Taylor Swift will return to the stage in London on Thursday to end the European leg of her "Eras" tour, a week after her Vienna concerts were cancelled due to a suicide attack plot. Around 90,000 fans will again pack London's Wembley Stadium for the first date in the five-day run, with additional ticket checks and restrictions in place. Last week, all three of the American mega-star's shows in the Austrian capital were cancelled following the discovery of an Islamic State-inspired plan to launch an attack using explosives and knives.
Three alleged Islamic State sympathizers have been arrested on charges of plotting the atrocity, which was thwarted with the help of US intelligence. London's Metropolitan Police has said there was "nothing to indicate that the matters being investigated by the Austrian authorities will have an impact on upcoming events here in London". The force was working "closely with venue security teams and other partners to ensure there are appropriate security and policing plans in place", a police spokesperson said in a statement.
Fans have been warned on Wembley's website to expect "additional ticket checks" around the stadium. - 'Tay-gating' - Swift's return to the British capital, following three sold-out shows in June, also comes two weeks after three young girls were killed in a stabbing at a dance class themed around the pop star's music in northwest England. Following the knife attack, Swift said she was "completely in shock" and at a "complete loss for how to ever convey my sympathies to these families".
She has not yet commented on the decision to cancel the Vienna shows. London's mayor Sadiq Khan told Sky News that the city was "going to carry on working closely with police, ensuring that the Taylor Swift concerts can take place in London safely". "We have a huge amount of experience in policing these events, we're never complacent, many lessons were learned after the awful Manchester Arena attack," Khan added.
He was referring to the 2017 bombing at an Ariana Grande concert that killed 22 people, some of them children. Fans without tickets will also not be allowed to "tay-gate" the event -- the practice of Swift fans standing outside the venue during the live show to hear the music. - Royal audience - The stadium's website says that "no one is allowed to stand outside any entrance or.
.. at the front of the stadium" and "non-ticket holders will be moved on".
While the practice was not permitted at her June concerts there, some fans still managed to gather outside Wembley. After two performances in Madrid at the end of July, Swift noted around 50,000 "people came out and listened to the show" from a nearby hillside on both nights, "participating in the show from afar". Meanwhile, her last London appearances were attended by some high-profile names.
They included Keir Starmer, who was then running to become Britain's prime minister, and Prince William -- celebrating his birthday -- along with his children, Prince George and Princess Charlotte. The singer posted a photo posing with the royals and her boyfriend, American football player Travis Kelce, with the caption "Happy Bday M8! London shows are off to a splendid start". After wrapping up the European leg of her record-breaking tour -- which began in Paris in May and saw the star perform across the continent -- Swift will then head back to North America.
Its final leg there starts on October 18 in Miami. Gena Rowlands, an award-winning US actress best known for starring in the films of her first husband, director John Cassavetes, died Wednesday at age 94, according to US media reports. Rowlands died surrounded by family at her home in Indian Wells, California , US entertainment publication TMZ reported.
No official cause of death was immediately given, but Rowlands's son Nick Cassavetes said in June she had suffered from Alzheimer's disease for the past five years, according to the New York Times. Rowlands starred in 10 films by John Cassavetes, and was married to him for nearly 35 years until his death in 1989. Starting in the 1960s, the couple formed an enchanting and explosive on-screen partnership over three decades that explored themes of passion and self-destruction against a backdrop of alcohol and infidelity.
In what many consider her finest role, Rowlands captured to devastating effect the descent of a housewife into mental illness in "A Woman Under the Influence" (1974), bringing her the first of two Oscar nominations. "Incapable of an unreal moment," said Woody Allen of the actress, whom he cast in his 1988 film "Another Woman." "Whatever I say about Gena isn't enough because she's so incredible," said Winona Ryder, quoted in the LA Times in 1992 when the two co-starred in Jim Jarmusch's "Night on Earth.
" - A storied career - Rowlands was born on June 19, 1930, in Cambria, Wisconsin, into a cultured middle-class family. Her father was a state senator and her mother was a painter and occasional actress. She enrolled in New York's American Academy of Drama and in 1953 met Cassavetes, a fast-talking and exuberant Greek-American.
A year later they were married. It was their collaboration that generated her stand-out performances, the highlight arguably being "A Woman Under the Influence" which also brought an Oscar nomination for Cassavetes as director. Rowlands was captivating as housewife Mabel who descends into madness after years of quiet, complicated dominance by her hardworking, silent husband, played by Peter Falk.
In 1989, Cassavetes died from liver failure after years of alcoholism. Rowlands continued to make films and also worked for television, winning four Emmys. She and Cassavetes had three children, all of whom have gone on to work in film and television.
Her son Nick directed her in "The Notebook" alongside Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams in 2004. In 2012, she married retired businessman Robert Forrest and in 2015 was awarded an honorary Academy Award, the same year she retired from acting. Tim O'Brien, veteran journalist and senior executive editor at Bloomberg Opinion, has been interviewing Donald Trump for years — from the ex-president's time building and completing Trump Tower in the 1980s, to his years starring in The Apprentice — and up to his four years in the Oval Office.
