The underlying log passes through a central notch cut into the upper log (object 1033) and extends into the section. Plan view of the unit (left) and during excavation (right). The numbers refer to the distance in centimetres.  Nature.

Dear Commons Community,

The discovery of ancient wooden logs in the banks of a river in Zambia has changed archaeologists’ understanding of ancient human life.

Researchers found evidence the wood had been used to build a structure almost half a million years ago.

The findings, published in the journal Nature, suggest stone-age people built what may have been shelters.  As reported by the BBC.

“This find has changed how I think about our early ancestors,” archaeologist Prof Larry Barham said.

The University of Liverpool scientist leads the Deep Roots of Humanity research project, which excavated and analyzed the ancient timber.

The discovery could transform the current belief ancient humans led simple, nomadic lives.

“They made something new, and large, from wood,” Prof Barham said.

“They used their intelligence, imagination and skills to create something they’d never seen before, something that had never previously existed.”

The researchers also uncovered ancient wooden tools, including digging sticks. But what excited them most were two pieces of wood found at right angles to each other (see photo above).

“One is lying over the other and both pieces of wood have notches cut into them,” University of Aberystwyth archaeologist Prof Geoff Duller said.

“You can clearly see those notches have been cut by stone tools.

“It makes the two logs fit together to become structural objects.”

Further analysis confirmed the logs were about 476,000 years old.

Team member Perrice Nkombwe, from the Livingstone Museum, in Zambia, said: “I was amazed to know that woodworking was such a deep-rooted tradition.

“It dawned on me that we had uncovered something extraordinary.”

Until now, evidence for the human use of wood has been limited to making fire and crafting tools such as digging sticks and spears.

One of the oldest wooden discoveries was a 400,000-year-old spear in prehistoric sands at Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, in 1911.

Unless it is preserved in very specific conditions, wood simply rots away.

But in the meandering riverbanks above the Kalambo Falls, close to the Zambia-Tanzania border, it was waterlogged and essentially pickled for millennia.

The team measured the age of layers of earth in which it was buried, using luminescence dating.

Grains of rock absorb natural radioactivity from the environment over time – essentially charging up like tiny batteries, as Prof Duller put it.

And that radioactivity can be released and measured by heating up the grains and analyzing the light emitted.

The size of the two logs, the smaller of which is about 1.5m (5ft), suggests whoever fitted them together was building something substantial.

Unlikely to have been a hut or permanent dwelling, it could have formed part of a platform for a shelter, the team says.

“It might be some sort of structure to sit beside the river and fish,” Prof Duller said:.

“But it’s hard to tell what sort of [complete] structure it might have been.”

The ancient wood was preserved in riverbed sediments

It is also unclear what species of ancient human – or hominid – built it.

No bones have been found at this site so far.

And the timber is much older than the earliest modern human – or Homo sapien – fossils, which are about 315,000 years old.

“It could have been Homo sapiens and we just haven’t discovered fossils from that age yet,” Prof Duller said.

“But it could be a different species – Homo erectus or Homo naledi – there were a number of hominid species around at that time in southern Africa.”

Transported to the UK for analysis and preservation, the wooden artefacts are being stored in tanks that mimic the waterlogging that preserved them so beautifully for the last half-million years. But they will soon return to Zambia to be displayed.

“With this discovery, we hope to enrich our collection and use the finds to inform the interpretation of the woodworking tradition in Zambia,” Ms Nkombwe said.

Continuing the work at the Kalambo Falls site, she added, “has the potential to deepen our knowledge of ancient woodworking techniques, craftsmanship, and human interactions with the environment”.

Most interesting find!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned yesterday that shutdowns are a political liability for Republicans as Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline to keep the government open.

At his weekly press conference, McConnell, R-Ky., made it very clear that he’s “not a fan of government shutdowns.” As reported by NBC News.

“I’ve seen a few of them over the years. They never have produced a policy change and they’ve always been a loser for Republicans politically,” he said.

