YCLOAK

VIENNA, AUSTRIA — The 19-year-old Austrian who masterminded a foiled plot to attack Taylor Swift fans at a concert in Vienna with a bomb or knife had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State militant group, authorities said on Thursday.

The main suspect, who has North Macedonian roots, made a full confession in custody, Austria’s general director for public security, Franz Ruf, told a news conference.

He swore loyalty to the IS militant group’s leader on the internet and kept chemicals and technical devices at his home in the town of Ternitz in preparation for an attack, Ruf said.

The 19-year-old, whose name was not given, was planning an attack with an explosive or knife among the estimated 20,000 “Swiftie” fans set to gather outside the stadium, said national intelligence head Omar Haijawi-Pirchner.

“There is currently no information that other concerts are subject to an explicit threat,” he said at the news conference.

Two other Austrian youths, ages 17 and 15, were also detained Wednesday over the foiled plot.

Swift’s three concerts in Vienna, due to start on Thursday for a sold-out audience of 65,000 each, were canceled, to the consternation of fans, many of whom had traveled far.

“It’s just heartbreaking, just frustrating. But at the end of the day, I guess it’s for everyone’s safety,” said Mark del Rosario, who had flown from the Philippines for the show.

U.S. broadcaster ABC cited law enforcement and intelligence sources as saying Austrian authorities had received information about the Swift concert threat from U.S. intelligence.

It cited the sources as saying at least one of the suspects had pledged allegiance to ISIS-K, a resurgent wing of IS, on Telegram in June, although the plot was IS-inspired rather than directed by the group’s operatives.

Austrian Interior Minister Gerhard Karner said foreign intelligence agencies helped with the investigation, as Austrian law does not allow monitoring of messenger apps.

Event organizer Live Nation urged fans of Coldplay, which is due to play at the same stadium on August 21, to stay calm and said it was in contact with authorities.

It did not comment on whether the show would take place.

British police said on Thursday there was nothing to indicate that the planned attack in Vienna would have an impact on her shows at Wembley Stadium in London next week.

Past attacks and plots

“Concerts are often a preferred target of Islamist attackers, large concerts,” said Karner, listing the 2015 attack on Paris’ Bataclan venue and the 2017 bombing at the Manchester Arena where U.S. pop star Ariana Grande had played.

The planned attack also recalled a foiled plot by three IS-linked suspects against Vienna’s gay pride parade last year.

Authorities have revamped their national security intelligence in the wake of a 2020 attack by a convicted jihadist in the center of Vienna that left four dead, the first such militant attack in the Austrian capital in a generation.

 

Swifties disappointed

The shows were to be part of the record-breaking Eras Tour by the American singer-songwriter, which started on March 17, 2023, in Glendale, Arizona, and is set to conclude on Dec. 8, 2024, in Vancouver, Canada.

Swift, 34, has not yet commented on the cancellations on her official Instagram account, which has 283 million followers.

Her fans were horrified at the threat, with some begging organizers to postpone the concert instead of canceling it outright. Promoters have said they will pay back tickets.

“I can’t believe the concert i’ve been waiting for over 10 years is now gone. I don’t think i’ll ever get over this,” wrote one fan on social media.

“As disappointing as not being able to go to this concert is TRUST ME u do not want to experience that,” added another.

Some who had traveled from abroad for the concerts planned to do some sightseeing or hang with friends instead.

“We’ll check out some museums, maybe catch up with a few friends who reside here,” said del Rosario. “But apart from that, maybe look at Swiftie-organized events. To be with fellow fans, you know, share the same pain and just dance it out. As I believe Taylor Swift would want us to have fun.”

One group of local Swifties said they had received permission to still hold tour parties in coordination with local police.
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Geneva — Switzerland’s Locarno Film Festival opens on Wednesday with Shah Rukh Khan, Jane Campion, Alfonso Cuaron and Irene Jacob set to be honored with special awards.

Founded in 1946, Locarno is one of the world’s longest-running annual film festivals and focuses on auteur cinema.

Held on the shores of Lake Maggiore, in the Italian-speaking Ticino region of southern Switzerland, films are screened in Locarno’s central square, a feature of Swiss national life depicted on the country’s 20-franc banknotes.

The open-air Piazza Grande holds up to 8,000 moviegoers, and films are shown on one of the largest screens in the world.

Bollywood superstar Khan, 58, will on Saturday be given the Pardo alla Carriera award for people whose artistic contributions have redefined cinema.

“The wealth and breadth of his contribution to Indian cinema is unprecedented,” said the festival’s artistic director Giona A. Nazzaro.

“Khan is a king who has never lost touch with the audience that crowned him. This brave and daring artist has always been willing to challenge himself.”

The 77th festival, which runs until August 17, features 225 films, including 104 world premieres and 15 debut movies.

Locarno’s top prize is the Golden Leopard. Previous winning directors include Roberto Rossellini, John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, Milos Forman, Mike Leigh and Jim Jarmusch.

Seventeen films, all world or international premieres, are vying for the award, including movies from Lithuania, France, Austria, Italy and South Korea.

The Golden Leopard comes with a prize fund of $87,400, shared between the director and the producer.

Switzerland’s largest film event will feature a retrospective dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Columbia Pictures.

‘Tortured, fascinating characters’

New Zealand’s Campion will be recognized with the Leopard of Honor, given to outstanding personalities of world cinema.

She was the first woman to be nominated twice for the best director Oscar: first for “The Piano” (1993) and then for “The Power of the Dog” (2021), which secured her the Academy Award.

“Her work, peopled with tortured, fascinating characters and marked by an astonishing skill in grappling with the more disturbing side of the human condition, represents one of the undisputed pinnacles of contemporary filmmaking,” Nazzaro said.

Previous recipients include Ennio Morricone, Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, Paul Verhoeven, Terry Gilliam and Werner Herzog.

Mexican filmmaker Cuaron, who won the best director Oscars for “Gravity” (2013) and “Roma” (2018), will receive the lifetime achievement award.

“Cuaron has reinvented himself as an artist with each new film,” said Nazzaro.

French-Swiss actress Jacob, who starred in “The Double Life of Veronique” (1991) and “Three Colours: Red” (1994), will receive the Leopard Club Award, given for film work touching the collective imagination.

Stacey Sher — the U.S. film producer behind “Pulp Fiction,” “Get Shorty,” “Gattaca,” “Erin Brockovich,” “Django Unchained” and “The Hateful Eight” — will receive the Raimondo Rezzonico Award for major achievements in international movie production.

Nearly 150,000 people attended last year’s festival.
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New York — After 10 days in theaters, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is already the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever, not accounting for inflation.

In its second weekend, the Marvel Studios blockbuster starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman continued to steamroll through movie theaters, collecting $97 million according to studio estimates Sunday. That raised its two-week total to $395.6 million, pushing it past the long-reigning top R-rated feature, “The Passion of the Christ,” which held that mark for 20 years with $370 million domestic. 

Worldwide, the Shawn Levy-directed “Deadpool & Wolverine” has quickly amassed $824.1 million in ticket sales, a total that already surpasses the global hauls of the first two “Deadpool” films. The 2016 original grossed $782.6 million worldwide; the 2018 sequel collected $734.5 million.

The weekend’s primary challengers both struggled.

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller, “Trap,” managed a modest opening of $15.6 million at 3,181 theaters for Warner Bros. The film, starring Josh Hartnett as a serial killer hunted by police at a pop concert, didn’t screen for critics before opening day and scored lower in reviews (48% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) than Shyamalan’s films typically do. Audiences gave it a C+ CinemaScore.

With a budget of about $35 million that Shyamalan largely finances himself, “Trap” didn’t need a huge opening. But it may struggle to break even.

