Democrats are moving forward this week on a Senate vote on a bill that would codify abortion rights into federal law, in the wake of a leaked draft from the Supreme Court that signals a possible end to the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. As Arash Arabasadi reports, the legislation is expected to be blocked by Senate Republicans.
…
The U.S. Supreme Court may overturn federal protections for abortions, according to a leaked draft of an opinion expected in the next few months. That would leave the legal status of abortions up to individual states. For VOA, Deana Mitchell reports from Texas, where women are not permitted to have abortions beyond six weeks of pregnancy.
…
Irish rock group U2’s frontman Bono and his bandmate The Edge performed a 40-minute concert in a metro station in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Sunday and praised Ukrainians fighting for their freedom from Russia.
“Your president leads the world in the cause of freedom right now … The people of Ukraine are not just fighting for your own freedom, you’re fighting for all of us who love freedom,” Bono told a crowd of up to 100 gathered inside the Khreshchatyk metro station. He was referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Russia, which calls its action in Ukraine a “special military operation,” continues to carry out missile strikes across Ukraine. However, some life has returned to Kyiv even though air raid sirens sound regularly.
Bono rallied the crowd between songs during his performance.
“This evening, 8th of May, shots will ring out in the Ukraine sky, but you’ll be free at last. They can take your lives, but they can never take your pride,” he said.
…
Almost 400 years ago, the Catholic residents of a small Bavarian village vowed to perform a play of “the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ” every 10 years, if only God would spare them any further losses from the plague known as the Black Death.
Legend has it that ever since 1634, when the villagers of Oberammergau first performed their passion play, no more residents died of that pestilence or any other plagues — until 2020, when the world was hit by a new plague, the coronavirus pandemic.
Oberammergau, like so many places worldwide, suffered some COVID-19 deaths, though residents who confirmed that were unsure how many.
Another consequence: The villagers could not fulfill their vow to stage the play after a 10-year interval. It was set to open in the spring of 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic.
Now, after a two-year delay, the famous Oberammergau Passion Play is finally opening on May 14 — the 42nd staging since its long-ago debut. Almost half of the village’s residents — more than 1,800 people, including 400 children — will participate in the play about the last five days before Christ’s crucifixion.
It’s a production modernized to fit the times, stripped of antisemitic allusions and featuring a diverse cast that include refugee children and non-Christian actors.
The play will be one of the first major cultural events in Germany since the outbreak of the pandemic, with almost half a million visitors expected from Germany and all over the world, notably from the United States.
“Just a few weeks ago, many could not believe that the Passion Play would premiere,” said director Christian Stueckl, who was born in Oberammergau and has been in charge of the play for more than 30 years.
“We don’t know what COVID-19 will do, if there will be another wave,” he said. “But we have an endless desire to bring our passion play back to the stage and we are highly motivated.”
All the actors tested themselves for the virus before every rehearsal and will continue to do so for all 103 performances which run through Oct. 2, Stueckl said. They have all been letting their hair grow — and the men letting beards grow — for over a year, as tradition dictates.
With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine still underway, themes such as war, hunger, persecution and displacement play prominent roles in this year’s production — showing the timelessness of human suffering from 2,000 years ago and from today.
The play — which for hundreds of years reflected a conservative, Catholic outlook — has received a careful makeover to become reflective of Germany’s more diverse society. It includes a leading Muslim actor for the first time and has been purged of the many notorious antisemitic plot lines which drew widespread criticism.
“The history of the Oberammergau Passion Play as being one which manifests these antisemitic tropes — Jews as villainous, Jews as deceptive, Jews as bloodthirsty, Jews as manipulative, Jews as Christ killers — was always part of the story,” Rabbi Noam Marans told The Associated Press in a recent interview in Oberammergau.
Marans, the director for interreligious and intergroup relations for the American Jewish Committee in New York, has been advising Stueckl together with a team of Christian and Jewish American experts for several years on how to rid the play of antisemitic content.
It’s been a success story. The play no longer depicts the Jews as Christ’s killers and shows clearly that Jesus was a Jew himself. It places the story of Jesus’ last days in historical context, with all its intra-Jewish tensions and the Jews’ oppression by the Romans.
The male performers wear yarmulkes, making them clearly recognizable as Jews. Of course, there are many Christian elements as well, such as the famous choir and orchestra whose musical compositions go back to the early 19th century.
The mix of Christian and Jewish influences on the current performance is vividly illustrated during the depiction of the Last Supper, when a huge Menorah is lit on the table and the disciples of Jesus recite both Hebrew prayers and the Christian Lord’s Prayer.
“Let there be no doubt: in Oberammergau, in the play, antisemitism has no place, and it has no place in the lives of the performers either,” Stueckl said.
Along with tackling the play’s antisemitism, Stueckl made it a more inclusive performance overall.
Until the 1990s, when Stueckl took over as director, performers had to belong to one of the two major German churches, Roman Catholic or Lutheran. These days, people who have left the church, atheists, Muslims, and members of any other religious affiliation are welcome to participate as long as they are residents of Oberammergau.
Judas is played by Muslim actor Cengiz Gorur. The deputy director, Abdullah Karaca, is the son of Turkish immigrants. And several children of refugees from Africa and elsewhere, who only recently arrived in Oberammergau after fleeing their home countries, were invited to perform.
When it comes to women, there’s still some work to be done. Stueckl called the play “very male-dominated” — all leading roles are male, with the exception only of Jesus’ mother, Mary, and Mary Magdalene.
Asked whether he could imagine a future performance in which women played leading male roles, Stueckl shook his head.
“I don’t think I will live to see Jesus being played by a woman — or Mary by a man,” he said. Then he paused for a moment, smiled, and added: “Even though the world would not come to an end because of that.”
…
For Allyson Jacobs, life in her 20s and 30s was about focusing on her career in health care and enjoying the social scene in New York City. It wasn’t until she turned 40 that she and her husband started trying to have children. They had a son when she was 42.
Over the past three decades, that has become increasingly common in the U.S., as birthrates have declined for women in their 20s and jumped for women in their late 30s and early 40s, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. The trend has pushed the median age of U.S. women giving birth from 27 to 30, the highest on record.
As an older parent celebrating Mother’s Day on Sunday, Jacobs feels she has more resources for her son, 9, than she would have had in her 20s.
“There’s definitely more wisdom, definitely more patience,” said Jacobs, 52, who is a patients’ services administrator at a hospital. “Because we are older, we had the money to hire a nanny. We might not have been able to afford that if we were younger.”
While fertility rates dropped from 1990 to 2019 overall, the decline was regarded as rather stable compared to previous eras. But the age at which women had babies shifted. Fertility rates declined by almost 43% for women between ages 20 and 24 and by more than 22% for women between 25 and 29. At the same time, they increased by more than 67% for women between 35 and 39, and by more than 132% for women between 40 and 44, according to the Census Bureau analysis based on National Center for Health Statistics data.
Decisions by college-educated women to invest in their education and careers so they could be better off financially when they had children, as well as the desire by working-class women to wait until they were more financially secure, have contributed to the shift toward older motherhood, said Philip Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist.
In the past, parents often relied on their children for income — putting them to work in the fields, for example, when the economy was more farm-based. But over the last century or more in the U.S., parents have become more invested in their children’s futures, providing more support while they go to school and enter young adulthood, he said.
“Having children later mostly puts women in a better position,” Cohen said. “They have more resources, more education. The things we demand of people to be good parents are easier to supply when you are older.”