McConnell’s comments come as Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans are scrambling to pass a short-term funding bill that would keep the government running through Oct. 31 amid opposition from hard-line conservatives. But even if that funding measure manages to clear the House, it’s laden with conservative policy provisions that make it dead on arrival in the Senate.

With less than two weeks left to act, a shutdown at the end of the month appears to be a possibility.

Asked about the House’s bill to keep the government funded for another month, McConnell said he supports “what the Speaker is trying to accomplish because he’s trying to avoid a government shutdown.”

“So we’re pulling for the Speaker and hoping we can move forward,” he added.

McConnell declined to make predictions about what the House would do.

“What I do think is critically important to the American people is for the government not to shut down. … But I can’t predict exactly how this ends. We’ll see what the House does and act accordingly,” he said.

McConnell has it right!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Google is introducing Bard, its artificially intelligent chatbot, to other members of its digital family — including Gmail, Maps and YouTube — as it seeks ward off competitive threats posed by similar technology run by Open AI and Microsoft.

Bard’s expanded capabilities announced yesterday will be provided through an English-only extension that will enable users to allow the chatbot to mine information embedded in their Gmail accounts as well as pull directions from Google Maps and find helpful videos on YouTube. The extension will also open a door for Bard to fetch travel information from Google Flights and extract information from documents stored on Google Drive.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Google is promising to protect users’ privacy by prohibiting human reviewers from seeing the potentially sensitive information that Bard gets from Gmail or Drive, while also promising that the data won’t used as part of the main way the Mountain View, California, company makes money — selling ads tailored to people’s interests.

The expansion is the latest development in an escalating AI battle triggered by the popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and Microsoft’s push to infuse similar technology in its Bing search engine and its Microsoft 365 suite that includes its Word, Excel and Outlook applications.

ChatGPT prompted Google to release Bard broadly in March and then start testing the use of more conversational AI within its own search results in May.

The decision to feed Bard more digital juice in the midst of a high-profile trial that could eventually hobble the ubiquitous Google search engine that propels the $1.7 trillion empire of its corporate parent, Alphabet Inc.

In the biggest U.S. antitrust case in a quarter century, the U.S Justice Department is alleging Google has created its lucrative search monopoly by abusing its power to stifle competition and innovation. Google contends it dominates search because its algorithms produce the best results. It also argues it faces a wide variety of competition that is becoming more intense with the rise of AI.

Giving Bard access to a trove of personal information and other popular services such as Gmail, Google Maps and YouTube, in theory, will make them even more helpful and prod more people to rely in them.

Google, for instance, posits that Bard could help a user planning a group trip to the Grand Canyon by getting dates that would work for everyone, spell out different flight and hotel options, provide directions from Maps and present an array of informative videos from YouTube.

This is only the beginning of the AI wars among major corporate providers!

Tony

Bob Vander Plaats

Dear Commons Community.

Bob Vander Plaats, head of the influential conservative Christian organization The Family Leader, told CNN that while evangelicals are “appreciative” of what Trump accomplished as president, they’re also “exhausted” by his antics.

Many are ready to move on ― and that could potentially lead to an upset when Iowa holds its first-in-the-nation caucuses in January.

“Iowa is tailor-made to upend Trump,” Vander Plaats, who is based in Iowa, told CNN. “If he loses Iowa, there’s a competitive nomination process. If he wins Iowa, I think it’s over.”

Trump visited Iowa earlier this month, where he received a decidedly mixed reaction, from cheers at a frat party to boos and some middle fingers during a visit to a football game.

Vander Plaats has been critical of Trump ― last month, for example, he called the former president out for “F bombs and mocking people with disabilities.”

But he’s not alone within the movement.

Mike Evans, part of a group of evangelicals who met with Trump at the White House, had blunt words for the former president in an interview with The Washington Post last year.

“He used us to win the White House. We had to close our mouths and eyes when he said things that horrified us,” Evans told the newspaper. “I cannot do that anymore.”

He added: “Donald Trump can’t save America. He can’t even save himself.”

