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Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.

-Eleanor Roosevelt

College students leave behind hoard of trash at California’s Shasta Lake

Maya Yang, © The Guardian
June 2, 2024

College students celebrating Memorial Day weekend by California’s Shasta Lake left behind hoard of trash, according to US Forest Service officials.

Last weekend, approximately 3,000 students from the University of California, Davis and the University of Oregon partied at Shasta Lake, a 30,000-acre reservoir in the golden state, and left piles of debris cluttered around the lake.

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You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.

-Abraham Lincoln

Ex-State Department official explains resigning over U.S. policy in Gaza

By Nick Schifrin and Dan Sagalyn, © PBS.org
May 30, 2024

Another U.S. government official resigned to protest the Biden administration’s policy toward Israel. At least half a dozen officials in the State, Defense, Education and Interior have done so since the war in Gaza began. The latest is Stacy Gilbert, who is leaving the State Department after a 20-year career. Nick Schifrin sat down with Gilbert to discuss her decision.

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Real Madrid win Champions League final as Dortmund rue missed chances

David Hytner, © The Guardian
June 1, 2024

It is the competition that Real Madrid like to think they own and the reasons why were mapped out in graphic detail at Wembley. Yet again. Borussia Dortmund brought the punch of the underdog and they played with a stirring liberation in the first half, creating chances and, well, missing them. It was impossible to think they would not regret it.

Madrid reset at half-time and when they started to press, everybody knew they had seen this movie, especially the ending. If Vinícius Júnior was a symbol of Madrid’s travails in the first half – booked for a lunge at the Dortmund goalkeeper, Gregor Kobel; guilty of a lack of conviction, at times – he relocated his game to dazzling effect thereafter.

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‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ is a tender love story and a subversive Western

By Justin Chang, © NPR
May 31, 2024

One of the many charms of The Dead Don’t Hurt is that you can’t immediately tell whether it’s trying to be an old-fashioned Western or a revisionist one. It has a lot of familiar genre signposts: men riding horses across rugged landscapes, a bloody shootout in a saloon, and two actors, Viggo Mortensen and Vicky Krieps, who bring traditional movie-star charisma to a tender love story.

But at times the film feels casually subversive. The first of those horsemen we see is not a cowboy but a knight in shining armor — a figure out of a child’s fantastical dream. And then there’s the way the movie plays with time: That shootout, which technically happens at the end of the story, is instead shown at the very beginning.

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Tony Kroos
Toni Kroos of Real Madrid CF gestures during the during the La Liga EA Sports match round 38 match between Real Madrid and Real Betis Balompie at Santiago Bernabeu Stadium on May 26, 2024 in Madrid, Spain. (Photo by GSI/Icon Sport via Getty Images) during LaLiga Ea Sports match between Real Madrid and Betis at Bernabeu on May 25, 2024 in Madrid, Spain.(Photo by GSI/Icon Sport via Getty Images)