Lani Trezzi, 48, and her husband had their first child, a son, when she was 38, and a daughter followed three years later. Even though she had been with her husband since she was 23, she felt no urgency to have children. That changed in her late 30s, once she’d reached a comfortable spot in her career as an executive for a retail company.
“It was just an age when I felt confident all around in the many areas of my life,” said Trezzi, who lives in New Jersey, outside New York City. “I didn’t have the confidence then that I have now.”
Over the last three decades, the largest increases in the median age at which U.S. women give birth have been among foreign-born women, going from ages 27 to 32, and Black women, going from ages 24 to 28, according to the Census Bureau.
With foreign-born women, Cohen said he wasn’t quite sure why the median age increased over time, but it likely was a “complicated story” having to do with their circumstances or reasons for coming to the U.S.
For Black women, pursuing an education and career played roles.
“Black women have been pursuing higher education at higher rates,” said Raegan McDonald-Mosley, an obstetrician and gynecologist, who is CEO of Power to Decide, which works to reduce teen pregnancies and unwanted births. “Black women are becoming really engaged in their education and that is an incentive to delay childbearing.”
Since unintended pregnancies are highest among teens and women in their 20s, and more of their pregnancies end in abortion compared to older women, ending Roe v. Wade would likely shift the start of childbearing earlier on average, in a reverse of the trend of the past three decades, “although the magnitude is unknown,” said Laura Lindberg, principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.
“The burden will fall disproportionately on women of color, Black women, people without documentation, people living in rural areas, people in the South — where there are a lot of Black women — and in the Midwest,” said McDonald-Mosley, who also has served previously as chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Motherhood also has been coming later in developed countries in Europe and Asia. In the U.S., it could contribute to the nation’s population slowdown since the ability to have children tends to decrease with age, said Kate Choi, a family demographer at Western University in London, Ontario.
In areas of the U.S. where the population isn’t replacing itself with births, and where immigration is low, population decline can create labor shortages, higher labor costs and a labor force that is supporting retirees, she said.
“Such changes will put significant pressure on programs aimed at supporting seniors like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare,” Choi said. “Workers may have to pay higher taxes to support the growing numbers of the retired population.”
Although the data in the Census Bureau report stops in 2019, the pandemic over the past two years has put off motherhood even further for many women, with U.S. birth rates in 2020 dropping 4% in the largest single-year decrease in nearly 50 years. Choi said there appears to have been a bit of a rebound in the second half of 2021 to levels similar to 2019, but more data is needed to determine if this is a return to a “normal” decline.
During the pandemic, some women at the end of their reproductive years may have given up on becoming parents or having more children because of economic uncertainties and greater health risks for pregnant women who get the virus, she said.
“These women may have missed their window to have children,” Choi said. “Some parents of young children may have decided to forego the second … birth because they were overwhelmed with the additional child-caring demands that emerged during the pandemic, such as the need to homeschool their children.”
…
Millions of Beijing residents queued up for another round of COVID-19 tests Sunday as China’s capital seeks to trace and isolate every infection to contain a small but stubborn outbreak — and avoid a Shanghai-type prolonged lockdown.
Strict COVID curbs in Beijing, Shanghai and dozens of other major cities across China are taking a psychological toll on its people, weighing on the world’s second-largest economy and disrupting global supply chains and international trade.
But Chinese authorities are unwavering in their commitment to stamp out the coronavirus, rather than live with COVID like many countries that are easing or ditching virus measures. Last week the authorities threatened action against critics of the zero-COVID policy.
Most of the 25 million people in the commercial hub of Shanghai, China’s most populous city, had been confined to their housing compounds for more than a month. Many complain of not being able to get food or to access emergency health care or other basic services.
Parts of Shanghai have seen their risk levels officially downgraded to the point where government rules would in theory allow them to leave their residences.
But while some were allowed out for brief walks or grocery trips, most were still stuck behind the locked gates of their compounds, causing widespread frustration and occasionally leading to rare altercations with hazmat-suited authorities.
Beijing was desperate to avoid such drama, relentlessly working to track and isolate infections.
On Sunday, residents lined up for another round of tests in the Chaoyang, Fangshan and Fengtai districts and small parts of others where infections had been detected over the past two weeks.
It has become an almost daily routine in the capital. Even if they are not subject to the mass tests, many still need to show a recent negative result to get to work or enter various venues.
Health app ‘abnormalities’
Beijing has closed gyms and entertainment venues, banned dine-in services at restaurants and shut scores of bus routes and almost 15% of its sprawling subway system.
The streets were less hectic than usual, with many not wanting to risk any activity that could classify them as close contacts of COVID patients, forcing them into quarantine.
Businesses that remained open were suffering.
A barber who asked to be identified only by his surname, Song, said his salon at a high-end shopping mall in Chaoyang has seen far fewer clients since the outbreak.
“They’re afraid of getting abnormalities in their health apps,” Song said, referring to the mobile monitoring software all residents must use. “North of us are malls and offices that have been sealed, and their apps might mark them as close contacts if they came.”
Song said his salon will try to stay open for as long as possible, but he was not sure for how long.
Beijing’s daily COVID cases are in the dozens, much lower than Shanghai’s at this point in its own outbreak, when infections were in the triple digits and rising.
Shanghai’s cases fell for a ninth day, Sunday data showed, but remained in the thousands.
Like other cities in China, Shanghai is building thousands of permanent PCR testing stations. With most residents still indoors, this seems to anticipate a gradual return to normal life when people are back out on the streets.
But authorities have warned that remains far off.
Top Chinese leaders meeting last week said the nation would fight any comment or action that distorted, doubted or repudiated its COVID policy. Shanghai party and city officials have also warned against complacency.
…
Country star Mickey Gilley, whose namesake Texas honky-tonk inspired the 1980 film Urban Cowboy and a nationwide wave of Western-themed nightspots, has died. He was 86.
Gilley died Saturday in Branson, Missouri, where he helped run the Mickey Gilley Grand Shanghai Theatre. He had been performing as recently as last month but was in failing health over the past week.
“He passed peacefully with his family and close friends by his side,” according to a statement from Mickey Gilley Associates.
Gilley — cousin of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis — opened Gilley’s, “the world’s largest honky tonk,” in Pasadena, Texas, in the early 1970s. By mid-decade, he was a successful club owner and had enjoyed his first commercial success with Room Full of Roses. He began turning out country hits regularly, including Window Up Above, She’s Pulling Me Back Again and the honky-tonk anthem Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time.
Overall, he had 39 Top 10 country hits and 17 No. 1 songs. He received six Academy of Country Music Awards, and also worked on occasion as an actor, with appearances on Murder She Wrote, The Fall Guy, Fantasy Island and The Dukes of Hazzard.
“If I had one wish in life, I would wish for more time,” Gilley told The Associated Press in March 2001 as he celebrated his 65th birthday. Not that he’d do anything differently, the singer said.
“I am doing exactly what I want to do. I play golf, fly my airplane and perform at my theater in Branson, Missouri,” he said. “I love doing my show for the people.”
‘Urban Cowboy’
Meanwhile, the giant nightspot’s attractions, including its famed mechanical bull, led to the 1980 film Urban Cowboy, starring John Travolta and Debra Winger and regarded by many as a countrified version of Travolta’s 1977 disco smash, Saturday Night Fever. The film inspired by Gilley’s club was based on an Esquire article by Aaron Latham about the relationship between two regulars at the club.
