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Amazon has launched a Parent Dashboard for Amazon FreeTime, its child-friendly selection of books, videos, apps, and games available for the Fire Kids Edition. The new system will be available on FreeTime across all the compatible platforms, including Kindle e-readers and the Amazon Fire TV, though it arguably makes most sense on the Amazon Fire Kids Edition tablet. The goal … Continue reading

Lithuania will keep increasing military spending after hitting NATO’s recommended level of 2 percent of economic output in the next two years, its finance minister said, as Russia builds up capabilities on the borders of its Baltic neighbors.

Relations with the West were damaged by Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and deteriorated even further last week after a gas attack in Russia-backed Syria.

“We are a NATO member but we are also responsible for our security ourselves,” Vilius Sapoka told Reuters on Tuesday in his first interview with international media since Lithuania’s coalition government took office last year.

“Next year we will already reach 2 percent of GDP (in terms of military spending) … and I think we will keep gradually increasing that number.”

That rise in spending, alongside an improving European economy, is expected to nudge Lithuania’s growth rate up to 3 percent this year.

Sapoka’s government, a “catch all” of the Peasants, Greens Union and Social Democrats that came to power in November, faces broad challenges though.

Income inequality is among the highest in the European Union and has been increasing, driving younger people abroad for work.

Sapoka said the government wants to raise tax revenues to 40 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in the next five years from 30 percent, to help improve education and healthcare.

It will stick to its predecessor’s “fiscal discipline” path, he said, but is embarking on an aggressive drive to attract high tech finance and bio-medicine firms with tax breaks.

It already allows firms to offset three times what they spend on research and development but is about to go further.

“If you invest in new technologies, at the moment you can deduct 50 percent (from tax) and we will increase that up to 100 percent.”

Lithuania also has a stake in Britain’s negotiations to leave the European Union. Brexit has made the future uncertain for the roughly 200,000 Lithuanians living in the United Kingdom.

“Here we are very clear that all the rights that were acquired by Lithuanian people are preserved,” Sapoka said.

A “mirror arrangement” should be given to EU-based Britons, he said.

Echoing the standard EU line, he also said that “all parties should respect their financial obligations,” referring to the 60 billion euros ($64 billion) that countries such as Austria have said the UK should pay as it leaves.

While Lithuania wants a show of unity in the EU, two years after joining the euro, it also leans on the side of fiscal discipline for Greece, as the Baltic nation takes part in its second batch of bailout talks.

“We talk about solidarity but we should not forget the principle of responsibility as well,” Sapoka said.

(Editing by Louise Ireland)

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Artist Damien Hirst always aims to shock.

Having already exhibited a dead shark in a vitrine of formaldehyde, a severed cow’s head on which live maggots feasted, and an 18th-century skull covered in platinum with over 8,000 diamonds, you might wonder just how, exactly, Hirst plans on living up to his own hype.

After a 10-year hiatus from making art, Hirst has made his best bid, in the form of an underwater art show depicting the remains of a fictional shipwreck. The show is called “Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable,” and in typical Hirst fashion, it’s not cheap. According to The New York Times, “Treasures” cost the artist millions of dollars to produce and Parisian collector François Pinault millions to present. (Neither gave exact figures.) In turn, the cheaper works on view will cost potential buyers around $500,000 each, with the big-ticket items costing a cool $5 million.

The exhibition revolves around a mythical story of a shipwreck that, according to Hirst’s story, was discovered off the coast of eastern Africa in 2008. The wreckage allegedly contained a bounty of treasure once belonging to a freed Turkish slave who rose to riches during his lifetime between the first and second centuries. When his ship, the “Unbelievable,” went down, his trove of sculptural objects were lost for centuries. 

Until recently, that is, when divers salvaged some of the barnacle-encrusted pieces from the debris. To add to the mystique of his self-spun mythology, Hirst actually filmed people recovering the sunken goodies from the sea. The shipwrecked treasures ― now on view in Venice ― include massive, kitsch carvings depicting pharaohs, mythical figures, sea beasts and goddesses ― many of which curiously resemble contemporary pop figures like Rihanna and Pharrell.

For Hirst, who has long been obsessed with mythology, the exhibition is a very elaborate exercise in the importance of imagination.

“Believing, it’s different from religion,” the artist told the Times, reportedly over and over. “It’s what we need to do today. When you’re an artist, everything you do you think is about the world we are living in today. And now with all the liars running our governments, it’s far easier to believe in the past than it is in the future.”

For some, Hirst is the ultimate maximalist, his exorbitant visions transcending both good taste and bad in their sheer enormity. His work aims to literally take the viewer’s breath away, showing that art can be as spectacular as a blockbuster film, without the mediation of a screen.

As The Guardian put it: “It takes a kind of genius to push kitsch to the point where it becomes sublime.”

For others, however, Hirst’s show resembles nothing more than a shock artist’s attempt at a comeback, generated less through ingenuity than through obscene amounts of money. The Telegraph called the show “a spectacular, bloated folly, an enormity that may prove the shipwreck of Hirst’s career,” adding that it was “characterised by lifeless surfaces, lurid emotions, and vile, excessive details, such as a couple of toadstools growing on the base. Ugh.”

When overblown excess and unabashed grandiosity so viscerally conjure associations with the current U.S. president, Hirst’s longstanding eye for opulence feels, at best, tone deaf and, at worst, emetic. Although optimism and imagination are clearly the aims of Hirst’s under-the-sea adventure, the end result feels more like a last-gasp display of extravagance as gaudy as Trump Tower.

Hirst’s work will be on view at the Palazzo Grassi until Dec. 3.

— 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.

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