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Saoirse Ronan lights up the screen in delightful "Little Women"
Cahir O'Doherty
@randomirish
Saoirse Ronan's new film Little Women hasn't been released yet and she's already she's winning the best reviews of her career.
From her breakthrough role in "Atonement" to the indie hit "Lady Bird," to the about-to-be-classic "Little Women," Saoirse Ronan, 25, has proved she has the talent and range to tackle any role she has a mind to.
"Little Women" (opening December 25) looks ravishing. It's beautifully shot, it features a quartet of charismatic young actresses as the March sisters, it features an ideally cast young male lead in Timothee Chalamet and every detail from the costume design to the locations are superb.
Read more: WATCH: Saoirse Ronan wants to play this legendary Irish woman in a movie
Eliza Scanlen, Saoirse Ronan and Emma Watson in Little Women
But Ronan and Gerwig have something more ambitious in mind than a gauzy portrait of four girls facing the many ups and downs of romance and the real world.
Their version of "Little Women" remains true to its source material but it includes the real-world struggles of writer Louisa May Alcott, the woman who wrote the classic 1868 novel.
When we first see Jo March she is running. In this case to the offices of the New York scandal sheet that prints her not exactly literary short stories, the success of which helps to keep a roof over her families head.
From our first glimpse of Jo, we know a few things about her. She's self-possessed, determined, watchful and no one's fool. In her exchanges with the editor and publisher who prints her work she consistently holds her own, which by the standards of 1868 (the time that "Little Women" was first published) are remarkable.
Saoirse Ronan as Jo March and Timothee Chalamet as Laurie in Little Women
What follows is as unexpected as it is pure, Ronan and Gerwig's film adaptation is the most perfectly realized period drama since "A Room With A View" but it's also a bit of a feminist hand grenade, calculated to inspire a new generation of smart, spirited girls (and boys) to strive to be their best selves and not to let other people's prejudices or sexism get in their way.
Just like Alcott did in 1868, Gerwig and Ronan bring great realism and depth to their portrayal of the March sisters, making us root for them before we even notice.
Jo (Ronan) is the headstrong one and the most obvious stand-in for Alcott herself, Meg (Emma Watson) is the oldest sister who's as kind as she is upright, Beth (Florence Pugh) is the quietest one and the most artistically gifted and Amy (Eliza Scanlen) is the youngest and most passionate of the crew, given to huge tantrums that infuriate all around her.
They're as recognizable as the people you grew up around in other words, which is why the book still has so many fans over 150 years since it was written. The all-star cast includes Meryl Streep as Aunt March, the crotchety old bat whose withering barbs almost hide the fact that she has the four girls' best interests at heart.
Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Eliza Scanlen and Florence Pugh in Little Women
Streep plays Aunt March as a snob who understands the world of men and who frets that the March girls are too romantic or too silly to contend with what real life will throw at them.
Streep's portrayal is our first tip-off that this is going to be more than a simple tale about four girls who may marry well. You can see real anxiety in her conversations with each of her nieces that they take their heads out of the clouds before they lose their shot.
Being a woman of her age that means Aunt March thinks the solution is to marry a rich young man. She can not see the paths to a truly independent future that Jo or Meg sees.
Timothee Chalamet as the lazy, rich neighbor Laurie is ideally cast. You can see that his future could go either way, perhaps he'll stay true to the good nature he was born with, or perhaps his elevated position and influence will corrupt him and turn him into another one of the good for nothing men he can see all around him.
Money, getting it, losing it, seeking it, ignoring it, looms so large over the March sisters' futures that it's practically a character in itself. The March girls come within a whisper of destitution, then they come close to a rich marriage that will change their fortunes, but in the end by remaining consistent with their own values they win the biggest prize of all, their own self-respect.
This "Little Women" is that rare thing, a perfect film because it's stuffed with so many flawless performances that you'll have a job to decide which one you liked the most. It's also on its way to being the defining classic, the last word on Alcott's text.
