On Wednesday morning, President-elect Donald Trump might have had reason to be nervous — if, of course, he acknowledged that feeling existed. Claims of the Russian government possessing damaging information about his personal life were everywhere. His secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson was facing tough questions from Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about Russia and Vladimir Putin. And Trump was scheduled to hold a news conference — his first since last summer.
By the time Trump was done with his lunchtime news conference — one filled with half -truths and distortions — he had won the day.
How? By turning the Russia story into a debate over fake news and the media — and in so doing, turning the media against itself.
This was no accident. From Trump’s opening statement, it was clear that he wanted to make the story of the day one about the media and its foibles. Here’s the first thing Trump said :
It’s very familiar territory, news conferences, because we used to give them on an almost daily basis. I think we probably maybe won the nomination because of news conferences and it’s good to be with you.
We stopped giving them because we were getting quite a bit of inaccurate news, but I do have to say that — and I must say that I want to thank a lot of the news organizations here today because they looked at that nonsense that was released by maybe the intelligence agencies? Who knows, but maybe the intelligence agencies which would be a tremendous blot on their record if they in fact did that. A tremendous blot, because a thing like that should have never been written, it should never have been had and it should certainly never been released.
Immediately the theme of the news conference is established. Most of the media is good. But some aren’t. And this whole Russia story is really about why some in the media — BuzzFeed, in particular — decided to publish a dossier filled with unverifiable claims about Trump. Whether or not Trump had seen the two-page summary of what was in the dossier — intelligence officials said he had — was lost in the shuffle.
Then came Trump’s showdown with CNN’s Jim Acosta in which Acosta repeatedly tried to ask a question of the president-elect only to be stymied in his attempt to do so. Here’s that exchange:
ACOSTA: Can you give us a question since you’re attacking us? Can you give us a question?
TRUMP: Don’t be rude. No, I’m not going to give you a question. I’m not going to give you a question.
ACOSTA: Can you state …
TRUMP: You are fake news.
If there was any question what the story coming out of the news conference would be, it ended in that exchange. Conservatives cheered Trump’s willingness to shout down an adversarial reporter. The media warned of the dangers posed by Trump’s willingness to punish journalists who didn’t treat him well. Talk of what made “fake news” was everywhere. So was chatter about whether or not BuzzFeed should have published the dossier.
What wasn’t everywhere — and by that I mean top of mind for the average American — was Trump’s skirting of a blind trust for his assets. Or his continued unwillingness to condemn Putin. Or any real clarity about what he knew when about the Russian dossier. Or any serious discussion about Trump’s continued unwillingness to release his tax returns.
You get the idea. The day became dominated by two narratives that are good for Trump: 1) Him versus the media and 2) the media versus the media.
You let this happen!!!!, screamed media critics. You followed the bright shiny thing rather than pushing Trump on what really matters!
An easy charge to level. But one that is simply not borne out by the facts. Reporters did try to push Trump. He refused to engage, preferring to either call on reporters more favorable to him — the question on Trump’s recommendations for the media to do better was ridiculous — to help drive his preferred message.
And we — the media — covered the lack of a blind trust. And Trump’s refusal to release his taxes. And his lack of criticism of Putin. But all of that got lost amid the maelstrom about the media that Trump was able to kick up and then — through the power of social media — stoke.
. @CNN is in a total meltdown with their FAKE NEWS because their ratings are tanking since election and their credibility will soon be gone!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 12, 2017
Trump won Wednesday. That’s a testament to his nuanced understanding of how the modern media works, the media’s own soft spots and the ways in which polarization dictates how people consume any news event. It’s also further evidence that the Trump presidency will be like nothing politics has ever seen before.

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© Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/12/how-donald-trump-won-wednesday/
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January 12, 2017
— It can be tempting to see prayer as a potentially futile exercise, a wishful technique or set of hopeful words to try to get through some difficult situation or manage pain – but not necessarily something that leads to practical results. Yet many, including me, have found that prayer can indeed bring tangible healing. Last month, a news article caught my eye when it asked: “Can science explain the reason why people get healed after being prayed for?” The story reported how researchers from Vrije University in Amsterdam are “looking into the science behind healings that occur after prayer.”
Often research into science and prayer relates to how mental states reduce stress or produce other physical changes with positive health effects. But more than 140 years ago, a woman named Mary Baker Eddy dedicated her life to looking deeply into what she believed must be a spiritual law behind the healing works of Christ Jesus. Her inspired search of the Bible culminated in her discovery of what she termed Christian Science , and she published her findings in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” a book that continues to show how we can indeed find healing solutions through scientific prayer.
