answered by means of a message from Duke Theodo of Bavaria, who knew of his reputation as a holy man and a sound teacher of the faith.
Bavaria, in Rupert's day, was neither fully pagan nor solidly Catholic.
Although missionaries had evangelized the region in the past, the local religion tended to mix portions of the Christian faith – often misunderstood along heretical lines – with native pagan beliefs and practices.
The Bavarian duke sought Rupert's help to restore, correct, and spread the faith in his land.
After sending messengers to report back to him on conditions in Bavaria, Rupert agreed.
The bishop who had been brutally exiled from Worms was received with honor in the Bavarian city of Regensburg.
With the help of a group of priests he brought with him, Rupert undertook an extensive mission in Bavaria and parts of modern-day Austria.
His missionary journeys resulted in many conversions, accompanied by numerous miracles including the healing of diseases.
In Salzburg, Rupert and his companions built a great church, which they placed under the patronage of St. Peter and a monastery observing the Rule of St. Benedict.
Rupert's niece became the abbess of a Benedictine convent established nearby.
Rupert served as both the bishop of Salzburg and the abbot of the Benedictine monastery he established there.
This traditional pairing of the two roles, also found in the Irish Church after its development of monasticism, was passed on by St. Rupert's successors until the late 10th century.
St. Rupert died on March 27, Easter Sunday of the year 718, after preaching and celebrating Mass.
After the saint's death, churches and monasteries began to be named after him – including Salzburg's modern-day Cathedral of St. Rupert (also known as the “Salzburg Cathedral”) and the Church of St. Rupert, which is believed to be the oldest surviving church structure in Vienna.
3 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
💜🫶💙
49 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
(CNN) — It’s late summer 2,850 years ago. A fire engulfs a stilt village perched above a boggy, slow-moving river that weaves though the wetlands of eastern England.
The tightly packed roundhouses, built from wood, straw, turf, and clay just nine months earlier, go up in flames.
The inhabitants flee, leaving behind all their belongings, including a wooden spoon in a bowl of half-eaten porridge.
There is no time to rescue the fattened lambs, which are trapped and burnt alive.
The scene is a vivid and poignant snapshot, captured by archaeologists, of a once thriving community in late Bronze Age Britain known as Must Farm, near what’s now the town of Peterborough.
The research team published a two-volume monograph on Wednesday that describes their painstaking $1.4 million (£1.1 million) excavation and analysis of the site in the county of Cambridgeshire.
Described by the experts involved as an “archaeological nirvana,” the site is the only one in Britain that lives up to the “Pompeii premise,” they say, referencing the city forever frozen in time by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 that has yielded unparalleled information about ancient Rome.
“In a typical Bronze Age site, if you’ve got a house, you’ve probably got maybe a dozen post holes in the ground and they’re just dark shadows of where it once stood.
If you’re really lucky, you’ll get a couple of shards of pottery, maybe a pit with a bunch of animal bones.
This was the complete opposite of that process. It was just incredible,” said Chris Wakefield of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit at the University of Cambridge, an archaeologist and member of the 55-person team that excavated the site in 2016.
"All the axe marks had been used to shape and sculpt the wood. All of those looked fresh, like they could have been done last week by someone,” Wakefield added.
The remarkably preserved condition of the site and its contents enabled the archaeological team to draw comprehensive new insights into Bronze Age society — findings that could overturn the current understanding of what everyday life was like in Britain during the ninth century BC.
Tumblr media
Must Farm domesticity — and a mystery
The site, which dates to eight centuries before Romans arrived in Britain, revealed four roundhouses and a square entranceway structure, which stood approximately 6.5 feet (2 meters) above the riverbed and were surrounded by a 6.5-foot (2-meter) fence of sharpened posts.
The archaeologists believe the settlement was likely twice as big. However, quarrying in the 20th century destroyed any other remains.
