The coming week could bring an important moment in the war between Russia and Ukraine, as U.S. President Donald Trump’s deadline for the Kremlin to reach a peace deal approaches — or it could simply melt away.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff was expected in Moscow in the middle of this week, just before Trump’s Friday deadline for the Kremlin to stop the killing or face potentially severe economic penalties from Washington.

Previous Trump promises, threats and cajoling have failed to yield results., and the stubborn diplomatic stalemate will be hard to clear away. Meanwhile, Ukraine is losing more territory on the front line, although there is no sign of a looming collapse of its defenses.

Trump envoy is expected at the Kremlin

Witkoff was expected to land in the Russian capital on Wednesday or Thursday, according to Trump, following his trip to Israel and Gaza.

“They would like to see (Witkoff),” Trump said Sunday of the Russians. “They’ve asked that he meet so we’ll see what happens.”

Trump, exasperated that Russian President Vladimir Putin hasn’t heeded his calls to stop bombing Ukrainian cities, a week ago moved up his ultimatum to impose additional sanctions on Russia as well as introduce secondary tariffs targeting countries that buy Russian oil, including China and India.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday that officials are happy to meet with Trump’s envoy. “We are always glad to see Mr. Witkoff in Moscow,” he said. “We consider (talks with Witkoff) important, substantive and very useful.”

Trump is not sure sanctions will work

Trump said Sunday that Russia has proved to be “pretty good at avoiding sanctions.”

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“They’re wily characters,” he said of the Russians.

The Kremlin has insisted that international sanctions imposed since its February 2022 invasion of its neighbor have had a limited impact.

Ukraine insists the sanctions are taking their toll on Moscow’s war machine and wants Western allies to ramp them up. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday urged the United States, Europe and other nations to impose stronger secondary sanctions on Moscow’s energy, trade and banking sectors.

Trump’s comments appeared to signal he doesn’t have much hope that sanctions will force Putin’s hand.

The secondary sanctions also complicate Washington’s relations with China and India, who stand accused of helping finance Russia’s war effort by buying its oil.

Since taking office in January, Trump has found that stopping the war is harder than he perhaps imagined.

Senior American officials have warned that the U.S. could walk away from the conflict if peace efforts make no progress.

Putin shows no signs of making concessions

The diplomatic atmosphere has become more heated as Trump’s deadline approaches.

Putin announced last Friday that Russia’s new hypersonic missile, the Oreshnik, has entered service.

The Russian leader has hailed its capabilities, saying its multiple warheads that plunge to a target at speeds of up to Mach 10 cannot be intercepted. They are so powerful, he said, that the use of several of them in one conventional strike could be as devastating as a nuclear attack.

Also, one of Putin’s top lieutenants warned that the Ukraine war could nudge Russia and the U.S. into armed conflict.

Trump responded to what he called the “highly provocative statements” by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev by ordering the repositioning of two U.S. nuclear submarines.

Putin has repeated the same message throughout the war: He will only accept a settlement on his terms and will keep fighting until they’re met.

The war is killing thousands of troops and civilians

Russia’s relentless pounding of urban areas behind the front line have killed more than 12,000 Ukrainian civilians, according to the United Nations. It has pushed on with that tactic despite Trump’s public calls for it to stop over the past three months.

On the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line, Russia’s bigger army has made slow and costly progress. It is carrying out a sustained operation to take the eastern city of Pokrovsk, a key logistical hub whose fall could open the way for a deeper drive into Ukraine.

Ukraine has developed technology that has allowed it to launch long-range drone attacks deep inside Russia. In its latest strike it hit an oil depot near Russia’s Black Sea resort of Sochi, starting a major fire.

By CATHY BUSSEWITZ, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Saying “enough is enough,” thousands of workers at three Boeing manufacturing plants went on strike overnight less than a year after the company boosted wages to end a separate, 53-day strike by 33,000 aircraft workers.

On Monday, about 3,200 workers at Boeing facilities in St. Louis; St. Charles, Missouri; and Mascoutah, Illinois, voted to reject a modified four-year labor agreement with Boeing, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union said.

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In a post on X, the union said: “3,200 highly-skilled IAM Union members at Boeing went on strike at midnight because enough is enough.”

The vote followed members’ rejection last week of an earlier proposal from the troubled aerospace giant, which had included a 20% wage increase over four years.

“IAM District 837 members build the aircraft and defense systems that keep our country safe,” said Sam Cicinelli, Midwest territory general vice president for the union, in a statement. “They deserve nothing less than a contract that keeps their families secure and recognizes their unmatched expertise.”

The union members rejected the latest proposal after a weeklong cooling-off period.

Boeing warned over the weekend that it anticipated the strike after workers rejected its most recent offer that included a 20% wage hike over four years.

“We’re disappointed our employees rejected an offer that featured 40% average wage growth and resolved their primary issue on alternative work schedules,” said Dan Gillian, Boeing Air Dominance vice president and general manager, and senior St. Louis site executive. “We are prepared for a strike and have fully implemented our contingency plan to ensure our non-striking workforce can continue supporting our customers.”

