Credit.Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse â Getty Images
In December 2016, a month before Donald Trumpâs inauguration, I wrote a column that I called âInvasion of the Agency Snatchers.â The reference was to the great 1956 science fiction film âInvasion of the Body Snatchers,â in which a truckload of giant vegetable pods arrives in a typical American town. Each pod takes over the identity of a local inhabitant, erasing everything that made the person human while maintaining a perfectly preserved outward appearance.
Many viewers interpreted the movie as a political allegory. Some saw Communism, some McCarthyism. I saw the Trump cabinet, then in formation.
Head of Elite French University Resigns Following Professor Incest Case
Frédéric Mion, the director of the prestigious Sciences Po university, acknowledged “errors in judgment in my handling of the allegations.”
Frédéric Mion, the director of Sciences Po, in 2018.Credit.Patrick Kovarik/Agence France-Presse Getty Images
Feb. 9, 2021
PARIS The director of a prestigious French political science university resigned on Tuesday evening, weeks after accusations of incest involving one of the school’s most prominent figures had raised suspicions about who might have known about the allegations and kept silent.
Frédéric Mion, who has been the director of the university, Sciences Po, since 2013, said in a letter to students that he had decided to resign after a report from education ministry inspectors pointed to “errors in judgment in my handling of the allegations which were communicated to me in 2018, and inconsistencies in the way I communicated about this case after
John H. Durham will remain as special counsel even as the Biden administration requests a mass resignation of U.S. attorneys. The prosecutor investigating Hunter Biden’s taxes will also remain.
Serebrennikov’s firing had been expected, after an article published last week by TASS, the state news agency, quoted an anonymous source in the Culture Ministry saying that Serebrennikov’s contract would not be renewed. Prominent figures in Russia’s theater world intervened to try and stop it: On Sunday, the Association of Theater Critics sent an open letter to City Hall in Moscow calling for Serebrennikov to remain. “The Gogol Center is impossible without Serebrennikov,” it said, adding, “Moscow in the 2020s is impossible without the Gogol Center.”
“What is happening today in Russia as a whole, and in its cultural space, is a very sad picture, with less freedom and more violence by the authorities,” Ludmila Ulitskaya, the internationally acclaimed Russian novelist, said in an email. “My honor and respect to Kirill Serebrennikov,” she added. “He is a worthy representative of Russian culture.”