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Iran said it will start easing some of the world’s tightest internet restrictions by lifting its ban on WhatsApp and Google Play — a sign that authorities want to placate domestic opponents as the Islamic Republic faces major economic and foreign-policy challenges. Earlier on Tuesday, Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace approved the lifting of blocks on “certain widely used foreign platforms” according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency, which named WhatsApp and Google Play as the first two applications to be unblocked. Since the 2009 protests against the reelection of hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, social media networks including Facebook, X and YouTube have been banned or restricted by authorities who’ve blamed them for facilitating protests and fomenting opposition to the state. Iran’s government has faced criticism for years from ordinary Iranians, Western governments, the United Nations and political activists for its draconian attitude toward the internet. Officials — most of whom use banned social media sites to run their own public-facing accounts — often fail to deliver on promises to reduce censorship. Instead, it’s increased significantly over the past 10 years. It’s not clear when Tuesday’s decision will come into effect. IRNA said it was reached by a unanimous vote at a council meeting attended by the head of the judiciary and reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian who’d pledged to relax internet freedoms for Iranians when he was elected in July. The move comes as the Islamic Republic, already widely unpopular at home following a nationwide 2022 uprising that was brutally suppressed, is locked in a standoff with Israel for supporting Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Both groups — designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. and its allies — have been crippled by Israel’s military response to the October 2023 attacks by Hamas. The ouster of Bashar al-Assad in Syria has also upended Iran’s foreign policy at a time when it’s struggling to keep the lights on for industry and households amid a major fuel and natural-gas crisis. “The process of lifting cyberspace restrictions will be multistaged and ongoing, and it won’t be limited to the removal of restrictions on one or a few platforms,” IRNA said. Complete internet blackouts have often been imposed on Iranians, including during protests in November 2019 and the 2022 nationwide uprising, which prompted the U.S. government at the time to ease restrictions on internet services to Iran, such as Elon Musk’s Starlink. The Washington-based Freedom House said Iran was among the three least free countries in the world in terms of internet access — after China and Myanmar — in its annual “Internet Freedom Scores” ranking. ©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield Reverses Anesthesia Policy After Swift Backlash
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A Sault Ste. Marie man who was lobbying for December to be proclaimed Christian Heritage Month by city hall says he will continue his effort — while a spokesperson in the mayor's office says so no formal request has come across his desk. Arnold Heino was recently named the People's Party of Canada candidate for Sault Ste. Marie and is behind a local attempt to have Christian Heritage Month recognized. He first sent an email on the subject Nov. 29, hoping for the declaration to be part of one of the city council meetings scheduled for Dec. 2 and 9. "There's a number of communities across Canada that have recognized December as Christian Heritage Month," Heino said in an interview on Monday. "I think my biggest disappointment is that they haven't reached out to me yet." "One of the biggest reasons why I think it's important is because the very first sentence in our Charter of Rights is this is a country based on the supremacy of God. You can't hide that." A group called the Christian Music Festival, which is operated by Jay and Molly Banerjei, is supporting the effort to have December recognized across Canada as Christian Heritage Month. On its website, the group says more than 40 municipalities across Canada have made proclamations, including Toronto, Ottawa, Calgary, Sudbury and others. The proclamation was hotly debated in council chambers in Toronto last month , but was eventually passed by a vote of 11 to 4. Parkdale—High Park councillor Gord Perks led the opposition to the motion in Toronto. Perks said he was wary of the request, in part, because the motion lacked information on the Christian Heritage Festival organization. Christianity, Perks argued, is already so entrenched in Canadian society that a standalone month isn’t necessary. “Canada as an entity is soaked and steeped in the Christian church. They do not need separate recognition. When we do something like recognize some different group, that is an effort to rebalance,” he said. Perks also said the role Christianity played in colonization, while also serving as the backbone of the residential school system, is not something to celebrate. Scarbrough—Agincourt councillor Nick Mantas, who sponsored the Toronto motion, said