At the recent Games for Change festival in New York City, the video games on display were a far cry from Mario Brothers and Call of Duty. Instead, game developers showed off titles that tackled civic and social issues. VOA reporter Tina Trinh explores.
((mandatory CG: GamBridzy))
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In a vast network of tunnels carved into the rocks under the Maltese capital Valletta, faded maps of the Mediterranean hint at the place’s role in directing key battles in World War II.
Malta is now restoring the 28,000 square meters (300,000 square feet) of tunnels, planning to open a huge section to the public.
The compound, hidden under the picturesque port city perched on cliffs above the sea, was built by the British and served as the staging ground for major naval operations. The British military withdrew in 1979 and the compound was abandoned for almost 40 years.
German and Italian forces bombarded Malta intensively between 1940 and 1942 to try gain control of the Mediterranean, but did not manage to force the British out. During the Cold War, the tunnels were used to track Soviet submarines.
Over the years, water and humidity have let rust and mold spread. Some rooms have been vandalized, but traces of the military apparatus that once occupied the complex still remain.
Military cot beds, tangled cables and dust-covered rotary phones litter the rooms.
The Malta Heritage Trust, a non-governmental preservation group, began the multi-million-dollar restoration of the site in 2009.
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You’re in Nepal.
A 7.8 magnitude earthquake has just struck your village and you must rescue the survivors.
This is “After Days,” a video game based on the real-life Nepal earthquake that killed almost 9,000 people in 2015.
Minseok Do was showing the game at the recent Games for Change festival in New York City. The games on display were a far cry from “Mario Brothers” and “Call of Duty.” These developers featured titles that tackled civic and social issues.
Public consciousness about civic and social issues has long been raised by the news and entertainment industries in the United States and other parts of the world, and now video game creators are making their own statements and hoping to reach the younger digital generation in the process.
In “After Days,” players take on the role of Ahsha, a young Nepalese woman who attempts to rescue her neighbors in the aftermath of the massive earthquake.
“Other media, such as novels and movies, require consumers to use their imagination to understand characters’ emotions,” said Do, CEO of GamBridzy. “Games have players be in characters’ shoes by letting them command and control. It is in my opinion the most powerful platform.”
In the game, players carry out various missions like transporting injured victims in stretchers and coordinating with rescue teams to restore critical infrastructure.
The first episode is set in Sindhupalchok, one of the hardest-hit districts of the earthquake in Nepal.
“Some say it will take about 10 years to complete all the restoration, but international attention is not focused on this, and it is important that we show our interest and support,” said Do. Twenty percent of proceeds from game sales will go toward rebuilding efforts.
Elin Festøy, a producer from Norway, also was in New York to promote her game.
“We really wanted to create attention and awareness around children born of war … children being born of the most hated soldiers in the world,” said Festøy.
She and her team created “My Child Lebensborn,” a mobile game in which players are the caretakers of World War Two-era children from the Lebensborn project, an attempt by the Nazi regime to create an Aryan “master race.”
Lebensborn involved child kidnappings as well as anonymous births by unwed mothers in and outside of Germany, with their offspring adopted by German families. After the war, many Lebensborn children faced prejudice and discrimination, even from their own mothers.
“It’s about being able to see children as children and not as symbols of [the] enemy,” said Festøy.
“My Child Lebensborn” is targeted at players aged 13 and up. Recognizing that 13-year-olds might not exactly run to play the game, one of the team’s goals includes creating a bundle for schools that includes both the game and an accompanying film on the Lebensborn project.
Video games at the Games for Change festival didn’t shy away from difficult or touchy topics. Indeed, they were a vehicle for discussion and dialogue.
“The problem in a lot of developing countries is that people do not talk about issues. People do not want to share their problems out of embarrassment,” said Dr. Ilmana Fasih, a director at ZMQ.
The New Delhi-based consulting company developed “YourStoryTeller,” a mobile app that is less video game than a digital narrative.
User-contributed stories are transformed into comic strips. Each week, a new story addresses women’s issues in India, a country where patriarchal attitudes are common.
In one example, a young woman’s studies are disrupted for an arranged marriage that takes her from India to Canada, where she is physically abused by her new husband.
Fasih acknowledged the stories are definitely not of the Disney fairytale variety, and they definitely have a point of view.
