Taylor Swift fans celebrate singer’s milestone moment with throwback clip Taylor Swift marks major milestone as old video resurfaces Taylor Swift fans are delighted to celebrate 27th Swiftmas this year as the pop superstar experienced a “life-changing” moment 27 years ago. The 35-year-old Grammy-winning artist received her first guitar from her parents Andrea and Scott Swift as a Christmas present 27 years ago. Celebrating the 27th anniversary of Anti-Hero hitmaker’s first guitar, Swifties resurfaced the video all over social media, on Wednesday. In the adorable video from Swift’s childhood, when she was an eight-year-old, she was seen among many wrapped and unwrapped presents. The young songstress screams as she opens the present containing guitar and exclaims, "Guitar!" before declaring, "I am happy!" Fans flocked to the comments section of the sweet video and noted how that one guitar changed the future of music. One fan penned, "would like to thank scott and andrea swift for getting taylor a guitar for christmas 27 years ago". "The beginning of an era," another Swiftie added, and “the amount of lives changed all because of one guitar,” chimed in a third.a Appreciating Swift’s supportive parents, one fan noted, “These parents deserve a medal for this- the moment that changed all eras in our Universe. merry Swiftmas” More fans gushed, “Maybe the best investment of all time,” and “That was a gift to the entire world.” The Rise and Fall of Sean 'Diddy' Combs André 3000 reacts after Drake leaks collaborative track with Kanye West Mike Schur reflects on ‘SNL’s’ controversial Japanese parody of ‘The Office’ Blake Lively reveals secret behind her and Ryan Reynolds 'happy marriage'NoneMR’s security de-militarised Essential reading on Ranil’s role Sri Lankans have been politically scammed as never before. With AKD and the NPP, there’s been generational, gender and governance change, no structural reform (let alone ‘system-change’), and most crucially no change of economic policy paradigm and corporate/superrich bias. In an inversion of their mandate, there’s stark continuity in the economic policy framework that caused Sri Lanka’s debt crisis and perpetuates mass economic austerity. As presidential candidate Anura emphasised improvement of human resources, upgrading of human capital, as his economic keystone, but his presidential policies have placed the keystone in the opposite direction, and his macroeconomic commitments are and cannot but be ruinous to human resources/human capital. What would it mean if, as Deshal de Mel, (former? intermittent?) advisor to the Finance Ministry exults, three Presidents who were perceived to have been and publicly purported to be very different from each other—Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Anura Kumara Dissanayake—deployed one and the same team, on core economic policy including the deal with the private creditors (ISB holders)? Is it because the team comprised the best of the best? Then why the ‘stealth’? Surely we should know the names of everyone involved so the nation could be grateful. Logically, three widely disparate presidents should have issued instructions with different emphases to the team, and under AKD they should have concluded with a quite different package than that which Ranil had chalked-out. But if there were three widely different presidents, one team, and the package that was worked on was the same, it means that whatever their public postures the three Presidents were of essentially the same view, shared the same economic policy paradigm. Bluntly, all 3 Presidents, 3 Finance Ministers and their unchanging team, over ‘983 days’ and counting, served the same interests: big private financial corporate interests, local and foreign. Though the threat to him is qualitatively higher than to any other Sri Lankan, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s security contingent is being stripped of its military component, reducing it to a purely Police detachment. Dinesh Schaffter’s brutal murder has not been solved. His shadowy, sadistic killers have not been identified let alone apprehended. How difficult would it be for a die-hard pro-Tiger Diaspora billionaire or consortium of contributors to hire foreign mercenaries specialised in Black Ops to infiltrate a team into Colombo and assassinate Mahinda Rajapaksa, in bitter, bloody revenge