there was “no political intention behind this motion” and argued history shouldn’t get in the way. “We all understand the history behind it, but it is time to move forward and to support the Christian faith, just like all the other faiths in Canada,” he said. Perks also took exception to the wording of the month’s name. He pointed to the Christian Heritage Party, a socially and fiscally conservative party founded in 1987. Perks said the party opposes abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, denies climate change and stokes hatred of Islam. “Language matters. The phrase ‘Christian heritage’ is not a neutral phrase,” Perks said. Heino said his request is also not political. "This isn't an idea that I want one religion against another religion, that's totally not the idea," he said. "It's just that Christianity should be recognized as much as every other religion." In the Sault, proclamation requests are considered by the mayor's office, said Jordan Allard, Shoemaker's policy and communications advisor. For many years, the mayor would make proclamations at the start of Sault Ste. Marie City Council meetings. Allard said the long-standing process was changed last year and all applications must go through the city's web page to set up for proclamations. Allard acknowledged that Heino's email was received, but said a formal application through the city's website never came through. "The procedural bylaw was amended in 2023 to move proclamations from council meetings to prerecorded videos that are shared on social media and broadcast by Rogers Media," said Allard in a series of emailed responses made earlier this month. "The requestor was directed to the proper process for proclamation." Heino said he has reached out to the Christian Heritage Month group for some guidance, but had already begun the process of applying for the declaration prior to becoming aware of them. Allard said so far this term, there has been no requests for proclamations denied by the mayor's office. "We ask the public to submit requests at least two weeks in advance to provide time for coordination [and] production of the videos," said Allard. Heino was a member of a group of protesters that stood at the steps of the Ronald A. Irwin Civic Centre in September for a ' 1 Million March for Children' event , which at the time Shoemaker called "the actions of a fringe minority." In an email on Monday, Shoemaker said he does not consider the request for Christian Heritage Month to be declared in the Sault a fringe request. "Quite the opposite. However, I have not seen a request come through the proclamations process as he was directed to do," said Shoemaker. — with files from TorontoTodayPark Ohio director Patrick Auletta sells $307,994 in stock
“The End,” by director Joshua Oppenheimer ( “The Act of Killing,” “The Look of Silence” ), is a gloomy musical about perhaps the only six people left on Earth: an oilman and his trophy wife (Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton), their bunker-born adult son (George MacKay) and the three aides (Bronagh Gallagher, Tim McInnerny, Lennie James) invited into this underground ark. Something awful is outside. We hear allusions to a blood-red sun, a poisoned sea and buzzards. But this salt mine-slash-sanctuary boasts walls hung with fine art and a dinner table set for wine and Champagne. These survivors have walled-off suffering for more than 20 years. Still, they can’t breathe. Not in the literal sense. The cast has the lung capacity for more than two hours of singing and the songs, which Oppenheimer wrote the lyrics for and composer Joshua Schmidt scored, are flat-out stunners, belted with humble charm. If a voice cracks, it cracks. The emotion holds center stage, backed by adamant violins and horns and sneaky melodies that vault up an octave to hit surprising notes. But there’s not enough air in here for everyone to have a personality. The characters are all rigorously mannered, as though they’re mimicking the mannequins in old film strips of 1950s bomb shelters. In the opening song, people stroll into the living room one by one, casually clutching mugs of coffee, and when they realize the others are already crooning about another perfect new morning, they join in as though to be polite. “We fight through the dark together / our future is bright,” they harmonize, keeping their backs as straight as a church choir. The irony is obvious and for the first hour, that’s all there is. The assured magnate, the superficial wife, the doted-upon child who was raised so cloistered he whistles canary songs to a tank of crawdads and tries to teach pet tricks to a fish. These aren’t full characters — they don’t even merit names — they’re just the clichés we’d expect to see dining on Dover sole while the rest of us are dead. (Plus the workers don’t merit much attention.) Oppenheimer and his co-screenwriter Rasmus Heisterberg have given each family member one flaw that they sing about so incessantly that the running time could be slashed by a third. We get it, bunker life is airless. This house is so gray and cold that something’s got to snap. During the film’s stiff and dull first stretch, the family discovers a young stranger, played by Moses Ingram, who has