“This is a soft opening for an M. Night Shyamalan suspense crime thriller,” wrote David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter for Franchise Entertainment. “The writer/director’s movies out-earn other original thrillers by a wide margin, and that’s true here, but this start is not on the level of recent Shyamalan films.” 

The live action “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” adapted from the classic kids’ book, also didn’t make much of a mark in theaters. The Sony Pictures release debuted with $6 million. It, too, got dinged by critics (28% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), though audiences (an A- CinemaScore) liked it more. “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” which stars Zachary Levi, cost about $40 million to make.

“Twisters,” the Universal Pictures disaster film, continues to kick up a storm at the box office. It held in second place with $22.7 million in its third weekend. Lee Isaac Chung’s sequel to the 1996 original, starring Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos, has racked up $195.6 million domestically. While it has made less of an impression overseas, “Twisters” is holding particularly well in North American theaters, down just 35% from the week prior.

Hollywood closed July with its best month in a year and its first $1 billion month since July 2023. While comparisons to last year aren’t favorable — July was when “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” launched — a pair of Walt Disney Co. releases in “Inside Out 2” and “Deadpool & Wolverine” (the two top films of the year) powered a banner month for the movie industry.

There will still be reminders, though, of harder times in cinemas earlier in the spring and early summer, when a sparse release calendar and a few notable flops put the box office at a deficit. On Friday, AMC Theatres, the largest North American chain, posted a $32.8 million loss for the second quarter of 2024.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday. 

1. “Deadpool & Wolverine,” $97 million. 

2. “Twisters,” $22.7 million. 

3. “Trap,” $15.6 million. 

4. “Despicable Me 2,” $11.3 million. 

5. “Inside Out 2,” $6.7 million. 

6. “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” $6 million. 

7. “Longlegs,” $4.1 million. 

8. “A Quiet Place: Day One,” $1.4 million. 

9. “Daaru Na Peenda Hove,” $615,782. 

10. “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” $600,000.
    …

PARIS — Faith leaders gathered with Olympic officials Sunday morning in front of Notre Dame Cathedral to celebrate how “faith and sport can complement each other,” in the words of International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach.

The 2024 Paris Games got off to a rocky start with many religious groups around the world, including the Vatican. They criticized a scene in the opening ceremony seen as mocking Christianity by evoking “The Last Supper” and featuring drag queens, though the performers and the ceremony’s artistic director denied being inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s painting.

“We wanted to show that the most important thing is peace,” Catholic Bishop Emmanuel Gobilliard said at the gathering. It was modeled after the first such interfaith meeting, organized by modern Olympics founder Pierre de Coubertin in the 1924 Paris Games.

Far from the controversy, in an inconspicuous tent-like structure tucked away at the end of the athletes’ village in Paris, ordained and lay representatives from the five major global religions have taken up that mantle, providing spiritual comfort to Olympians.

Representatives of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism worked for months to set up a shared hall where the more than 10,500 athletes and their staff can find information about worship and speak with a chaplain.

For the first half of the Games, many seem to have found their way there to have a quiet moment away from the overwhelming pressure of competition.

“Some of the athletes who come to pray, I think they came to give up their pressure, to take some time to get out of their own heads,” said the Rev. Jason Nioka, a former judo champion who’s in charge of the largest contingent of Olympic chaplains, about 40 Catholic priests, nuns and lay faithful.

Each religion got 50 square meters (538 square feet) of the structure provided by the Paris Games organizing committee, with instructions to comply with France’s secularism laws that strictly prescribe the role of religion in public spaces.

What the faith leaders have done with the space is itself a wordless message of dialogue, tolerance and welcome — beginning with redistributing the size of the different rooms based on the expected number of faithful.

The door between the small Jewish room and the Muslim space, about twice its size but equally sparingly adorned, is often kept open.

“Here it’s very symbolic,” said Rabbi Moshe Lewin, vice president of the Conference of European Rabbis and one of the Jewish chaplains. “The conviviality, that’s the image that we should transmit.”

“People smile when they see an imam and a rabbi together,” added Najat Benali, president of the Coordination of Muslim Associations of Paris, who leads the Muslim chaplaincy. “We do ‘geo-fraternity,’ not geopolitics.”

The Hindu space also welcomes visitors with blessings by a small water fountain as chanting resounds from a volunteer’s cellphone. It’s the most exuberantly decorated space, with statues from India and a recreated temple structure in painted polyester foam.

In the middle is the Christian area, where Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox share an altar with a large Bible flanked by a cross and icons. Next to it hangs a poster with a quote about faith by U.S. star gymnast Simone Biles.

Last week, three athletics competitors from Australia, Finland and Jamaica walked in to pray, and faith leaders asked if they could join them.

“It was like a little Pentecost,” said Anne Schweitzer, who’s coordinating about three dozen Protestant chaplains.

She discovered one of the three athletes, a silver medalist, is also quoted in the Gospel edition called “More Precious than Gold,” created for the Games and available to visitors there and at churches across Olympic host cities.

Some Catholics, as well as volunteers in the village, have gone next door to meditate in the Buddhist space, said Luc Charles, a Zen monk with the Buddhist Union of France.

“It’s the occasion to get to know each other better,” he added.
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LOS ANGELES — Aerosmith says Steven Tyler’s voice has been permanently damaged by a vocal cord injury last year and the band will no longer tour.

The iconic band behind hits such as “Love in an Elevator” and “Livin’ on the Edge” posted a statement Friday announcing the cancellation of remaining dates on its tour and provided an update on Tyler’s voice.

“He has spent months tirelessly working on getting his voice to where it was before his injury. We’ve seen him struggling despite having the best medical team by his side. Sadly, it is clear that a full recovery from his vocal injury is not possible,” the statement said. “We have made a heartbreaking and difficult, but necessary, decision — as a band of brothers — to retire from the touring stage.”

Tyler announced he injured his vocal cords in September during a show on the band’s Peace Out: The Farewell Tour. Tyler said in an Instagram statement at the time that the injury caused bleeding but that he hoped the band would be back after postponing a few shows.

Tyler’s soaring vocals have powered Aerosmith’s massive catalog of hits since its formation in 1970, including “Dream On,” “Walk This Way” and “Sweet Emotion.” They were near the start of a 40-date farewell tour when Tyler was injured.

“We’ve always wanted to blow your mind when performing. As you know, Steven’s voice is an instrument like no other,” the band said in Friday’s statement to fans.

“It has been the honor of our lives to have our music become part of yours,” the band said. “In every club, on every massive tour and at moments grand and private you have given us a place in the soundtrack of your lives.”

Aerosmith is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee and a four-time Grammy-winning band. In addition to Tyler, its members are Joe Perry, Brad Whitford, Tom Hamilton and Joey Kramer.
…

PARIS — LGBTQ+ athletes, officials and observers have warned that a deluge of hateful comments misidentifying female boxer Imane Khelif in the Paris Olympics as transgender or a man could pose dangers for the LGBTQ+ community and female athletes.

The concerns come as famous figures — from former U.S. President Donald Trump to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling — have railed against the Algerian boxer after her Italian competitor Angela Carini quit their bout Thursday. They and other social media comments falsely claimed Khelif was a man fighting a woman.

The comments have rippled across social media, pulling Khelif and Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting into the larger social contention about women in sports.

International Olympic Committee spokesperson Mark Adams said Friday that Khelif “was born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport.”

He warned “not turn it into some kind of witch hunt.”

Some athletes and LGBTQ+ observers worry that hateful comments from critics — and the IOC failing to address a larger global conversation before the Olympics — have already started to vilify transgender, nonbinary and other LGBTQ+ people at an event championing inclusion. It comes as expanding interpretations of gender identity have spurred a larger political tug-of-war, often centered around sports.