Over the years, the MAGA hopeful has developed clear and present obsessions — such as Hannibal Lecter. MSNBC's Joy Reid on Wednesday asked O'Brien to offer some insight into why the ex-president often mentions the fictitious character. READ MORE: Trump fears winding 'up as the thing his old man most reviled': ex-Obama official "Part of the Hannibal Lecter references, I think, come from the fact that Donald Trump actually thinks that migrants seeking asylum belong in insane asylums," O'Brien said, "and Hannibal Lecter was in an asylum, and he can't really separate the difference of two.
So, that's raw ignorance." The longtime journalist added, "The larger cultural touch point here is that Donald Trump is, indeed, baked in amber. The clothing his wears, the celebrities he fawns over, the music he most closely relates to, is all from the 1980s.
He completed Trump Tower in the 1980s. It was the first project he did apart from his father. It was the project that put him on magazine covers.
It's the project that ultimately led to the book 'The Art of the Deal.' And he was celebrated as this young deal maker who could do no wrong." O'Brien then turned to some of Trump's other obsessions.
"On a number of occasions when he talked to me about that period of his life, he had this obsession with Orson Wells and Citizen Kane," the MSNBC political analyst added, "and the idea that Wells' greatest movie was completed when he was still in his 20s, and he never really equalled it again. And he had this great fear that Trump Tower would be the signature moment of his life. And in fact, he then went on a whole bankruptcy spree, and through most of the late 1980s and 1990s, he was a punchline about the excesses of the 1980s, until The Apprentice came along, which lifted him up as a celebrity.
But still no one took him seriously. And then he became president. So the long arc here is tracing the life of someone who actually never grew up and never grew beyond this one era in which he felt he was celebrated without anyone blinking.
" READ MORE: 'Can’t control it': Why 'notorious germophobe' Trump fears jail on a 'psychological level' Reid added, "People who are aging, oftentimes will retreat to a comfort space. And it's not necessarily Alzheimer's, but it's part of the aging brain, where you start off talking about one thing, and you end up back where you're comfortable." Noting that O'Brien has interviewed Trump for decades, the MSNBC host asked, "Does he feel fully cognitively healthy? The Bloomberg editor replied, "Some is an ageing brain.
But let's remember his father died from Alzheimer's. Donald Trump has always lived in mortal terror of the fact that he may have the gene, and may die of Alzheimer's, too." O'Brien added, "I think this is more than someone just aging.
This is somebody, I think, who is living in the past for the reasons you identified, which is that it's common to go back to what you know. There's another thing to really remember is that the United States is going to become a minority/majority country within the next 20 years or so, and he is standing up for a world he came from—a primarily white world." Watch the video below or at this link .
- YouTube www.youtube.com READ MORE: Trump is 'running scared' from 'toxic' plan that has his ideas all over it: analysis —President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, June 27, 1936 When President Joe Biden was running for reelection, his main pitch was about the danger Donald Trump represented to American democracy and peace in the world. Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, she’s shifted the emphasis of the campaign away from that danger and onto the opportunities that lay before Americans if we can just elect enough Democrats to bring them into reality. The recent and dramatic swing in the polls is probably mostly driven by Biden stepping down and Harris stepping up, showing the nation she’s fully capable of running a campaign and the country.
But it also reflects her shift in strategy. ALSO READ: GOP's attack on Americans' retirement savings just went to the next disgusting level Every moment of every day, we’re always doing one of two things: moving toward pleasure or moving away from pain. Mentally and emotionally we never stand still; we are always either moving toward something we want or moving away from something we fear or would prefer to avoid.
The Moving-away-from-pain Strategy In the short run, the most effective strategy for persuasive political communication is to motivate someone to move away from pain. The reason is simple: it’s physiological. If you get an electric shock, you pull your finger away from the wall socket.
If you’re barefoot and step on glass, you lift up your foot. “Wow!” “Gotta do something!” Causing people to experience — or even imagine experiencing — pain gets an immediate response. Moving-away-from-pain strategies are very powerful because they’re among the first we learn as children.
Many children’s first spoken word is “No!” because they so strongly experienced parental admonishments to avoid pain: “No, don’t pull on the tablecloth!” “No, don’t touch the hot stove!” “No, don’t run into the street!” And by the age of two, most children have experienced enough pain, accidental or unintentionally self-inflicted, that they know well the association between “No!” and pain or the threat of pain. If moving away from pain motivational strategies were compared to the forces of nature, they most closely resemble the electromagnetic force: nobody wants to be struck by lightning, and avoiding that fate will lead people to run for cover during a storm. As adults we internalize these moving-away-from-pain strategies and use them to motivate ourselves and others.
Dick Cheney motivated voters using the pain strategy when he ran for reelection in 2004 and said that if Americans voted for Democrats, terrorists would again attack the United States. Vote for Democrats, feel pain. Vote for Republicans, avoid pain.
