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British Prime Minister Theresa May was under pressure on Monday to give a date for leaving office as the price to bring Brexit-supporting rebel lawmakers in her party behind her twice-defeated European Union divorce treaty.
At one of the most important junctures for the country in at least a generation, British politics was at fever pitch and, nearly three years since the 2016 EU membership referendum, it was still unclear how, when or if Brexit will ever take place.
With May humiliated and weakened, ministers lined up to insist she was still in charge and to deny a reported plot to demand she name a date to leave office at a cabinet meeting at 1000 GMT on Monday.
“Time’s up, Theresa,” Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper said in a front page editorial. It said her one chance of getting the deal approved by parliament was to name a date for her departure.
“I hope that the cabinet will tell the prime minister the game is up,” Andrew Bridgen, a Conservative lawmaker who supports Brexit, told Sky News.
“The prime minister does not have the confidence of the parliamentary party. She clearly doesn’t have the confidence of the cabinet and she certainly doesn’t have the confidence of our members out there in the country,” he said.
Ministers will discuss at 0900 GMT how to address parliament’s attempts to take control of Brexit before a meeting of May’s cabinet team, a government source said.
The United Kingdom, which voted 52-48 percent to leave the EU in the referendum, remains deeply divided over Brexit.
Just 24 hours after hundreds of thousands of people marched through London on Saturday to demand another referendum, May called rebel lawmakers to her Chequers residence on Sunday in an attempt to find a way to break the deadlock.
“The meeting discussed a range of issues, including whether there is sufficient support in the Commons to bring back a meaningful vote (for her deal) this week,” a spokesman for May’s Downing Street office said.
Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker attended along with ministers David Lidington and Michael Gove who had been reportedly lined up as caretaker prime ministers. They were forced on Sunday to deny they wanted May’s job.
Ms May was told by Brexiteers at the meeting she must set out a timetable to leave office if she wants to get her deal ratified, Buzzfeed reporter Alex Wickham said on Twitter.
May told the lawmakers she would quit if they voted for her twice-defeated European Union divorce deal, ITV news said.
The Sun’s political editor, Tom Newton Dunn, said some ministers were urging May to pivot to a no-deal Brexit as the only way to survive in power.
The deal May negotiated with the EU was defeated in parliament by 149 votes on March 12 and by 230 votes on Jan. 15.
To get it passed, she must win over at least 75 MPs – dozens of rebels in her Conservative Party, some opposition Labour Party MPs and the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), which props up her minority government.
The Sunday Times reported 11 unidentified ministers agreed May should stand down, warning she has become a toxic and erratic figure whose judgment has “gone haywire”.
Brexit had been due to happen on March 29 before May secured a delay in talks with the EU. Now a departure date of May 22 will apply if parliament passes May’s deal. If she fails, Britain will have until April 12 to offer a new plan or decide to leave without a treaty to smooth the transition and avoid an economic shock.
Lawmakers are due on Monday to debate the government’s next steps on Brexit, including the delayed exit date. They have proposed changes, or amendments, including one which seeks to wrest control of the process from the government in order to hold votes on alternative ways forward.
Amendments are not legally binding, but do exert political pressure on May to change course.
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Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM) party floated by actor turned politician Kamal Haasan has forged an alliance with the TMC in Andaman and Nicobar islands for the Lok Sabha elections, which are just a few weeks away.
The decision was formally announced after Kamal Haasan met Chief Minister and TMC chief Mamata Banerjee at Nabanna in Howrah on Monday.
“The meeting was excellent. Makkal Needhi Maiam is in alliance with TMC for Andaman and we hope this special relationship will evolve in future,” said Kamal Haasan.
“I am going to campaign for their candidate in Andaman and I am going to Andaman for the same on April 6,” he said. Andaman and Nicobar Islands has only one Lok Sabha constituency which represents the entire Union Territory.
Kamal Haasan’s party had recently released its first list of 21 candidates for the Lok Sabha elections in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry. The list did not include Haasan’s name.