But even at the end Ronan and Gerwig have some surprises in store. It would betray the text and the writer to simply marry off the March girls and fade to black. Instead, they show us Jo stepping into herself as a young woman and a successful writer and teacher, all on her own terms and in her own time.
That image alone will inspire a generation.
Little Women opens December 25.
Related: Movies


Margot is a highly organized and structural thinker who analyzes the big picture without losing sight of the details. She specializes in project management and business development, supporting client relationships and providing strategic operational expertise at Basis.
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On Monday May 20th, 2019 we will once again be participating in the UJA Walk with Israel.
Our family walks in this community-wide event every year. Over the last 5 years we have raised over 60K, and last summer we were blessed to see the results of this walk first hand in Israel!
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Home » Margarita Suñer
Margarita Suñer
Morrill Hall, Room 103
ms24@cornell.edu
PhD, Indiana University, 1973
Syntax, Romance linguistics
Suñer, M and L. D. King (2007). Gramática española: An álisis lingüístico y práctica. McGraw-Hill. 3rd edition (revised).
Suñer, M. (2006). Left Dislocations with and without Epithets. Probus 18.1:127-157.
Suñer, M. (2003). Aafke Hulk and Jean-Yves Pollock (eds.), Subject inversion in Romance and the theory of Universal Grammar (Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax). New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Journal of Linguistics 39: 209-213 (Review).
Suñer, M. (2003). The Lexical Preverbal Subject in a Romance Null Subject Language: Where Art Thou?, A Romance Perspective in Language Knowledge and Use: Selected Papers from the 31st Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Chicago, 19-22 April 2001, eds. Rafael Nuñez-Cedeño, Luis López, and Richard Cameron. John Benjamins, 2003: 341-357.
Suñer, M. (2001). The Puzzle of Restrictive Relative Clauses with Conjoined DP Antecedents. In J. Herschensohn, E. Mallén and K. Zagona (eds.), Features and Interfaces in Spanish and French: Essays in Honor of Heles Contreras. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 267-278.
Suñer, M. (2000). Some Thoughts on "que": Description, Theory, and L2. Hispania 83: 867-876.
Suñer, M. (2000). The Syntax of Direct Quotes with Special Reference to Spanish and English.Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 18: 525-578. Suñer, M. (2000). Object-shift: Comparing a Romance Language to Germanic. Probus 12: 261-289.
Suñer, M. (1998). Resumptive restrictive relative clauses: A crosslinguistic perspective. Language, 74, 335-364.
Suñer, M. (1995). Negative elements, island effects and resumptive 'no.' The Linguistic Review, 12, 233-273.
Suñer, M. (1994). Verb movement and the licensing of argumental wh-phrases in Spanish. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 12, 335-372.
Suñer, M. (1993). About indirect questions and semi-questions. Linguistics and Philosophy, 16, 45-77.
Suñer, M. (1992). Subject clitics in the Northern Italian vernaculars and the matching hypothesis.Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 10, 641-672.
Suñer, M. (1988). The role of agreement in clitic-doubled constructions. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 6, 391-434.
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); S160-S162
10.4103/IJPC.IJPC_163_20
Anger and Distress of a Curable Gastric Carcinoma Patient Becoming Incurable: A Dilemma of a Pandemic
Abhity Gulia, Prateek Sharma1, Sushma Bhatnagar
Department of Onco-Anesthesia and Palliative Medicine, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar IRCH, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India
1Department of Otorhinolaryngology and Head and Neck Surgery, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India
Address for correspondence: Dr. Sushma Bhatnagar, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar IRCH, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India. E-mail: sushmabhatnagar1@gmail.com
Received: 2020-05-22 , Accepted: 2020-05-26 , Published: 2020-06-30
This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.
This article was originally published by Wolters Kluwer - Medknow and was migrated to Scientific Scholar after the change of Publisher; therefore Scientific Scholar has no control over the quality or content of this article.
A pandemic is a time of great distress for cancer patients with a heightened risk of infection along with fear of disease progression occurring from postponement of therapy. Our patient who was initially diagnosed early and was awaiting surgery was suddenly terrified when her surgery got postponed due to the pandemic. To add to her distress was the disease progression which left her wondering that what went wrong on her part that she was in such a situation. The dilemma of the present situation is that an already stretched system due to the pandemic cannot accommodate for elective treatments of other diseases more so when there is a risk of complications in cancer patients associated with the infection.