Another onetime faith adviser to Trump, James Robison of Life Outreach International, said last year that Trump’s ego is getting in the way of the agenda.

“If Mr. Trump can’t stop his little petty issues, how does he expect people to stop major issues?” Robison said, according to the Post.

And Washington Times columnist Everett Piper, who had previously endorsed Trump, blamed the former president for the Republican Party’s disappointing midterm election performance last year and said it could only get worse for the GOP next year.

“Donald Trump has to go,” Piper wrote in the Washington Times. “If he‘s our nominee in 2024, we will get destroyed.”

Evangelicals need to do some deep soul searching as to whether they should endorse Trump to be the GOP nominee!

Tony

Dear Commons Community.

The same Ohio river valley where the Wright brothers pioneered human flight will soon be manufacturing cutting-edge electric planes that take off and land vertically, under an agreement announced yesterday between the state and Joby Aviation Inc.

“When you’re talking about air taxis, that’s the future,” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine told The Associated Press. “We find this very, very exciting — not only for the direct jobs and indirect jobs it’s going to create, but like Intel, it’s a signal to people that Ohio is looking to the future. This is a big deal for us.”

Around the world, electric vertical takeoff and landing, or eVTOL aircraft are entering the mainstream, though questions remain about noise levels and charging demands. Still, developers say the planes are nearing the day when they will provide a wide-scale alternative to shuttle individual people or small groups from rooftops and parking garages to their destinations, while avoiding the congested thoroughfares below.

Joby’s decision to locate its first scaled manufacturing facility at a 140-acre (57-hectare) site at Dayton International Airport delivers on two decades of groundwork laid by the state’s leaders, Republican Lt. Gov. Jon Husted said. Importantly, the site is near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratories.

“For a hundred years, the Dayton area has been a leader in aviation innovation,” Husted said. “But capturing a large-scale manufacturer of aircraft has always eluded the local economy there. With this announcement, that aspiration has been realized.”

The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur, lived and worked in Dayton. In 1910, they opened the first U.S. airplane factory there. To connect the historical dots, Joby’s formal announcement Monday took place at Orville Wright’s home, Hawthorn Hill, and concluded with a ceremonial flypast of a replica of the Wright Model B Flyer.

Joby’s production aircraft is designed to transport a pilot and four passengers at speeds of up to 200 miles (321.87 kilometers) per hour, with a maximum range of 100 miles (160.93 kilometers). Its quiet noise profile is barely audible against the backdrop of most cities, the company said. The plan is to place them in aerial ridesharing networks beginning in 2025.

The efforts of the Santa Cruz, California-based company are supported by partnerships with Toyota, Delta Air Lines, Intel and Uber. Joby is a 14-year-old company that went public in 2021 and became the first eVTOL firm to receive U.S. Air Force airworthiness certification.

The $500 million project is supported by up to $325 million in incentives from the state of Ohio, its JobsOhio economic development office and local government. With the funds, Joby plans to build an Ohio facility capable of delivering up to 500 aircraft a year and creating 2,000 jobs. The U.S. Department of Energy has invited Joby to apply for a loan to support development of the facility as a clean energy project.

Joby CEO JoeBen Bevirt told the AP that the company chose Ohio after an extensive and competitive search. Its financial package wasn’t the largest, but the chance to bring the operation to the birthplace of aviation — with a workforce experienced in the field — sealed the deal, he said.

“Ohio is the No. 1 state when it comes to supplying parts for Boeing and Airbus,” Bevirt said. “Ohio is No. 3 in the nation on manufacturing jobs — and that depth of manufacturing prowess, that workforce, is critical to us as we look to build this manufacturing facility.

Bevirt said operations and hiring will begin immediately from existing buildings near the development site, contingent upon clearing the standard legal and regulatory hurdles. The site is large enough to eventually accommodate 2 million square feet (18.58 hectares) of manufacturing space.

Construction on the manufacturing facility is expected to begin in 2024, with production to begin in 2025.

