Advice About: August 2016

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

2 more Mississippi schools won"t fly state flag with Confederate emblem

(CNN)Two Mississippi universities have removed the state flag, which features a Confederate emblem, from campus amid statewide debate over what to do with the controversial banner.

Mississippi State University and the Mississippi University for Women are the latest state schools to furl the flag in response to concerns that it no longer represents modern-day Mississippi. Of the state"s eight public universities, Delta State University is the only one left still flying the flag.

The changes come at a time when schools and local governments across the state have taken steps to distance themselves from Confederate symbols. But it"s not the first time the state has grappled with the issue.

In a 2001 referendum, 65% of Mississippians voted to keep the Confederate emblem instead of replace it with 20 white stars on a blue field to represent Mississippi"s status as the 20th state.

The 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting led to renewed calls nationwide to abandon Confederate symbols amid evidence that the massacre was racially motivated. The debate materialized in Mississippi through its state flag, which has existed in its current form since 1894, featuring the Confederate battle emblem in the left corner.

South Carolina removes Confederate flag

But the momentum has failed to reach state lawmakers, who let various proposals to change the flag die in the last legislative session. Gov. Phil Bryant"s office did not immediately return requests for comment, but he has said before that any change to the state flag should be decided by the people in a vote.

Meanwhile, schools and communities have taken matters into their own hands.

"Under our process of shared governance, the leadership in our individual colleges have flexibility in making decisions about operations under their jurisdiction. In keeping with that process, requests were made recently to replace the Mississippi flag in several locations with a larger American flag to better conform to our very large American flag which flies over the Drill Field (MSU"s primary campus green space)," Mississippi State University spokesman Sid Salter said.

MSU President Mark E. Keenum approved those requests, a move Student Association President Roxanne Raven hailed as "courageous" given "the political climate at the state level."

"I want this to be a welcoming environment and for every student on campus to feel they have a place. With this being gone I think it is a step closer to making everyone feel welcome," Raven said in a phone interview Tuesday.

After Charleston, students approached deans of various departments where the flag few and asked them to take it down, she said. Its symbolism created an unwelcoming atmosphere for minority students and others who felt it did not represent Mississippi, she said.

"The flag doesn"t represent to me all the wonderful things that Mississippi stands for," she said. "Mississippi doesn"t always have the best national image and I think the flag and its symbolism are partially responsible for that.

"As a Mississippian I want to be known for more than the state flag."

A majority of students wanted the flag to come down, but not everyone supported the decision, she said.

The opposition was reflected in comments on the school"s Facebook page.

"You should fly the state flag. It is the current state flag and voters voted on it," one commenter said. "I graduated from MSU and I am disgusted."

"All state funding should be removed from any school refusing to fly the state flag," another person said.

Mississippi University for Women President Dr. Jim Borsig said the decision to remove the flag came after campus discussions, which led to a united call for state lawmakers to change the flag.

"The redesign of the north campus grounds required removing a flagpole and the decision was made at that time to not replace the state flag," he said in a statement on Facebook.

"The W"s student body reflects Mississippi"s wonderful diversity and over 85% of our students are from Mississippi. Enrollment is up this fall and we remain committed to our mission of creating opportunities for all Mississippians."

Cruising Modena in a Maserati with chef Massimo Bottura

Modena, Italy (CNN)Massimo Bottura, chef patron of the Michelin three-starred restaurant Osteria Francescana, is a man of many pleasures: food, naturally, but also art and jazz, which have famously inspired some of his most striking dishes.

But for this aesthete, similar pleasures can be found behind the wheel of a car -- particularly when the car in question is a vintage Maserati Ghibli Spyder, one of only 125 ever made.

"Driving a car like this to me is really special because I am one of the few very lucky to have the opportunity to drive such a rare car," said Bottura, who brought CNN Style along for a ride through his hometown of Modena, Italy.

"It"s emotional, like listening to Miles Davis whispering in a trumpet."

