“The personal aspect is key to the series,” says “Patria” producer Miguel Salvat.

“Patria” focuses on a 60-something woman, Bittori, who has cancer, who returns to her native village in the Basque Country Gipuzkoa and seeks reconciliation with her best friend, after they were torn part by the Basque conflict.

“Patria’ is not about ETA. It’s a journey towards an embrace,” Gabilondo told the Spanish press at San Sebastian.

“The novel describes how normal people lived, people who weren’t politicians, in the military nor police, nor terrorists,” Gabilondo told Variety.

“It turns on the suffering on the street, how everybody was worried about what was going out, and didn’t talk, couldn’t really comment, or feel, without running the risk of being said to be on this side of the fence, and being used.”

https://hollywoodfact.com/hbo-patria-footage-focus-on-basque-conflict-variety/

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. — Andrew Yang, a former Democratic presidential candidate and current frontrunner in the race for NYC mayor, came to the rescue of a photojournalist who was attacked Friday on the Staten Island Ferry.

Yang was traveling on the 11 a.m. boat from Manhattan to Staten Island for a tour of the borough, accompanied by his press staff and a few members of the media, including Getty photographer Spencer Platt.

When a ferry passenger carrying what appeared to be a metal pole approached the photographer, shoved him, and threateningly raised the implement, Yang sprang into action.

“I think most people would have the same impulse I had,” Yang said of the incident. “To try and do anything that you can to protect somebody who might be threatened or endangered.”

The man recognized Yang, who engaged and calmed him, speaking with him briefly and allowing the photographer to get away from the tense situation...

https://www.silive.com/nycmayor/2021/02/andrew-yang-comes-to-aid-of-photographer-attacked-on-staten-island-ferry.html

Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia’s powerful oil minister and architect of the Arab world’s drive to control its own energy resources in the 1970s and its subsequent ability to affect oil production, fuel prices and international affairs, died in London. He was 90.

His death was announced on Tuesday by Saudi state television.

In an era of turbulent energy politics, Mr. Yamani, a Harvard-trained lawyer, spoke for Arab oil producers on a world stage as the industry weathered Arab-Israeli wars, a revolution in Iran and growing pains. The world’s demand for oil lifted the governments of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states into realms of unimaginable wealth. Crossing Europe, Asia and America to promote Arab oil interests, he met government leaders, went on television and became widely known. In a flowing Arabian robe or a Savile Row suit, speaking English or French, he straddled cultures, loving European classical music and writing Arabic poetry.

Mr. Yamani generally strived for price stability and orderly markets, but he is best known for engineering a 1973 oil embargo that led to soaring global prices, gasoline shortages and a quest for smaller cars, renewable energy sources and independence from Arab oil.

As the Saudi oil minister from 1962 to 1986, Mr. Yamani was the most powerful commoner in a kingdom that possessed some of the world’s largest oil reserves. For nearly 25 years, he was also the dominant official of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, whose rising and falling production quotas rippled like tides through worldwide markets.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/business/ahmed-zaki-yamani-dead.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage

Johnny Pacheco, the Dominican-born bandleader who co-founded the record label that turned salsa music into a worldwide sensation, died on Monday in Teaneck, N.J. He was 85. His wife, Maria Elena Pacheco, who is known as Cuqui, confirmed the death, at Holy Name Medical Center. Mr. Pacheco lived in Fort Lee, N.J.

Fania Records, which he founded with Jerry Masucci in 1964, signed Latin music’s hottest talents of the 1960s and ’70s, including Celia Cruz, Willie Colón, Hector Lavoe and Rubén Blades. Mr. Pacheco, a gifted flutist, led the way on and off the stage, working as a songwriter, arranger and leader of the Fania All Stars, salsa’s first supergroup.

...From its humble beginnings in Harlem and the Bronx — where releases were sold from the trunks of cars — Fania brought an urbane sensibility to Latin music. In New York, the music had taken on the name “salsa” (Spanish for sauce, as in hot sauce), and the Fania label began using it as part of its marketing.

Guided by Mr. Pacheco, artists built a new sound based on traditional clave rhythms and the genre Cuban son (or son Cubano), but faster and more aggressive. Many of the lyrics — about racism, cultural pride and the tumultuous politics of the era — were far removed from the pastoral and romantic scenes in traditional Cuban songs.

In that sense, salsa was “homegrown American music, as much a part of the indigenous musical landscape as jazz or rock or hip-hop,” Jody Rosen wrote in The New York Times in 2006 on the occasion of the reissue of the Fania master tapes — after they had spent years gathering mold in a warehouse in Hudson, N.Y.

More at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/15/arts/music/johnny-pacheco-dead.html