Cancer patients
A pandemic due to the newly emerged coronavirus that initially affected parts of China has become widespread and affected the whole world.[12]
Because of lack of immunity in the population against the novel virus, it has varied levels of severity among different persons. It is also suggested that people with preexisting comorbidities such as cardiac conditions, diabetes, and cancer have a heightened risk of complications with the infection. People with severe infection commonly present with respiratory failure, sepsis, kidney injury, and even death.[3]
In the present pandemic scenario, major elective surgeries including oncological surgeries have also been postponed. The reason for this consensus is thought to be the need to free up hospital beds and ventilators and infrastructure for COVID patients. Furthermore, it is seen that COVID infection in the perioperative period leads to exaggerated morbidity and mortality.
We, in the present case report, present the agony of a middle-aged female who was diagnosed with early-stage cancer but progressed to an advanced disease due to delay in her surgery because of the pandemic. This case report highlights the indirect harms caused by the pandemic to the health of patients with other comorbidities.
A 52-year-old female who recently recovered from a myocardial infarction following a coronary angiography and stenting was not fortunate enough to be in good health thereafter. She developed symptoms such as pain upper abdomen, feeling of fullness even with small meals, and loss of appetite just 1 month after her stenting. Perplexed by her symptoms, she visited the hospital in January 2020. She underwent a battery of investigations including an upper gastrointestinal endoscopy which suggested a growth at the lower end of the stomach compromising the gastric outlet. After having a tissue diagnosis of adenocarcinoma stomach, the patient was devastated and worried about the outcome the disease will have for her. The patient developed a ray of hope when she was planned for surgery considering the localized nature of the disease. She was informed that an early diagnosis and treatment will have favorable outcomes for her. She was scared by the outcomes and extensive nature of the surgery but still hoped to get through it and be better.
However, when her surgery time neared, the country had been hit by the pandemic. Because of the few people being diagnosed of coronavirus, the hospital where her surgery was planned decided to put on hold major elective surgeries to avoid the risk of coronavirus to patients. She was informed that her surgery was canceled to avoid any risk to her health considering her high risk for complications because of the pandemic. She recalled that she felt like the floor slipped off from under her. Her caregiver stated that they understood that the decision of postponing of surgery was in their favor, but they were distressed by the fact that what if it progressed. Their mind kept wondering if there was some way that they could get the surgery done and still did not get the infection. They were advised certain home-based medications for the disease to tide over some time.
After 1½ months of this, the patient presented in the emergency department of our hospital with progressively increasing dysphagia, multiple episodes of vomiting, and significant weight loss. On initial stabilizing, a scan was done which suggested complete gastric outlet obstruction along with metastatic spread to the liver. It was informed that all that could be done for her in the present situation is a feeding jejunostomy to help her intake of food. Because in the present cachexic situation, it will take her some time to build up before she can tolerate a chemotherapy. This left the patient and her relative startled and they could not believe their ears. On explaining about the advanced nature of the disease, they were heart wrenched. The patient was annoyed at the entire situation and said I do not know whom to blame for my current situation. She said that ever since I was diagnosed with this disease, the only good thing I thought was its early stage. But now, because of this pandemic, although I did not get infected, should I be happy or be furious that I am in an even worse situation nearing death. It was a difficult conversation which led us wondering what went wrong that she is in such a situation.
Pandemic is a time of great challenge for the health-care setup of any country. It is burdensome to create the capacity to get through the pandemic and, at the same time, provide elective services to the comorbid patients needing health-care services. Considering the time-sensitive treatment of cancer patients, it seems difficult to decide regarding deferring of the anticancer treatment.