for their ‘Mahaveera’ Prabhakaran’s demise and the LTTE’s decisive defeat? AKD’s administration is leaving Mahinda wide-open. It has cold-bloodedly jeopardised the security and safety of the leader who restored security and safety for the immense majority of Sri Lanka’s citizens. Disguised as Santa, President AKD gifted social sectors who are among the most vulnerable, a tax on their fixed deposits i.e., their life savings, which will reduce the monthly or annual interest on which they live, buy medicines etc. Undertaken to offset loss of revenue through the slender, spotty VAT reduction, this heartless measure could be avoided by increased direct taxes on the top corporate earners and the superrich. The economic callousness of the Government is manifest when reading data provided by numbers.lk: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BLSjMSarQ/ The apologia for Anuranomics-- ‘what alternative did Anura have?’-- a pseudo-left echo of Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA) is masterfully answered in concrete detail by Kusum Wijetilleke last Sunday, in a piece entitled ‘The Curse of Incrementalism: NPP Capitulation to the Status-Quo’. The Government has relaxed foreign exchange regulations for an initial period of six months. (https://www.dailymirror.lk/breaking-news/Government-decides-to-further-ease-capital-controls/108-298515). That’s sugar to a diabetic. Foreign exchange regulations in place through the JR and Premadasa presidencies were relaxed by Ranil Wickremesinghe and Ravi Karunanayake in 2017, causing or contributing to a massive outflow of dollars, which according to figures provided in parliament by then Minister of Justice Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, is larger than our total foreign debt. Former President Ranil Wickremesinghe (appointed not elected, then electorally trounced) made an appearance on television, addressing the nation in robust support of President Anura Dissanayake’s recent address to parliament and specifically his ISB deal. Ranil kept using the term “we” (“api”), as in “we have now arrived at an agreement with the sovereign bond holders and a new bond will be issued on December 20th”. (https://youtu.be/IUAHz8mmwpk) He faulted the Opposition for its criticism of President Dissanayake’s economics and insisted the Opposition make it clear than any and all criticism was within the existing agreement with the IMF, i.e., without advocating renegotiation/revision, as Sajith does. Is Ranil Wickremesinghe AKD’s Emeritus Economic Advisor or ‘Economics Godfather’? Has his security been slashed as badly as Mahinda’s, or does Ranil (still) have Army Commandos and/or the STF? ‘Ranil Wickremesinghe & The Emasculation of the United National Party’ (Neptune, Colombo 2024) a brand-new book by Prof Rajiva Wijesinha (his cousin), is mandatory reading for any student of Sri Lanka’s politics and contemporary history. A chronicle by an erudite observer-participant in the politics of the last few decades, it is the seedbed of several doctoral dissertations. As I noted in my remarks at Rajiva’s book launch, Ranil Wickremesinghe’s story is one of negative dominance of Sri Lankan affairs. He is a reverse Midas, dooming through corrosion, every party and leader he has touched or has touched him. The long list includes the UNP, SLFP and SLPP, all of which have had their large vote bases fissure, decompose and disintegrate. Ranil’s toxic economic ideas and ideology have now possessed Anura Dissanayake and the JVP-NPP. The JVP was thought of either as (a) the anti-capitalist ‘third force’ or (b) the radical wing of the national liberation struggle, the leftwing vanguard of the anti-UNP bloc. It authentically occupied each role at different periods. During the so-called Yahapalanaya (‘Good governance’) coalition of Ranil’s UNP and dissident Maithripala Sirisena’s SLFP faction, Anura and the JVP were seen in a third way: as the leftwing ally of a centre-right neoliberal coalition. The green elephant being the UNP symbol, the JVPers were nicknamed “rathu ali pataw” or “red baby elephants” with Anura as the ‘Rathu Ali Patiya’. Malik Samarawickrema and Mangala Samaraweera were Ranil’s “AKD Whisperers”. This Christmas season it is even more appropriate than usual to call to mind the circumstances of bloody repression by the authorities that surrounded the birth of