Kavanaugh won't make traditional walk down court steps due to security concerns

Justice Brett Kavanaugh will not participate in the tradition of walking down the marble steps in front of the Supreme Court following his formal investiture ceremony next Thursday, the Supreme Court announced, citing security reasons.

Kavanaugh, who has served since being confirmed early last month, will have his formal investiture ceremony, which has often been followed by a walk -- and photo opportunity -- on the front steps with the chief justice, in this case John Roberts.But Kavanaugh won't make the walk "out of an abundance of caution due to security concerns," Supreme Court spokesperson Kathleen Arberg said Friday.

Both Kavanaugh and California professor Dr. Christine Blasey Ford have received a slew of death threats after Ford accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her while they were in high school, and detailed her allegation during a testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Kavanaugh denied any wrongdoing and was confirmed to the court in October after a week-long FBI investigation into the allegations made by Ford and other women.

"What happened to the Kavanaugh family violates every notion of fairness, decency and due process," said President Donald Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct himself, during Kavnanaugh's ceremonial swearing-in last month.

People "must always be presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty," the President continued.

The tradition of walking down the Supreme Court steps after a formal investiture ceremony -- usually done alongside the court's chief justice -- began in the 1950s, but not all justices have participated in the tradition.

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Melbourne Cup: Magic Circle aims to break curse of British trainers

(CNN)It's one of racing's holy grails, but the Melbourne Cup remains a mystical prize for British trainers.

Plenty have tried, but it's as if there is a curse on the British in Australia's famous "race that stops a nation." Hoping to break that spell this year is Magic Circle, trained by Ian Williams.

Another strong European contingent will descend on Melbourne for Tuesday's showpiece, but instead of the power houses of Godolphin or John Gosden, it is the less-heralded Williams who will be spearheading the British attack.

"It's a national event and is very exciting to be involved in," Williams told CNN Sport.

"To have a runner in such a race is a great privilege and to have a horse good enough to compete in such a race is an even bigger privilege.

"This year's event is probably one of the most competitive races the Melbourne Cup will ever have seen.

"And, of course, to win a race like this would be a huge accolade."

Williams trains not out of the Flat racing heartlands of Newmarket or Berkshire's Lambourn Valley, but in Alvechurch in the West Midlands.

Not quite as racing-glamorous perhaps, but perfectly placed as he became the first trainer to win at every racecourse -- Flat or jump racing -- in the UK.

Now Williams is attempting to make more history with Magic Circle, a six-year-old gelding he bought last October for owner Dr. Marwan Koukash, a former refugee from the Middle East who has built up a multimillion dollar business in England's northwest.

Koukash has quite the celebration planned if his horse does win on Tuesday.

"I fit into my G-string now," Koukash told racing.com. "When we win nobody at Flemington is going to stop me providing the best or most colorful celebrations we've ever had or likely to have.

"I'm going to take off my clothes off, keep my tie and thong and shoes socks on. I know they're going to employ security, but I know how to evade them and I'm going to deliver."

Magic Circle was already a six-time winner when he joined Williams' 100-strong string at Dominion Stables, and he has rewarded them further with stellar victories in the Chester Cup and a Group Three race at Sandown this season.

A Group race win qualifies the horse for the Melbourne Cup, and from that moment on the famous race and its $2.8 million first prize became the focus for Williams.

Magic Circle, who will be ridden by last year's winning jockey Corey Brown, is second favorite behind esteemed Irish trainer Aidan O'Brien's Yucatan for the two-mile (3,200 meter) marathon.

Another Briton Charlie Appleby will pose a strong threat with Cross Counter for Godolphin.Carnival atmosphere'

Williams is excited to be heading back for a second time after saddling a horse called Munsef to 12th in the race in 2009.

"It was one of the most amazing experiences to see a city the size of Melbourne literally grind to a halt for a horse race," he says.

"The whole atmosphere and build up the week before the race was incredible. There's an electric atmosphere."

On the day before the Melbourne Cup, tens of thousands line Swanston Street for a parade featuring cars carrying the jockeys, owners, trainers and connections of each of the 24 horses.

"It has all the pomp and glory of a carnival and a carnival atmosphere," adds Williams. "It's one of the most exciting racing experiences you can be involved with."

For European horses it's a serious undertaking, with two weeks in quarantine in Newmarket, followed by a 30-hour flight followed by a further two weeks quarantine at Werribee, a racecourse facility south west of Melbourne.

Williams' traveling head lad Fabrice Smeulders is on hand to look after Magic Circle and keep his exercise ticking over.Special horse'

The journey in itself isn't the barrier to victory. After all, Joseph O'Brien, son of famed trainer Aidan, led an Irish one-two-three with Rekindling ahead of his father's Johannes Vermeer and Willie Mullins' Max Dynamite last year.

Countryman Dermot Weld was the trailblazer, becoming the first non-Australian trainer to win the Cup in 1993 with Vintage Crop.

He followed it up with Media Puzzle in 2002, while trainers from Germany, France and Japan have since clinched the Cup.

European horses are regularly in the first three, but a victory still eludes O'Brien Sr. -- and the British.

"It's probably all about the horses," says Williams. "It takes a special horse to travel halfway around the world and run at its best and the English trainers haven't been as lucky as they could have been. Let's hope the luck is stacked up for one of them this year."

For all his success traveling around the UK, Williams has to fight to get noticed among the bigger yards backed by major breeding operations such as Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum's Godolphin or O'Brien's Coolmore Stud-backed Ballydoyle yard.

"The big wins are always tough and it always boils down to the horses you're able to train," says Williams.

"We maybe don't have the quality in general compared with the Maktoum horses or large owners, breeders or trainers but we're lucky with what we've got.