Though charred from the fire, the remaining buildings and their contents were extremely well preserved by the oxygen-starved conditions of the fens, or wetlands, and included many wooden and textile items that rarely survive in the archaeological record.
Together, traces of the settlement paint a picture of cozy domesticity and relative plenty.
The researchers unearthed 128 ceramic artifacts — jars, bowls, cups and cookware — and were able to deduce that 64 pots were in use at the time of fire.
The team found some stored pots neatly nested.
Tumblr media
Textiles found at the site made from flax linen had a soft, velvety feel with neat seams and hems, although it wasn’t possible to identify individual pieces of clothing.
Wooden artifacts included boxes and bowls carved from willow, alder and maple, 40 bobbins, many with threads still attached, various tools, and 15 wooden buckets.
“One of those buckets … on the bottom of it were loads and loads of cut marks, so we know that people living in that Bronze Age kitchen when they needed an impromptu chopping board, were just flipping that bucket upside down and using that as a chopping surface,” Wakefield said.
“It’s those little moments that build together to give a richer, fuller picture of what was going on.”
Tumblr media
The circumstances of the event that brought it all to a halt are still a bit of a mystery.
The researchers believe the fire took place in late summer or early autumn because skeletal remains of the lambs kept by one household showed the animals, typically born in spring, were three months to six months old.
However, what exactly caused the devastating fire remains unclear. The blaze could have been accidental or deliberately started.
The researchers uncovered a stack of spears with shafts over 10 feet (3 meters) long at the site, and many experts think that warfare was common in the time period.
The team worked with a forensic fire investigator but ultimately couldn’t identify a specific “smoking gun” clue pointing to the cause.
“An archaeological site is a lot like a jigsaw puzzle. At a typical site you have 10 or 20 pieces out of 500,” Wakefield said.
“Here, we had 250 or 300 pieces and we still couldn’t get the complete picture on how this big fire broke out.”
Mike Parker Pearson, a professor of British later prehistory at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, described both the report and the site “as exceptional.” He wasn’t involved in the research.
“The fire may have been disastrous for the inhabitants but it is a blessing for archaeologists, a unique snapshot of life in the Bronze Age,” he said via email.
Upending ideas about Bronze Age society
The contents across the four preserved houses were “remarkably consistent."
Each one had a tool kit that included sickles, axes, gouges, and handheld razors used to cut hair or cloth.
With almost 538 square feet (50 square meters) of floor space in the largest, each of the dwellings appeared to have distinct activity zones comparable to rooms in a modern home.
“By plotting the positions of all these finds — pots, loomweights, tools, and even sheep droppings, the archaeological team have reconstructed the houses’ internal use of space,” Parker Pearson noted.
“The kitchen area was in the east, the storage and weaving area in the south and southeast with the penning area for lambs, and the sleeping area in the northwest, though we don’t know where the doorway was for each house.”
Not all the items were of practical use, such as 49 glass beads plus others made of amber.
Archaeologists also unearthed a woman’s skull, smooth from touch, possibly a keepsake of a lost loved one.
Some of the items the researchers found will go on display starting April 27 in an exhibition titled “Introducing Must Farm: A Bronze Age Settlement” at the Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery.
Tumblr media
Lab analysis of biological remains revealed the types of food the community once consumed.
A pottery bowl imprinted with the finger marks of its maker held a final meal — a wheat grain porridge mixed with animal fat.
Chemical analyses of the bowls and jars showed traces of honey along with deer, suggesting the people who used the dishes might have enjoyed honey-glazed venison.
Ancient excrement found in waste piles below where the houses would have stood showed that the community kept dogs that fed on scraps from their owners’ meals.
And human fossilized poop, or coprolites, showed that at least some inhabitants suffered from intestinal worms.
The waste piles, or middens, were one line of evidence that showed how long the site was occupied, with a thin layer of refuse suggesting the settlement was built nine months to a year before it went up in flames.