Jesus. Netanyahu’s Israel has been perpetrating the modern-day equivalent of King Herod’s Slaughter of the Innocents. One of the most unforgettably heart-rending episodes was of a 6-year-old girl Hind Rajab, who made a plaintive telephone call for help which we all heard on TV around the world before she went missing and was discovered slaughtered by the IDF. According to a Belgium-based NGO dedicated to justice for Hind Rajab, an Israeli soldier who has earned the nickname ‘Terminator’ for self-advertised war-crimes was on holiday in Sri Lanka. Alerted by the IDF he has since skipped the island. (https://www.dailymirror.lk/breaking-news/Belgium-based-NGO-claims-Israel-soldier-terminator-in-Sri-Lanka/108-298377). Sirimavo Bandaranaike or Ranasinghe Premadasa would have deported him and shut down the pipeline bringing IDF soldiers on R&R to Sri Lanka while Israel continues to attack countries and communities in a Nazi-like rampage. Not so, Anura Dissanayake. Recently, there was a two-hour discussion on foreign policy billed ‘Sri Lanka’s Place in a Turbulent World’, on TV1’s Face the Nation. The participants included an old friend and several young ones, including a very bright former student. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LioiN2q69Q&list=PLwBEINflt3JHYOP-1BUn6SjgBpVSHnvd0) Two propositions stated by the very smart younger analysts startled me. The first was that Israel’s war on Gaza and the West Bank was essentially the same as Russia’s invasion of/intervention in Ukraine. That’s a classic ‘category error’; apples and oranges. Israel’s is an Occupation and has been so for decades as acknowledged by numerous UN Security Council resolutions. Israel’s Occupation has structural characteristics of Apartheid, as affirmed both by former US President Jimmy Carter and the ANC leaders who fought apartheid in South Africa. This, and NATO expansion towards the East in the post-Cold war era, make the response to Ukraine far more muted in the global South (notably among the BRICS Plus constituency, containing the global majority) than the response to Gaza. The second, far more dangerous proposition, presented by the young academic in the strategic/security studies sector, issued from what he repeatedly insisted was ‘strategic thinking’: Sri Lanka should not recalibrate and retrench from its present policy on Israel which includes ‘R&R war tourism’, because from a ‘strategic’ point of view, Sri Lanka needs strong relations with Israel, an AI weapons hub. This is bad strategy and bad thinking. Which strategic interests—the strategic interests of what and who— are we or should we be thinking of, when we speak of strategy? Surely, of Sri Lanka as a country or more precisely Sri Lanka as State. The worst crisis and challenge the Sri Lankan state faced since Independence was in the 1980s when it had two civil wars – North and South, secessionist and anti-systemic--and an external military force on Sri Lankan soil. That crisis was caused by the mismanagement of Sri Lanka’s internal relations with one of its constituent communities (Sri Lanka’s Tamils), which had a co-ethnic rear-base, an ethnic kin-state as neighbour. No strategic thinking about Sri Lanka’s foreign policy or pathway can start from or limit itself to bilateral relations – diplomatic, economic or military relations with another state. Strategic thinking must flow from the foundational set of questions, axiomatically geostrategic but also ontological-existential, which I borrow from Mervyn de Silva: ‘who we are, what we are, where we are’. Strategic thinking about the Sri Lankan state must place high priority on grasping Sri Lanka’s composition and the necessity to manage with prudence its internal relationships between its constituent communities, especially when those communities have a larger global/globalised extended family they belong to. The Ranil-Manusha expansion of Sri Lanka’s relations with Israel during and despite its genocidal Gaza war, continued and maintained by Anura-Vijitha, does not take into account: What kind of ‘strategic thinking’ can recommend robust, expansive relations with Israel ignoring these three factors? What kind of ‘strategic thinking’ can ignore the possible outreach to Islamist militancy outside Sri Lanka or the gaze of Islamist militancy falling on Sri Lanka as a place which welcomes IDF war criminals with open arms? How can