“I thank John Travolta every night before bed for keeping my career alive,” Gilley told the AP in 2002. “It’s impossible to tell you how grateful I am for my involvement with Urban Cowboy. That film had a huge impact on my career, and still does.”
The soundtrack included such hits as Johnny Lee’s Lookin’ for Love, Boz Scaggs’ Look What You’ve Done for Me and Gilley’s Stand by Me. The movie turned the Pasadena club into an overnight tourist draw and popularized pearl snap shirts, longneck beers, the steel guitar and mechanical bulls across the country.
But the club shut down in 1989 after Gilley and his business partner Sherwood Cryer feuded over how to run the place. A fire destroyed it soon after.
An upscale version of the old Gilley’s nightclub opened in Dallas in 2003. In recent years, Gilley moved to Branson.
He was married three times, most recently to Cindy Loeb Gilley. He had four children, three with his first wife, Geraldine Garrett, and one with his second, Vivian McDonald.
A Natchez, Mississippi, native, Gilley grew up poor, learning boogie-woogie piano in Ferriday, Louisiana, alongside Lewis and fellow cousin Jimmy Swaggart, the future evangelist. Like Lewis, he would sneak into the Louisiana clubs to listen to R&B music. He moved to Houston to work construction but played the local club scene at night and recorded and toured for years before catching on in the ’70s.
Gilley had suffered health problems in recent years. He underwent brain surgery in August 2008 after specialists diagnosed hydrocephalus, a condition characterized by an increase in fluid in the cranium. Gilley had been suffering from short-term memory loss and credited the surgery with halting the onset of dementia.
He underwent more surgery in 2009 after he fell off a step, forcing him to cancel scheduled performances in Branson. In 2018, he sustained a fractured ankle and fractured right shoulder in an automobile accident.
…
Rich Strike came off a blistering pace at odds of more than 80-1 to beat 19 blue-blooded opponents and produce one of the biggest upsets in history while capturing the 148th running of the Kentucky Derby on Saturday afternoon at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.
Rich Strike, who was only entered into the field on Friday when Ethereal Road was scratched, is trained by Eric Reed, and owned by RED TR-Racing. Sonny Leon, a journeyman jockey based in Ohio, rode Rich Strike and won his first Kentucky Derby in his first attempt.
Race-favorite Epicenter was second by a length, with Zandon third by another half-length.
Rich Strike had raced just seven times before the Derby, winning once and finishing third three times.
He found his way through the field after starting in the 21st and far outside post position and under the fastest opening quarter mile in race history.
Rich Strike was still far back under a very fast pace as the horses turned for home down the long Churchill Downs stretch but went to the rail to save ground. Leon moved out to get past a fading Messier and then returned to the rail to run down Epicenter and Zandon, who were eye to eye with the finish line in sight but could not hold off the winner.
The winner is the second longest shot to win the Derby after Donerail took the post at 91-1 odds to win the Run for the Roses in 1913.
…
In a bid to protect coastal communities from climate change and encourage investment, African nations are increasingly turning to mangrove restoration projects, with Mozambique becoming the latest addition to the growing list of countries with large scale mangrove initiatives.
Mozambique follows efforts across the continent — including in Kenya, Madagascar, Gambia and Senegal — and is touted as the world’s largest coastal or marine ecosystem carbon storage project. Known as blue carbon, carbon captured by these ecosystems can sequester, or remove, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at a faster rate than forests, despite being smaller in size.
Mozambique’s mangrove restoration project — announced in February alongside its UAE-based partner Blue Forest Solutions — hopes to turn 185,000 hectares (457,100 acres) in the central Zambezia and southern Sofala provinces into a forest which could capture up to 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide, according to project leaders.
“Blue carbon can be utilized not only to sequester tons of carbon dioxide but to also improve the lives of coastal communities,” Vahid Fotuhi, the Chief Executive officer of Blue Forest, told the Associated Press. “There are around one million hectares of mangroves forests in Africa. Collectively they’re able to sequester more carbon dioxide than the total annual emissions of a country like Croatia or Bolivia.” He added these projects would create green jobs and promote biodiversity.
Africa’s major mangrove forests have been decimated in recent decades due to logging, fish farming, coastal development, and pollution, leading to increased blue carbon emissions and greater exposure of vulnerable coastal communities to flooding and other threats to livelihood.
But the continent’s growing attention on mangrove restoration can be attributed in part to the successful Mikoko Pamoja project, initiated in 2013 in Kenya’s Gazi Bay, which protected 117 hectares (289 acres) of mangrove forest and replanted 4,000 trees annually, spurring other countries to also address their damaged coastal land and recreate its success.
Mikoko Pamoja, Swahili for ‘mangroves together’, centered its efforts around protecting the small communities in Gazi and Makongeni villages from coastal erosion, loss of fish and climate change. It was dubbed the “world’s first blue carbon project” and earned the community of just 6,000 global fame, accolades, carbon cash and greater living standards.
“Mikoko Pamoja has led to development of projects in the community, including installation of water,” Iddi Bomani, the village chairperson of the Gazi community, said. “Everyone has water available in their houses.”
“It especially leads to improved livelihoods through job creation when done by communities,” Laitani Suleiman, a committee member of the Mikoko Pamoja, added.
Several other projects have come to fruition since. In Senegal, 79 million replanted mangrove trees are projected to store 500,000 tons of carbon over the next 20 years. Neighboring Gambia launched its own reforestation effort in 2017, with Madagascar following suit with its own preservation project two years later. Egypt is planning its mangrove restoration project ahead of hosting the United Nations climate conference in November this year.
The projects have sparked a clamor for the sale of carbon credits, a type of permit that allows for a certain amount of emissions as remuneration for forest restoration or other carbon offset projects. Gabon was offered a recent pay package of $17 million through the Central African Forest Initiative due to its protection efforts, but complaints persist on the low prices offered to African governments.
“Africa remains excluded from a lot of financing available under climate change,” Jean Paul Adam, head of the climate division at the Economic Commission for Africa, said, adding that a lack of financing means nations on the continent are unable to build up their resilience to climate change.
He added that “nature-based solutions and advocating for a fair development price of carbon” would propel the African economy.
And the benefits of reforestation can be significant, according to Coral Reef Alliance’s Marissa Stein.
“Restoring and protecting our marine habitats plays a key role in maintaining the health of our planet,” she said, adding that mangroves alone store up to four times more carbon per hectare than tropical rainforests. The Global Mangroves Alliance also estimates that mangroves reduce damages and flood risk for 15 million people and can prevent over $65 billion of property damage each year.
…
Elvis Costello, Patti Smith and Mavis Staples will be among the dignitaries expected in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this weekend for the opening of the Bob Dylan Center, the museum and archive celebrating the Nobel laureate’s work.
Dylan himself won’t be among them, unless he surprises everyone.
The center’s subject and namesake has an open invitation to come anytime, although his absence seems perfectly in character, said Steven Jenkins, the center’s director. Oddly, Dylan was just in Tulsa three weeks ago for a date on his concert tour, sandwiched in between Oklahoma City and Little Rock, Arkansas. He didn’t ask for a look around.
“I don’t want to put words in his mouth,” Jenkins said. “I can only guess at his reasoning. Maybe he would find it embarrassing.”
It’s certainly unusual for a living figure — Dylan is due to turn 81 on May 24 — to have a museum devoted to him, but such is the shadow he has cast over popular music since his emergence in the early 1960s. He’s still working, performing onstage in a show devoted primarily to his most recent material.