The MNM will contest all the 40 Lok Sabha seats in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry for the coming Parliamentary polls.
“In Tamil Nadu, we have two opposition DMK and AIADMK. BJP is in alliance with AIADMK, so now we have three opposition in Tamil Nadu,” said Haasan.
MNM was launched by Haasan on February 21 last year from his hometown of Rameswaram. As part of the launch of his political faction, Haasan toured Tamil Nadu extensively to interact with locals in different villages of Tamil Nadu.
Kids
According to a recent study, children who live in homes where two languages are spoken have shown better attention control than kids in a monolingual family.
Infants who sense more than one language show better attention control than the infants who hear only one language. This proved that exposure to a bilingual environment can be a significant factor in the early development of attention in infancy says the study published in the journal Developmental Science.
“By studying infants, a population that does not yet speak any language, we discovered that the real difference between monolingual and bilingual individuals later in life is not in the language itself, but rather, in the attention system used to focus on language.
“This study tells us that from the very earliest stage of development, the networks that are the basis for developing attention are forming differently in infants who are being raised in a bilingual environment. Why is that important? It’s because attention is the basis for all cognition,” said Ellen Bialystok, co-author of the study.
The researchers conducted two separate studies in which infants’ eye movements were measured to assess attention and learning. Half of the infants who were studied were being raised in monolingual environments while others were being raised in environments in which they heard two languages spoken approximately half of the time each.
The infants were shown images as they lay in a crib equipped with a camera and screen, and their eye movements were tracked and recorded as they watched pictures appear above them, in different areas of the screen. The tracking was conducted 60 times for each infant.
In the first study, the infants saw one of two images in the centre of the screen followed by another image appearing on either the left or right side of the screen. The babies learned to expect that if, for example, a pink and white image appears in the centre of the screen, it would be followed by an attractive target image on the left; if a blue and yellow image appeared in the centre, then the target would appear on the right. All the infants could learn these rules.
In the second study, which began in the same way, researchers switched the rule halfway through the experiment. When they tracked the babies’ eye movements, they found that infants who were exposed to a bilingual environment were better at learning the new rule and at anticipating where the target image would appear. This is difficult because they needed to learn a new association and replace a successful response with a new contrasting one.
“Infants only know which way to look if they can discriminate between the two pictures that appear in the centre. They will eventually anticipate the picture appearing on the right, for example, by making an eye movement even before that picture appears on the right.
What we found was that the infants who were raised in bilingual environments were able to do this better after the rule is switched than those raised in a monolingual environment,” said Scott Adler, the co-author of the study.
Researchers say the experience of attending to a complex environment in which infants simultaneously process and contrast two languages may account for why infants raised in bilingual environments have greater attention control than those raised in monolingual environments.
They found that anything that comes through the brain’s processing system interacts with this attention mechanism. Therefore, language, as well as visual information, can influence the development of the attention system.
movies
Paris Jackson has denied that she tried to harm herself. TMZ.com reported recently that Jackson attempted suicide, and she responded directly to the news outlet’s tweet, saying, “f**k you, you f**ing liars (sic).”
The website reported that she was in a stable condition after being transported to a local hospital and placed on a 5150 psychiatric hold. They subsequently reported that Paris had been released from the hospital and was under the care of her team.
“She is in better spirits and surrounded by friends and family,” a source told USWeekly.com, adding, “She’s strong but had a horrible episode, appears that everything she held inside finally burst. She does feel better and family and friends are still flying in.”
movies
Cardi B will make her feature film debut in the upcoming stripper scam movie, Hustlers, according to TheHollywoodReporter.com. The rapper will join Jennifer Lopez and Constance Wu, as well as fellow newcomers Julia Stiles, Lili Reinhart and Keke Palmer.
Interestingly, the plot of the movie is largely inspired by a viral New York Magazine article that detailed the true story of how a group of women conned the men they once serviced. In the film, which will begin filming in New York City on March 22, Lopez will play the ring leader of the infamous group.