It has been suggested in the previous reports that patients who underwent surgery and later contacted COVID-19 were highly prone to severe events due to the infection when compared to those who did not undergo surgery.[4]
A study suggesting the treatment strategy in COVID-19 scenario for gastrointestinal tumor suggests high priority use of multidisciplinary therapy and nonsurgical antitumor therapy.[5] It can be, however, considered to discuss the options in a multidisciplinary setting with all care providers when thinking of deviation from the initial treatment plan. Whenever there is any change in the treatment plan the patient should be well informed, and their fears and queries should be dealt in detail with compassion and honesty.
The psychological distress among people with cancer during the pandemic is very high considering the fear of the infection, heightened risk of complications associated with the infection, fear of infection to their caregivers, and above all, the stress of delay in their cancer treatment. It is sometimes difficult for them to accept whether not visiting the hospital will be beneficial or indirectly harm them by leading to the progression of cancer. Cancer patients' challenges are not only limited to deferred treatment but sometimes even in traveling to obtain access to the hospital services. Our patient had a major setback when she knew that despite the best of her efforts to be cured, she has progressed to an advanced disease and has a limited life expectancy. The whole family had been emotionally and financially drained in the effort to get her treated but without any benefit.
We know that the ending of the pandemic cannot be predicted and the duration of delay in surgery is uncertain. The dilemma of the present situation is that an already stretched system due to the pandemic cannot accommodate for all elective treatments. Also, it has been reported from China that cancer patients have a 3.5 times higher need of mechanical ventilation or dying compared to noncancer[4] suggesting that hospital visits for treatment might be harmful in these patients.
All this has led to great confusion whether to proceed with elective treatments or defer them in the present scenario as there are heightened morbidity and mortality associated with both the situations. Definitively, it becomes difficult to explain to patients when it comes to situation like that described in the present report. But we might need to think it in a broader perspective considering the judicious resource utilization and ensuring the safety of both the patient and caregiver.
The authors certify that all appropriate consent forms have been obtained from the patient regarding clinical information to be reported in the Journal. She understands that her name and initials will not be published, and due efforts will be made to conceal her identity, but anonymity cannot be guaranteed.
Chen N, Zhou M, Dong X, Qu J, Gong F, Han Y, . Epidemiological and clinical characteristics of 99 cases of 2019 novel coronavirus pneumonia in Wuhan, China: A descriptive study. Lancet. 2020;395:507-13.
Yu J, Ouyang W, Chua ML, Xie C, . SARS-CoV-2 transmission in patients with cancer at a tertiary care hospital in Wuhan, China. JAMA Oncol e200980.
Zhou F, Yu T, Du R, Fan G, Liu Y, Liu Z, . Clinical course and risk factors for mortality of adult inpatients with COVID-19 in Wuhan, China: A retrospective cohort study. Lancet. 2020;395:1054-62.
Liang W, Guan W, Chen R, Wang W, Li J, Xu K, . Cancer patients in SARS-CoV-2 infection: A nationwide analysis in China. Lancet Oncol. 2020;21:335-7.
Chen YH, Peng JS, . Treatment strategy for gastrointestinal tumor under the outbreak of novel coronavirus pneumonia in China. Zhonghua Wei Chang Wai Ke Za Zhi. 2020;23:I-IV.
Challenges to Family Caregivers in Caring for… October 28, 2021
The Psychosocial and Spiritual Experiences of… December 31, 2019


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Home > News > 'Prison, economic ruin, repression and exile'
'PRISON, ECONOMIC RUIN, REPRESSION AND EXILE': THE PRICE NICARAGUA'S HEALTH WORKERS PAY FOR DOING THEIR JOBS
"What I have lived is a horror in silence. I can't take it anymore. I remained silent and was persecuted for it. It's time for me to speak up"
One morning in August 2014, Dr. Richard Saenz Coen received a phone call from Nicaragua's Minister of Health. She needed a highly qualified gynecologist to perform a caesarian on a woman in labor, immediately. Dr. Saenz was escorted to a public hospital and found the premises practically empty, closed off by security forces and police. When he arrived at the operating room, he was shocked to find it occupied by armed paramilitaries. A man in plain clothes grabbed the doctor's hand, and told him in a threatening tone, "you better know what you're getting yourself into."