the expanded equation with Israel under the Ranil-Manusha and Anura-Vijitha dispensations not be seen for the strategic and security threat it poses to the Sri Lankan state by alienating an entire community which has already experienced one round of radicalisation, providing the backcloth of the Easter Massacre 2019, though external infiltrators and provocateurs were very probably involved? Sri Lanka’s passage in a turbulent world must be navigated with awareness of the tempest to come. nWashington is undecided: should Russia be neutralised with a Trump-propelled deal on Ukraine, or should the collective West go for broke on Ukrainian/Russian and Iranian fronts and possibly open a Cuban/Latin American front? Both the Israeli campaign in the Middle East and NATO/Ukraine in Europe, aimed at Iran and Russia respectively, are flanking moves in the West’s grand strategy aimed at the ultimate target, China. If Sri Lanka has a strong strategic bond with Israel, it is taking sides wittingly or unwittingly, and painting a target on its back. Our doctrine must be one of strategic prudence. This holds true of any Defence Cooperation Agreement with India. Just as Sri Lanka should not allow anything hostile to India to emanate from Sri Lanka’s land or sea, we must not allow anything hostile to China to do so either, still less allow ourselves to be enmeshed in a type of defence relationship which may be a subset of an Indian strategic configuration aimed separately or in conjunction with its fellow Quad partners, against China. It is absurd to regard moral-ethical factors and world opinion as unrelated to strategic policy-making, and compartmentalise the two. Prof Joseph Nye’s famous concepts of ‘soft power’ and ‘smart power’ incorporate the moral-ethical ingredient into the all-important ‘story’ or ‘narrative’ which seeks to persuade. Israel’s story is the nastiest in the world today (and in my lifetime since the Vietnam War). We should take our distance from it. Yet, Sri Lanka on the NPP’s watch is turning a blind eye to Zionist genocidaires enjoying themselves on our island. For Sri Lanka, a small state, it is strategically imperative that: (I)We establish a presence (a toehold) and participate in as many spaces in the world system as possible, raising our profile. (II) We share the same broad, autonomous – I call it ‘Neo-Nonaligned’--space and outlook as the majority of the world’s nations and peoples, in support of a multipolar world order which can contribute to global balance, global equilibrium.Iranian President To Visit Moscow For Talks In January
— BORN: Oct. 1, 1924, at the Wise Clinic in Plains, Georgia, the first U.S. president born in a hospital. He would become the first president to live for an entire century . — EDUCATION: Plains High School, Plains, Georgia, 1939-1941; Georgia Southwestern College, Americus, Georgia, 1941-1942; Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, 1942-1943; U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Maryland, 1943-1946 (class of 1947); Union College, Schenectady, New York, 1952-1953. — PRESIDENCY: Sworn-in as 39th president of the United States at the age of 52 years, 3 months and 20 days on Jan. 20, 1977, after defeating President Gerald R. Ford in the 1976 general election. Left office on Jan. 20, 1981, following 1980 general election loss to Ronald Reagan. — POST-PRESIDENCY: Launched The Carter Center in 1982. Began volunteering at Habitat for Humanity in 1984. Awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. Taught for 37 years at Emory University, where he was granted tenure in 2019, at age 94. — OTHER ELECTED OFFICES: Georgia state senator, 1963-1967; Georgia governor, 1971-1975. — OTHER OCCUPATIONS: Served in U.S. Navy, achieved rank of lieutenant, 1946-53; Farmer, warehouseman, Plains, Georgia, 1953-77. — FAMILY: Wife, Rosalynn Smith Carter , married July 7, 1946 until her death Nov. 19, 2023. They had three sons, John William (Jack), James Earl III (Chip), Donnel Jeffrey (Jeff); a daughter, Amy Lynn; and 11 living grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. Source: Jimmy Carter Library & MuseumOnline technology bootcamps available at LTU in 2025