Toyota, a long-term investor, worked with Joby in 2019 to design and to successfully launch its pilot production line in Marina, California. The automaker will continue to advise Joby as it prepares for scaled production of its commercial passenger air taxi, the company said.

Congratulations to Dayton, Ohio!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

An LGBTQ-inclusive student mural (above) created inside a Michigan middle school must be painted over by the end of October. The decision, made last week by the local school board, comes nearly a year after the mural ignited backlash from some parents who said it promoted LGBTQ imagery and witchcraft.  As reported by NBC News

A high schooler in Grant, Michigan, painted the mural inside of a student health center at Grant Middle School after she won a student art contest. Some parents objected to the mural during a Grant Public Schools Board of Education meeting in October because the mural features a student wearing a T-shirt with the colors of the transgender Pride flag, two students wearing the colors of the bisexual Pride flag and another wearing rainbow Pride colors.

Some critics argued that the artwork promotes witchcraft because it includes a video game character that looks like a demon and a Hamsa Hand, also known as the Hand of Fatima, a palm-shaped design seen as a symbol of protection in many cultures.

The school board voted in June to cut ties with Family Health Care, which operates the Child and Adolescent Health Center inside Grant Middle School, in addition to two other school-based health centers in the area, according to WOOD-TV, an NBC affiliate in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The centers provide free medical, dental and behavioral health care to children, according to the Family Health Care website.

Family Health Care and a group of parents challenged the board’s vote, and, after months of negotiations, the board approved a new contract with Family Health Care last week, WOOD-TV reported. The mural’s removal is part of the deal.

“While it is disappointing that the mural must be removed by the end of October, it’s a compromise we reluctantly were willing to accept to ensure the children of the Grant community continue to have access to medical and behavioral health care,” Family Health Care said in a statement last week. At the school board meeting last October, Evelyn Gonzales, the Grant High School student who painted the mural, said through tears that she created it “to make people feel welcome.”

Poor child!

Tony

Joe Carrotta for NYU Langone Health/Handout via REUTERS

Dear Commons Community,

For a history-making two months, a pig’s kidney worked normally inside a brain-dead man.  

The dramatic experiment came to an end Wednesday as surgeons at NYU Langone Health removed the pig kidney and returned the donated body of Maurice Miller to his family for cremation.

It marked the longest a genetically modified pig kidney has ever functioned inside a human, albeit a deceased one. And by pushing the boundaries of research with the dead, the scientists learned critical lessons they’re preparing to share with the Food and Drug Administration -– in hopes of eventually testing pig kidneys in the living.  As reported by the Associated Press and Reuters.

“It’s a combination of excitement and relief,” Dr. Robert Montgomery, the transplant surgeon who led the experiment, told The Associated Press. “Two months is a lot to have a pig kidney in this good a condition. That gives you a lot of confidence” for next attempts.

Montgomery, himself a recipient of a heart transplant, sees animal-to-human transplants as crucial to ease the nation’s organ shortage. More than 100,000 people are on the national waiting list, most who need a kidney, and thousands will die waiting.

So-called xenotransplantation attempts have failed for decades — the human immune system immediately destroyed foreign animal tissue. What’s new: Trying pigs genetically modified so their organs are more humanlike.

Some short experiments in deceased bodies avoided an immediate immune attack but shed no light on a more common form of rejection that can take a month to form. Last year, University of Maryland surgeons tried to save a dying man with a pig heart –- but he survived only two months as the organ failed for reasons that aren’t completely clear. And the FDA gave Montgomery’s team a list of questions about how pig organs really perform their jobs compared to human ones.

Montgomery gambled that maintaining Miller’s body on a ventilator for two months to see how the pig kidney worked could answer some of those questions.

“I’m so proud of you,” Miller’s sister, Mary Miller-Duffy, said in a tearful farewell at her brother’s bedside this week.

Miller had collapsed and was declared brain-dead, unable to donate his organs because of cancer. After wrestling with the choice, Miller-Duffy donated the Newburgh, New York, man’s body for the pig experiment. She recently got a card from a stranger in California who’s awaiting a kidney transplant, thanking her for helping to move forward desperately needed research.