Read: How Italy won the race for beauty

But the joy of the road is nothing new for Bottura. He still remembers standing along the same streets as a child, watching and listening to the passing cars and motorcycles.

"Coming back to Modena in a province in this small town, they keep you grounded," Bottura said.

"It"s another secret of how my life stayed so easy and simple: you never have to lose the perception of who you are and where you come from."

Watch the video above to take a ride around Modena with Massimo Bottura.

Death of senior leader al-Adnani caps bad month for ISIS

(CNN)The death of one of ISIS" most prominent figures, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, is one more example of the pressure the group is under in both Iraq and Syria. Al-Adnani was the most visible figure in ISIS" core leadership, and instrumental as the group"s spokesman and external operations planner.

According to the ISIS" affiliated news agency Amaq, al-Adnani was killed while supervising battle lines in Aleppo province in northern Syria. Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook confirmed that al-Adnani was the target of a "precision strike near al-Bab, Syria." That"s a critical junction for ISIS in northern Syria as it tries to retain access to the Turkish border some 25 kilometers away.

ISIS has lost plenty of key figures in the last 18 months -- many of them to US drone strikes as intelligence on the movements of the group"s hierarchy has improved. But the loss of al-Adnani is a severe blow. He"d been the group"s emir in Syria for more than three years, had a high public profile and a key role in organizing plots to attack Western Europe.

Even though ISIS remains a resilient outfit with what might be called a deep bench, his death comes at a critical time for the group.

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ISIS" core territory in Iraq and Syria has continued to shrink over the last month. ISIS has lost some 15% of the land it held at the beginning of the year and its affiliates in both Libya and the Sinai desert in Egypt also have suffered setbacks.

It"s much too early to begin writing death notices: There are plenty of opportunities for ISIS to exploit as its enemies turn on each other in both Syria and Iraq, but it"s under pressure on many fronts.

Al-Adnani himself had recognized this. In an audio message at the end of May -- his first in seven months -- he asked of the "crusaders": "Will we be defeated and you victorious if you took Mosul or Sirte or Raqqa or all the cities -- and we returned as we were in the beginning? No, defeat is losing the will and the desire to fight."

Setbacks for ISIS

Over the past month, the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces have chipped away at ISIS" control around Mosul, the largest city it controls and the place where ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi declared the "caliphate" two years ago.

The expulsion of ISIS from the town of Qayyarah by Iraqi security forces further fragments the territory it holds in the area. The Peshmerga claim to have recovered several villages and about 100 square kilometres of territory to the east of Mosul.

Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has promised Iraqis that Mosul will be liberated this year, but that will require a coordination of multiple forces and a plan for governance.

In Syria, the rebel Syrian Democratic Forces finally drove the remnants of an ISIS presence from the town of Manbij, a critical way station between Raqqa and the Syrian border (and not far from where al-Adnani was killed.) Hundreds of ISIS members fled north to the border town of Jarablus on the Syrian border -- only to flee again weeks later when the Turkish-led incursion into northern Syria began.

Gen. Joseph Votel, commander of the US Central Command, told reporters at the Pentagon that al-Baghdadi had told fighters in Manbij "to fight to the death."

"They didn"t," Votel said, questioning how much command and control ISIS leadership has over its fighters.

Another US official, Adam Szubin, whose role at the Treasury includes pursuing terrorists" sources of money, says the group is under growing financial pressure. In an interview last month with the Combating Terrorism Center"s Sentinel, he said, "We"ve seen allegations to the tune of millions of dollars being embezzled by ISIL leaders as their resources have shrunk."

Beyond the caliphate

In Libya, the last pocket of ISIS resistance is clinging on in the coastal city of Sirte, attacked on the ground by militia that support the nascent Libyan government and from the air by US airstrikes.

However, kicking ISIS out of Sirte may be a double-edged sword. Its fighters have scattered to the south, but the many Tunisians among them may return home to launch more terror attacks there, according to a new United Nations report.

