Author: mfnnews
Tight security in Mendiola, roads near Malacañang amid Nov.16 rallies
Heavy security is in place in Mendiola Street and the roads near Malacañang Palace amid the protest rallies being held in Metro Manila on Sunday, November 16.
PNP to cops: Observe maximum tolerance amid protest rallies
Philippine National Police personnel were reminded Sunday to observe maximum tolerance as several groups held protests in Metro Manila to demand transparency and better governance amid corruption allegations in flood control projects.
China Coast Guard ship formation sails through Japan-administered Senkaku Islands
A China Coast Guard ship formation passed through the waters of the Senkaku Islands on Sunday on a “rights enforcement patrol”, the China Coast Guard said in a statement, as Beijing ramps up tensions with Japan over its prime minister’s remarks on Taiwan.
8 sites where you can order holiday cards that don’t cost a fortune
Zazzle, Shutterfly, Paper Culture, and other sites offer affordable holiday cards with dozens of different designs.
Democratic lawmaker texted Epstein during hearing — appeared to use his tips to grill Trump’s ex-lawyer
A Democratic lawmaker admitted to texting with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing, seeking his advice on how to question President Donald Trump’s so-called “fixer,” Michael Cohen.
Cohen has claimed that Trump tried to conceal a $130,000 hush-money payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels to hide an alleged extramarital affair. Trump has denied these claims, stating that the funds were sent directly to Cohen, his then-personal attorney, for legal expenses. Cohen testified against the president in the case led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), in which Trump was convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. Trump has filed an appeal seeking to reverse the criminal conviction.
‘During the hearing, Congresswoman Plaskett received texts from staff, constituents and the public at large offering advice, support and in some cases partisan vitriol, including from Epstein.’
Documents released Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee revealed that a member of Congress, whose name was redacted, had been exchanging text messages with Epstein during a February 2019 hearing where lawmakers heard testimony from Cohen.
Epstein’s messages to the lawmaker appeared to indicate that he was watching the hearing live. Although the name of the congressperson was redacted from the committee’s documents, the timing of the messages indicated that the convicted sex predator was texting Democratic Delegate Stacey Plaskett of the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Washington Post reported.
Plaskett’s office released a statement on Friday, admitting that she had been texting with Epstein.
Plaskett reportedly sent a message to Epstein before the hearing. When the hearing began and the live feed started, Epstein complimented the delegate’s outfit.
RELATED: Trump felony conviction in doubt? President files appeal to clear his name
Stacey Plaskett. Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
“Are you chewing,” read Epstein’s message to the lawmaker moments after the camera cut to Plaskett, who was seen moving her mouth in a chewing motion.
“Not any more,” Plaskett responded, according to the documents. “Chewing interior of my mouth. Bad habit from middle school.”
“Cohen brought up RONA – keeper of the secrets,” Epstein wrote at 11:24 a.m. His message seemed to reference Rhona Graff, Trump’s former executive assistant and former vice president of the Trump Organization, although Plaskett did not immediately grasp the reference.
“RONA??” the lawmaker replied.
“Quick I’m up next is that an acronym,” Plaskett asked, appearing to indicate that it would soon be her turn to question Cohen.
RELATED: Sorry, liberals — the Epstein emails don’t nail Trump
Michael Cohen. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
At 12:25 p.m., Epstein suggested the lawmaker ask Cohen about other individuals close to Trump.
“Hes (sic) opened the door to questions re who are the other henchmen at trump org,” he wrote.
When it was Plaskett’s turn to question Cohen, she inquired about Trump’s associates, as Epstein had recommended.
“During the hearing, Congresswoman Plaskett received texts from staff, constituents and the public at large offering advice, support and in some cases partisan vitriol, including from Epstein,” the statement from Plaskett’s office read. “As a former prosecutor she welcomes information that helps her get at the truth and took on the GOP that was trying to bury the truth. The congresswoman has previously made clear her long record combating sexual assault and human trafficking, her disgust over Epstein’s deviant behavior and her support for his victims.”
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‘Nuremberg’: Russell Crowe’s haunting portrayal of Nazi evil
Say what you will about Russell Crowe, but he has never been a run-of-the-mill actor.
At his best, he surrenders to the role. This is an artist capable of channeling the full range of human contradictions. From the haunted integrity of “The Insider” to the brute nobility of “Gladiator,” Crowe once seemed to contain both sinner and saint, pugilist and philosopher.
In a time when truly commanding leading men are all but extinct, Crowe remains — carrying the weight, the wit, and the weathered grace of a bygone breed.
Then, sometime after “A Beautiful Mind,” the light dimmed. The roles got smaller, the scandals bigger.
There were still flashes of brilliance — “American Gangster” with Denzel Washington, “The Nice Guys” with Ryan Gosling — proof that Crowe could still command attention when the script was worth it. But for every film that landed, two missed the mark: clumsy thrillers, lazy comedies, and a string of forgettable parts that left him without anchor or aim. His career drifted between prestige and paycheck, part self-sabotage, part Hollywood forgetting its own.
Exploring the abyss
But now the grizzled sexagenarian returns with “Nuremberg” — not as a comeback cliché, but as a reminder that the finest actors are explorers of the human abyss. And Crowe, to his credit, has never been afraid to go deep.
