Mother Teresa: Why the Catholic missionary is still no saint to her critics: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/mother-teresa-why-the-catholic-missionary-is-still-no-saint-to-her-critics-a6778906.html

In India, where Mother Teresa carried out the majority of her work, that legacy has already been called into question once this year. In February, the head of the Hindu nationalist group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) sparked outrage when he criticised her intentions.

“It’s good to work for a cause with selfless intentions. But Mother Teresa’s work had ulterior motive, which was to convert the person who was being served to Christianity,” RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat said at the opening of an orphanage in Rajasthan state, the Times of India reported. “In the name of service, religious conversions were made. This was followed by other institutes, too.”

In 1994, Hitchens and British Pakistani journalist Tariq Ali wrote an extremely critical documentary on Mother Teresa titled “Hell’s Angel.” The documentary, which drew heavily from the account of Aroup Chatterjee, an Indian-born British writer who had worked briefly in one of Mother Teresa’s charitable homes, listed a catalog of criticisms against her. It found fault with the conditions in the facilities of her Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, which one journalist compared to the photographs she had seen of Nazi Germany’s Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and Hitchens rallied against what he called the “cult of death and suffering.”

The Complicated Pasts of 6 Trailblazing Women: https://www.history.com/news/mother-teresa-6-trailblazing-women-complicated-pasts

Why She’s Complicated: Even sainthood doesn’t spare one from criticism. The facilities Mother Teresa raised millions to build were rundown and unsanitary, some charged (she advocated reusing hypodermic needles) and she refused an audit that would explain how that could be. Medical treatment was often grossly insufficient, and needed care sometimes proved secondary to the goal of converting souls to Catholicism, critics said. At her Nobel acceptance speech, she condemned abortion as “the greatest destroyer of peace,” and later, she advocated codifying a ban on divorce in the Irish constitution. In both cases, her positions were extreme, even for the Catholic Church—and widely perceived to further disadvantage poor women. Her very presence as a white European Catholic “savior” in India (she was born in Macedonia of Albanian descent), others point out, embodies a long tradition of political and spiritual colonialism.

Mother Teresa Was No Saint: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/krithika-varagur/mother-teresa-was-no-saint_b_9470988.html

To canonize Mother Teresa would be to seal the lid on her problematic legacy, which includes forced conversion, questionable relations with dictators, gross mismanagement, and actually, pretty bad medical care. Worst of all, she was the quintessential white person expending her charity on the third world — the entire reason for her public image, and the source of immeasurable scarring to the postcolonial psyche of India and its diaspora.

A 2013 study from the University of Ottawa dispelled the “myth of altruism and generosity” surrounding Mother Teresa, concluding that her hallowed image did not stand up to the facts, and was basically the result of a forceful media campaign from an ailing Catholic Church.

Although she had 517 missions in 100 countries at the time of her death, the study found that hardly anyone who came seeking medical care found it there. Doctors observed unhygienic, “even unfit,” conditions, inadequate food, and no painkillers — not for lack of funding, in which Mother Theresa’s world-famous order was swimming, but what the study authors call her “particular conception of suffering and death.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/12/magazine/the-strange-case-of-the-missing-joyce-scholar.html

Some 16 years ago, The Boston Globe published an article about a jobless man who haunted Marsh Plaza, at the center of Boston University. The picture showed a curious figure in a long overcoat, hunched beneath a black fedora near the central sculpture. He spent his days talking with pigeons to whom he had given names: Checkers and Wingtip and Speckles. The article could have been just another human-interest story about our society’s failing commitment to mental health, except that the man crouched in conversation with the birds was John Kidd, once celebrated as the greatest James Joyce scholar alive.

Kidd had been the director of the James Joyce Research Center, a suite of offices on the campus of Boston University dedicated to the study of “Ulysses,” arguably the greatest and definitely the most-obsessed-over novel of the 20th century. Armed with generous endowments and cutting-edge technology, he led a team dedicated to a single goal: producing a perfect edition of the text. I saved the Boston Globe story on my computer and would occasionally open it and just stare. Long ago, I contacted Kidd about working on an article together, because I was fascinated by one of his other projects — he had produced a digital edition, one that used embedded hyperlinks to make the novel’s vast thicket of references and allusions, patterns and connections all available to the reader at a click.

Big snip-----

When I pressed him on real-world specifics, the manuscripts, the work that must have been on disks somewhere, he recalled that, yes, he had assembled a draft of an edition with a complete introduction. One of Kidd’s editors at Norton, Julia Reidhead, confirmed that both existed but said that one delay after another — “an infinite loop of revision” — ran into the legal wall of new copyright extensions, and so Norton “stopped the project.” One Joyce scholar remembers reading the introduction but no longer has a copy, and Kidd doesn’t have one either. Instead, we are left with bizarre relics of what could have been. Early on in the Joyce wars, in fact, Arion Press issued a new edition of “Ulysses” that included some of the preliminary Kidd edits. The book was luxurious, with prints by Robert Motherwell, and only 175 of them were printed. I found one for sale on Amazon. The seller wanted $25,678.75.

He was of average height, very bald, with blue eyes and a hooked nose. His hands and feet were so distorted by gout that he could not endure a shoe for long, unroll a book, or even hold one. The flesh on his right side too had grown out and hung down to such an extent, that it could with difficulty be held in place by a bandage.

It is said that he was a heavy eater and in winter time was in the habit of taking food even before daylight, while at dinner he helped himself so lavishly that he would have the leavings which remained in a heap before him passed along and distributed among the attendants who waited on him. He was more inclined to unnatural desire, and in gratifying it preferred full-grown, strong men. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Suetonius/12Caesars/Galba*.html

Mr Putin offered to host the next summit after his US counterpart Donald Trump suggested Russia should have been at the Quebec gathering which came to an acrimonious end last night.

Russia was booted out of the then-G8 when it annexed Ukraine's Crimea four years ago and has done little since to win favour with the elite group of wealthy nations.

Mr Putin, speaking during a visit to China, said: "We did not choose to leave it, our colleagues refused to come to Russia due to known reasons at some point.

“Please, we will be glad to see everyone here in Moscow.” https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/972155/putin-russia-g7-summit-donald-trump-usa