MINNEAPOLIS -- Austen Cashman returned from Chicago to his Twin Cities roots for the holidays. Sunday was his 10th day back home. He was an early attendee along with family and friends for Sunday’s Vikings-Green Bay showdown in U.S. Bank Stadium. “We get here early in order to watch Blake work out on the field, and that’s also where the Vikings come out to be introduced,” Kory Thomas said. That would be Blake Cashman, former Eden Prairie High great, former Gophers standout, former much-injured New York Jet, former productive Houston Texan, and now an indispensable inside linebacker for the Vikings. Thomas is married to Blake’s mother, Corinne. Father Steve Cashman also was in the house with another collection of Vikings (and Blake) backers. “There probably will be 30 or 35 of us altogether,” Corinne Thomas said. Among those interested in getting a pregame look at Blake was Austen, his kid brother by one year. That is because during these 10 days in the Twin Cities he had spent no time with his brother. “I’ve been staying at the house and taking care of Blake’s dog, but I haven’t seen him,” Austen said. “Blake lets us all know ahead of time: There’s no Christmas involving him when there’s a game to be played, and especially a big game like this one against the Packers.” So go ahead and open gifts and drink a bit of eggnog, but Blake Cashman won’t be involved. He will be watching “tape” to get ready for Green Bay. “I can say this, and not because he’s my brother,” Austen said. “Blake is the most competitive person I know. He never stops — working out, preparing for a game." Considering the one year in age difference, were there a few tussles around the home? Corinne smiled at the question, and Austen offered this: “There were way too many of those. I wound up with a broken hand once when Blake decided I had done a terrible job vacuuming the basement.” Did this truly happen? “Yes, Blake and Austen got into it about doing the job right — owning your responsibilities and doing your best," Corinne said. ”Blake has been intense in everything he does. For him, 100 percent is the minimum." Which probably explains Cashman putting behind original walk-on status and three years of injuries with the Jets to become this valuable in his sixth season as an NFLer: The Vikings had their two-game losing streak to Detroit and the Los Angeles Rams in late October, and part of the explanation offered by coaches was that Cashman was missing with an injury. The reports from the Eagan complex were that Cashman was a playmaker, yes, but also vital in positioning others to make plays. Mike Grant, the Eden Prairie coaching legend, has found himself unsurprised by Cashman’s contribution to this phenomenal Vikings season — 14-2 after Sunday’s 27-25 victory over the Packers, twice the number anticipated preseason in sports books. Eden Prairie was rolling to four consecutive state titles (2011-14) as Cashman ended his high school career in 2014. The last of those came 28-27 against potent Totino-Grace, with Cashman moving to receiver to catch a 24-yard touchdown pass and then leading a charge to stop Grace’s try for a winning two-point conversion. “Blake might not like it when I say we had better athletes, more gifted players physically, but that’s true,” Grant said. “What he always did was make plays. He was a very good athlete, but most of all, he had a quick-twitch mind. “You see players that are in between, not out of the play, but not really in it. Blake Cashman ... for us, for the Gophers, and now the Vikings: He’s in the middle of the play.“ That was the case late Sunday afternoon and into the evening. The Packers put up the last 15 points, putting a dent in what had been a Vikings domination. Still, it was never really a nail-biter, and now the Vikings can go to Detroit next week and take the No. 1 seed in the NFC with a win over the Lions. Which without a doubt was the Christmas gift that Blake Cashman sought last week. All that preparation rather than holiday cheer? He led the Vikings with 11 tackles and was credited with 1.5 of the Vikings’ three sacks of Jordan Love. Pregame, it was a game for which the defense was announced, so family and friends were able to see Cashman run through the dragon’s smoke down below. Postgame, Blake was headed to the house, where everyone gathered would get to hug the game ball he was awarded after Sunday’s game, and brother Austen might also get a firm but not damaging handshake. ©2024 The Minnesota Star Tribune. Visit at startribune.com . Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.