While the Paris Olympics has pushed an agenda of openness and a record 193 openly LGBTQ+ athletes are competing, a performance by drag queens during the opening ceremony faced intense backlash from religious conservatives and others contending that it mocked the Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Some performers and the opening ceremony’s artistic director say they have received threats.

Nikki Hiltz, one of the world’s top middle-distance runners competing in the women’s category for the U.S. Olympic team, has faced such hateful comments firsthand. Assigned female at birth, Hiltz identifies as nonbinary.

“Transphobia is going crazy at these Olympics,” Hiltz wrote on a post on Instagram responding to the boxing debate. “Anti-trans rhetoric is anti-woman. These people aren’t ‘protecting women’s sport,’ they are enforcing rigid gender norms, and anyone who doesn’t fit into those norms is targeted and vilified.”

The controversy is rooted in claims by the International Boxing Association that Khelif and Lin failed unspecified and untransparent eligibility tests for women’s competition, which the IOC called “a sudden and arbitrary decision” from a governing body it has banned from the Olympics since 2019.

While some sports have detailed guidelines about transgender athletes and hormone levels in competitions, boxing is relying on rules dating to the 2016 Olympics that say the threshold for eligibility is what appears on an athlete’s passport amid a larger rift between the IBA and the IOC.

“The current aggression against these two athletes is based entirely on this arbitrary decision (by the IBA), which was taken without any proper procedure,” said Adams of the IOC. “These dangerous, misogynistic and baseless attacks can lead to misinformation.”

Athletes have faced “quite a few cases of online aggression,” said Adams of the IOC. He said it is the responsibility of the Olympic body to “look after” the athletes and “make sure that they’re safe.”

Though some like Cyd Zeigler, co-founder of Outsports, a site that tracks LGBTQ+ participation in the Olympics, say failures by the IOC to provide clarity before the Games has hurt both female athletes and LGBTQ+ competitors, both of whom have long fought for recognition.

“The issue is not the athlete trying to compete, it’s whoever is making the policy,” Zeigler said. “The awful part of this is the vitriol over the last two days has been aimed at these athletes.”

Zeigler said the backlash is likely to stifle LGBTQ+ public participation in the Games in the future despite activists saying the Olympics have taken major strides in recent years.

“By trying to bury the issue they knew was coming, transphobic (people) begin to direct the conversation,” Zeigler said. “We can have conversations about the inclusion of trans athletes. There are thoughtful conversations to have. It is the vitriol, the nasty, horrible, graphic, ghastly language that gets used around this that eats at me.”

Former athletes like Belgium’s Charline Van Snick, 33, a former judo medalist in the 2012 Games, said the testing and comments about Khelif and Hamori’s bodies are undoing years of work by female athletes to push back against stigma.

While many say they have seen major progress in recent years, Ilona Maher, a star of the U.S. women’s rugby team, broke out in tears in a social media post before the Olympics following comments claiming she was a man.

“There are some women with more testosterone, or different kinds of body,” Van Snick said. “In judo, you are fighting, and you have to stay a woman, what is accepted of a woman. If you look too much like a man, they say, ‘Oh, she’s a man.’ But I’m a woman” who could beat a man in the sport.
…

NANTERRE, France — The party for Léon Marchand spread beyond the pool, quickly sweeping across Paris.

At Stade de France, hosting the first night of track and field, an enormous ovation broke out when Marchand won his fourth gold medal of the Olympics. The roar was so loud that the first heat of the 400-meter run in the decathlon was delayed.

At the French Olympic house, nearly 20,000 gathered outside to watch Marchand cap his dominating run at the pool, including 19-year-old Arthur Oursel.

“He’s a hero,” Oursel said. “He’s our hero.”

With French President Emmanuel Macron among the more than 15,000 fans cheering him on in a rugby stadium-turned-natatorium, Marchand soared to another runaway victory in the 200-meter individual medley Friday night.

“I don’t think anything went wrong this week,” Marchand said. “It was just perfect.”

The 22-year-old French phenomenon left no doubt he’ll be remembered as one of the biggest stars of the Summer Games in his home country. He finished in an Olympic record of 1 minute, 54.06 seconds, just missing Ryan Lochte’s 13-year-old world mark.

That was about the only thing he didn’t accomplish in six magical days at La Defense Arena, previously winning the 400 IM, 200 butterfly and 200 backstroke — the latter two about two hours apart in the same session.

Marchand became only the fourth swimmer in Olympic history to win four individual golds at a single Games.

The others? Michael Phelps, who did it in both 2004 and 2008; Mark Spitz in 1972; and East German Kristin Otto in 1988.

Heady company, indeed.

“That’s crazy. Those guys are legends,” Marchand said. “I don’t think I have realized it yet. Maybe I will in a few days.”

The silver went to Britain’s Duncan Scott, a body length behind at 1:55.31. China’s Wang Shun grabbed the bronze in 1:56.00, edging out American Carson Foster for a spot on the podium.

What a night for France

A packed house at La Defense Arena came to cheer on their favorite son one more time. They chanted, sang Sweet Caroline, waved the French tricolor flag and unveiled a huge tifo in the upper deck.

After Marchand touched the wall, he held up four fingers — one for every gold. He climbed from the pool, pumped his fists, then held out his arms as if to say, “What more could you want?”

Not a thing.

He had done it all, more than fulfilling the expectations of his nation and the comparisons to Phelps, who was here to cheer Marchand on. What might have been a burden to some athletes only seemed to push Marchand to even greater heights.

Macron shook Marchand’s hand during Friday’s celebration and sent his congratulations via social media.

“The impossible isn’t French!” Macron wrote in French. “Four home gold medals and a new Olympic record — it’s historic. It’s Leon Marchand.”

Marchand certainly enjoyed his moment, which his American coach Bob Bowman — Phelps’ coach, in an appropriate touch — had encouraged him to do.

He led the fans behind the podium in a cheer before climbing to the top step one more time. The crowd erupted in its most rousing rendition yet of La Marseillaise — though, of course, they’ve had plenty of chances to work on the French national anthem this week.

Chants of “Léon! Léon! Léon!” filled the arena as soon as the anthem was done. Someone held up a sign that simply said “Merci Léon.”

“I’m extremely proud,” Marchand said, “to be French.”

Australian gold for McEvoy, McKeown

Before Marchand’s triumph, Cameron McEvoy and Kaylee McKeown won more gold for Australia.

McEvoy touched first in the 50 freestyle, denying Caeleb Dressel a repeat in swimming’s most frantic event. McKeown followed with a victory in the 200 backstroke to become the first female swimmer to sweep the back at two straight Summer Games.

Asked if she could’ve envisioned such an accomplishment, McKeown said, “Not in a million years.”

McEvoy became the first Australian man to win gold at these games, and McKeown quickly boosted her country’s total to an Olympics-leading seven golds overall — three more than both the U.S. and Marchand, who is essentially a country unto himself.

McKeown noted what an amazing time this is for women’s sports, following in the footsteps of athletes such as Simone Biles and Caitlin Clark in raising the profile of female athletes.

“Not just the Aussie girls, but the whole world and female sports has been unreal this year,” McKeown said.

McEvoy made it from one end of the pool to the other in 21.25, edging Benjamin Proud of Britain by five-hundredths of a second. Florent Manaudou of France gave the home crowd another thrill by taking the bronze in 21.56.

Dressel, who won five gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics, finished sixth in 21.61.

McKeown rallied again, just as she did in the 100 backstroke, to chase down perennial American runner-up Regan Smith. The winning time was an Olympic record of 2:03.73, breaking the mark that Missy Franklin set at the 2012 London Games.