Wait … scientific prayer? Yes – prayer based on the spiritual truth of God’s infinite goodness and its expression in all creation. Such prayer enables us to trust that despite the surface appearance that there is only physical cause and effect, the love that God has for each of us is spiritual fact and primal cause.
I was able to apply this divine Science in my prayers for myself when I discovered an abnormal growth on my body. Its location suggested this could be a serious condition. However, as I turned to God in prayer, I felt assured that since there is one almighty God, one supreme good cause, then this condition, although it seemed frightening, simply couldn’t be true about who I really was as God’s good spiritual creation.
My daily prayers became the application of this spiritual truth. I saw more clearly that no matter how serious a problem looks, it doesn’t change the fact of God’s love for us or our loveliness to God. Divine Love doesn’t create or know us as suffering, pained, conflicted mortals, but rather as immortal ideas of its goodness.
From this spiritual viewpoint I began to gain a clearer view of the actual unreality of the not-good growth in light of the reality of good, and the unhelpfulness of any speculation about it. My desire to better feel my inherent wholeness was answered as I saw more fully the truth about my true identity and relation to God as Love’s perfect, spiritual expression. In a very short time, the growth simply dissolved, and hasn’t returned.
On the basis of this central truth of God’s allness, many have found that prayer becomes reliably effective. It lifts thought to a higher standpoint that’s in accord with what God is, knows, and does. Praying from this spiritually scientific standpoint, one starts to find more healing, harmony, and right answers to problems of all kinds.

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© Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/A-Christian-Science-Perspective/2017/0112/The-Science-behind-prayer-that-heals
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Surely you’ve heard of Elijah Page? A voice from the past, yes, but a voice you remember: he played guitar and stood up alone to sing about injustice and heartbreak in the days when it still seemed possible to change the world. Dylan, Guthrie, Seeger, Page – performing in clubs and at festivals, for ­audiences that took those voices to heart, that shaped their lives according to the songs they heard.
In reality, you are unlikely to have heard of Elijah (or Eli) Page, because W B Belcher invented him for his debut novel – but Page is a pretty convincing concoction. A compelling performer in his day, he vanished from the scene and, it seems, disappeared completely, as the narrator, Jack Wyeth, relates. Wyeth is a Page-obsessed folkie, a millennial with father issues (his guitar-playing dad left when he was five) who drops girlfriends and dead-end jobs like so much change from his pocket, never able to settle, never knowing what he wants.
One day, out of the blue, he gets a call from Eli Page’s manager. Page is ready to write a memoir; all he needs is a ghostwriter. Wyeth takes the job and goes to upstate New York but when he gets there he discovers, perhaps unsurprisingly, that his task is not as straightforward as he’d hoped.
The American folk scene offers a good canvas for the shattering of youthful illusions. It is hard to avoid comparing this novel to the Coen brothers’ haunting 2013 film, Inside Llewyn Davis , in which Oscar Isaac plays a 1960s folk musician based on a singer called Dave Van Ronk. Van Ronk gets a namecheck in Belcher’s book and, for those who love conspiracy theories, it may be worth noting that the writer who helped Van Ronk put his posthumously published memoir together was called Elijah Wald.
There’s more. Albert E Brumley’s 1929 spiritual “I’ll Fly Away”, which you can find on the soundtrack of the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? , also gets a mention here. This is the kind of knitting together that is intrinsic to folk on both sides of the Atlantic, where old tunes and new tunes circle each other and bind until it becomes hard to tell them apart.
Folk is – let’s be frank – always on the margins. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be a place for rebellion and protest. Both Eli and Jack are marginal figures – even in their own lives, it seems. What brings them together is a need to escape from the confines of the present day, though that desire takes different forms. Eli has become a crank, a near ­recluse: imagine Bob Dylan crossed with J D Salinger and you’ll start to get the picture.
Belcher’s portrait of small-town life and the dark currents running under any surface is well done, and it’s clear that the author knows the drill. He lives along the same river, the Battenkill, that winds through the book; he is also on the board of directors of Caffe Lena in New York, the most venerable folk venue in United States.
Perhaps, at times, the material is a little too close to his heart. One of the strengths of Lay Down Your Weary Tune is its sense of mystery, but that mystery is stretched out just a little too long. What is going on with Eli? Who is responsible for the strange spate of crime in town? The story is a good one – laced with lost fathers and vanished daughters – but like those long, long Child ballads, it wouldn’t have suffered by losing a verse or two. And sometimes the similes get out of hand: wine glasses that “chirped like falsetto birds” when they clinked; a spine curved “like a lazy creek”. It’s lovely, but occasionally distracting.
