Leonel Salazar

Dr. Leonel Salazar is a lawyer who graduated from the Central University of Venezuela (UCV) and has been part of the Official List of Conciliators and Arbitrators of CEDCA since 2023.

He has published “The legal-economic circuit of intellectual property” (2010), and “Notoriously known distinctive signs” (in press, 2023); also, in national and international peer-reviewed journals on intellectual property, technological innovation and commercial law.

He is Vice President of the Association for the Advancement of University Research (APIU). Founding Member of the Venezuelan Society of Commercial Law (SOVEDEM) and the Venezuelan University Network of Intellectual Property (RedUPIVen). Head of the Intellectual and Industrial Property Chair at Santa María University (Caracas).

Béla Tarr

Béla Tarr (21 July 1955), who died yesterday, 6 January, was a world-renowned Hungarian filmmaker and a seminal figure in the "slow cinema" movement. He was celebrated for his bleak, black-and-white visual style, exceptionally long takes, and existential themes.

Tarr’s work moved from early "social cinema" realism toward a philosophical, deeply atmospheric approach. He frequently collaborated with novelist László Krasznahorkai, his wife and editor Ágnes Hranitzky, and composer Mihály Vig. His influence extended to prominent directors such as Gus Van Sant and Jim Jarmusch.

Béla Tarr died at the age of 70 in a Budapest hospital on 6 January 2026, following a long and serious illness. His passing was marked by tributes from the European Film Academy and colleagues who hailed him as a radical artist and a "titan of contemplative cinema".

The Venezuelan Blue Student Beret

“Our world of blue berets

His voice invites you to listen

push life towards the soul

in a message of triumphant march!"

(Anthem of the Central University of Venezuela)

For decades, Venezuelan university students have been recognized by a distinctive blue beret, worn at ceremonies, marches, and academic events. Few, however, know the origins of this emblem that sets Venezuelan students apart worldwide.

The story begins in 1927, during the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez, when universities were largely silenced by repression. Two young women from Caracas society, sisters María Luisa and Lola Blanco Meaño, ordered a batch of blue berets from the Paris department store Au Bon Marché. In early 1928, students Miguel Otero Silva and Uberto Mondolfi purchased several and began wearing them daily to classes, sparking immediate interest among their peers.

The remaining berets were soon distributed in solidarity with students organizing Carnival festivities to raise funds for a Student Center to support disadvantaged students from the provinces, at a time when most regional universities were closed. These activities were coordinated by the newly formed Federation of Students of Venezuela (FEV), led by law student Raúl Leoni.

Public parades in February 1928 marked the first mass appearance of the blue beret. Speeches and celebrations quickly took on political overtones, provoking repression and the imprisonment of many students. In response, women from Caracas society joined the protests, also wearing blue berets.

By 1929, the symbol assumed a more tragic meaning. A small group of students studying abroad abandoned their studies to join General Román Delgado Chalbaud’s armed expedition. Wearing their blue berets, they sailed toward Venezuela, many to their deaths, fixing the beret forever as a symbol of student unity, resistance, and sacrifice.

Manuel Caballero

Manuel Antonio Caballero Agüero (1931 - 2010) was a notable Venezuelan historian, journalist, best-selling author and professor of contemporary Venezuelan History at the Central University of Venezuela.

Caballero was born in Barquisimeto, studied History at the Central University of Venezuela and obtained a PhD at University College London. With the publication of his PhD dissertation he became the first Venezuelan author to be published by Cambridge University Press.

In 1989 he was invited to teach at the Universitá degli Studi di Napoli in Italy. He wrote regularly for Venezuelan newspapers El Nacional, El Diario de Caracas and most recently El Universal. Despite his past as a left-wing thinker and political activist, in particular against President Rómulo Betancourt, in his later years he became one of the most vocal and vehement critics of President Hugo Chávez and his administration.

He revised his perspective on President Betancourt in a biography written in 2004.