Another silver for Regan Smith

Smith touched in 2:04.26 for the fifth silver medal of her career, to go along with a single bronze. She has yet to win gold.

The bronze went to Canada’s Kylie Masse in 2:05.57.

Smith insisted that she was satisfied with the result, even though a gold medal remained just out of reach.

“That’s one of my fastest times ever. I think I really gave Kaylee a run for it and I made things really close and exciting. So I’m thrilled with it.”

Dressel comes up short

The American star qualified in two individual events, and he won’t be winning a medal in either of them.

Shortly after his sixth-place showing in the 50 freestyle, he returned to the pool for the semifinals of the 100 butterfly — another of the events he won in Tokyo.

Dressel couldn’t pull off the grueling double, managing only the 13th-fastest time to miss out on the final Saturday night.

He did anchor the U.S. to gold in the 4×100-meter freestyle relay for the eighth gold medal of his career.

It was a disappointing showing for one of the biggest stars of the Tokyo Games, but not all that unexpected given what he’s been through.

A year after the pandemic-delayed 2021 Olympics, Dressel walked away from swimming in the middle of the world championships.

He desperately needed a break to recapture his love of swimming, which is still a bit of a work in progress. Dressel seems much happier now, welcoming his first child about five months ago, but he couldn’t recapture that blazing speed from three years ago.

“Obviously not my best work,” Dressel said. “I’ve had a lot of fun, but this hasn’t been my best week. I don’t think I need to shy away from that.”

He has one more relay to go in Paris, giving him another shot at his ninth career gold.

Dressel would like to go out on a high note, because these Games have been “a little heartbreaking, a little heartbreaking for sure.”

After leaving the pool deck, he broke down in tears.
…

EAUBONNE, France — Growing up in cutthroat New York gave Lauren Scruggs the competitive mindset needed to claim an unexpected fencing silver medal on her Olympic debut in Paris.

The 21-year-old Queens native shared the podium with fellow American Lee Kiefer, who retained her Olympic title in the women’s individual foil event gold medal bout on Sunday.

“I’ve grown up in New York my whole life. It can be kind of rough sometimes,” Scruggs, the first Black American fencer to win an Olympic medal in a women’s individual event, told Reuters.

“You develop a hard shell, and in terms of how that translates to my fencing, I think it came out, that energy and that toughness.”

When Scruggs found herself neck-and-neck with then world No. 2 Arriana Errigo in the quarterfinals, she managed to score the last touch, knocking out the Italian 15-14.

“I think that was my toughest bout of the day in terms of energy, and going past my limits, and I have definitely New York to thank for that,” said Scruggs, one of the rare Black fencers at the highest level.

“Fencing is predominantly white, I think for a multitude of reasons, it’s just the history of the sport, and the lack of representation and encouragement,” she explained.

“To have this accomplishment is a big deal for me, because when I was younger I only had a few people to look up to in the sport, so to be someone that little kids now can look up to is very special to me.”

They can draw inspiration from her impressive grit, which coach Sean McClain described in the U.S. training venue in Eaubonne, in the outskirts of Paris, saying that since she was eight, Scruggs only cared about winning medals.

“And she’s maintained that distaste for losing her entire career,” he said. “I really think in an event like the Olympics, it’s more about how you compete.”

Expensive sport

Born in the U.S. to Jamaican immigrants, Scruggs grew up in Queens with her mother and grandmother.

“I was in a single-parent household early on, so my family had to basically cut some corners around here and there to support us,” said Scruggs, whose brother was the first to get into fencing and inspired her to take up the sport.

Now a college student at Harvard, where she trains every day, Scruggs had to fight to make it into a “pretty expensive” sport.

“It was not easy growing up, trying to fence while being from where I’m from, just income-wise,” she said.

“If you have the funds, it makes it a lot easier to pursue the sport and feel comfortable asking that from your family.

“But if you’re coming from a lower-income background, it might push you harder. And I think it’s what happened with me. I just wanted it more than my peers.”

On paper, Scruggs did not have a big medal chance, but she showed her mettle at the Grand Palais arena.

“Fencing skill wise, Lauren is on par with the better fencers in the world, but she’s not better than them. What made the difference was that competitiveness,” said McClain, who has also become Scruggs’ stepfather.

“That comes from my wife,” he added. “I knew it was possible, but I didn’t really think Lauren was going to win a medal in her first Olympics. But my wife did. She was like, she’d better win a medal. So that’s where it comes from — that’s the fiery spirit!”

With Kiefer and alongside teammates Jackie Dubrovich and Maia Weintraub, Scruggs will represent the U.S. against China on Thursday in the quarterfinals of the women’s foil team event.

Scruggs is aiming for gold this time and is dreaming already of qualifying for the next Games, which will take place in Los Angeles in four years’ time.

“I can’t imagine myself not fencing,” she said. “It’s not even love, it’s just a part of me. It’s connected to who I am,” she said. 
…

Paris — As a gay youth growing up in central France, Hugo Bardin never felt he lived in a world that represented who he was — a world in which he had a place.

And that is why Bardin, who performs as the drag queen Paloma, felt it was meaningful and important to be part of a Paris Olympics opening ceremony that presented a multifaceted, multiethnic France with people of different ethnicities and orientations.

“It was a really important moment for the French people and the representation of France around the world,” says Paloma, who took part in a single scene that has drawn some furious criticism — including from presidential candidate Donald Trump in the United States, who called it “a disgrace.”

Although the ceremony’s artistic director, Thomas Jolly, and other participants have repeatedly said the scene wasn’t inspired by “The Last Supper,” critics interpreted that part of the show as a mockery of Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting showing Jesus Christ and his apostles. 

Paloma, best known for winning “Drag Race France,” appeared with other drag artists and dancers alongside Barbara Butch, a popular DJ who wore a silver headdress that looked like a halo. Butch has now filed a complaint alleging online abuse and harassment, and Paris police have launched an investigation.

Paloma is not, at this point, planning to take legal action over online harassment, and would prefer to focus on the many “loving messages” that have been pouring in. The performer been getting thousands of messages daily, she told The Associated Press, most of them positive but some that he described as “violent” and even “from the Middle Ages.”

Still, there are no misgivings, despite the backlash. Paloma said she was proud to have been part of a show that did not rely on a series of French cliches — for example, “the Parisian with a baguette under their arm.”

“It could have been a postcard from 1930,” she said of the ceremony. “But instead, it was a photograph of France in 2024.”

Many agreed, and praised the ceremony for its creativity, style and showmanship.

But French Catholic bishops and others were among those who said Christians had been offended, though Paris Olympics organizers have said there was “never an intention to show disrespect to any religious group” but rather to “celebrate community tolerance.”

Trump was asked on Fox News what he thought of the so-called “Last Supper” scene. “I’m very open-minded,” the former president and current Republican nominee told host Laura Ingraham, “but I thought what they did was a disgrace.”

Of Trump’s comments, Paloma said: “My first reaction is to say that if Donald Trump is not reacting, then we have not done our job.”

The criticism, she said, has been fueled by hate. “Where is the Catholicism, the Christianity in that? It is very hypocritical that their message is not about religion or kindness, it’s about hate towards Jews, fat people, queer people and trans people.”

“We have been accused of trying to impose our vision on the world,” Bardin said. “We are not. … We just want to let people know that we have a place in the world, and we are claiming that place.”

Paloma spoke to the AP in a phone interview and later at her Paris workshop, a studio devoted to her drag performance. Bardin debuted the drag queen persona some five years ago, the Spanish name inspired by the films of Pedro Almodóvar.