Similarly, moving away from pain is at the core of Trump’s campaign strategy now; he’s largely abandoned his moving-toward-pleasure slogan of “Make America Great Again” and now spends almost all of his and his campaign’s time warning about Democrats’ embrace of queer people, racial diversity, and Keynesian economic policies. Sabrina Haake points out : Doktor Zoom writes over at Wonkette about the essence of the Trump campaign’s message: Trump himself is laying the prospect of impending pain on thick, posting last week on his failing, Nazi-infested social media platform that if Harris is selected we will experience: The downside of the moving-away-from-pain strategy — which Trump is now experiencing — is that over time it stops working or produces terribly dysfunctional results. It’s like whipping a horse to keep it going.
At first it works, but after a while if you keep whipping the horse over and over, harder and harder, eventually the horse will drop dead of exhaustion, or it will give up and stop trying to avoid the pain and just sit there and whimper. When overused, the moving-away-from-pain strategy eventually becomes ineffective; now, after 8 years of Trump’s imprecations and warnings — about everything from immigrants to crime to Democrats being socialists to Vance’s scurrilous Swift Boat allegation that Walz misrepresented his military service —people just shrug. We’ve seen this movie before, and it’s now getting tiring.
The moving-toward-pleasure strategy At the other end of the motivational spectrum is moving toward pleasure , the primary strategy that the Harris/Walz campaign has embraced and promoted for the past two weeks . Pleasure is typically nowhere near as initially powerful as pain. Prick your finger with a pin: it’s hard to produce an experience of pleasure that is as strong and as brief as that common experience of pain.
Probably the closest we get to such intense feelings of pleasure are either drug-induced experiences (studies with rats show that they’ll push a bar to get cocaine until they starve to death) or orgasm (which will cause humans and other animals to risk their lives to achieve). But broadly, setting aside drug-induced and sexual ones, the vast majority of our moving-toward-pleasure behaviors are very gentle and subtle. Getting a pay raise, having a good conversation, or enjoying a nice meal or movie — none of those, in terms of the intensity of the sensation, comes even close to the short-term power of the experience of having somebody poke you with a pin or scare you.
If somebody pokes you, you’ll jump immediately; most of us, however, have never involuntarily jumped for a meal or a nice conversation. But that doesn’t mean moving toward pleasure isn’t a powerful force; in fact, over the long term, it’s far more powerful than moving away from pain. Moving toward pleasure is like the natural force of gravity.
Just as gravity is the weakest of the four primary natural forces, it is also the most steady and constant. It’s keeping you and me glued to our seats. It steadily acts through our lives, never varying.
Although moving-toward-pleasure strategies don’t always produce immediate changes in behavior like moving-away-from-pain strategies do, they can last far longer and be far more powerful if properly reinforced. Conservatives generally prefer moving-away-from-pain strategies, while liberals generally promote moving-toward-pleasure strategy. It makes sense that conservatives, who tend to think that the world is an evil place, would tend toward a moving-away-from-pain strategy; likewise, liberals, who tend to think the world is a good place, tend toward a moving-toward-pleasure strategy.
To be successful in politics, however, both types of motivational strategies are important. We want a safe nation (moving away from the pain of danger) and a nation where every person can fulfill their greatest potential (moving toward the pleasure of fulfillment). From a communication perspective, both types of motivational strategies have their uses.
In politics, a holistic message includes both moving toward pleasure and moving away from pain, but should always start with pleasure. “Vote for me because I’ll expand Social Security — while the other guy will gut it.” As both the Reagan 1984 “Morning in America” campaign and the Obama 2008 “Hope and Change” campaigns showed, primarily offering people the pleasure of a beautiful and newly reinvented America can be a very seductive pitch.
That was also the primary subtext of Trump‘s original 2016 “Make America Great Again” slogan, which he’d appropriated from Reagan’s 1980 campaign. The simple way to do this is exactly what the Harris/Walz campaign is doing now. Start with the vision of a new and better America like the “freedom” meme Harris has put at the core of her stump speech.
In doing this, she’s borrowed heavily and brilliantly from the 20th century’s most effective politician, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who repeatedly pointed out that people aren’t free if they’re hungry, homeless, or unemployed. Harris is adding the freedom of women’s bodily autonomy, freedom to read what you want, and freedom from sickness to the pitch, pointing out that Democrats are promoting freedom while Republicans are trying to take it away.
As surrogates for the Harris/Walz campaign, we can all learn from this understanding of how people are motivated to make political decisions. When talking with friends, neighbors, or canvasing door-to-door, always open with moving toward pleasure, talking about the great things Democrats have done for America and how much more there is to be done. Democrats brought us the 5-day workweek, Social Security, Medicare, safe food and drugs, a cleaner environment, free college and quality public schools, etc.
Add to that all the things Harris/Walz want to do for America going forward, from expanding healthcare and cutting drug prices to free college to solving our problem at the border. But then also segue into the moving away from pain strategy by pointing out how Republicans opposed every one of those things for over 100 years and are today committed to ripping away even more of our freedoms than they’ve already taken or prevented from coming into being. Understanding how motivation works makes us all more effective political communicators.
Now that you consciously and intentionally know this, get out there and wake folks up! ALSO READ: GOP's attack on Americans' retirement savings just went to the next disgusting level.