A couple of hours later, Nicaragua's president, Daniel Ortega, and his wife, the current vice president Rosario Murillo, appeared outside the operating room. Dr. Saenz had just delivered their grandchild. President Ortega shook his hand and thanked him for his service. Dr. Saenz could have never predicted that just a few years later this very same president – himself a torture survivor and revolutionary during the Sandinista uprising against the Somoza dictatorship in the 1970s – would oversee the dismissal, imprisonment, torture and exile of him and his fellow health workers.
Dr. Saenz fled Nicaragua in June 2021. "Prison, economic ruin, repression, and now exile" were the prices he paid for being a doctor in Nicaragua, he told Amnesty International. He is one of almost 200 doctors who have fled Nicaragua since 2018, and, according to the Inter American Commission on Human Rights, one of more than 400 doctors dismissed from their jobs. And with COVID-19 cases reaching alarming levels and presidential elections looming in November, the context could not be grimmer for Nicaragua's health workers.
The nation has been mired in a grave human rights crisis since April 2018, when hundreds of people took to the streets to protest social security reforms in Nicaragua. The Ortega government responded with an unprecedented wave of repression and crackdown on dissidents that continues to this day. More than 100,000 people have fled the country in this time, while dozens of activists, human rights defenders and journalists have been threatened, imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases disappeared. The authorities have intensified their repressive tactics with a new wave of arrests in the lead up to elections, detaining more than 30 people simply for exercising their human rights since 28 May 2021.
Doctors like Saenz who dare to practice their profession against the will of the government are at grave risk in this context. He is one of dozens of doctors who took to the streets in 2018 to attend to the protestors that sustained bullet wounds and injuries during the crackdowns. Under government orders, public hospitals refused to attend to those injured, so doctors gave up their own time to treat them.
In the months following the April 2018 protests, Dr. Saenz was again summoned by the Ministry of Health. This time it was not to receive any gratitude nor handshakes for serving his people. Without any judicial order, the authorities told him his medical license would be revoked immediately and that he was prohibited from practicing medicine in the country.
The persecution against him did not end there. The Nicaraguan police detained Dr. Saenz four times over the next three years. On most of these occasions the authorities held him for several days, beat him and deprived him of food. In one instance, they took him to El Chipote, a police facility in Managua infamous for the brutal treatment detainees face there.
"My time in detention was degrading and humiliating. There was so much abuse. They beat me, they kicked me, they forced me to watch people being raped in front of me. There are other things that happened that I don't even want to remember," Dr Saenz told Amnesty International.
During these years, Dr. Saenz maintained a low profile and secretly continued to treat patients as well as carrying out charity work that he had been doing for many years. He was not only a doctor but also owned a small dairy farm and a shrimp business. However, the government ensured that all his assets dried up. By the time he decided to leave Nicaragua, pro-government groups had raided his house and destroyed and stolen his possessions. According to Dr. Saenz, the authorities used his stolen documents to fabricate charges of social security fraud against him.
Despite the relentless persecution he faced, in 2020 Dr. Saenz participated in a volunteer drive to bring medical supplies to indigenous communities affected by COVID-19, as well as providing medical care for dissidents and political prisoners who later fled the country. His actions angered the authorities, who followed him and detained him again for four days in April 2021 in the Chinandega police station. He fell ill due to his preexisting condition of diabetes and insulin dependency, and after days of near starvation, ill treatment, and interrogation, the police set him free.
Yet the threats and persecution against him did not abate. In June 2021 a trusted source told Dr. Saenz the authorities were coming for him again, this time with no mercy. It was time for him to flee the country.
Hundreds of doctors and nurses across Nicaragua have suffered similar experiences. For many, their only "offense" was following science and upholding the duties of their profession.
Since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in late March 2020, the Nicaraguan authorities tried to downplay its impact in the country. They promoted mass public gatherings and kept schools open. Health workers told Amnesty International they were initially prohibited from wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) at work, and some had their masks forcibly stripped from their faces. Others suffered reprisals at work for diagnosing patients with COVID-19. The authorities argued that they did not want to generate "panic" among the population.