Asked if she had any regrets, Paloma replied: “My only regrets is people’s reactions. I’m sorry if people are offended but we did not try to parody, to mock ‘The Last Supper.’ It was not the point. So I can’t regret what I did. I’m sorry for people to only see things in a bad way.”

She added: “Maybe change the perspective. Change the point of view. Try to see the beauty in what we did. Because it was just beauty. It was just only about beauty and reunion, and reparation.” 
…

Midyat, Turkey — Through a basement door in southeastern Turkey lies a sprawling underground city — perhaps the country’s largest — which one historian believes dates back to the ninth century before Jesus Christ.

Archaeologists stumbled upon the city-under-a-city “almost by chance” after an excavation of house cellars in Midyat, near the Syrian border, led to the discovery of a vast labyrinth of caves in 2020.

Workers have already cleared more than 50 subterranean rooms, all connected by 120 meters of tunnel carved out of the rock.

But that is only a fraction of the site’s estimated 900,000-square-metre area, which would make it the largest underground city in Turkey’s southern Anatolia region.

“Maybe even in the world,” said Midyat conservation director Mervan Yavuz who oversaw the excavation.

“To protect themselves from the climate, enemies, predators and diseases, people took refuge in these caves which they turned into an actual city,” Yavuz added.

The art historian traces the city’s ancient beginnings to the reign of King Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 883 to 859 BC.

At its height in the seventh century BC, the empire stretched from The Gulf in the east to Egypt in the west.

Referred to as Matiate in that period, the city’s original entrance required people to bend in half and squeeze themselves into a circular opening.

It was this entrance that first gave the Midyat municipality an inkling of its subterranean counterpart’s existence.

“We actually suspected that it existed,” Yavuz recounted as he walked through the cave’s gloom.

“In the 1970s, the ground collapsed and a construction machine fell down. But at the time we didn’t try to find out more, we just strengthened and closed up the hole.”

A hiding place underground

The region where the cave city is located was once known as Mesopotamia, recognized as the cradle of some of the earliest civilizations in the world.

Many major empires conquered or passed through these lands, which may have given those living around Matiate a reason to take refuge underground.

“Before the arrival of the Arabs, these lands were fiercely disputed by the Assyrians, the Persians, the Romans and then the Byzantines,” said Ekrem Akman, a historian at the nearby University of Mardin.

Yavuz noted that “Christians from the Hatay region, fleeing from the persecution of the Roman Empire… built monasteries in the mountains to avoid their attacks”.

He suspects that Jews and Christians may have used Matiate as a hiding place to practice their then-banned religions underground.

He pointed to the inscrutable stylized carvings — a horse, an eight-point star, a hand, trees — which adorn the walls, as well as a stone slab on the floor of one room that may have been used for celebrations or for sacrifices.

As a result of the city’s long continuous occupation, he said it was “difficult to pinpoint” exactly what at the site can be attributed to which period or group.

But “pagans, Jews, Christians, Muslims, all these believers contributed to the underground city of Matiate,” Yavuz said.

Centuries of invasions

Even after the threat of centuries of invasions had passed, the caves stayed in use, said curator Gani Tarkan.

He used to work as a director at the Mardin Museum, where household items, bronzes and potteries recovered from the caves are on display.

“People continued to use this place as a living space,” Tarkan said.

“Some rooms were used as catacombs, others as storage space,” he added.

Excavation leader Yavuz pointed to a series of round holes dug to hold wine-filled amphorae vessels in the gloomy cool, out of the glaring sunlight above.

To this day, the Mardin region’s Orthodox Christian community maintains that old tradition of wine production.

Turkey is also famous for its ancient cave villages in Cappadocia in the center of the country.

But while Cappadocia’s underground cities are built with rooms vertically stacked on top of each other, Matiate spreads out horizontally, Tarkan explained.

The municipality of Midyat, which funds the works, plans to continue the excavation until the site can be opened to the public.

It hopes the site will prove a popular tourist attraction and attract visitors to the city of 120,000.
…

NEW YORK — Edna O’Brien, Ireland’s literary pride and outlaw who scandalized her native land with her debut novel “The Country Girls” before gaining international acclaim as a storyteller and iconoclast that found her welcomed everywhere from Dublin to the White House, has died. She was 93.

O’Brien died Saturday after a long illness, according to a statement by her publisher Faber and the literary agency PFD.

“A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling,” Faber said in a statement. “The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.”

O’Brien published more than 20 books, most of them novels and story collections, and would know fully what she called the “extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter.” Few so concretely and poetically challenged Ireland’s taboos on religion, sex and gender. Few wrote so fiercely, so sensually about loneliness, rebellion, desire and persecution. A world traveler in mind and body, O’Brien was as likely to imagine the longings of an Irish nun as to take in a man’s “boyish smile” in the midst of a “ponderous London club.”

O’Brien was an unknown about to turn 30, living with her husband and two small children outside of London, when “The Country Girls” became one of Ireland’s most polarizing works of fiction in memory. Written in just three weeks and published in 1960, for an advance of roughly $75, “The Country Girls” follows the lives of two young women — Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Bridget (Baba) Brennan journey from a rural convent to the risks and adventures of Dublin. Admirers were as caught up in their defiance and awakening as would-be censors were enraged by such passages as “He opened his braces and let his trousers slip down around the ankles” and “He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited and warm and violent.”

Fame, wanted or otherwise, was O’Brien’s ever after. Her novel was praised and purchased in London and New York while back in Ireland it was labeled “filth” by Minister of Justice Charles Haughey and burned publicly in O’Brien’s home town of Tuamgraney, County Clare. Detractors also included O’Brien’s parents and her husband, the author Ernest Gebler, from whom O’Brien was already becoming estranged.

O’Brien would be recognized well beyond the world of books. The 1980s British band Dexy’s Midnight Runners” named her alongside Eugene O’Neill, Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde among others in the literary tribute “Burn It Down.” She dined at the White House with then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jack Nicholson and befriended Jacqueline Kennedy, whom she remembered as a “creature of paradoxes. While being private and immured she also had a hunger for intimacy — it was as if the barriers she had put up needed at times to be battered down.”

O’Brien’s other books included the novels “August Is a Wicked Month,” the story of a woman’s sexual liberation that was banned in parts of Ireland; “Down By The River,” based on a true story about a teenage Irish girl who becomes pregnant after being raped by her father, and autobiographical “The Light of Evening,” in which a famous author returns to Ireland to see her ailing mother. Her most recent work, “Girl,” a novel about victims of Boko Harem, came out in 2019.

Josephine Edna O’Brien was one of four children raised on a farm where “the relics of riches remained. It was a life full of contradictions. We had an avenue, but it was full of potholes; there was a gatehouse, but another couple lived there.” Her father was a violent alcoholic, her mother a talented letter writer who disapproved of her daughter’s profession, quite likely out of jealousy. Lena O’Brien’s hold on the author’s imagination, the force of her regrets made her a lifelong muse and a near stand-in Ireland itself, “the cupboard with all things in it, the tabernacle with God in it, the lake with the legends in it.”

By her early 20s, she was working in a pharmacy in Dublin and reading Tolstoy, Thackeray and O’Connor among others in her spare time. She had dreams of writing since sneaking out to the nearby fields as a child to work on stories, but doubted the relevance of her life until she read a biography of James Joyce and learned that “Portrait Of An Artist As a Young Man” was autobiographical. She began writing fiction that ran in the literary magazine The Bell and found work reviewing manuscripts for the publishing house Hutchinson, where editors were impressed enough by her summaries to commission what became “The Country Girls.”