And he’s still pushing the envelope. “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan’s nearly 17-minute rumination on the Kennedy assassination and celebrity, is as quietly stunning as “Like a Rolling Stone” was nearly a half-century ago, even if he’s no longer at the center of popular culture.
The center offers an immersive film experience, performance space, a studio where visitors can play producer and “mix” different elements of instrumentation in Dylan’s songs and a curated tour where people can take a musical journey through the stages of his career. The archive has more than 100,000 items, many accessed only by scholars through appointment.
Museum creators said they wanted to build an experience both for casual visitors who might not know much of Dylan’s work and for the truly fanatical — the skimmers, the swimmers and the divers, said designer Alan Maskin of the firm Olson Kundig.
The museum hopes to celebrate the creative process in general, and at opening will have an exhibit of the work of photographer Jerry Schatzberg, whose 1965 image of Dylan is emblazoned on the building’s three-story facade.
Since Dylan’s still creating, “we’re going to continue to play catch-up” with him, Jenkins said.
So for a figure who was born and raised in Minnesota, came of musical age in New York and now lives in California, how does a museum devoted to his life’s work end up in Oklahoma?
He’s never seemed the nostalgic type, but Dylan recognized early that his work could have historical interest and value, Jenkins said. Together with his team, he put aside boxes full of artifacts, including photos, rare recordings and handwritten lyrics that show how his songs went through revisions and rewrites.
With use of those lyrics, two of the early displays will focus on how the songs “Jokerman” and “Tangled Up in Blue” took shape — the latter with lyrics so elastic that Dylan was still changing verses after the song had been released.
Dylan sold his archive in 2016 to the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation, which also operates the Woody Guthrie Center — a museum that celebrates one of Dylan’s musical heroes and is only steps away from the new Dylan center.
Dylan likes the Guthrie museum, and also appreciates Tulsa’s rich holdings of Native American art, Jenkins said. Much of that is on display at another new facility, the Gilcrease Museum, which is also the world’s largest holding of art of the American West.
“I think it’s going to be a true tourist draw to Tulsa for all the right reasons,” said Tulsa Mayor G. T. Bynum. “This is one of the great musicians in the history of humankind and everyone who wants to study his career and see the evolution of his talent will be drawn to it.”
Bynum hopes that it also encourages others who may someday want to put their archives on display, and make Tulsa a center for the study of modern American music.
Dylan designed and built a 16-foot-high metal sculpture that will be displayed at the entrance to the museum. Otherwise, he had nothing to do with the museum’s design and declined, through a spokesman, to offer a comment about the opening.
“If Bob were telling us what we could or couldn’t do, it would have felt like a vanity project, in a way,” Maskin said. “It was a tremendous relief not to have to satisfy Bob Dylan.”
Still, it’s safe to assume the lines of communication are open if necessary: Jenkins, the center’s director, is the brother of Larry Jenkins, Dylan’s long-time media representative.
In addition to a dinner to celebrate the opening this weekend, Costello, Smith and Staples will all perform separate concerts at Cain’s Ballroom. Costello was asked to program a jukebox that will be on display at the museum and, within a day, submitted his suggestions for 160 Dylan songs and covers, Steven Jenkins said.
The Bob Dylan Center is open to the public on May 10.
Maskin has no expectation that Dylan will ever see the designer’s work. Still, he indulges himself in a fantasy of a slow summer day, a security guard dozing in the corner, and someone slipping in wearing black jeans, sunglasses and a familiar mop of hair to wander among the displays.
“To be honest, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he said. “I think he’s interested in the work he’s doing, and not the work he’s done.”
…
An Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe worth an estimated $200 million headlines this month’s spring sales in New York that collectors say are among the most anticipated ever.
Christie’s expects Warhol’s 1964 Shot Sage Blue Marilyn to become the priciest 20th century artwork when the auction house puts it under the hammer on Monday.
Not to be outdone, competitor Sotheby’s is offering $1 billion of modern and contemporary art, including the second helping of the famed Macklowe Collection, during its marquee week in May.
“The excitement is certainly unprecedented,” Joan Robledo-Palop, a collector and CEO of Zeit Contemporary Art in New York City, told AFP, about the buzz surrounding this season’s auctions.
The 100-centimeter by 100-centimeter silk-screen Warhol is part of a series of portraits the pop artist made of Monroe following her death from a drug overdose in August 1962.
They became known as the Shot series after a visitor to Warhol’s “Factory” studio in Manhattan fired a gun at them, piercing the portraits which were later repaired.
Alex Rotter, head of 20th and 21st century art at Christie’s, has called the portrait “the most significant 20th century painting to come to auction in a generation.”
The current most expensive 20th century auctioned work is Picasso’s Women of Algiers, which fetched $179.4 million in 2015.
The auction record for a Warhol is the $104.5 million paid for Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) in 2013.
Other highlights offered by Christie’s include Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict (1982), expected to go for more than $30 million, and Untitled (Shades of Red) by Mark Rothko, tipped to fetch up to $80 million.
The auction house is also offering three Claude Monet oil on canvases that are predicted to sell for upwards of $30 million each.
Rothko, Picasso, Richter
“Every couple of decades you have a sale where the quality is so high that you don’t see all of this at once normally. This season really grew into one of those unique moments,” Rotter told AFP.
After selling the first batch of works from the Macklowe Collection — the most expensive to hit the market at $600 million — last fall, Sotheby’s will auction the remaining 30 items when its sales open on May 16.
Highlights include Gerhard Richter’s 1975 Seascape, estimated at up to $35 million, and Rothko’s Untitled from 1960 that has a high-end pre-sale estimate of $50 million.
Sotheby’s said its modern evening auction of 19th and 20th century works, including by Pablo Picasso and Philip Guston, is its “most valuable” in the category in 15 years.
Picasso’s Femme nue couchée is appearing at auction for the first time, and Sotheby’s expects it to fetch more than $60 million. Other highlights include a Monet view of Venice tipped to fetch $50 million.
Brooke Lampley, head of sales for global fine art at Sotheby’s, said she expects records to be broken across categories.
“The art market is very strong. That’s why we see such an amazing array of works on offer this season,” she told AFP.
…
The U.N. Children’s Fund, UNICEF, reports the war in Ukraine is having a devastating impact on children, with tens of thousands requiring psychological and social care.
Millions of children in Ukraine have suffered from more than two months of relentless bombing and shelling, a lack of food, the inability to go to school, and the loss of other essential services.
This psychological trauma, says UNICEF, has created a child protection crisis of extraordinary proportions.
U.N. agencies report more than 6,800 civilian casualties, including more than 3,300 killed. Some 7.7 million people have been displaced inside Ukraine and more than 5.7 million others have sought refuge in neighboring countries, including nearly two-thirds of all children in Ukraine.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine February 24, more than 90,000 children were living in institutions, orphanages, boarding schools, and other care facilities—nearly half of them are children with disabilities.
Speaking from the western city of Lviv, Aaron Greenberg, UNICEF’s Regional Child Protection Adviser for Europe and Central Asia Region, said tens of thousands of these children have been returned to families. Unfortunately, he said, many children are not receiving the care and protection they require, especially children with disabilities.
“The war has impacted all children’s psychosocial well-being. All of them,” he said. “Children have been uprooted from their homes, separated from caregivers, and directly exposed to war. Children have been shaken by bomb explosions and the blaring sirens of missile alert systems…. And, most importantly, many children have witnessed or experienced physical and sexual violence.”