Boeing has been struggling after two of its Boeing 737 Max airplanes crashed, one in Indonesia in 2018 and the other in Ethiopia in 2019, killing 346 people. In June, one of Boeing’s Dreamliner planes, operated by Air India, crashed, killing at least 260 people.

Last week, Boeing reported that its second-quarter revenue had improved and losses had narrowed. The company lost $611 million in the second quarter, compared to a loss of $1.44 billion during the same period last year.

Shares of Boeing Co. slipped less than 1% before the opening bell Monday.

“Everything collapses in the ripping sound of great manifestations,” wrote Suzanne Césaire in 1945. The line purportedly described an immense hurricane in the Caribbean Sea, but knowing Césaire—a formidable theorist, postcolonial and feminist activist, and surrealist from Martinique—“great manifestations” also referred to seismic shifts in history and decolonization. A critic who wrote with the revolutionary force of manifestos and the wisdom of the longue durée, Césaire published in the short-lived literary journal Tropiques, which she established with her husband in 1941 and co-edited. There appeared the only seven essays she ever completed. After 1945, she would not publish again. 

Due to her relatively small body of work, as well as societal misogyny then and now, Césaire’s legacy is often overshadowed by that of her husband, Aimé Césaire. Award-winning poet, former president of the Regional Council of Martinique, and mayor of Fort-de-France for 56 years, Aimé is an icon of postcolonial politics and Francophone literature. He published many books, such as Discourse on Colonialism, and is memorialized across France, Martinique, and elsewhere. Still, even with no clear answer to the question of why Suzanne Césaire stopped writing, her contributions have become seminal texts in surrealist, feminist, and communist movements, especially those rooted in Black and anticolonial struggles. 

Two offerings in the Dallas-Fort Worth area are a testament to the small but sure renaissance of Césaire’s legacy. In 2024, María Elena Ortiz, curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, organized the exhibition Surrealism and Us: Caribbean and African Diasporic Artists since 1940, named after Césaire’s essay, “1943: Surrealism and Us.” This summer in Dallas, artist Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich will screen her new film, an experimental take on a biopic, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire. Ortiz and Hunt-Ehrlich, friends and collaborators, are making an important revision to our historical record and proposing profound questions about nature, fascism, race, and gender from the Caribbean to Europe to the United States. 

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From March to July 2024, the Modern’s Surrealism and Us exhibition displayed 80 artworks at the intersection of Caribbean aesthetics, Afrosurrealism, and Afrofuturism. Works included 1940s Cubist paintings by Cuban artist Wifredo Lam; 1950s paintings of colorful, erotic shapes by Dominican artist Cossette Zeno; collaborative exquisite corpse drawings by 1970s surrealists; and contemporary video, installation, paintings, and sculptural work by American artists Arthur Jafa, Kara Walker, Kerry James Marshall, and Simone Leigh. Essays in the exhibition catalogue explore Afrofuturism and Afrosurrealism in American popular culture today, pointing to musicians and filmmakers such as Janelle Monáe, Jordan Peele, and Boots Riley. As Ortiz writes, “The conditions of Black life, in the Caribbean and America, have become ever more viscerally surreal.” 

Ortiz planned the exhibition to emphasize themes such as “the marvelous,” a concept developed by Césaire that referred to a state of mind in which colonized people can access their unconscious minds to question colonial oppression. In wall text and in the catalogue, Ortiz encourages spectators to consider Haiti in particular, drawing attention to the Haitian Revolution, which was catalyzed by a Vodou ceremony. The writings of Césaire and Ortiz both tell the story of surrealism from a Caribbean perspective, a departure from the dominant art historical focus on French surrealism. As they explain it, surrealism was not merely a French art movement that made its way to the Caribbean. Rather, surrealistic thinking was a mode people in the Caribbean, particularly those in the African diaspora, had already been using for centuries to imagine realities beyond their present conditions. 

Compared to a large museum exhibition, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s film, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire—a visually stunning, intriguing, and conceptual project—zooms in more closely on Césaire as an individual figure. Filmed at a lush tree archive in South Florida resembling the flora and waterways of Caribbean jungles, Ballad’s defining feature is regular voice-overs read by actors playing Suzanne and Aimé, drawn from Suzanne’s writings and texts written about her. The film deconstructs the biopic genre by making transparent the production and performances that go into a film—by including shots of the crew and details of the set and by exposing the interpretive work of actors. Zita Hanrot and Motell Gyn Foster, playing the central couple, discuss on camera their speculations about what may have been going on inside the Césaires’ complicated marriage and why Suzanne may have stopped writing. They reenact scenes from the couple’s lives, such as radio appearances or dance sequences, but often they simply walk around, read archival papers, or speak directly to the viewer. Their role is not so much to act as the Césaires as to ambiguously stand in for them or explicitly play themselves. We are invited into the complex work of actors, people sincerely engaged in a mysterious ritual of remembrance. 