"In my mind, it's easier for this government to have you die from COVID-19 than have to kill you by gunfire," one doctor, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Amnesty International. "For me, the government's approach to COVID-19 has amounted to collective murder."
In May 2020, over 700 doctors signed a letter addressed to the Nicaraguan government, urging it to consider the science on COVID-19 and urgently implement a series of public health measures. Soon after, dozens were fired in reprisal for speaking out and signing the letter. When Amnesty International asked them about the circumstances of their dismissal, they said hospital directors simply told them they were being fired due to "higher orders", and gave no other reasons.
"These medical personnel were like a lighthouse in the middle of the dark," said Nicaraguan journalist Wilfredo Miranda.
Dismissals were not the only consequences they faced. Along with Dr. Saenz, several other doctors have been followed by government informants, slandered in the media, or surveilled daily by police outside their residences.
According to the Citizen Observatory on COVID-19 in Nicaragua, an independent collective set up to pool data and information on the pandemic, 155 health workers have died from the virus. Yet Nicaragua's Ministry of Health has not provided any public data on infection rates nor deaths of health workers during the entire pandemic.
In late July, the Ministry of Health summoned several doctors to its offices and told them that if they did not stop disseminating information about the pandemic, they could face arrest or prison under the new Special Law on Cybercrimes. Passed in December 2020, the law establishes a legal framework that can be used to convict anyone expressing an opinion that, in the eyes of the authorities, "causes alarm, fear or anxiety".
In the following days, the government passed a decree to cancel the legal registration of 24 civil associations, many of them medical organizations. The authorities' pretext for this decree was that many organizations did not have their papers in order. However, representatives of associations told Amnesty International that, since 2018, the government had made it impossible to keep registries up to date.
"The government began to invent administrative excuses to keep your organization in legal limbo, so that it became impossible to have your registries up to date, even though you had presented all the papers as requested," said one founding member of a community medical organization.
One representative of an organization that provides health to communities in vulnerable situations throughout the country told Amnesty International that the police turned up without a warrant and began to seize the organization's property. This was before the decree had even become official. More than a dozen staff members instantly lost their jobs.
The bureaucratic assault on these organizations followed the silencing of other important voices in Nicaragua's medical community. During the 2018 repression, a series of collectives and doctors' organizations were founded, including the Nicaraguan Medical Unit (UMN). With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UMN took on a prominent role in providing reliable information to the public. But, amidst the government crackdown on the medical sector, the UMN was forced to close its premises and disband in late June 2021.
One UMN member spoke to Amnesty International from exile, having fled the country in June. He said that two members of pro-government armed groups on motorbikes had followed him as he left his house for his medical clinic one morning. "That's the modus operandi of how they work. First the paramilitaries locate you and follow you, and then they inform the police who come for you shortly afterwards to arrest you." The doctor fled the city immediately. In the following days his house was under constant police surveillance.
Dozens of other Nicaraguan health workers have also sought asylum in the United States, Costa Rica and other Central American countries.
As if the tactics of repression, harrassment and legal cancellation were not enough, health workers have also been overlooked in Nicaragua's vaccination efforts. The first batch of vaccines arrived on 24 February 2021, donated from Russia in an unspecified amount, followed by donations of the AstraZeneca vaccine from the WHO's COVAX facility in March, further donations from Russia in May, and most recently a second shipment of COVAX-provided vaccines in early August.
The WHO has called for health workers, especially those exposed to COVID-19, to be prioritized in any country's vaccine rollout, as well as calling on states to publish a clear plan that outlines the priority groups for vaccination. Yet Nicaragua commenced its vaccination by completely ignoring health workers, who only started receiving shots in May 2021, long after others had received theirs.
A doctor responsible for coordinating Nicaragua's vaccination programme during the 1980s told Amnesty International the country has the capacity to vaccinate at least 150,000 people per day. The current effort pales in comparison. "This is the worst vaccination effort I have seen in more than 40 years working in the health sector in Nicaragua," he said. Nicaragua has one of the lowest vaccination rates of any Latin American country, with just 5.4% of the population fully vaccinated as of mid-August .