Greenberg said UNICEF and partners are working to help these traumatized children. Since the war started, he said more than 140,000 children and their caregivers have received mental health and psychosocial services. He said UNICEF currently has 56 mobile units operating across the country, including in the east where fighting is most intense.
“Over 7,000 women and children have been reached by violence prevention, risk mitigation and violence response services, including GBV, gender-based violence, including in the eastern areas of the country,” he said. “But it is not enough. And although we are all working in overdrive, I think we must be prepared with more specialized services for child survivors of physical and sexual violence.”
Greenberg noted that children with disabilities have suffered disproportionately in this war and must receive urgent support. He added that the government, UNICEF, and partners are scaling up more services to these very vulnerable children.
…
The third long-duration astronaut team launched by SpaceX to the International Space Station (ISS) safely returned to Earth early Friday, splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico off Florida to end months of orbital research ranging from space-grown chilies to robots.
The SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying three U.S. NASA astronauts and a European Space Agency (ESA) crewmate from Germany parachuted into calm seas in darkness at the conclusion of a 23-hour-plus autonomous flight home from the ISS.
The splashdown, at about 12:45 a.m. EDT (0445 GMT) was carried live by a joint NASA-SpaceX webcast.
The Endurance crew, which began its stay in orbit on Nov. 11, consisted of American spaceflight veteran Tom Marshburn, 61, and three first-time astronauts — NASA’s Raja Chari, 44, and Kayla Barron, 34, and their ESA colleague Matthias Maurer, 52.
Camera shots from inside the crew compartment showed the astronauts strapped into their seats, garbed in helmeted white-and-black spacesuits.
It took splashdown-response teams less an hour to reach the capsule bobbing in the water, hoist it onto the deck of a recovery vessel and open the hatch to let the astronauts out for their first breath of fresh air in nearly six months.
The return from orbit followed a fiery re-entry plunge through Earth’s atmosphere generating frictional heat that sent temperatures outside the capsule soaring to 1,930 degrees Celsius.
Two sets of parachutes billowed open above the capsule in the final stage of descent, slowing its fall to about 24 kph before the craft hit the water off the coast of Tampa, Florida.
Applause from the SpaceX flight control center in suburban Los Angeles was heard over the webcast, which showed infrared images of the capsule on its final descent.
The newly returned astronauts were officially designated as NASA’s “Commercial Crew 3,” the third full-fledged, long-duration team of four that SpaceX has flown to the space station under contract for the U.S. space agency.
SpaceX, founded in 2002 by Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of electric carmaker Tesla Inc. who recently clinched a deal to buy Twitter, supplies the Falcon 9 rockets and Crew Dragon capsules now flying NASA astronauts to orbit from U.S. soil.
The company also controls those flights and handles the splashdown recoveries, while NASA furnishes the crews and launch facilities at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and manages U.S. space station operations.
Microgravity cotton & combustion
California-based SpaceX has launched seven human spaceflights in all over the past two years — five for NASA and two for private ventures — as well as dozens of cargo and satellite payload missions since 2012.
Crew 3 returned to Earth with some 250 kilograms of cargo, including loads of ISS research samples.
Aside from carrying out routine maintenance while in orbit some 400 kilometers above Earth, the astronauts contributed to hundreds of science experiments and technology demonstrations.
Highlights included studies of the genetic expression in cotton cells cultured in space, gaseous flame combustion in microgravity and the DNA sequences of bacteria inside the station. Crew members also tested new robot devices, harvested chili peppers grown in orbit and conducted experiments in space physics and materials science.
Barron and Chari performed a spacewalk to prepare the station for another in a series of new lightweight roll-out solar arrays, to be used eventually on the planned Gateway outpost that will orbit the moon.
Crew 3’s return comes about a week after they welcomed their replacement team, Crew 4, aboard the space station. One of the three Russian cosmonauts also now inhabiting the station, Oleg Artemyev, assumed command of the ISS from Marshburn in a handover before Endurance departed early Thursday.
…
With the coronavirus killing an estimated 15 million people worldwide, including nearly 1 million in the United States, the Biden administration, despite a lack of funding for domestic and international pandemic response, is set to mobilize a global effort to end the acute phase of COVID-19.
The move comes as the World Health Organization announced that the COVID-19 pandemic directly or indirectly caused 14.9 million deaths worldwide from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2021.
The U.S. will co-host the second Global COVID-19 Summit on May 12, following the first in September 2021. The virtual summit will mark a shift from a crisis management strategy to the more sustainable approach of building resilient public health systems.
“The virus — after omicron particularly — has shown us that we have to evolve our strategy,” a senior administration official told VOA. The goal, the official said, is to reduce transmission, deaths and hospitalizations rather than eradicate the virus.
The summit will focus on “supporting locally led solutions” toward global goals, which include getting shots into arms, enhancing access to tests and treatments, and generating sustainable financing for future pandemic preparedness.
“We cannot have just one solution, which might fit all of these different situations,” Dr. Thierno Baldé of the World Health Organization’s Africa regional office told VOA. “The reality is to try to understand that, and therefore to have the most appropriate solution constructed commonly, with different countries, with different partners.”
To galvanize international support, the U.S. will co-host the event together with CARICOM (Caribbean Community) chair Belize; Group of Seven president Germany; Group of 20 President Indonesia, and African Union chair Senegal.
No pandemic funding
The U.S., however, will bring no new pledges to the summit table. The administration’s request for $22.5 billion in additional COVID-19 response money, including $5 billion for global pandemic funding, has been stuck for weeks largely because of Republican lawmakers who insist they won’t pass it unless the administration brings back Title 42. The Trump-era order allows authorities at the Mexican border to turn away migrants during a pandemic emergency.
The lack of funding jeopardizes the administration’s global pandemic response, including Global Vax, an international initiative launched in December to turn vaccines into vaccinations in 11 African countries, and which is set to run out of money in September. It could also undermine the administration’s ability to galvanize other countries’ commitments, particularly at an event that has been designed with a “step up to speak up” approach, meaning that countries can secure a speaking role only if they bring either financial pledges or policy commitments to support summit goals.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki told VOA the summit would highlight to Congress the need for more funding so that the U.S. “can continue to be the arsenal of vaccines for the world.” She noted that even without the additional funding, the U.S. remains the largest contributor to the global fight against the pandemic.
Lack of global coordination
The first two years of the pandemic were marked by rich countries stockpiling more doses than they needed for boosters and protection against new variants, which threatened supplies to lower-income countries, where vaccination rates were low.
Now, with 2 billion doses of vaccine being produced each month, the problem is not a lack of supply but slowing demand and poor delivery capacity — problems that activists argue also stem from lack of coordination.
“If we’d had a coordinated global plan to end the pandemic, we wouldn’t now be in the situation where there’s quite a lot of vaccine doses but not enough money to actually distribute them in countries that need them,” Tom Hart told VOA. Hart is president of the ONE Campaign, an advocacy organization that fights preventable disease.
Beyond vaccines, the summit will also seek to improve access to testing and treatment, including by scaling up production and diversifying local and regional manufacturing capacity. Current efforts to achieve that include technology transfer agreements and the so-called TRIPS (Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) waiver proposal by South Africa and India at the World Trade Organization that called for intellectual property waivers on COVID-19 therapeutics and diagnostics. While the proposal is supported by more than 100 member countries, negotiations have been gridlocked for months.