“This has been quite the journey,” Miller-Duffy said as she and her wife Sue Duffy hugged Montgomery’s team.

On July 14, shortly before his 58th birthday, surgeons replaced Miller’s own kidneys with one pig kidney plus the animal’s thymus, a gland that trains immune cells. For the first month, the kidney worked with no signs of trouble.

But soon after, doctors measured a slight decrease in the amount of urine produced. A biopsy confirmed a subtle sign that rejection was beginning –- giving doctors an opportunity to tell if it was treatable. Sure enough, the kidney’s performance bounced back with a change in standard immune-suppressing medicines that patients use today.

“We are learning that this is actually doable,” said NYU transplant immunologist Massimo Mangiola.

The researchers checked off other FDA questions, including seeing no differences in how the pig kidney reacted to human hormones, excreted antibiotics or experienced medicine-related side effects.

“It looks beautiful, it’s exactly the way normal kidneys look,” Dr. Jeffrey Stern said Wednesday after removing the pig kidney at the 61-day mark for closer examination.

The next steps: Researchers took about 180 different tissue samples –- from every major organ, lymph nodes, the digestive tract –- to scour for any hints of problems due to the xenotransplant.

Experiments in the deceased cannot predict that the organs will work the same in the living, cautioned Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center who is helping develop ethics and policy recommendations for xenotransplant clinical trials.

But they can provide other valuable information, she said. That includes helping to tease out differences between pigs with up to 10 genetics changes that some research teams prefer — and those like Montgomery uses that have just a single change, removal of a gene that triggers an immediate immune attack.

“Why we’re doing this is because there are a lot of people that unfortunately die before having the opportunity of a second chance at life,” said Mangiola, the immunologist. “And we need to do something about it.”

Best of luck to NYU Langone.  Incredible medical research!

Tony

Pope Pius XII

Dear Commons Community,

Newly discovered correspondence suggests that World War II-era Pope Pius XII had detailed information from a trusted German Jesuit that up to 6,000 Jews and Poles were being gassed each day in German-occupied Poland. The documentation undercuts the Holy See’s argument that it couldn’t verify diplomatic reports of Nazi atrocities to denounce them.

The documentation from the Vatican archives, published this weekend in Italian daily Corriere della Sera, is likely to further fuel the debate about Pius’ legacy and his now-stalled beatification campaign. Historians have long been divided about Pius’ record, with supporters insisting he used quiet diplomacy to save Jewish lives while critics say he remained silent as the Holocaust raged.

Corriere is reproducing a letter dated Dec. 14, 1942 from the German Jesuit priest to Pius’ secretary which is contained in an upcoming book about the newly opened files of Pius’ pontificate by Giovanni Coco, a researcher and archivist in the Vatican’s Apostolic Archives. As reported by the Associated Press.

Coco told Corriere that the letter was significant because it represented detailed correspondence about the Nazi extermination of Jews, including in ovens, from an informed church source in Germany who was part of the Catholic anti-Hitler resistance that was able to get otherwise secret information to the Vatican.

The letter from the priest, the Rev. Lothar Koenig, to Pius’ secretary, a fellow German Jesuit named the Rev. Robert Leiber, is dated Dec. 14, 1942. Written in German, the letter addresses Leiber as “Dear friend,” and goes on to report that the Nazis were killing up to 6,000 Jews and Poles daily from Rava Ruska, a town in pre-war Poland that is today located in Ukraine, and transporting them to the Belzec death camp.

According to the Belzec memorial which opened in 2004, a total of 500,000 Jews perished at the camp. The memorial’s website reports that as many as 3,500 Jews from Rava Ruska had already been sent to Belzec earlier in 1942 and that from Dec. 7-11, the city’s Jewish ghetto was liquidated. “About 3,000-5,000 people were shot on the spot and 2,000- 5,000 people were taken to Bełżec,” the website says.

