The New York Times Magazine: Joe Biden: ‘I Wish to Hell I’d Just Kept Saying the Exact Same Thing’. “The vice president looks back — and forward.” By Jonathan Alter.
Link via MetaFilter: The Penultimate Week.
Category Archives: Around the World
Surprise!
The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon: Michelle Obama Surprises People Recording Goodbye Messages to Her (YouTube, 5:30min)
“We asked regular Americans to record a video message saying goodbye to First Lady Michelle Obama – what they didn’t know was that FLOTUS was right behind the curtain, waiting to surprise them.”
Bears Ears National Monument
Bears Ears: The Movement to Protect a Cultural Landscape. (Vimeo, 11min)
The film is outdated only in the sense that the area has now been declared a National Monument by President Obama; it sheds light on what there is to see and why the Native Americans value the land so much. Makes me want to see it even more!
Thanks for the link, Garret!
This speech “will go down in the history books”
Deutsche Welle: Opinion: Obama’s positive outlook. “US President Barack Obama has held his farewell address. It is one of the few speeches by an outgoing president that will go down in the history books, believes DW’s Miodrag Soric.”
Watch the speech and/or read the transcript at Whitehouse.gov. The video is also available directly on YouTube: Farewell Address to the American People (51 minutes).
New National Monument in the USA
On December 28, 2016 President Obama declared the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. There’s no website for it yet on NPS.gov, but some info is available at Wikipedia.
Boston Globe Big Picture: Bear Ears Buttes in Utah.
“Known as Bear Ears for the pair of purple buttes at the region’s center, the newly proclaimed 1.9 million-acre National Mounument will preserve a photographer’s checklist of high-desert drama: spires, bridges, canyons. Yet the region’s true distinction is not its topography, but its cultural significance; perhaps no place in America is as rich with ancient Native American sites as Bear Ears. In October 2015, a coalition of five Indian nations, including the Hopi, Ute, and Navajo, formally proposed the monument, attempting to preserve the parcel’s 100,000 archeological sites from ongoing looting and grave robbing. Last June, in a letter to President Obama, more than 700 archeologists endorsed the proposal, saying that looting of the area’s many ancient kivas and dwellings was continuing “at an alarming pace“ and calling Bear Ears “America’s most significant unprotected cultural landscape.“ “
(No typos added by me; the Boston Globe calls it Bear Ears instead of Bears Ears.)