Test to treat
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has recently rolled out a national “test to treat” program that tests people for COVID-19 and immediately treats them with the Pfizer antiviral drug Paxlovid if results are positive. It now aims to introduce similar pilot projects in other countries.
“The exact model may be different because the health systems are different,” the administration official said, noting that additional hurdles need to be addressed, including securing supplies of the generic drugs nirmatrelvir and ritonavir, which make up Paxlovid — a drug that is prohibitively expensive for lower- to middle-income countries.
Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, told VOA that it would be up to Pfizer, Merck and other companies that already have antivirals on the market to work with countries and existing multilateral systems to get these “test to treat” pilot projects in place so when the money and the supply ramp up, countries can scale up quickly.
In March, the Medicines Patent Pool, a United Nations-backed organization, signed agreements with 35 manufacturers in 12 countries to produce nirmatrelvir and ritonavir, but these are unlikely to be on the market until 2023. Udayakumar said the U.S. was working to make an affordable generic version of Paxlovid available within several months.
The Global COVID-19 Summit aims to secure pledges to help close the gap of about $15 billion in funding that the WHO says the world needs. While those pledges will be made, advocates are pessimistic.
“It’s not clear whether that’s being coordinated, whether one country or one region will have more than it needs and another region will go without,” Hart said. “That’s the problem with no coordination and no global plan.”
…
There is renewed interest nuclear energy in Europe driven in part by climate goals but also the war in Ukraine – especially as the European Union moves to cut all energy ties with Russia. But tapping nuclear power remains expensive, time consuming and deeply controversial. For VOA, Lisa Bryant takes a look at the debate from Paris. Camera: Lisa Bryant
…
It took two trips over state lines, navigating icy roads and a patchwork of state laws, for a 32-year-old South Dakota woman to get abortion pills last year.
For abortion-seekers like her, such journeys, along with pills sent through the mail, will grow in importance if the Supreme Court follows through with its leaked draft opinion that would overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision and allow individual states to ban the procedure.
The woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she was concerned for her family’s safety, said the abortion pills allowed her to end an unexpected and high-risk pregnancy and remain devoted to her two children.
But anti-abortion activists and politicians say those cross-border trips, remote doctors’ consultations and pill deliveries are what they will try to stop next.
“Medication abortion will be where access to abortion is decided,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at Florida State University College of Law who specializes in reproductive rights. “That’s going to be the battleground that decides how enforceable abortion bans are.”
Use of abortion pills has been rising in the U.S. since 2000 when the Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone — the main drug used in medication abortions. More than half of U.S. abortions are now done with pills, rather than surgery, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.
Two drugs are required. The first, mifepristone, blocks a hormone needed to maintain a pregnancy. A second drug, misoprostol, taken one to two days later, empties the uterus. Both drugs are available as generics and are also used to treat other conditions.
The FDA last year lifted a long-standing requirement that women pick up abortion pills in person. Federal regulations now also allow mail delivery nationwide. Even so, 19 states have passed laws requiring a medical clinician to be physically present when abortion pills are administered to a patient.
South Dakota is among them, joining several states, including Texas, Kentucky, Arkansas, Ohio, Tennessee and Oklahoma, where Republicans have moved to further restrict access to abortion pills in recent months.
Those moves have spurred online services that offer information on getting abortion pills and consultations to get a prescription. After the woman in South Dakota found that the state’s only abortion clinic could not schedule her in time for a medication abortion, she found an online service, called Just The Pill, that advised her to drive to Minnesota for a phone consultation with a doctor. A week later, she came back to Minnesota for the pills.
She took the first one almost immediately in her car, then cried as she drove home.
“I felt like I lost a pregnancy,” she said. “I love my husband and I love my children and I knew exactly what I had to say goodbye to and that was a really horrible thing to have to do.”
Besides crossing state lines, women can also turn to international online pharmacies, said Greer Donley, a professor specializing in reproductive health care at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. Some women also are having prescribed pills forwarded through states without restrictions.
“It allows for someone to have an abortion without a direct role of a provider. It’s going to be much harder for states to control abortion access,” she said, adding, “The question is how is it going to be enforced?”
Abortion law experts say it’s an unsettled question whether states can restrict access to abortion pills in the wake of the FDA’s decision.
“The general rule is that federal law preempts conflicting state law,” said Laura Hermer, a professor at the Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota. “There is no question that the FDA has proper authority to regulate the drugs used in medication abortions. The question is whether a state can make a viable, winning argument that, for public health purposes, it needs to further regulate access to the relevant medications.”
Hermer said she doesn’t think there is a valid public health reason because the published evidence is that the drugs are “exceptionally safe.” But if the Supreme Court overrules Roe v. Wade and a state gives embryos and fetuses full rights as people “then all bets would be off.”
The Planned Parenthood regional organization that includes South Dakota doesn’t believe it can legally mail abortion pills to patients there.
Telemedicine providers have to abide by the laws of the state where the patient is, said Dr. Sarah Traxler, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood North Central States in St. Paul. She acknowledged that some organizations disagree.
“But,” she added, “we don’t feel like we have liberty to mail pills from Minnesota to other places in the country where it’s illegal to provide medication abortion.”
Sue Leibel, the state policy director for Susan B. Anthony List, a prominent organization opposed to abortion, acknowledged that medication abortions have “crept up” on Republican state lawmakers.
“This is a new frontier and states are grappling with enforcement mechanisms,” she said, adding, “The advice that I always give — if you shut the front door, the pills are going to come in the back door.”
Leibel maintained women should not be prosecuted for seeking abortions, keeping with a long-standing principle of many abortion opponents. She suggested the next target for state enforcement should be the pharmacies, organizations and clinics that provide the abortion pills. She also said abortion-rights opponents should focus on electing a presidential candidate who would work to reverse the FDA’s decision.
The FDA said a scientific review supported broadening access to the drugs and found complications were rare. The agency has reported 26 deaths associated with the drug since 2000, though not all of those can be directly attributed to the medication because of existing health conditions and other factors.
However, with new legal battles on the horizon and abortion seekers going to greater lengths to obtain the procedure, Donley, the law school professor, worried that state lawmakers will turn their attention toward the women who get the pills.
Indeed, a Louisiana House committee advanced a bill Wednesday that would make abortion a crime of homicide for which a woman ending her pregnancy could be charged, along with anyone helping her.
“Many anti-abortion legislators might realize the only way to enforce these laws is to prosecute the pregnant person themselves,” Donley said.
…
Billionaire Elon Musk has strengthened the equity stake of his offer to buy Twitter with commitments of more than $7 billion from a range of investors, including Silicon Valley heavy hitters like Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.
Other investors include Sequoia Capital Fund, which pledged $800 million, and VyCapital, which pledged $700 million, according to a Thursday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. But Ellison, who is also a and Tesla board member, is making the biggest contribution, pegged at $1 billion.
Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud has pledged 35 million in Twitter shares in support of Musk, according to the filing.
Musk in earlier regulatory filings revealed that he has sold roughly $8.5 billion worth of shares in Tesla to help fund the purchase. Musk later tweeted that he doesn’t plan any further sales of the company’s shares, meaning he would need outside commitments to help fund the $44 billion deal.
Because of the new funding listed in the SEC filing Thursday, Musk will cut the $12.5 billion in margin loans he was leaning on in half, to $6.25 billion. The transaction is also now being funded by $27.25 billion in cash and equities, up from $21 billion.