The characters, however, are vivid and true. Jack becomes enamoured of Jenny, whose connection to Page is a puzzle right to the end of the book. Jenny is soft and strong and real, and her attachment to her ex-fiancé, a bullying local police officer called Cal, perfectly convincing. Eli stays just out of focus – but by design, dimmed to himself as well as to the people who try to get close to him. In the final pages, Jack finds a moment in which he sees: “Everything was perfect and everything was perfectly broken.” That may be the vision he has to live by. I’ll be happy to listen to the next song Belcher chooses to sing.
Lay Down Your Weary Tune by W B Belcher is published by Other Press, 408pp, £13.99
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If you’re a woman under 50, the name Mildred Hubble probably means something to you. Jill Murphy wrote her first book, The Worst Witch , when she was just 18. First published in 1974, it captivated audiences with its story of a bumbling young girl trying to scrape through her magical education. Perhaps your imagination was first caught by the books, with their descriptions of Miss Cackle’s Academy for Witches, which “stood at the top of a high mountain surrounded by a pine forest” and “looked more like a prison than a school, with its gloomy grey walls and turrets,” and the students themselves “dressed in black gymslips, black stockings, black hobnailed boots, grey shirts and black-and-grey ties”.
Or perhaps it was the Nineties TV show that you really remember, starring Georgina Sherrington as Mildred, practically falling over her incredibly long plaits, and Felicity Jones as a deliciously posh and evil Ethel, Mildred’s long-standing nemesis.
However you fell in love with Mildred, Maud, Miss Cackle and Miss Hardbroom, there’s good news. The Worst Witch returns today on CBBC (4.30pm), with a cast borrowed from Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey , updated special effects, and a more modern take on a magical boarding school. The series will also be available globally on Netflix later this year.
Mildred Hubble is played by 13-year-old Bella Ramsey, a talented actress who frequently stole the show in several recent episodes of Game of Thrones : no easy feat in a programme overrun with known scene-thieves. But unlike Mildred Hubbles of yore, this character is not from a family of witches – she’s just a normal girl from a council estate.
Like Hermione or Harry in Harry Potter , she has no idea magic even exists until she makes her way to school. In fact, here the script seems to borrow directly from Harry Potter: Maud’s question, “Didn’t anything ever happen to you that you couldn’t explain?” is reminiscent of Hagrid’s “Not a wizard, eh? Never made things happen when you was scared or angry?”
Dowton Abbey ’s Raquel Cassidy makes for a particularly sarcastic Mistress Hardbroom, with other teachers played by Kacey Ainsworth, Clare Higgins and Amanda Holden.
There are lines about allergies and preferring “Ms” over “Mistress”, and even references to online magazines for witches. But while there are plenty of superficial updates, this new series doesn’t need to stray too far from the timeless source material. It’s full of brilliant women – students and teachers alike. Just look at these badass bitches:
But The Worst Witch is, essentially, a story aimed at bookish young women that deals with imposter syndrome. Mildred finds herself at a competitive school, in intimidating surroundings, with a demanding and complex set of rules and requirements. Murphy writes, “There were so many rules that you couldn’t do anything without being told off, and there seemed to be tests and exams every week.” She constantly feels like an outsider – she even has the wrong cat. But despite constantly doubting her own ability and even her own identity as a “witch”, she frequently surprises herself (and others) with great achievements.
The new series runs with this theme – Mildred stumbles across the school by chance, and knows nothing at all about witch society. She fumbles over the appropriate way to address people, she gets motion sickness when magically transported (which other students find “pathetic”), she tells herself she cannot do potions or exams.
But when it comes down to it, Mildred’s fears about herself are misplaced. Friends and teachers are able to sense her talent, even as she makes mistakes. This is a show that also shows how constant comparisons with peers can only lead to more insecurity – brainbox Ethel is unreasonably hard on herself for missing the 100 per cent mark.
This is a delightful adaptation with a cast full of personality and an empowering message for CBBC audiences, which tells us you can save the world, even if you trip over your shoelaces while doing it. What could be more faithful to Murphy’s original books?
The Worst Witch, a CBBC production in collaboration with ZDF, ZDF Enterprises and Netflix, airs on CBBC today at 4.30pm.

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© Source: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2017/01/why-elijah-page-best-folk-singer-youve-never-heard
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