In 2010, he underwent a prostate surgery that triggered a series of infections unresponsive to antibiotics, further complicated by diabetes. He died on 12 December 2010.

At the Movies

 Anna Karina

Lana Turner, here with John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice [1946]

Louise Brooks

Tony Hancock in The Rebel [1961]

Faye Dunaway for Bonnie And Clyde [1967]

Eve Green in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers [2003]

Ingrid Bergman in Arc Of Triumph [1948]

Julien Carette in Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion [1976]

Catherine Deneuve & Françoise Dorléac in Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles De Rochefort”

William Albert Allard

William Albert Allard (1937) is an American documentary photographer.

In 1964 Allard joined National Geographic in Washington, D.C. as an intern. He worked exclusively in colour. His most notable work as an intern included his photographs of the Amish for an article entitled "Amish Folk: Plainest of Pennsylvania's Plain People," (published in August 1965).

A Time We Knew: Images of Yesterday in the Basque Homeland came out in 1990.

Mela Muter

Mela Muter is the pseudonym used by Maria Melania Mutermilch (1876 –1967), the first professional Jewish painter in Poland. 

Mela Muter - Portrait of a man in a beret, before 1939

She lived most of her life in France. Muter's painting career began to flourish after she moved to Paris from Poland in 1901 at the age of twenty-five. Before World War I, Muter's painting practice aligned itself with the Naturalism movement; her signature works containing vivid hues and strong brush strokes. Muter gained swift popularity in Paris and within five years of her residency in the city, had already begun showing her works. Muter received French citizenship in 1927. After the breakout of WWII Muter fled to Avignon for safety during the Nazi occupation. After the war, Muter returned to Paris where she worked and resided until her death in 1967.

Ailefroide, altitude 3954

More berets by Jean-Marc Rochette, in his beautiful graphic novel Ailefroide, altitude 3954 (Altitude, in English).

Altitude offers an exhilarating, autobiographical account of writer and artist Jean-Marc Rochette’s early life as a mountain climber. 

Together with co-writer Olivier Bocquet, they recount Jean-Marc’s passion for mountain climbing as a teenager, from when he discovered how the Alps held an escape for him at a formative time in his life, to the realisation that this frozen playground can also be a place of danger and fatal beauty. 

Set against the backdrop of the terrifying but magnificent natural beauty of the French Alps, Altitude is an impassioned tale of how physical endurance can help scale dreams and mountain peaks.

Model Strangers - Irene

Another video by Chris of Model Strangers, the beautiful Irene makes a good start for 2026! 

Uncensored, Unfiltered, and Canadian

On this last day of 2025, a year that was in many ways not the best for human kind, lets finish with happy and positive beret video:

May 2026 be a good year for all people and sentient beings!

The Last Queen

A few berets in the beautiful graphic novel The Last Queen, by Jean-Marc Rochette:

It is 1920. The forests have grown too small for freedom. Édouard Roux, once an outcast youth feared as a child of bears and witches, is left disfigured and alone in the aftermath of the Great War. But when the animal sculptor Jeanne Sauvage grants Édouard the face of Hercules, life begins anew. 

The two share an epic romance that takes them from the cabarets and salons of Montmartre to the Vercors Massif mountains of Édouard’s homeland. Amidst those mountains, in the Great Hall of the She-Bear, rests a secret from older times…

In The Last Queen, Jean-Marc Rochette bridges war, love, art and greed to shed tragic light on the longstanding struggle between nature and modernity.

 

Ernesto Agazzi

Ernesto Agazzi (1942) is a Uruguayan agronomist and politician, belonging to the Broad Front.

Ernesto Agazzi was imprisoned during the dictatorship until 1978 for being a member of the Tupamaros guerrilla group. Released, he went into exile in France where he continued his studies, becoming an agricultural engineer. He returned to Uruguay during the democratic transition in 1984 and became a professor at the Faculty of Agronomy at the University of the Republic, as well as a member of the university's Central Governing Council.