The Thursday filing also said that Musk is in ongoing talks with other parties including former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who is the second largest individual stakeholder in the company after Musk.
“This was a smart financial and strategic move by Musk that will be well received across the board and also shows the Twitter deal is now on a glide path to get done by the end of this year,” wrote analyst Dan Ives who follows Twitter for Wedbush.
Shares of Twitter Inc. have remained below the per-share offering bid by Musk of $54.20 because there are still doubts on Wall Street about whether the deal will go through.
Shares of the San Francisco social media platform rose 2% before the opening bell, to $50.10.
…
China is stepping up censorship of U.S. films as producers make movies with an eye toward pleasing Beijing yet without isolating the global audience, industry insiders say.
The roughly 25-year-old practice of cutting scenes that don’t conform to Communist Party ideals from Hollywood movies has expanded.
“Now it’s kind of escalated in the sense that they’re much more direct in banning films outright rather than just tampering or asking for scenes to be removed,” said Stanley Rosen, a University of Southern California political science professor who follows China’s film industry.
Industry observers say censors are also asking that versions of movies for audiences outside China follow Beijing’s script.
Hollywood movies, Chinese censors
It is unlikely that censors will allow the 2022 Marvel Studios movie “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” to be shown in China. The state-affiliated Global Times tabloid published a scathing op-ed on the film Sunday, saying that it contains nods to Falun Gong, a spiritual movement Beijing has banned and labeled as a cult. According to the op-ed, a news rack for The Epoch Times, a publication the writer calls “the mouthpiece of the Falun Gong,” appears in the frame as Doctor Strange battles a tentacled monster.
Liu Pengyu, spokesperson of the Chinese embassy in Washington, said, “As a country under the rule of law, China regulates the film industry in accordance with the Film Administration regulations.” Liu, however, did not describe the process in detail.
Marvel Studios did not reply to VOA’s questions about “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”
The China Film Administration, an oversight body for the $7.4 billion market, banned Marvel Studios’ 2021 superhero films “Eternals” and “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” which were released last year.
The 2021 superhero film “Spider-Man: No Way Home” missed Chinese approval because authorities wanted Sony Pictures to remove images of the Statue of Liberty from the film, several news outlets reported.
The 2015 sci-fi movie “Pixels” made it into China after removing a scene of aliens blasting a hole into the Great Wall, news reports said at the time.
“As the dragon gets bigger, its leverage gets bigger, and no one’s pushed back yet,” said Chris Fenton, Hollywood executive and lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
An increase in Sino-U.S. tensions since the administration of former U.S. president Donald Trump may have exacerbated China’s treatment of American movies, said James Tager, research director at the free-speech advocacy group PEN America in New York.
Film studios stuck in the middle
Film studios have been operating under the pressure of satisfying censors in China — a massive market in normal times, when cinemas are not closed because of COVID-19 — while appearing before American audiences and legislators as supporters of artistic freedom, Tager said.
Hollywood doesn’t want a “pinball”— a situation in which both U.S. and Chinese officials take aim at the film industry, he said.
Hollywood companies are pre-censoring films to avoid losing access to China’s lucrative box office market, PEN America said in a 2020 report.
Refusal of a Chinese order to cut a scene would risk the studio’s future business in China, such as the next Disney or Marvel film or other assets, Tager said. Walt Disney Co., for example, has a 47% stake in Shanghai Disneyland, according to the PEN America report.
“You may get a reputation as someone who doesn’t play ball, which could have even further knock-on effects, possibly for other films or possibly for other business relationships that large studios have in China,” he said.
Self-censorship is getting worse, Fenton said. Some studios even worry that China will punish them for leaving objectionable scenes in film versions for audiences outside China.
“To me, the bigger issue is when China tells us we can’t have stuff in movies for other markets,” Fenton said. “That’s where we’re suddenly allowing them to spread their narrative rather than the narrative of the filmmakers or the studio or of Hollywood — or the U.S. or the Western side of things. Who gives them that right to tell us we can’t have that in a movie that someone in Argentina sees?”
China wants its view of the world to resonate worldwide, said James Gomez, regional director of the Asia Centre, a Bangkok-based think tank.
“It’s competing powers, it’s competing narratives,” he said. “It’s a different world view, and China wants to be able to shape the world view.”
Objections to Chinese-tailored films
The Philippines pushed back against studios’ attempt to woo China in the case of the 2022 American action movie “Uncharted.” The Southeast Asian country’s cinemas yanked the movie at the request of the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs. The department objected to a scene that showed Beijing’s nine-dash line claim to the South China Sea, which Manila vigorously disputes. The nine dashes demarcate China’s claim to about 90% of the sea.
Manila moved earlier to block the showing of “Abominable,” a 2019 animated collaboration between a U.S. and a Chinese production company, because the same nine-dash line was shown in the cartoon.
Some studios may eventually forego the China market to be seen elsewhere as “celebrating artistic freedom elsewhere on the globe,” Tager said.
Hollywood is slowly factoring in the “arbitrary” demands from China, Rosen said. One thing it has learned, he said, is to avoid making Chinese-themed films such as “Shang-Chi” because those can be better done in China.
…
The shirt worn by Diego Maradona when he scored the controversial “Hand of God” goal against England in the 1986 World Cup has sold for $9.3 million (7.1 million pounds), the highest price ever paid at auction for a piece of sports memorabilia.
Auctioneer Sotheby’s sold the shirt in an online auction that closed Wednesday. It did not identify the buyer.
Maradona scored two goals during the quarterfinal game in Mexico City on June 22, 1986, just four years after Britain and Argentina had fought a war over the Falkland Islands. The Argentine great’s first goal was ruled a header, but the ball had bounced off Maradona’s fist, out of sight of the referee.
Maradona said afterward that it had been scored “a little with the head of Maradona, and a little with the hand of God.”
Maradona’s second goal saw him dribble the ball past almost the entire English team before beating goalkeeper Peter Shilton. In 2002, it was voted “goal of the century” in a FIFA poll.
Argentina won the game 2-1 and went on to win the World Cup.
After the game. Maradona swapped shirts with England midfielder Steve Hodge, who loaned it long-term to England’s National Football Museum in Manchester before putting it up for sale.
Maradona, considered by many to be the greatest player of all time, struggled with cocaine abuse and other excesses and died in November 2020 at age 60.
After Sotheby’s announced the coming sale last month, relatives of Maradona expressed doubt the blue No. 10 jersey was the shirt the soccer star had worn in the second half of the game, when he scored both goals. The auction house said the shirt’s identity was confirmed by sports memorabilia photo-matching firm Resolution Photomatching and confirmed by Sotheby’s chief science officer.
Brahm Wachter, Sotheby’s head of streetwear and modern collectibles, said the shirt was “a tangible reminder of an important moment not only in the history of sports, but in the history of the 20th century.”
The previous record for sports memorabilia was $8.8 million paid at a December 2019 auction for the manifesto that launched the modern Olympic movement. The previous record for a piece of sportswear was $5.64 million for a Babe Ruth New York Yankees jersey in 2019.
The sale prices include an auction house charge known as the buyer’s premium.
…
The Global Network, an alliance of humanitarian and developmental agencies, says around 193 million people globally experienced extreme hunger last year, with more than half a million on the brink of famine in Ethiopia, southern Madagascar, South Sudan, and Yemen.
The network, which includes the European Union, U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, and World Food Program, is calling for action to tackle the life-threatening crisis.