In the Sinai desert, where the ISIS affiliate has inflicted hundreds of casualties on Egyptian security forces, military operations appear to be having some success. In August, the Egyptian army claimed to have killed a senior leader of the group.

Opportunities for ISIS

Amid fast-moving events in northern Syria, one surprise was the speed with which ISIS retreated from Jarablus - a crucial conduit for supplies and fighters. After weeks of resistance in nearby Manbij, hundreds of ISIS fighters slipped out of Jarablus within hours of the incursion by Turkish armor.

Perhaps they decided that resisting Turkish tanks and US airpower was pointless. But ISIS" leadership may also have calculated that the Turks" real target was the Syrian Kurdish militia -- the YPG.

A weaker Kurdish resistance would suit ISIS just fine. An expanding conflict between the YPG and Syrian rebel factions supported by Turkey would relieve some of the pressure on Raqqa, the largest town in Syria still held by ISIS.

The United States has urged both Turkey and the YPG to focus their attacks on ISIS, and on Tuesday a tenuous truce appears to have taken hold. But there is little love lost between rebel factions supported by Turkey and those that joined the YPG under the US-supported umbrella of the Syrian Democratic Forces.

Columb Strack, a senior analyst at IHS Jane"s, says ISIS" "main objective here is to maintain the remaining informal smuggling routes across the Turkish border, and the town of al-Bab, which acts as a logistics hub for that. Losing access to the Turkish border would make the Islamic State"s governance project unviable."

ISIS also will be hoping for more clashes between the Kurds and the Syrian regime after the sudden flare-up in Hasakah last month, so it can take advantage of how thinly spread the YPG is across a huge front.

ISIS also appears to be probing a new front in southern Syria, close to the Jordanian border. In late June it carried out a suicide bombings against Jordanian soldiers on the border. Last week, it launched a complex attack against a rebel group"s base where the borders of Jordan, Syria and Iraq meet. It can still carry out offensive operations on a wide number of fronts.

Even so, across the globe, from North Africa to Afghanistan to western Europe, ISIS and its affiliates are beginning to look more like a traditional terror network and less like wilayat, or provinces of the caliphate, as they are grandiosely described.

ISIS will continue to take advantage of a fluid battlefield and the weakness of its enemies where it can. It will continue trying to co-opt and coerce other Islamist factions and tribes, especially in Syria. But above all it will look for ways to attack Western Europe, Russian cities and even the United States.

More often than not, such attacks will be carried out by individuals (as was the case in Nice, Ansbach, Orlando and Rouen) with a complex mix of personal and religious grievances who adopt the ISIS brand late in the day.

But as its core territory shrinks, ISIS will celebrate such attacks with desperate glee.

Meet the artist that shot a bouquet of flowers 30,000 meters into space

Tokyo, Japan (CNN)From flowers locked in ice to space-age pine trees, Japanese artist Makoto Azuma has built a career from a "new genre of art" that blends plants with artificial mediums to strikingly beautiful effect.

A florist by training, the Tokyo-based Azuma creates what he describes as "living art" -- ecosystems using fish and bonsai, bicycles covered in astroturf and spectacular fungi dipped in gold, platinum and copper.

For one of his best known series, "Exobiotanica", Azuma sent a 50-year-old Japanese white pine bonsai and an extravagant mother"s day bouquet 30,000 meters into the atmosphere and photographed his unusual satellites suspended against the edge of the earth.

"Many misunderstand me as a contemporary artist, or drawer, or sculptor, he says. "But I create living art. I am creating a totally new way of expression."

CNN Style spoke to Azuma about the inspiration behind his work, his relationship with flowers and the technical challenges of transforming life into art.

Do you see yourself as an artist or a florist?

I think I am a florist to begin with. But I create my art work in orderto find out new value and potential inflowers. So I am a florist as well as an artist. Both are important for me.