The date of Koenig’s letter is significant because it suggests the correspondence from a trusted fellow Jesuit arrived in Pius’ office in the days after the ghetto was emptied, and after Pius had received multiple diplomatic notes and visits from a variety of envoys of foreign governments from August 1942 onwards with reports that up to 1 million Jews had been killed so far in Poland.

While it can’t be certain that Pius saw the letter, Leiber was Pius’ top aide and had served the pope when he was the Vatican’s ambassador to Germany during the 1920s, suggesting a close working relationship especially concerning matters related to Germany.

According to “The Pope at War,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist David Kertzer, a top secretariat of state official, Monsignor Domenico Tardini, told the British envoy to the Vatican in mid-December that the pope couldn’t speak out about Nazi atrocities because the Vatican hadn’t been able to verify the information.

“The novelty and importance of this document comes from this fact: that on the Holocaust, there is now the certainty that Pius XII was receiving from the German Catholic Church exact and detailed news about crimes being perpetrated against Jews,” Coco was quoted by Corriere as saying.

However, Coco noted that Koenig also urged the Holy See to not make public what he was revealing because he feared for his own life and the lives of the resistance sources who had provided the intelligence. Pius’ supporters have long insisted that he couldn’t speak out strongly against the Nazis because of fears of reprisals.

In a telephone interview Saturday, Kertzer said the letter could be significant because it could mark the first time a reference to Jews being gassed in ovens had been revealed in a letter he said would certainly have been brought to Pius’ attention. Kertzer said historians have been eagerly awaiting Coco’s book because as a Vatican archivist, Coco had access to a trove of Pius’ personal files that weren’t yet indexed and made available to scholars when the Vatican opened the Pius archives in March 2020.

“When we started working there, it wasn’t a secret — although it took a while to figure out — what kinds of documents were missing,” Kertzer said, noting that documents from the Vatican’s office in Washington during the war years have still not yet been catalogued.

This is a dark chapter in Pope Pius’ legacy!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

My wife, Elaine, and I saw Kenneth Branagh’s new movie, A Haunting in Venice, last night. We are both Agatha Christie fans (Elaine more than me).  We enjoyed Branagh’s third movie about Hercule Poirot. It has excellent acting, a couple of plot twists that Christie fans love, and a fair amount of spookiness, bordering on horror, not normally part of the Christie genre.  Hercule Poirot fans will love A Haunting… Not sure if others will. 

Below is a review courtesy of The Associated Press.

Tony

————————————————————-

The Associated Press

Movie Review: Kenneth Branagh crafts a sumptuously spooky ‘A Haunting in Venice’

By LINDSEY BAHR

September 12, 2023

Kenneth Branagh indulges in the kind of macabre theatricality that only a crumbling Venetian palazzo on a stormy Halloween night can provide in “ A Haunting in Venice. ”

Moviegoers probably long ago made up their mind one way or another about Branagh’s stately and flawed Hercule Poirot franchise, but should there be any curiosity left for this third installment is worth it. It is spooky, fun and features Tina Fey, looking smart and sleek in post-war suits as the fast-talking author of wildly successful whodunnits who says things like “I’m the smartest person I know” in a mid-Atlantic accent.

Set in 1947 on a particularly foggy night in the city of canals, “A Haunting in Venice” is beautiful to look at, with costumes by Sammy Sheldon, production design by John Paul Kelly and cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos. And it’s embellished with moody but palatable scares that feel reminiscent of classics like “The Innocents” and “The Others,” that are enhanced by Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score. In other words, this might not excite a “Saw” enthusiast, but for the more easily scared and skittish it hits just the right notes.

Agatha Christie takes a bit of a backseat here, as Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green take only the loosest inspiration from her 1969 book “The Hallowe’en Party” for their haunting, firstly by moving it to Venice. It’s where Poirot has chosen to live out his self-imposed retirement (an enviable exile if there ever was one). His whereabouts are hardly a secret though — desperate folks line up outside of his picturesque apartment hoping he’ll take a stab at their cases. But for now, a handsome Italian bodyguard (Riccardo Scamarcio) is there to make sure they don’t get close enough to ask.