In December 2016, Ernesto Agazzi resigned his seat in the Senate, citing age and, in his own words, to leave his place to younger generations, an attitude that deserved wide recognition from fellow legislators.

The Sculptor

In the silence of his studio, Raymond is never alone. He speaks with the sculptures he creates from stone and wood, calling them by their first names. 

A dialogue that remains intimate: "We need solitude to tell each other things." 

Ormen Friske

The Ormen Friske was a Swedish copy of a Norwegian Viking ship. It was built in the spring of 1949 at the Frisksportförbundet's ship yard in Stensund in Södermanland and launched there in June of the same year. The ship sank in a storm in the German Bay of the North Sea in midsummer 1950. The 15 people on board, all Swedes, perished.

Heligoland had been uninhabited since World War II, when it was used for several years as a training area for British and American strategic bombers. Around the same time that the Ormen Friske sank, American aircraft began bombing Heligoland, but although conceivable, there is no evidence that the Ormen Friske was hit.

Sam Svensson at the helm of Ormen Friske

German authorities seized large parts of the hull and repeatedly pressed for an expert investigation. However, Sweden's representative on the scene decided that no investigation should be carried out. The lack of commitment from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other authorities when it came to investigating the accident has been interpreted as their unwillingness to help draw attention to the Western Allies' war preparations and the important role of Heligoland.

The Korean War broke out on the same day that the first fatalities from the Ormen Friske were found. All  fifteen people on board died, the bodies of eight were found in total, and they were buried in Sweden.

Rune Edberg

Archaeologist Rune Edberg did a study: In the Wake of aViking Ship Tragedy. 

Basque Xalbador Christmas Eguberri Noël Baigorry

 A video of Christmas traditions from the small Basque village of Baigorry (with subtitles in English).

Basque Christmas

Olentzero, says the Basque legend, is the charcoal burner who lives in the mountains where he makes charcoal.  

The beret and the worn and dirty clothes remind us that this man is a man of the forest and the mountains where he lives and works. 

Once a year, just before Christmas, he goes, with his sickle and his bouquet of gorse, to towns and villages to distribute coal (and not gifts) to the poor so that no one would suffer from the cold on Christmas night. Coal was then the symbol of the sun that will begin to heat the earth again after winter and its period of dormancy.

One might think that the main reason for seeing this charcoal burner descend into Basque villages on Christmas Eve is to announce the birth of Kixmi (Jesus), but Olentzero was a legend in the Basque Country long before the presence of Christianity. So, what message can he possibly bring us?

The message is that beyond what we cannot see... Beyond what we do not know... Beyond the cold, dark, harsh winter ahead and the unknown that looms... There is always a glimmer of hope to hold on to, a fire to keep us warm, guides to enlighten us on the mysteries of the world around us.

Artisan Broom Making

An instructive video, showing how to make your own ecologically sound broom - while wearing a beret, naturally. 

19th C. Young Man with beret

Portrait of a Young Man by an unknown photographer, in the Garden of the Abbey of Septfontaines near Bourmont en Haute Marne.

Late 19th Century. Ducos Collection

Salomon Savery

Salomon Savery (1594–1683) was an engraver from the Dutch Republic.

Portrait of an Elderly Man with a Beret on His Head, after Rembrandt van Rijn

Savery was born in Amsterdam. His earliest dated print is from 1610, after a work by his uncle Joos Goeimare. He travelled to England in 1632. At times he collaborated with Pieter Quast.

He died in Haarlem.

Fresque Robotique

In Vitry-sur-Seine, in the suburbs of Paris, at 42 rue Pierre Semard, on the corner of avenue Anatole France and opposite the exit of the "RER" station, you will discover on the blind facade of a house this monumental fresco entitled "Fresque Robotique", complete with beret and baguette. 

Created in 2010, this work is by the Italian painter Pixel Pancho.