"Two other factors supported that line of reasoning," Wakefield said.
“The second was that a lot of the wood that was used in the construction was unseasoned, it was still effectively green, it hadn’t been long in position,” he said.
“The third one is that we have a lack of the kind of insects and animals that are associated with human habitation."
"It wouldn’t be long before beetles would worm (in) … but there’s no evidence of any of that in any of the 18,000 plus timbers.”
The fact that the site, with its rich and varied contents, was in use for only a year upended the team’s preconceived “visions of everyday life” in the ninth century BC.
It may suggest that Bronze Age societies were perhaps less hierarchical than traditionally thought, according to the 1,608-page report.
“We are seeing here not the accumulation of a lifetime, but just a year’s worth of materials,” the authors noted in the report.
“It suggests that artefacts such as bronze tools and glass beads were more common than we often imagine and that their availability may not in fact have been restricted.”
Tumblr media
1 note · View note
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
0 notes
Text
Tumblr media
💙🫶💙
80 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
9 notes · View notes
Text
youtube
Reaction to Catherine, Princess of Wales cancer news and YOUR comments of support | Montage
26 March 2024
The world reacted in shock when The Princess of Wales revealed her cancer diagnosis.
World leaders, celebrities and fans of the royals were moved to sending messages of support to the Princess.
We gathered together a mix of reactions including many of YOUR comments alongside some of our favourite pictures of Catherine over the years in a special montage.
4 notes · View notes
Text
SAINT OF THE DAY (March 26)
Tumblr media
St. Margaret Clitherow was born to a protestant family around the year 1555 in Middleton, England.
Margaret was known throughout the town for her wit and good looks.
In 1571, she married John Clitherow, a wealthy butcher and a chamberlain of the city, and bore him three children.
Several years after her marriage to John, Margaret was introduced to the Catholic faith and converted.
She was a zealous defender of Catholicism and hid fugitive priests in her home.
Eventually, Margaret was turned in to the sheriff and tried for the crime of harboring Catholic priests.
While Margaret was on trial, many efforts were made to encourage her to deny the Catholic faith, but she held firmly.
Finally, Margaret was condemned to be pressed to death upon sharp rocks. She was executed on 25 March 1586.
She was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 15 December 1929. He was canonized by Pope Paul VI on 25 October 1970.
She was known as "the Pearl of York." She is the patron saint of businesswomen.
Margaret's great faith was an inspiration to all three of her children.
Her daughter, Anne, became a nun, and her two sons, Henry and William, both became priests.
4 notes · View notes
Text
Tumblr media
(CNN) — Jack Latham was on a mission to photograph farms in Vietnam — not the country’s sprawling plantations or rice terraces but its “click farms.”
Last year, the British photographer spent a month in the capital Hanoi documenting some of the shadowy enterprises that help clients artificially boost online traffic and social media engagement in the hope of manipulating algorithms and user perceptions.
The resulting images, which feature in his new book “Beggar’s Honey,” provide rare insight into the workshops that hire low-paid workers to cultivate likes, comments and shares for businesses and individuals globally.
“When most people are on social media, they want nothing but attention — they’re begging for it,” Latham said in a phone interview, explaining his book’s title.
“With social media, our attention is a product for advertisers and marketers.”
Tumblr media
In the 2000s, the growing popularity of social media sites — including Facebook and Twitter, now called X — created a new market for well-curated digital profiles, with companies and brands vying to maximize visibility and influence.
Though it is unclear when click farms began proliferating, tech experts warned about “virtual gang masters” operating them from low-income countries as early as 2007.
In the following decades, click farms exploded in number — particularly in Asia, where they can be found across India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines, and beyond.
Regulations have often failed to keep pace: While some countries, like China, have attempted to crack down on operations (the China Advertising Association banned the use of click farms for commercial gain in 2020), they continue to flourish around the continent, especially in places where low labor and electricity costs make it affordable to power hundreds of devices simultaneously.