There are no public details on who has been vaccinated and under what criteria. A handful of doctors and nurses have been vaccinated in some hospitals, but others are still waiting. Amnesty International tried to obtain information about access for maintenance personnel and cleaners in hospitals, without any luck. Some media reports have pointed to favoritism in vaccinating government supporters first, regardless of their risk profile for COVID-19.
One doctor currently living in exile in Guatemala told Amnesty International of the pain of losing one of her closest friends and colleagues to COVID-19 as recently as June, when the government could have vaccinated health workers much earlier.
The Ministry of Health's role in putting health workers' lives at risk has even led to individual sanctions by the US government. In 2019, the US Treasury Department placed individual sanctions on the assets of Sonia Castro González – the Health Minister who called Dr. Saenz to deliver Ortega's grandchild in 2014 and who remains in office to date. The US government said it designated her for "leading the Ministry of Health, an entity that has, or whose members have, engaged in significant human rights abuse violations."
For his part, Dr. Saenz is still searching for a haven outside of Nicaragua.
"What I have lived is a horror in silence. I can't take it anymore. I remained silent and was persecuted for it. It's time for me to speak up."
Tags: NICARAGUA, Freedom of expression, COVID-19, Defenders DDHH.
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September 4, 2005 6:00AM PT
Bond in battle royale
007 team mulls major shakeup in franchise
By Claude Brodesser
Claude Brodesser
's Most Recent Stories
The Formula 1 Hummer
Par exec segues to Fox
Numbers don't lie — or do they?
With the announcement last week that Paul Haggis will write the next James Bond film, the question arises: What film?
Eon Prods. — along with producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson — and MGM/UA have been touting an imminent start for "Casino Royale" since 2004.
But with the new scribe starting over, it's dubious how realistic evenNovember 2006 is.
And the bigger questions: Whether Bond will stay the same or head in a new direction — and what influence a new studio (Sony) will have on the venerable franchise. The original "Casino" was a spoof on Bond, unlike the new version.
The vitality of actioners like Universal's two "Bourne" films as well as the mockery of pics like "Austin Powers," are forcing the Bond group to mull a rethinking of the format. One possible scenario would borrow from "Batman Begins," by going back to Bond's origins.
"Casino Royale" is meant to be far more than an update of Bond; it's the revelation of the ur Bond — one going on his first mission, without any baggage.
Haggis' rewrite is expected in a few months time, and Martin Campbell is firmed as director. But that tight production schedule brings up the question of casting.
Speculation on the Internet and British press has centered on sexy, charismatic leading men like Gerard Butler, Hugh Jackman, Daniel Craig and Julian McMahon.
But others suggest it will be a black Bond, played by Colin Salmon! Or it will be a downy-cheeked Bond, played by 22-year-old Henry Cavill! Or a fresh-from-TV Slavic Bond, played by "ER" star Gorin Visnjic!
A nasty bridge-burning spat with the previous 007, Pierce Brosnan, became public last month, with the thesp telling Entertainment Weekly he was dumped from the role and that he was glad to be free of its "cheesy" jokes.
Brosnan apparently had been seeking $25 million plus 5% of the gross, as well as certain bonuses — demands that led to the Broccolis' rethinking of the role and the franchise.
The Broccolis' restrictions on compensation are turning off some stars (no gross points, thank you) and the three-pic commitment has young thesps a little edgy. (Playing Commander Bond hardly guarantees a launch into stardom, viz George Lazenby.)
And then there's the question of a new studio.
Aside from "Spider-Man," Sony hasn't had much luck with sequels lately ("Bad Boys 2," "Stuart Little 2," "Charlie's Angels 2," "XXX: State of the Union"). It would love a new franchise.
The Broccolis are famously protective and cautious about Bond, but Sony execs are sure to have their own ideas about the series. Haggis is a bold choice, given his "Million Dollar Baby" adaptation and original "Crash" (which he also directed). But how bold do the Broccolis want to get?