Hasta La Gadget!

PARIS/PAPEETE, French Polynesia, April 22 (Reuters) – French overseas territories and French residents in the United States and Canada began voting on Saturday in France’s presidential election, a day before the main first-round of a poll that could change the global political landscape. Of nearly 47 million registered French voters, there are fewer than a million resident in far-flung places like French Polynesia in the South Pacific, and Guadeloupe, French Guiana and Martinique in the Caribbean. They vote early so as not to be influenced by the mainland results, due on Sunday evening at around 1800 GMT.

The first round will send two of 11 candidates into a run-off vote in two weeks’ time to pick a new president for France, a core member of the European Union and the NATO alliance, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, and the world’s fifth largest economy.

With two anti-globalization candidates whose policies could break up the EU among the four front-runners, the vote is of major significance to the international political status quo and to investment markets.

Coming after the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and Britain’s Brexit vote to quit the EU, few experts dare rule out a shock, and all of the likely outcomes will usher in a period of political uncertainty in France.

Polls make centrist and pro-European Emmanuel Macron the favorite, but he has no established party of his own and is a relatively unknown political quantity.

His three close rivals, according to voting surveys, include the anti-EU, anti-immigration National Front leader Marine Le Pen, who would dump the euro currency and revive the French franc. Far-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon wants France to rip up international trade treaties and quit NATO, while conservative Francois Fillon’s reputation has been sullied by a nepotism scandal.

“The election of either Le Pen or Melenchon would put Paris on a fast-track collision course with (EU officials in) Brussels,” said James Shields, professor of French politics at Aston University in Britain.

“The election of Marine Le Pen would make Brexit look trivial by comparison.”

LONG QUEUE IN MONTREAL

Although pollsters put Le Pen in second place behind Macron in the first round, she is seen as unlikely to win the second. Melenchon, by contrast, could take the presidency according to some scenarios.

Polls in the dying days of the campaign put all the candidates roughly on between a fifth and a quarter of the vote, with around five percentage points or less separating them ― threatening the margin of error for polling companies.

High levels of abstention and indecision are also a key factor.

Voters in the tiny French island of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, south of Canada’s Newfoundland in the north Atlantic, were first to start voting on Saturday morning.

In other U.S. cities and in Canada, voting took place at French consular offices. In Montreal, voters waited for up to three hours in a queue stretching for over 2 km (1.24 miles), suggesting a big turnout, French media reported.

Results from ballots cast in the territories and North America will remain sealed until Sunday evening and after polls have closed in mainland France.

France will be voting under tight security with over 50,000 police and other security branches fully mobilized for special election duty.

Security was thrust to the fore of the already acrimonious campaign after a policeman was killed by a suspected Islamist militant in Paris on Thursday.

Le Parisien newspaper said French government security authority the DCSP had circulated a note saying the threat during the elections of a militant attack like the ones that have killed more than 230 people in the past two years in France was a “constant and pregnant” one.

Legislative elections are due to follow in June.

(Additional reporting by Elizabeth Pineau and Andrew Callus; Editing by Andrew Callus and Catherine Evans)

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Anticipation for “Deadpool 2” has been running high ever since we saw the first teaser and found out Josh Brolin would be playing Cable. We’ve been patiently waiting for word on a release date, and now we finally have one.

Fox announced Saturday that the sequel, starring Ryan Reynolds as our wise-cracking hero, will hit theaters June 1, 2018, according to The Hollywood Reporter. We. Can’t. Wait. 

This weekend, Fox also announced official release dates for the four upcoming “Avatar” sequels, the first of which is set to come out in December 2020. The sequels have been delayed on multiple occasions, but according to a post on the film’s Facebook page, the team is starting production. 

But that’s not all! Fox also dated two other movies, including “New Mutants,” which will hit theaters April 13, 2018, and “X-Men: Dark Pheonix,” which will be out Nov. 2, 2018.

Next year is going to be a big one for superhero movies. In the meantime, here’s the “Deadpool 2” teaser, complete with a shot of Reynolds’ bare butt. 

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

YouTube says it has fixed the issue that made Restricted Mode a bit too restrictive. The option was supposed to make the website more suitable for minors when switched on, but its older version also filtered out millions of harmless videos, including…

This is A Mind Is Born, a demo of the Commodore 64 going haywire. It won first place at the Oldskool 4K Intro competition at this past week’s Revision 2017 event and it’s easy to see why.

Read more…

With the much-awaited release of Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” only four days away, much has been said in the past 24 hours about who the story, in both its book and TV show form, is for.