“I cried a lot writing ‘The Country Girls,’ but scarcely noticed the tears. Anyhow, they were good tears. They touched on feelings that I did not know I had. Before my eyes, infinitely clear, came that former world in which I believed our fields and hollows had some old music slumbering in them, centuries old,” she wrote in her memoir.

“The words poured out of me, and the pen above the paper was not moving fast enough, so that I sometimes feared they would be lost forever.”
…

CHADDS FORD, Pa. — At first glance, it looks like an aerial photo of a cemetery destroyed by war, with charred coffins ripped from broken concrete vaults and arched marble tombstones flattened by a bomb blast.

Then, the viewer begin to discern details: the coffins and vaults are actually parts of a keyboard. Instead of names and dates, the apparent tombstones are inscribed with words like “vibrato” and “third harmonic.”

“It looks like a graveyard,” photographer Frank Stewart said.

Stewart’s ghostly photograph of a New Orleans church organ ravaged by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina is part of a career retrospective of his decades documenting Black life in America and exploring African and Caribbean cultures.

“Frank Stewart’s Nexus: An American Photographer’s Journey, 1960s to the Present,” is on display at the Brandywine Museum of Art through Sept. 22. Brandywine is the fourth and final stop for the exhibition, which was organized by The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Telfair Museums in Savannah, Georgia.

“I wanted to talk about the Black church and what influence they had on the culture,” Stewart said of his post-Katrina work in New Orleans. “This organ, the music and everything corresponds. It all comes together. I just wanted to show the devastation of churches and the music and the culture.”

Music is elemental to Stewart’s practice. He was the long-time photographer for the Savannah Music Festival, and for 30 years he was the senior staff photographer for Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, which paired him with artistic director and Grammy-winning musician Wynton Marsalis.

“He’s like my brother,” said Stewart, whose exhibition includes “Stomping the Blues,” a 1997 photograph of Marsalis leading his orchestra off the stage during a world tour of his Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz oratorio “Blood on the Fields.”

Stewart, who was born in Nashville, Tennessee, and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and Chicago, has his own ties to jazz and blues. His stepfather, Phineas Newborn Jr., was a pianist who worked with the likes of musicians Lionel Hampton, Charles Mingus and B.B. King.

Describing himself as a child of the “apartheid South,” Stewart has drawn inspiration from photographers such as Ernest Cole and Roy DeCarava, who was among Stewart’s instructors at New York’s Cooper Union, where Stewart received a bachelor of fine arts degree. DeCarava’s photographs of 1950s Harlem led to a collaboration with Langston Hughes on the 1955 book, “The Sweet Flypaper of Life.”

Cole, a South African photographer, achieved acclaim in 1967 with “House of Bondage,” the first book to inspire Stewart. It chronicled apartheid using photographs he smuggled out of the country. Cole was never able to replicate his early success and fell on hard times before dying at age 49 in New York City. A documentary about him, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

“He came to New York and he was homeless in New York, so I would see him on the street and we would talk,” said Stewart, who is quick to draw a distinction between his work and Cole’s.

“I consider myself an artist more than a documentarian,” explained Stewart, who attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago before enrolling at Cooper Union and was a longtime friend and collaborator of artist Romare Bearden.

That’s not to say Stewart doesn’t have journalistic instincts in his blood. He recounts a work history that includes the Chicago Defender, the largest Black-owned daily in the country at the time, and stringing for Ebony, Essence and Black Enterprise magazines. He looks back less fondly on a short stint of large-format work photographing fine art for brochures and catalogs, an undertaking he described as “tedious.”

Through it all though, Stewart has maintained an artistic approach to his work, looking to combine pattern, color, tone and space in a visually appealing manner while not leaving the viewer searching for the message.

“It has to still be ‘X marks the spot,'” he explained. “It still has to be photographic. It can’t be just abstract.”

Or maybe it can. How else to explain the color and texture seen in “Blue Car, Havana” from 2002?

“It’s all about abstract painting,” Stewart said in wall text accompanying the photo.

The retrospective shines a light on how Stewart’s work has evolved over time, from early black-and-white photographs to his more recent prints, which feature more color.

“It’s two different languages,” he said. “English would be the black and white. French would be the color.”

“I worked in color the whole time, I just didn’t have the money to print them,” he added.

While photography can inform people about the world around them, Stewart has noted there is a gulf between the real world and a photograph.

“Reality is a fact, and a photograph is another fact,” he explained. “The map is not the territory. It’s just a map of the territory.”
…

HOUSTON — The gold bikini-style costume that Carrie Fisher wore as Princess Leia while making “Return of the Jedi” in the “Star Wars” franchise has sold for $175,000, according to the auction house that handled the sale.

The costume was made famous when Fisher wore it at the start of the 1983 film when Leia was captured by Jabba the Hutt at his palace on Tatooine and forced to be a slave.

The costume, one of the most memorable in the ” Star Wars ” movies, was sold on Friday by Dallas-based Heritage Auctions.

Joe Maddalena, Heritage’s executive vice president, said the costume that was sold was one that was screen tested and worn by Fisher on the movie’s set but ultimately did not make it onto the final version of the film as it was switched out for one that was more comfortable.

The auction house said the costume sparked a bidding war among collectors.

Maddalena said he wasn’t surprised by the attention bidders gave to the costume as well as to a model of a Y-wing fighter that took on the Death Star in the original “Star Wars” film that sold for $1.55 million. He said “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” have very avid fan bases.

“The power of ‘Star Wars’ proves itself again. These movies are just so impactful,” Maddalena said.

In a November 2016 interview with NPR’s “Fresh Air,” Fisher said wearing the costume was not her choice.

“When (director George Lucas) showed me the outfit, I thought he was kidding and it made me very nervous. I had to sit very straight because I couldn’t have lines on my sides, like little creases. No creases were allowed, so I had to sit very, very rigid straight,” said Fisher, who died about a month after the interview.

Richard Miller, who created the costume, said in an interview that’s included in a “Star Wars” box set that he used soft material to build the costume so that Fisher could move around more freely.

“However, she still didn’t like it. I don’t blame her,” said Miller, who was the chief sculptor for Industrial Light & Magic, the visual effects company founded by “Star Wars” creator George Lucas. “I did put leather on the back of it to help it feel better.”

The costume had its share of critics, who thought it sexualized Fisher for the franchise’s male fan base.

In “Interview” magazine in 2015, Fisher told actor Daisy Ridley, who starred in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” “You’re going to have people have fantasies about you. That will make you uncomfortable, I’m guessing.” She pushed back against the idea of being a sex symbol and told Ridley to “fight for your outfit.”
…

…

HONG KONG — Three of the world’s top auction houses are racing to expand in Hong Kong, eager to woo young Asian buyers even as the global art market retreats from pandemic-era highs.

In the span of two months, Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Bonhams will each see the culmination of yearslong efforts to upgrade their regional headquarters in the southern Chinese city.

Sotheby’s on Thursday unveiled showrooms at an upscale mall in Hong Kong’s finance district, a two-story space previously occupied by fashion label Giorgio Armani.

“We envision for this state-of-the-art space in Hong Kong to be the epicenter of culture for global visitors,” managing director of Asia Nathan Drahi said at the opening.

“We are very confident in the prospect of Hong Kong because it possesses some strong fundamentals for our industry,” he told AFP, pointing to the favorable tax framework.

Nearby, Christie’s is gearing up for a September opening at a new skyscraper designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, with its total floor space doubling to 4,600 square meters.

“Asia has been the pillar of the company,” said Francis Belin, president of Christie’s Asia Pacific.

“But we didn’t have the physical tool, the infrastructure … to actually be at the level of our ambitions.”

The firms are “putting their bets down and saying Hong Kong is the center for Asia,” according to art adviser Patti Wong — but she said the expansions come with risk.