In James Vanderbilt’s new film, the combative Kiwi plays Hermann Goering, the Nazi Reichsmarschall standing trial for his part in history’s darkest chapter. The movie centers on Goering’s psychological chess match with U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who becomes both fascinated and repulsed by the man before him. Goering, with his vanity, intelligence, and theatrical self-pity, is a criminal rehearsing for immortality.
The film unfolds as a dark study of guilt and self-deception. Kelley, played with that familiar, hollow-eyed tension of Rami Malek, sets out to dissect the anatomy of evil through Goering’s mind. Yet the deeper he digs, the more he feels the ground give way beneath him — the line between witness and accomplice blurring with every exchange.
Disturbingly human
Crowe’s Goering is not the slobbering villain of old war films. He’s disturbingly human, even likeable. He jokes, he reasons, he charms. He’s a man who knows how to disarm his enemy by appearing civil — and therein lies the horror. It’s a performance steeped in Hannah Arendt’s famous concept of the “banality of evil”: the idea that great atrocities are rarely committed by psychopathic monsters but by ordinary people made monstrous — individuals who justify cruelty through bureaucracy, obedience, or ideology.
Arendt wrote those words after watching Adolf Eichmann, another Nazi functionary, defend his role in the Holocaust. She was struck not by his madness but his mildness — his desire to be seen as merely following orders. Crowe’s Goering embodies that same terrifying normalcy. He doesn’t see himself as a villain at all, but as a patriot — wronged, misunderstood, and unfairly judged. It’s his charm, not his cruelty, that unsettles.
The brilliance of Crowe’s performance is that he resists caricature. He reminds us that evil doesn’t always wear jackboots. Sometimes it smiles, smokes, and quotes Shakespeare. It’s the kind of role only a mature actor can pull off — one who has met his own demons and understands that evil seldom announces itself.
It is also, perhaps, the perfect role for a man who has spent decades wrestling with his own legend. Crowe was once Hollywood’s golden boy — rugged, brooding, every inch the leading man — but the climb was steep and the fall steeper. Fame, like empire, demands endless victories, and Crowe, ever restless, grew weary of the war.
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Getty Images
A bygone breed
With “Nuremberg,” he hasn’t returned to chase stardom but to confront something larger — the unease that hides beneath every civilized surface. Goering, after all, was no brute. He was cultured, eloquent, even magnetic — proof that wisdom offers no wall against wickedness. And in a time when truly commanding leading men are all but extinct, Crowe remains — carrying the weight, the wit, and the weathered grace of a bygone breed.
At one point in the film, Goering throws America’s own hypocrisies back at Kelley: the atomic bomb, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the collective punishment of nations. It’s a rhetorical trick, but it lands. Crowe delivers those lines with the oily confidence of a man who knows that moral purity is a myth and that self-righteousness is often evil’s most convenient disguise.
The film may not be perfect. Its pacing lags at times, and its historical framing flirts with melodrama. But Crowe’s performance cuts through the pretense like a scalpel. There’s even a dark humor in how he toys with his captors — the court jester of genocide, smirking as the world tries to comprehend him.
Crowe’s Goering is, in the end, a mirror. Not just for the psychiatrist across the table, but for us all. The machinery of horror is rarely built by fanatics, but by functionaries convinced they’re simply doing their jobs.
Crowe’s performance reminds us why acting, when done with conviction, can still rattle the soul. His Goering is maddening and mesmeric. He captures the human talent for self-delusion, the ease with which conscience can be out-argued by ambition or fear. “Nuremberg” refuses to let the audience look away. It reminds us that every civilization carries the seed of its own undoing and every human heart holds a shadow it would rather not confront.
Russell Crowe is back, tipped for another Oscar — and in an age when Hollywood produces so few films worthy of our time or our money, I, for one, hope he gets it.
John Fetterman Shares Photo, Medical Update After Fall Lands Him In Hospital
Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) said on Saturday evening that he’s made a “full recovery” after taking a nasty fall at his home in Braddock, Pennsylvania, this past week. “[Twenty] stitches later and a full recovery, I’m back home with [Gisele Letterman] and the kids,” the Democrat posted to X, captioning a photo of himself. “I’m overwhelmed …
Trump Says He’ll Likely Sue BBC For Up To $5 Billion Over Edited Speech
President Donald Trump said on Friday he would likely sue the BBC next week for as much as $5 billion after the British broadcaster admitted it wrongly edited a video of a speech he gave but insisted there was no legal basis for his claim. The British Broadcasting Corporation has been plunged into its biggest …
National Archives Releases Amelia Earhart Records Promised By Trump
The U.S. National Archives on Friday released several batches of records related to the 1937 disappearance of famed aviator Amelia Earhart over the Pacific, following President Donald Trump’s recent order to declassify and release all such material held by the government. The release of 4,624 pages of documents, including log books of U.S. military vessels …
Trump Floats New Nicknames For Marjorie Taylor Greene Amid Fallout
President Donald Trump seems to be workshopping new nicknames for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), following his Friday announcement that he would support a primary challenge against the former ally. Over the last month or so, Greene has publicly attacked Trump for supposedly being “America Last” and spending too much time tending to global matters. …