In Saturday’s New York Times review, executive producer Bruce Miller discusses spearheading the show as a man when its creators initially wanted a woman to do so: 

“Offred spoke to me,” Mr. Miller said. “She’s in this nightmarish situation but she keeps her funny cynicism and sarcasm. She finds really interesting ways to pull levers of power and express herself.”

But Mr. Miller wasn’t a shoo-in for showrunner because producers were looking for a woman, he recalled. “The Handmaid’s Tale” has been a seminal right-of-passage novel for many young women for over three decades; a feminist sacred text.

“It’s sacred to me, too,” Mr. Miller said. “But I don’t feel like it’s a male or female story; it’s a survival story.”

At the show’s premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Friday, the starring actors placed a heavy emphasis on the show being a “human” story and not a “feminist” one. 

“I think that any story, if it is a story being told by a strong, powerful woman… any story that’s just a powerful woman owning herself in any way is automatically deemed ‘feminist,’” said Madeline Brewer, who plays handmaid Jane. “But it’s just a story about a woman. I don’t think that this is any sort of feminist propaganda.”

Elisabeth Moss, who plays the show’s main character Offred, echoed Brewer’s comments. 

“It’s not a feminist story, it’s a human story, because women’s rights are human rights,” Moss said. I never intended to play Peggy [from ‘Mad Men’] as a feminist and I never expected to play Offred as a feminist … I approach it from a very human place, I hope.”

Atwood has since responded by neither agreeing nor disagreeing with the cast. 

While the show doesn’t need to be labeled as “feminist,” and while it’s fine that a man who loves the story spearheaded its televised iteration, a story that a woman wrote about the forced subservience of women and their subsequent survival deserves to be owned by women. We get to claim it. 

The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian fiction, sure, but it’s one that has women storming to their local libraries to grab a copies of the book. Last month, women dressed up as handmaids and protested anti-abortion legislation in the Texas Senate gallery. And, at this year’s SXSW festival, women wore handmaids costumes and roamed the streets of Austin, Texas, as performance art. Even though the book was written more than 30 years ago, it is resonating with women all over again.

Rebecca Traister wrote about reading the book in the era of President Donald Trump for New York Magazine in Februrary. “[T]here’s no question that reading about Atwood’s imagined dystopia is far scarier today than it was, I suspect, for adults living in 1985,” she wrote.

For anyone who has read the book, there shouldn’t be much surprise as to why women feel so connected to it in this current political and social moment. After all, it feels closer to reality than the show’s creators wanted.

Moss, who also serves as a producer, acknowledged the eerie and terrifying parallels between Offred’s nightmarish journey and Trump’s America.

“We never wanted the show to be this relevant,” she told Entertainment Weekly in December.

The relevance of story is easy to spot.

In the dystopian theocracy of Gilead, where “The Handmaid’s Tale” is set, women’s bodies are policed and controlled by the male-run state. Handmaids’ only purpose is to bear children ― they have no rights, no freedom, no lives. Women are not trusted with their own bodies. 

America now has a president who brags about grabbing women “by the pussy.” This week, a lawyer in Tennessee said that women are “especially good at lying … because they’re the weaker sex.” A Missouri congressman said last year that becoming pregnant after a rape is a blessing from God. Rooms full of men make legislative decisions about women’s bodies. A panel of men in Maryland decided that rapists can continue to have parental rights over the children who were conceived by rape. And abortion access is under threat across the U.S. 

But the beauty of “The Handmaid’s Tale” ― something that Miller misses and perhaps what women connect to most deeply ― is that it is inarguably, explicitly, a story of women’s survival and audacity. 

The first time I read the novel, in the fall of 2015, I cried. Not because its content was so traumatizing. (It was.) And not because it felt so eerily similar to what was happening in our political landscape. (It did.)

I cried for lines like this:

 “We learned to whisper almost without sound. In the semidarkness we would stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren’t looking, and touch each other’s hands across space. We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other’s mouths.”

And lines like this:

“I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story, because after all I want you to hear it … By telling you anything at all I’m at least believing in you … Because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell, therefore you are.”

Atwood’s beautifully constructed prose is at its finest when she is portraying the sheer resilience of my fellow women.

In the wake of the presidential election, the resilience of women is what has kept me going. Women are resisting, calling, volunteering, donating… and living.

And like the fictional Offred ― whether Moss thinks she’s “feminist” or not ― we intend to survive.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.