"The challenge is to keep training winners to keep the business flowing and to keep interest in your abilities and what you achieve as a trainer to encourage people to send you the better horses to do the job with."

Whoever you are, the big prizes still mean a lot.

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This photographer is reimagining Norman Rockwell for the 21st century

n 1964, Norman Rockwell's Civil Rights-era painting "The Problem We All Live With" depicted Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old black girl, who entered an all-white school in 1960, walking between deputy 

U.S. marshals with volleyed tomatoes and a racial slur staining the wall behind her. In 2015, artist Maggie Meiners reimagined the famous composition to explore the plight of another youth: this time, a Dreamer -- a child of undocumented immigrants given temporary protection under the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

In the photo, which she titled "Dream Act" (2015), Meiners directed actors and models to depict the scene of a young immigrant girl, standing alone and surrounded by a squadron of U.S. border-patrol agents. While Meiners created the image three years ago, it found new relevance under the current 

U.S. administration's "Zero Tolerance" policy, enacted this spring, which resulted in immigrant children being separated from their parents at the U.S. border.

From Nirvana to 'weightless worlds': How photos evolved underwater

"Dream Act" wasn't Meiners's first Rockwell-inspired work. The artist has long been fascinated by the painter's depictions of 20th-century American life, which charmed and shocked millions in the mid-1900s, and their power to adeptly illustrate an entire era.

Along with Rockwell's arresting scenes of daily life -- town gossips spreading the good word; a zookeeper on his lunch break while a lion eyes his peanut butter sandwich -- were works that depicted timely, charged issues, like Civil Rights-era desegregation. In the process, his works came to embody American culture of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, and the social issues Rockwell and his peers were grappling with.

When Meiners visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in 2010, she couldn't help but wonder what Rockwell's paintings would look like if they'd been made today -- a thought that laid the groundwork for "Revisiting Rockwell," her photo series that reimagines the legendary painter's canvases in a contemporary context.

Meiners was facing "Freedom from Want" (1941-1943), one of Rockwell's most famous works, when the idea struck her. The painting depicts an idealistic Thanksgiving dinner, in which several generations of a middle-class white family gather around a long table crammed with requisite side dishes (cranberry sauce and the like) as the matriarch serves a massive, glistening turkey.

When Rockwell made the piece for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, he set out to portray traditional family values -- the starry-eyed kind included in then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address, known as "Four Freedoms."As Meiners studied the painting, she pondered what an ideal American family looked like in 2010 -- and, more poignantly, "who gets to decide what an ideal family is," she told Artsy, from her home in Chicago's suburbs. "What if you're an orphan? What if you're adopted? What if you're gay?"

At the time, the state of California had recently overturned Proposition 8, the controversial same-sex marriage ban, and gay rights were on Meiners's mind. The court's decision gave the artist hope that narrow definitions of family were expanding, and she wanted to illuminate the shift.Meiners has a background in cultural anthropology, so before executing a Rockwell reboot, she wanted to take a deeper dive into the the social forces that informed Rockwell's work. She began researching his practice and the political climate of his time, and realized that many of the topics that Rockwell depicted (parenting, generational divides, freedom of speech, race relations) could be tweaked to reflect contemporary culture.

From there, Meiners chose a number of paintings and illustrations to adapt for "Revisiting Rockwell." Her selections were based on two factors. First, "it was about what I could actually execute," she recalled. Restaging Rockwell's compositions would be a complicated process, as many are filled with 10 or more subjects set against detailed backdrops. More importantly, though, a given piece needed to depict a subject that was "translatable to something that's going on today," she said. "I asked myself: 'What can I say now that's a little different than what was said in Rockwell's time?'"

To ease into the series, Meiner temporarily shelved her plan for an updated Thanksgiving scene and started with Rockwell's "The Tattoo Artist" (1944), a painting that portrays just two people (logistically, this would be easier to restage with sets and models than more complex, larger works). While Rockwell's piece shows a male sailor getting inked -- the names of six past lovers on his muscled arm crossed out in favor of the newest, "Betty" -- Meiner trades Rockwell's macho protagonist with a woman, toppling 1940s gender dynamics in the process. In her version, a woman can proudly brandish tattoos and boast many past lovers, too.Soon after, Meiners took on the rendition of "Freedom from Want" (1943), placing a gay couple at the head of the Thanksgiving table. Next was the lighthearted "It Went Viral" (2012-2017), in which Meiners restaged Rockwell's famous "The Gossips" (1948), replacing the landlines that townspeople use to play a game of real-world "telephone" with big, glowing smartphones.

However, most of Meiners's works in the series, like 2015's "Dream Act," strike a decidedly more serious tone. Her transformation of Rockwell's "Freedom from Fear" (1943) is particularly powerful. In his painting, parents tuck their children into bed while holding a newspaper emblazoned with all-caps World War II-era headlines, telling stories of widespread bombing overseas. Meiners replaces the white family with a black mother and her two young sons, who face violence that exists much closer to home. She grasps a copy of the Chicago Tribune, bearing the headline "Another Black Youth Shot," referring to police violence and structural racism in America.Like "Dream Act," Meiners's photographs are meant to provoke discussion. Her work often deconstructs and reconstructs American iconography and visual history. And though it took three years for "Dream Act," to make waves on the internet, the impact was profound. Hollywood actress Jennifer Garner even posted it on her Instagram account on June 29th. Under it, her caption read: "This photograph from @maggiemeinersprojects #revisitingrockwell collection tells you everything you need to know in a glance. Kids belong with parents."

The popularity of Meiners's "Dream Act," and the controversy it reflected, resembles the public response to Rockwell's most probing, incisive works. And that, of course, was Meiners's hope for "Revisiting Rockwell."

"That was my big takeaway from this project: things change," she said. "But there's always something else that needs to be worked on."

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