Fey’s Ariadne Oliver gets through the gates, though, with a different kind of offer: She wants Poirot to accompany her to a séance. This medium, she says, appears to be the real deal and only he’ll be able to figure out if it’s all a trick. Soon he, reluctantly, finds himself at a Halloween party for the city’s orphans, held by a famous opera singer, Rowena, (Kelly Reilly) with a famously dead daughter whom they hope to contact later that evening when the children depart.

Branagh recruited a few of his “Belfast” stars into this ensemble, including Jamie Dornan as doctor still haunted by the war and Jude Hill as his precocious son Leopold. Camille Cottin is a housekeeper, Kyle Allen is the dead girl’s ex-fiancé, and Michelle Yeoh is the theatrical medium Mrs. Reynolds, who seems to be having a grand time chewing the scenery as a possible femme fatale. It is a distinct shift in tone from the previous films — sadder and more serious, with grief and death everywhere. Even before Alicia’s mysterious death (off a balcony, into the canal with a horrific scrape on her back) the grand palazzo had a body count: It’s where doctors are said to have locked up children to die during the plague.

And this crew is in for a long, stormy, claustrophobic night with finger pointing, more deaths and some inexplicable phenomena at play. Poirot’s existential crisis is probably the least interesting aspect of the whole thing, despite its centrality to the plot, but Branagh doesn’t waste too much of his time diving into those self-indulgent waters.

Maybe Branagh should have been leaning more into horror this whole time with this franchise. Or maybe it’s a case of underestimating a director whose work is prolific and not always personal. It can be hard to take stock of a filmmaker’s career when they’ve made great Shakespeare and Cinderella adaptations as well as “Thor” and “Artemis Fowl.” But it’s always a pleasant surprise when it works as “A Haunting in Venice” very much does.

Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Maureen Dowd, has a piece this morning, urging, Joe Biden to let go a bit and to make himself look more presidential during speaking engagements.  Entitled, “Go With the Flow, Joe!”,  here is an excerpt.

“President Biden gave a speech on Bidenomics at a community college in a Washington suburb on Thursday.

He ended without taking questions. He said he wished he could, “but I’m going to get in real trouble if I do that.”

Dude, you’re the leader of the free world! Who sends the president to the principal’s office?

At least this time, his staff didn’t play him offstage with a musical interlude as though he were an Oscar winner droning on too long. That’s what happened last Sunday in Vietnam. His press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, gave him the hook, abruptly ending the press conference as he was talking about his conversation with a top Chinese official. Oh yeah, nothing important.

Seconds earlier, he had said “I’m going to go to bed.” Republicans, naturally, jumped on that as evidence of senility. But that was silly. The president had had an extremely long day, on a five-day trip to India and Vietnam. The press conference was after 9 p.m. local time. I’ve been on plenty of those trips with presidents, and they’re exhausting.

Since he became president, Biden has sharply curbed how much he talks to the press, rarely giving interviews. He limits his press conferences mostly to duets with foreign leaders, where he can put his foreign policy relationships and experience on display. Even then, White House officials preselect questioners and aggressively approach reporters to ferret out what topics they would focus on if they were picked. On Friday at the White House, after backing the autoworkers in their strike, he didn’t take questions.

There’s something poignant about watching a guy who used to delight in his Irish gift of gab be muzzled. In interviews when he was a senator and then vice president, Biden could easily give a 45-minute answer to the first question. Heaven help anyone who tried to nix the prolix pol back then.

But now, when I watch him cut himself short, or get cut short by his staff, I get an image of a yellow Lab gamboling smack into an electric fence. When the president stops himself and says, “Am I giving too long an answer?” or “Maybe I’ll stop there,” or “I’m going to get in real trouble,” he seems nervous that his handlers might yank his choke collar if he rattles on.

He no longer seems a Happy Warrior.

Dowd’s conclusion:

“Biden needs to start looking like he’s in command. His staff is going to have to roll with him and take some risks and stop jerking the reins. Let Joe out of the virtual basement.”

Yes!

Tony