‘An ideal base’

Hong Kong’s biggest auctions of the year are held every spring and autumn at the city’s convention and exhibition center — an intense four months that build hype and draw visitors.

With new in-house venues, events will be more spread out.

“This is a big test for Hong Kong and whether we can develop into a more mature auction market [with] visitors throughout the year,” Wong said.

Global art sales have slowed since Christie’s and Sotheby’s first announced their Hong Kong expansion plans in the heady days of 2021 and 2022.

This year, Christie’s reported $2.1 billion in sales in the first six months — the second consecutive year of decline — down from its 2022 peak of $4.1 billion.

Wendy Goldsmith, a London-based art adviser and former Christie’s auctioneer, cited China’s real estate crisis as a major factor.

“[Asian collectors] are currently taking a bit of a breath buyingwise but the interest and appetite to collect is still there,” Goldsmith told AFP.

“Auction houses know that they’ll be back … and probably stronger than ever.”

Bonhams, which will move to a 1,765-square-meter location at a new office building in September, said it found success targeting transactions under 10 million Hong Kong dollars ($1.3 million).

“This segment has proven resilient despite broader economic uncertainties and represents a huge opportunity in Asia,” said Julia Hu, Bonhams’ managing director for Asia.

Hong Kong remained “an ideal base for tapping into other major Asian cities,” Hu added, citing its strategic location, efficient logistics, collector base, and tax and legal frameworks.

Young buyers

New York-based Phillips, another auction house, opened its regional headquarters next to Hong Kong’s museum of visual culture in 2023.

The companies are unfazed by Hong Kong’s political environment, even as critics say a crackdown by Beijing has chilled artistic freedoms, said cultural policy scholar Patrick Mok.

“The companies that operate in Hong Kong’s art market are rather apolitical … they know those [political] works can’t fetch good prices here,” Mok said.

Auction houses are now competing for younger buyers and embracing online bidding — a shift accelerated by the pandemic.

Christie’s said 29% of buyers in the first half of 2024 were millennials or Gen Z.

“Auction houses turned on a dime during COVID … [They] are marketing machines now,” said Goldsmith, adding that auctions have been spiced up to resemble Hollywood productions.

“[They] are more than willing to provide these events, lectures, dinners, viewings … all to conjure up the next bid.”

The opportunity — and challenge — of the Hong Kong venues will be to bring internet-native buyers into the real world.

But Hu from Bonhams was confident, saying that showroom auctions are irreplaceable.

“Our clients still crave the sheer thrill and excitement of being physically present,” she said. 
…

NEW DELHI — The Charaideo Moidam royal burial complex and shrines, built by northeast India’s Ahom dynasty, has been inscribed as a new World Heritage Site, the United Nations’ cultural agency said on Friday. 

UNESCO experts, who are deliberating on a list of sites nominated for the World Heritage Site tag, announced the decision in Indian capital New Delhi, where they are holding their 46th session. 

The Charaideo Moidams, located in Assam state, are a mound burial system that served as a resting place for Ahom kings and queens. They were constructed by providing an earth cover over a hollow vault made of bricks, stone or earth. 

The designated site contains 90 modiams of different sizes, which were created over a period of 600 years, and include other cultural features like ceremonial pathways and bodies of water, said a spokesperson from ICOMOS, the advisory body of the World Heritage Committee. 

“The moidams are an exceptional example of an Ahom necropolis that represents funeral traditions and associated beliefs in a tangible way,” they said. 

The Ahom clan established their capital in different parts of the Brahmaputra River Valley between the 12th to 18th century, after migrating from China, according to the U.N. cultural agency’s website. They established the first capital at the Patkai hills in eastern India and named it Charaideo, which means “a dazzling city above the mountain” in their language. Even though the clan moved across cities, the burial site they built was seen as the most sacred place for the departed souls of the royals. 

Experts say the shrines showcase the architecture and expertise of Assam’s masons, comparing them to the royal tombs of China and the pyramids of the Egyptian Pharaohs. 

The site has the largest concentration of these vaulted mound burials, according to UNESCO, and reflects the sculpted landscape of the surrounding hills. 

India is now home to 43 World Heritage Sites. 

Other sites inscribed on Friday included the Colonies of the Moravian Church in Germany, the U.S. and U.K.; the Umm Al-Jimal in Jordan and the Badain Jaran Desert in China. 

The committee also inscribed the Monastery of Saint Hilarion, in the archeological site of Tell Umm Amer in the Gaza Strip, on both the World Heritage List and on the List of World Heritage in Danger. It said the decision recognized the site’s value and the need to protect it given threats posed by the conflict in the Gaza Strip. 
…

…

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Puerto Rico’s governor on Wednesday signed a law that prohibits discrimination against people wearing Afros, curls, locs, twists, braids and other hairstyles in the racially diverse U.S. territory.

The move was celebrated by those who had long demanded explicit protection related to work, housing, education and public services.

“It’s a victory for generations to come,” Welmo Romero Joseph, a community facilitator with the nonprofit Taller Salud, said in an interview.

The organization is one of several that had been pushing for the law, with Romero noting it sends a strong message that “you can reach positions of power without having to change your identity.”

While Puerto Rico’s laws and constitution protect against discrimination, along with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, a precedent was set in 2016 when a U.S. Court of Appeals dismissed a discrimination lawsuit and ruled that an employer’s no-dreadlock policy in Alabama did not violate Title VII.

Earlier this year, legislators in the U.S. territory held a public hearing on the issue, with several Puerto Ricans sharing examples of how they were discriminated against, including job offers conditional on haircuts.

It’s a familiar story to Romero, who recalled how a high school principal ordered him to cut his flat top.

“It was a source of pride,” he said of that hairstyle. “I was a 4.0 student. What did that have to do with my hair?”

With a population of 3.2 million, Puerto Rico has more than 1.6 million people who identify as being of two or more races, with nearly 230,000 identifying solely as Black, according to the U.S. Census.

“Unfortunately, people identified as black or Afro descendant in Puerto Rico still face derogatory treatment, deprivation of opportunities, marginalization, exclusion and all kinds of discrimination,” the law signed Wednesday states.

While Romero praised the law, he warned that measures are needed to ensure it’s followed.

On the U.S. mainland, at least two dozen states have approved versions of the CROWN Act, which aims to ban race-based hair discrimination and stands for “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair.”

Among those states is Texas, where a Black high school student was suspended after school officials said his dreadlocks fell below his eyebrows and ear lobes, violating the dress code.

A March report from the Economic Policy Institute found that not all states have amended their education codes to protect public and private high school students, and that some states have allowed certain exceptions to the CROWN Act.

A federal version was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022, but it failed in the Senate. In May, Democratic lawmakers reintroduced the legislation.
…

NORWICH, Conn. — Veteran diplomat Martin S. Indyk, an author and leader at prominent U.S. think tanks who devoted years to finding a path toward peace in the Middle East, died Thursday. He was 73.

His wife, Gahl Hodges Burt, confirmed in a phone call that he died from complications of esophageal cancer at the couple’s home in New Fairfield, Connecticut.

The Council on Foreign Relations, where Indyk had been a distinguished fellow in U.S. and Middle East diplomacy since 2018, called him a “rare, trusted voice within an otherwise polarized debate on U.S. policy toward the Middle East.”

A native of Australia, Indyk served as U.S. ambassador to Israel from 1995 to 1997 and from 2000 to 2001. He was special envoy for the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during former President Barack Obama’s administration, from 2013 to 2014.

When he resigned in 2014 to join The Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, it had symbolized the latest failed effort by the U.S. to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. He continued as Obama’s special adviser on Mideast peace issues.