Authors of the report warn the crisis is set to worsen this year. They say the key drivers of food insecurity — conflict, climate change, and the COVID-19 pandemic — are pushing increasing numbers of people into poverty.
The executive director of the World Food Program, David Beasley, calls it a perfect storm. He says whatever progress has been made in feeding the destitute is being lost because of Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and now Ukraine.
“As we look around the world, 276 million people marching towards starvation,” he said. “And now we have got the breadbasket of the world being turned into breadlines. Who would have ever thought that we would see this in our time, our lifetime. Mass migration taking place out of Ukraine. And it is going to devastate the food security situation around the world.”
He notes Ukraine and Russia together produce 30 percent of the world’s wheat, 20 percent of the world’s maize, and up to 80 percent of sunflower seed oil. He says those supplies are not moving out of Ukraine because Russia has blockaded Black Sea ports.
“If we do not get ahead of this thing, we will have not just famine in multiple countries around the world because, you know, we got additional droughts and all types of issues. But you will have destabilization of some nations and you will have mass migration by necessity. And no one wants that,” Beasley said.
UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell warns the global food crisis threatens child survival and development.
“By stark contrast, inadequate nutrition is the leading cause of child mortality,” she said. “In fact, nearly half of all deaths of children under five are attributable to undernutrition. … We now estimate that by the end of 2021, 50 million children were suffering from wasting, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition. We expect this number is now higher.”
The Global Network is calling for coordinated, collective action to address the food and nutrition crisis. It says emergency funding is needed now to pull starving people back from the brink, and longer-term action is crucial to create more sustainable agri-food systems.
Eminem, Lionel Richie, Carly Simon, Eurythmics, Duran Duran and Pat Benatar have been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, a list that also includes Dolly Parton, who initially resisted the honor.
The honorees — voted on by more than 1,000 artists, historians and music industry professionals — “each had a profound impact on the sound of youth culture and helped change the course of rock ‘n’ roll,” said John Sykes, the chairman of the Rock Hall, in a statement Wednesday.
Parton had gone on social media to “respectfully bow out” of the process, saying she did not want to take votes away from the remaining nominees and had not “earned that right.” The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Foundation responded by saying ballots had already been sent and it was up to the voters to decide if Parton was elected. Parton later said she would accept an induction.
To be eligible, artists are required to have released their first record 25 years prior to induction. Parton, Richie, Simon and Duran Duran were selected on their first go-round. Simon was a first-time nominee this year more than 25 years after becoming eligible. Eminem becomes the 10th hip-hop act to be inducted, making the cut on his first ballot.
The hall also announced Wednesday that Judas Priest and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis are getting the award for musical excellence and that Harry Belafonte and Elizabeth Cotten will be honored with the Early Influence Award.
Other artists and groups that failed this year for induction in the performer category are A Tribe Called Quest, Rage Against the Machine, Dionne Warwick, Carly Simon, Beck, Kate Bush, DEVO, Fela Kuti, MC5 and the New York Dolls.
Parton is most associated with country music and is in the Country Hall of Fame, but she has performed songs with a rock feel. Artists who have made both the Rock Hall and Country Hall of Fame include Brenda Lee, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Chet Atkins, Hank Williams and the Everly Brothers.
The induction ceremony will be held Nov. 5 at the Microsoft Theater in Los Angeles.
…
U.S. comedian Dave Chappelle was attacked on stage on Tuesday night at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles by an assailant who rugby-tackled him before being apprehended and arrested, video footage verified by Reuters showed.
The attack came just over a month after actor Will Smith slapped comedian Chris Rock on stage at the Oscars, an unprecedented incident at the globally televised event that prompted concerns that performers might be subject to copycat assaults.
Smith, who won the best actor award, was subsequently banned from attending the Oscars for 10 years.
It was not immediately clear if Chappelle was injured in Tuesday’s attack, or what motivated it.
An agent and public relations representative for Chappelle were not immediately available for comment. A representative for the Hollywood Bowl told Reuters the incident was under investigation, declining to comment further.
According to an ABC report, Rock, who had performed earlier in the evening, joined Chappelle on stage moments after it took place and joked: “Was that Will Smith?”
Chappelle and Rock were giving shows as part of an 11-day comedy festival called “Netflix is a Joke.”
Los Angeles police took a male suspect into custody who NBC Los Angeles said was armed with a replica gun capable of ejecting a knife blade.
Video footage obtained by Reuters showed the suspect on a stretcher being placed into an ambulance. He was taken to hospital with minor injuries, NBC Los Angeles cited police as saying.
Los Angeles Police Department officials did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Chappelle’s Netflix comedy special “The Closer” was criticized last year by some who saw it as ridiculing transgender people. Supporters of the comedian viewed it as a cry against cancel culture.
Brianna Sacks, a journalist for BuzzFeed News who attended h event, said the altercation took place as Chappelle ended his performance.
…
South African health officials are urging COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer Aspen to keep its plant in the Eastern Cape province open. This follows a Reuters article quoting Aspen’s senior director saying they may have to shut down as there have been no orders for their rebranded COVID vaccine.
A South African-owned subsidiary of pharmaceutical giant Aspen struck a deal with American company Johnson & Johnson in March to package, price, sell and distribute its vaccine in Africa.
This vaccine was rebranded as Aspenovax.
The move was hailed by many as there had been much concern about Africa’s reliance on imported vaccines which were often costly and at times in short supply.
But there have been no orders for Aspenovax. South Africa’s National Health Department Spokesperson Foster Mohale said the lack of orders is due to low vaccination rates not only at home, but globally.
“Vaccine hesitancy is one of the factors which contribute to these low vaccination rates or demand for more vaccines which also affect the production. Because obviously we understand that they are in a business, they can’t keep on producing vaccines when they know that the demand for vaccines is very low. So, we understand the situation where they are, and we sympathize with them,” he said.
Mohale said for now, South Africa has enough vaccines. He adds that in March, 100,000 vaccines expired. And more are due to expire in June and July.
However, he said that Aspen’s vaccine plant is important because no one knows what the future holds.
“We will try to engage them not to rush their decision precisely because we anticipate especially our scientists, our epidemiologists, we anticipate that the fifth wave might hit the country, South Africa, during the winter season which is a few weeks away from now. As you can see the number of daily COVID-19 patients has been rising for the past seven days,” he said.
Professor Petro Terblanche, who is the managing director of South African company, Afrigen, which in a continent-first made an mRNA COVID vaccine using Moderna’s data — said the situation at Aspen is a tragedy for the industry.
“This is just indicating again how important it is that this continent looks at policy reform. This is about how are we going to make sure that we give preferential procurement to local companies. How are we going to make sure that we create a marketplace and eco-system that will absorb local capacity? Otherwise, we will not have capacity locally in a sustainable manner and we’re going to get the next pandemic and we will be unprepared, and we will not have health security,” said Terblanche.
She believes money should also be put into educating people on the importance of vaccines.
“We need to ensure that we also put effort into advocacy for vaccination. Because we now have 17% of the continent that is vaccinated. We need to get them to at least 40% to ensure that we fully arrest this pandemic,” she said.
Mohale was unable to say when the Health Department would be meeting with Aspen’s executives.
…
Cars stuck on the assembly line. Delays in the delivery of dishwashers, refrigerators and game consoles. Consumers and businesses are feeling the pinch of the semiconductor shortage. The war in Ukraine could make the situation worse. Michelle Quinn reports.
…