What is the most surprising thing you have learned about plants and flowers to date?

Flowers have a very strongexistence. A human needs flowers and plantsto live, but flowers and plantsdo not need humans. They are so strong.

Naked guy accidentally photobombs teen"s senior pictures

(CNN)An Oregon teen thought the picturesque Willamette River would be the perfect backdrop for her senior photos. What the soon-to-be South Eugene High School senior didn"t count on? A naked photo bomber.

Jillian Henry,17, said when she and her friend, Elena Nesbit, realized they had company (sans clothes), "we both just started laughing".

Did the background skinny dipper realize he was interrupting a photo session? Jillian said she"s not sure.

"We weren"t the only people there and I feel like he had to have seen us in the water with a camera, but he didn"t leave or anything," she said.

Undeterred, the two snapped a few more photos before they decided to leave.

Jillian said her friends encouraged her to share the photos.

She tweeted out two, with the caption "love my senior pics :)"

Henry said she was excited when her tweet started getting "likes." Then she was out of cell service for a few hours. When she checked her phone again, she couldn"t believe the response.

The tweet has now been liked more than 100,000 times and retweeted more than 37,000 times.

Jillian said she never expected the photos to get as much attention as they did. But will the photos make the yearbook cut? She"s keeping her fingers crossed.

"I don"t know, I kinda hope so!"

How Japan went crazy for KitKats

(CNN)A freshly made white chocolate and raspberry mix is carefully poured into a piping bag by chef Yasumasa Takagi, one of Japan"s foremost patissiers.

After snipping the end of the bag, he squeezes the delicious pink paste into a tray of oblong, white plastic molds.

Surprisingly, Takagi isn"t creating an elaborate confection for customers to his fashionable Tokyo cafe; this is something far more modest.

It"s a KitKat.

The first opened in Tokyo in January 2014 and sold out of Chef Takagi"s specialty bars in hours.

Since then he"s been advocating for new flavors and pushing out new products, from the single-finger Sublime range to "special" flavors that include fruit or tea-infused minis.

Visitors to Japan can get their hands on Chef Takagi"s current range from under KitKat chandeliers (yes, really) at the Chocolatory concessions.

Gift boxes in limited-edition flavors are on sale at major train stations and airports.

There are no concrete plans for export, but if Takagi is able to convince a global food giant operating in one of the most competitive markets in the world to change their approach, don"t rule it out.

"What I would most like to achieve is to deliver Japanese KitKat Chocolatory with craftsmanship to the people around the world," he says.

Chocolatory, Seibu Ikebukuro department store, 1-28-1 Minami Ikebukuro, Toshima-ku, Tokyo; +81 3 5949 2026

I was on board with Kaepernick until....

(CNN)Colin Kaepernick sparked a media firestorm on August 26 when he refused to stand for the national anthem before a preseason game against the Green Bay Packers.

The San Francisco 49ers quarterback explained in an interview, "I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

I immediately applauded Kaepernick for using the art of protest to spark a national dialogue. People are dying. We are in the eye of a cultural crisis in America.

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Although Kaepernick is a person of color and has experienced prejudice, he sits in a space economic privilege -- a man who signed a multimillion dollar contract in 2014. Yes, he is entitled to his opinion, as am I. But is he seriously claiming Trump and Clinton are the same? Trump has said things that I"ve never heard from a Republican nominee in my lifetime. This is not a standard election. The safety and morale of our country is at stake.

It takes time to grow into activism. There is space for him to evolve and learn. His intentions were clearly genuine. While Kaepernick sitting during the national anthem was profound, his words about the Democratic nominee were disappointing and, quite frankly, misguided.

Colin, your voice is needed. Please don"t encourage anyone to bench their vote. We cannot let Trump become president. This is not the football field. This is not a game. You are blessed to live in a world where your livelihood is protected, but for the rest of us, we can"t endure a President Trump.