“Ambassador Indyk has invested decades of his extraordinary career to the mission of helping Israelis and Palestinians achieve a lasting peace. It’s the cause of Martin’s career, and I’m grateful for the wisdom and insight he’s brought to our collective efforts,” then-Secretary of State John Kerry said at the time, in a statement.

In a May 22 social media post on X, amid the continuing war in Gaza, Indyk urged Israelis to “wake up,” warning them their government “is leading you into greater isolation and ruin” after a proposed peace deal was rejected. Indyk also called out Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in June on X, accusing him of playing “the martyr in a crisis he manufactured,” after Netanyahu accused the U.S. of withholding weapons that Israel needed.

“Israel is at war on four fronts: with Hamas in Gaza; with Houthis in Yemen; with Hezbollah in Lebanon; and with Iran overseeing the operations,” Indyk wrote on June 19. “What does Netanyahu do? Attack the United States based on a lie that he made up! The Speaker and Leader should withdraw his invitation to address Congress until he recants and apologizes.”

Indyk also served as special assistant to former President Bill Clinton and senior director for Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council from 1993 to 1995. He served as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in the U.S. Department of State from 1997 to 2000.

Besides serving at Brookings and the Council on Foreign Relations, Indyk worked at the Center for Middle East Policy and was the founding executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Indyk’s successor at the Washington Institute called him “a true American success story.”

“A native of Australia, he came to Washington to have an impact on the making of American Middle East Policy and that he surely did — as pioneering scholar, insightful analyst and remarkably effective policy entrepreneur,” Robert Satloff said. “He was a visionary who not only founded an organization based on the idea that wise public policy is rooted in sound research, he embodied it.”

Indyk wrote or co-wrote multiple books, including Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East and Master of the Game: Henry Kissinger and the Art of Middle East Diplomacy, which was published in 2021. 
…

LOS ANGELES — Hollywood’s video game performers voted Thursday to go on strike, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections. 

The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement. 

SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the studios will not make a deal over the regulation of generative AI. Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said. 

Fran Drescher, the union’s president, said in a prepared statement that members would not approve a contract that would allow companies to “abuse AI.” 

“Enough is enough. When these companies get serious about offering an agreement our members can live — and work — with, we will be here, ready to negotiate,” Drescher said. 

A representative for the studios did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment. 

The global video game industry generates well over $100 billion in profit annually, according to game market forecaster Newzoo. The people who design and bring those games to life are the driving force behind that success, SAG-AFTRA said. 

“Eighteen months of negotiations have shown us that our employers are not interested in fair, reasonable AI protections, but rather flagrant exploitation,” said Interactive Media Agreement Negotiating Committee Chair Sarah Elmaleh. 

Last month, union negotiators told The Associated Press that the game studios refused to “provide an equal level of protection from the dangers of AI for all our members” — specifically, movement performers. 

Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give leadership the authority to strike. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months. 

The last interactive contract, which expired November 2022, did not provide protections around AI but secured a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began October 2016. That work stoppage marked the first major labor action from SAG-AFTRA following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012. 

The video game agreement covers more than 2,500 “off-camera (voiceover) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers,” according to the union. 

Amid the tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered indie and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry titans have rejected.
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YouTube star Lily Hevesh has been mesmerizing viewers with domino creations for 15 years. Last weekend, at the National Building Museum in Washington, she completed her most ambitious project yet: she brought down an installation of 100,000 dominoes and set a world record. Maxim Adams reports. Camera: Dmitry Shakhov, Artem Kohan.
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In the Pacific Northwest, there is a marching group that has thrilled parade audiences for more than 70 years. The Seattle Chinese Community Girls Drill Team has brought a sense of community and identity for generations of Chinese American girls. VOA’s Natasha Mozgovaya reports.
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Kyiv, Ukraine — This year, Ukraine’s largest music festival struck a different chord. Gone were the international headliners, the massive performance halls and the hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Instead, beloved local artists graced the stage this past weekend at the Atlas Festival — the first since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 — for a smaller but still ebullient crowd. The stage was erected in a shopping mall parking lot, the only option with a shelter large enough to contain the 25,000 people expected in the event of an air raid.

Carefree youth danced, romanced and sang along, rubbing shoulders with hardened military commanders as famous singers who crooned lyrics imbued with national pride. Music was the main goal, but so was shattering the illusion that the capital is invulnerable to the bloody battles hundreds of miles away.

“Such kind of festivals can’t be separated from the life of the country. The country is at war. The core issues here should relate to the war,” said Vsevolod Kozhemyako, a businessman and one of the founders of the 13th “Khartia” Brigade, now a part of Ukraine’s National Guard and defending the front line in Kharkiv.

“People who are still young and who don’t join (the fight) should understand that they cannot live in a bubble,” he said.

And yet, a bubble is precisely how it feels to be in Kyiv, as the war approaches its third year. While Ukrainian soldiers are killed and wounded every day along the 1,000-kilometer (620-mile) front line in the east, the capital is a contrast with its busy bars and clubs.

Every so often, Kyiv comes face to face with the war. Two weeks ago, a barrage of Russian missiles destroyed a children’s hospital and a private clinic, in one of the deadliest attacks since the full-scale invasion. Residents have grappled with power cuts caused by Moscow’s targeted destruction of Ukrainian energy generation at the height of a summer heat wave.

In every corner of the music festival, visitors were confronted with the inescapable reality that theirs is a country trapped in a bloody war of attrition. Festival organizers hoped to raise $2.2 million (2 million euros) to help soldiers purchase supplies for the front line.

In the mall’s basement parking lot, various military units, from Khartia to the 3rd Assault, offered interactive games to lure donations and possible recruits. A first-person shooter game offered visitors a chance to improve target practice by gunning down shadowy virtual infantrymen. In another corner, medics brandished severed plastic limbs and offered emergency medical training.

The festival concluded Sunday with a much-anticipated performance from Serhii Zhadan and his band Zhadan and the Dogs. Zhadan, a celebrated artist dubbed the poet of the Donbas, recently joined Khartia.

“It’s just a small break, an opportunity to take a breath,” said Zhadan, minutes before he took to the stage for a roaring crowd. “The most important things, they are happening over there, at the front line.”

On stage, Zhadan started with one of his most beloved songs “Malvi” or “Mallow.” The crowd sang along, word for word. “But what can you do with my hot blood,” they chanted. “Who will come at us.”

18-year old Viktoriia Khalis was excited to see his performance. She had been to the Atlas festival once before in 2021. The difference is stark, she said.

“The main thing that has changed, unfortunately, now the festival is connected with donations,” she said. But she also felt more connected to her homeland. “I feel this entire crowd is related to me. I feel unity.”

She was scared there would be another Russian air attack — a music festival with thousands of attendees would be a prime target — but said she couldn’t miss a chance to see her favorite artists.

For Nadiia Dorofeeva, one of Ukraine’s most famous singers, every concert feels different. “Before, when I entered a stage I was thinking only about if I looked good, sang well and if the people got what they came for. But now, I dream of having no air alarms, I am seeing how people cry at my concerts.”

One of Dorofeeva’s songs, “WhatsApp,” is about a girl waiting for her beloved to return from war. “She washed the phone with tears/Like rainy glass,” often moves listeners to tears.

Among the attendees was Lt. Gen. Serhii Naiev, an assistant deputy chief in Ukraine’s General Staff.

“There are well-known artists on stage, they are performing their concerts and there are a lot of Ukrainians around who are donating their money, much-needed money for the armed forces of Ukraine,” he said.

“We understand that our partners are supporting us, but we also understand that we could do a lot by ourselves, to be stronger,” he said.
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