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| Expect More Fukushimas |
 The
gung-ho nuclear industry is in deep shock. Just as it and its
cheerleader, the International Atomic Energy Agency, were preparing
to mark next month´s 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl
accident with a series of self-congratulatory statements about
the dawning of a safe age of clean atomic power, a series of
catastrophic but entirely avoidable accidents take place in
not one but three reactors in one of the richest countries of
the world. Fukushima is not a rotting old power plant in a failed
state manned by half-trained kids, but supposedly one of the
safest stations in one of the most safety-conscious countries
with the best engineers and technologists in the world. Chernobyl
blew up not because the reactor... |
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| THE IKE PHASE |
| ON January 20, 1961, John Kennedy delivered
his rousing Inaugural Address. But this speech was preceded,
as William Galston of the Brookings Institution has reminded
us, by an equally important speech: Dwight Eisenhower´s
farewell address. Kennedy´s speech was an idealistic call
to action. Eisenhower´s speech was a calm warning against
hubris. Kennedy celebrated courage; Eisenhower celebrated prudence.
Kennedy asked the country to venture forth. Eisenhower asked
the country to maintain its basic sense of balance. While Kennedy
gloried in the current moment, Eisenhower warned the country
to "avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering,
for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of
tomorrow... |
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The Last Supper (Leonardo da Vinci)
THE Last Supper is a 15th century mural painting in Milan created by Leonardo da Vinci for his patron Duke Ludovico Sforza and his duchess Beatrice d’Este.
It represents the scene of The Last Supper from the final days of Jesus as narrated in the Gospel of John 13:21, when Jesus announces that one of his Twelve Apostles would betray him.
The Last Supper measures 450 x 870 centimetres (15 feet x 29 ft) and covers an end wall of the dining hall at the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Italy.
The theme was a traditional one for refectories, although the room was not a refectory at the time that Leonardo painted it.
The main church building had only recently been completed (in 1498), but was remodelled by Bramante, hired by Ludovico Sforza to build a Sforza family mausoleum.
The painting was commissioned by Sforza to be the centrepiece of the mausoleum.
The lunettes above the main painting, formed by the triple arched ceiling of the refectory, are painted with Sforza coats-of-arms.
The opposite wall of the refectory is covered by the Crucifixion fresco by Giovanni Donato da Montorfano, to which Leonardo added figures of the Sforza family in tempera.
Leonardo began work on The Last Supper in 1495 and completed it in 1498—he did not work on the painting continuously.
This beginning date is not certain, as “the archives of the convent have been destroyed and our meagre documents date from 1497 when the painting was nearly finished.
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