This is a fitting tribute to Suzanne Césaire’s elusive legacy, as what remains of her is a memory as pieced-together, fragmented, and dreamlike as the art she studied. Hanrot was three months postpartum at the time of filming, and the burdens of motherhood are named as one reason Césaire may have stopped publishing: “It is difficult to be a productive writer when you have six children.” Hunt-Ehrlich has written that she makes work “concerned with the inner worlds of Black women,” and Ballad, without assuming what Césaire’s inner world consisted of, takes seriously the fact of it. Interwoven through the film are scenes of pieces of paper, implied to be Césaire’s discarded drafts, in varying states of precarity or decay: sheets flying in the wind off the back of a truck on set, floating in a pond rippled by fish below, covered in ants, burning in a campfire, or found by a camera assistant by chance. 

In its hazy reenactments of the 1940s, Ballad lingers on the historical conditions that Césaire wrote within: the Vichy control of Martinique. The first time we see Hanrot as Césaire, she is lost in thought smoking a cigarette in a Martinican lounge amid the threatening presence of a French soldier, with jazz playing on a victrola and the French flag hung between palms. Voice-overs describe how authorities attempted to shut down Tropiques, the Césaires’ literary magazine, in the context of escalated white supremacist governance and fascist purges of Martinican political prisoners. In moments like these, Ballad feels instructive for American artists and writers living through times of rising fascism, censorship, and deportations. The renaissance of Suzanne Césaire’s work in U.S. circles seems likely connected to modern concerns about liberation struggles, war, genocide, Black lives, and dissent. 

“The pattern of unfulfilled desires has trapped the Antilles and America,” wrote Césaire. Her language suggests the “unfulfilled desires” of people in America are not far away from those in the Caribbean. The logic of surrealism is that accepting and feeding our unconscious desires can help nurture our impulses toward creativity and freedom. Revealing to humankind its unconscious, she wrote, “will aid in liberating people by illuminating the blind myths that have led them to this point.” Under surreal conditions, perhaps, the only way out is through. 

The post Recovering Suzanne Césaire’s Legacy appeared first on The Texas Observer.

It’s fitting that the home of the St. Paul Saints hosted the biggest party in the Twin Cities over the weekend.

The pair of games at CHS Field in downtown St. Paul served as an unofficial passing of the torch between the local franchise founded on fun and the pop culture phenomenal taking the world by storm.

The St. Paul Saints walked so the Savannah Bananas could run.

Those familiar with both teams understand the connection.

In the early 1990s, the St. Paul Saints found their niche as an independent team entertaining fans out of Midway Stadium.

Though it wouldn’t be fair to the players to say the baseball took a backseat, the St. Paul Saints understood that in order to compete for eyeballs with the Minnesota Twins across the river, they had to offer more than the game itself.

To achieve that, the St. Paul Saints prided themselves on some of their gimmicks, which included having a live pig serve as the ball boy, duct tapping their intern to the outfield wall in the middle of the game, and starting the world’s largest pillow fight, among countless others that regularly went viral on social media.

The ultimate goal was making sure everybody in attendance walked away with a smile on their face.

It’s a similar vibe from the Savannah Bananas nearly 30 years later. Only they have taken it to the next level. Think the St. Paul Saints on steroids.

Maybe the most noticeable difference is the way their games are actually played. That’s because the Savannah Bananas have come up with their own set of rules designed to keep fans fully engaged.

It’s aptly named Banana Ball, and some of the changes include a time limit that ensures the game only lasts a couple of hours, a revamped scoring system, and an interesting wrinkle where a foul ball counts as an out if it’s caught by a fan.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg, however, as the Savannah Bananas truly separate themselves with the their trick plays, choreographed dance routines, and comedic sketches that make the game feel more like a Las Vegas show.

The smashing success of the Savannah Bananas paved the way for the Banana Ball World Tour, which also includes the Party Animals, the Firefighters, and the Texas Tailgaters. The spectacle needs to be be seen in person to truly appreciate its singularity across sports.

All of the teams were in action over the weekend as the Party Animals hosted the Texas Tailgaters at CHS Field in downtown St. Paul, while the Savannah Bananas hosted the Firefighters more than 1,000 miles away at Camden Yards in downtown Baltimore in a nationally-televised affair.

It was a complete sensory overload at CHS Field in downtown St. Paul, as every seat in the stadium was filled, and every inch of space overlooking the playing surface was occupied.

There were some stretches where the blaring music over the loud speakers made it feel like Lollapalooza. There were other stretches where fans singing along to “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey made it feel like biggest karaoke bar in the Twin Cities.

Meanwhile, the players on the Party Animals and the Texas Tailgaters kept the good vibes rolling throughout the game, whether they were riding a unicycle in the batter’s box, chugging a beer prior to their at-bats in the on-deck circle, or throwing hamburgers and hot dogs into the stands during a break in the action.

There was even some local flavor, as the the University of Minnesota dance team made a cameo, as did Minnesota Vikings mascot Viktor, leading a stadium wide Skol chant with the help of Party Animals outfielder Jake Skole.

It was impossible not to think of the St. Paul Saints in some of the moments of euphoria.

Though they have taken on a more formal approach since becoming the Triple A affiliate of the Minnesota Twins a couple of years ago, the St. Paul Saints and their kitschy antics helped make something like this possible.

Now it’s on the Savannah Bananas to keep it going.

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