endured the apocalypse long enough to track the source of their smoke exhaust. If you think that’s implausible, wait til you see how this presumably hardscrabble refugee — a girl who has never before worn shoes — not only arrives with TikTok-trained options about the rights of the working class, but appears unfazed by these opulent digs. Ingram and MacKay start off like the kind of couple you wouldn’t put together even though they truly might be the last fertile singles alive. But they warm to each other enough to sing their own duet, running through the salt mine with their arms stretched wide. (The choreographers Sam Pinkleton and Ani Taj smartly choose liberated movement over precision.) Finally, the film kicks up its heels and becomes something beautiful. Oppenheimer is after something that drives right at the heart of what a musical is. To harmonize means to agree. It’s a public display of solidarity — a pact to parrot the same delusions. Here, it’s only when these characters splinter off on their own that they sing their truth. Even then, they’ve been so suffocated by lies that they can’t always come up with the right words. In one number, Swinton, who goes glossy-eyed to show the cracks in her high-fashion veneer, poses in a transparent rain slicker while bleating raw, yowling noises that blend with the despairing strings. As for the naive son, whom MacKay plays with apple-cheeked precociousness plus a brain worm, during his wildest solo, he thrusts his crotch and goes, “Nyah, nyah!” Lies are to Oppenheimer what the skeleton was to Da Vinci. He’s fixated on understanding how they work, how they evolve and bend, how they wind up controlling the way a person moves through life. When Shannon’s patriarch insists that “drilling for oil was just an excuse for wind farms, clean water, save the chimpanzees,” he’s rewriting history for an audience of no one but himself and how he wants his son to see him. The scale of destruction he has caused is vague and unspeakable. We know riots were involved because he insists they weren’t. Given that our setting is the end of the world and all, we can estimate that his death toll trumps that of Oppenheimer’s breakthrough 2012 documentary, “The Act of Killing,” in which the former soldiers of an Indonesian death squad reenacted their past massacres to shore up their conviction that they were the heroes. That powerful film sided with our desire to punish the aggressors. But when Shannon’s fossil-fuel tycoon rebuts that the rest of humanity drove cars, too, well, he’s got a point. Perhaps out of a shared sense of guilt, Oppenheimer yearns to give these sinners a chance to atone for their mistakes. Alone, they plead for forgiveness, like when Shannon scales a mound of salt clutching a taxidermy bird like he fancies himself the heroine of “The Sound of Music.” Rather than condemn its characters forever, “The End” gives these plastic people the choice to reclaim their humanity. That’s what turns out to be torture. This is a musical that treasures goofy imperfection, a scene where McInnerny does a funny little tap dance, or the joy in Shannon’s hyena cackle. Oppenheimer untethers his script from the responsibilities of explaining how this doomsday manor functions. The food stash, the waste disposal, none of that comes into play, and the characters are wholly incurious about whatever’s going on outside their cave. Instead, all the attention goes to micro-shifts in people’s moods, which, for characters this manicured, are as dramatic as a new ripple in a rock garden. Only Ingram’s home invader can be both happy and sad at once. The girl can’t wall her emotions away and that rattles this bunker to its very foundation. The film around her is itself built on a fault line of contradictions — it’s at once tepid and sledgehammer-insistent, a slab of decadent milquetoast. But you leave thinking about the question the characters never bring themselves to ask or sing: What’s the difference between being alive and living?STONY BROOK, N.Y. (AP) — Derek Robertson threw for a school-record 536 yards and three touchdowns, and Monmouth wrapped up its season with a wild 55-47 victory over Stony Brook on Saturday. Robertson completed 28 of 45 passes with touchdowns of 3 yards to Marcus Middleton, 51 yards to Tra Neal and 42 yards to Max James. Neal, a wide receiver, threw a 40-yard touchdown pass to Jack Neri that gave the Hawks (6-6, 4-4 Coastal Athletic Association) a 55-44 lead in the fourth quarter. The PAT was blocked, keeping Stony Brook within 11 points. FCS No. 20 Stony Brook (8-4, 5-3) trailed 42-30 at halftime but was within 49-44 after Jasiah Williams threw a 23-yard touchdown pass to Dez Williams, also on a wide-receiver pass play. Tyler Knoop threw for 408 yards on 37-of-53 passing for Stony Brook. He had three TD passes and was intercepted once. Dez Williams had 134 yards receiving with two touchdowns and Jayce Freeman had 93 yards. TJ Speight had 151 yards receiving for Monmouth. The teams combined for 1,007 passing yards and 1,249 total yards. __ Get alerts on the latest AP Top 25 poll throughout the season. Sign up here AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/ap-top-25-college-football-poll and https://apnews.com/hub/college-football