‘Like Silicon Valley startups’
Latham’s project took him to five click farms in Vietnam.
(The click farmers he hoped to photograph in Hong Kong “got cold feet,” he said, and pandemic-related travel restrictions dashed his plans to document the practice in mainland China).
On the outskirts of Hanoi, Latham visited workshops operating from residential properties and hotels.
Some had a traditional setup with hundreds of manually operated phones, while others used a newer, compact method called “box farming” — a phrase used by the click farmers Latham visited — where several phones, without screens and batteries, are wired together and linked to a computer interface.
Tumblr media
Latham said one of the click farms he visited was a family-run business, though the others appeared more like a tech companies.
Most workers were in their 20s and 30s, he added.
“They all looked like Silicon Valley startups,” he said. “There was a tremendous amount of hardware … whole walls of phones.”
Some of Latham’s photos depict — albeit anonymously — workers tasked with harvesting clicks.
In one image, a man is seen stationed amid a sea of gadgets in what appears to be a lonely and monotonous task.
“It only takes one person to control large amounts of phones,” Latham said. “One person can very quickly (do the work of) 10,000. It’s both solitary and crowded.”
At the farms Lathan visited, individuals were usually in charge of a particular social media platforms.
For instance, one “farmer” would be responsible for mass posting and commenting on Facebook accounts, or setting up YouTube platforms where they post and watch videos on loop.
The photographer added that TikTok is now the most popular platform at the click farms he visited.
Tumblr media
The click farmers Latham spoke to mostly advertised their services online for less than one cent per click, view or interaction.
And despite the fraudulent nature of their tasks, they seemed to treat it like just another job, the photographer said.
‘There was an understanding they were just providing a service,” he added. “There wasn’t a shadiness. What they’re offering is shortcuts.”
Deceptive perception
Across its 134 pages, “Beggar’s Honey” includes a collection of abstract photographs — some seductive, others contemplative — depicting videos that appeared on Latham’s TikTok feed.
He included them in the book to represent the kind of content he saw being boosted by click farms.
But many of his photos focus on the hardware used to manipulate social media —webs of wires, phones and computers.
“A lot of my work is about conspiracies,” Latham said. ” Trying to ‘document the machines used to spread disinformation’ is the tagline of the project. The bigger picture is often the thing we don’t see.”
Tumblr media
Click farms around the world are also used to amplify political messages and spread disinformation during elections.
In 2016, Cambodia’s then-prime minister Hun Sen was accused of buying Facebook friends and likes, which according to the BBC he denied, while shadowy operations in North Macedonia were found to have spread pro-Donald Trump posts and articles during that year’s US presidential election.
While researching, Latham said he found that algorithms — a topic of his previous book, “Latent Bloom” — often recommended videos that he said got increasingly “extreme” with each click.
“If you only digest a diet of that, it’s a matter of time you become diabetically conspiratorial,” he said.
“The spreading of disinformation is the worst thing. It happens in your pocket, not newspapers, and it’s terrifying that it’s tailored to your kind of neurosis.”
Hoping to raise awareness of the phenomenon and its dangers, Latham is planning to exhibit his own home version of a click farm — a small box with several phones attached to a computer interface — at the 2024 Images Vevey Festival in Switzerland.
He bought the gadget in Vietnam for the equivalent of about $1,000 and has occasionally experimented with it on his social media accounts.
On Instagram, Latham’s photos usually attract anywhere from a few dozen to couple hundred likes.
But when he deployed his personal click farm to announce his latest book, the post generated more than 6,600 likes.
The photographer wants people to realize that there’s more to what they see on social media — and that metrics aren’t a measurement of authenticity.
“When people are better equipped with knowledge of how things work, they can make more informed decisions,” he said.
Tumblr media
“Beggar’s Honey,” co-published by Here Press and Images Vevey, is available now.
11 notes · View notes