“Kids grow up watching those stories. We want kids to grow up watching these stories where there are struggles,” said Fasih. “A young boy is able to understand what are the struggles that his mom, his sisters go through. That is probably one of the best ways to defeat patriarchy.”
A voice in your ear at the touch of a hand?
The Orii ring allows people to take phone calls, handle text messages and interact with a phone’s digital assistant, all by transferring sound to a user’s ear through bone conduction.
The ring, designed by Hong Kong-based start-up Origami Labs, was inspired by Peter Wong, the visually impaired father of the firm’s co-founder Kevin Wong.
“As a visual-impaired person, I rely on the software on the smartphone to read the icons, the texts to me,” said Peter Wong, who is a technical adviser for the ring.
A key feature ensures that only the user can hear the information conveyed by the ring.
“Can you imagine it reading out your password? That’s inconvenient and inappropriate,” Peter Wong said.
What began as a Kickstarter project has become the latest example of wearable, screen-free technology.
“We want to keep our heads up, we want to be able to stay more in the moment,” said Kevin Wong, 29, who set up Origami Labs in November 2015 with three friends from university.
The tech wearable market grew 51 percent in Asia last year, according to consumer research firm GfK. The overall industry is expected to be worth $34 billion globally by 2020, research provider CCS Insight has said.
The Orii ring is expected to reach the commercial market by February.
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The music video for the No. 1 hit song Despacito has a new record — it’s become the most popular clip on YouTube of all-time with more than 3 billion views.
YouTube announced Friday that Luis Fonsi’s ubiquitous song with Daddy Yankee has surpassed previous record holder See You Again, the song by Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth from the Furious 7 soundtrack.
Despacito became an international smash hit this year, topping the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The record-breaking video does not include the popular remix with Justin Bieber; that version has been viewed more than 464 million times.
The video is also the most liked video on YouTube.
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There are smart phones, smart light bulbs, and now smart shoes. A Japanese engineer has created LED footwear that become glowing computer displays. And even though there are other shoes on the market that glow, these shoes step it up a notch, as we hear from VOA’s Deborah Block.
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Kenya’s Elections Observation Group (ELOG) plans to deploy about 5,000 observers to monitor Tuesday’s vote. ELOG also will use Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) to monitor the presidential election.
The Elections Observations Group, (ELOG) which is made up of civil society and faith-based organizations, met Saturday in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, and said it will deploy about 5,700 election observers. Of those, approximately 1,700 observers also will monitor the elections using Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT).
Simon Wanjiru, the PVT Manager at ELOG, says the group is non-partisan, so its election observers will give independent and authentic results. ELOG began monitoring elections in Kenya in 2010.
Wanjiru adds that the system will be used as a monitoring mechanism to flag irregularities.
“We want to increase the confidence of the public in the elections and also we want to remove any uncertainties on the people, and they need to believe that now the systems have been done right and we will be able to show if they have been done correctly by the commission,” he said.
ELOG officials say PVT works in five steps. In the first stage, observers go to polling stations and verify whether they have network coverage. Once this is verified the second step entails the observer filling out a simulation form and sending it to the data center. This ensures the observer understands the process of reporting via text message or SMS.
The third step involves the message check, where the data base receives the texts and checks for any errors in answering. The fourth step involves the data reporters contacting observers who have not yet reported, and troubleshoots. The fifth and final step includes a data-quality check where errors and inconsistencies are flagged by the database automatically.
Wanjiru says the monitoring group will abide by constitutional mechanisms in a scenario where results are withheld.
“It’s only the IEBC, [Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission], which is mandated to release the results, but for ELOG we only do the verification so we cannot verify before they have released,” he said. “Remember the constitution says the IEBC has to release the results in seven days. In case it goes beyond seven days, we don’t just say we are going to release but we will compel, we have a court. And we can use the other CSOs [Civil Society Organizations], who can now help beef up and compel the IEBC to have the results out then we can verify.”
Joyce Majiwa, of the Institute for Education in Democracy, (IED) spoke to VOA on the sidelines of the press conference.
According to Majiwa the IED seeks to nurture democracy and good governance in Kenya and Africa. She further notes that the key areas in Tuesday’s polls include electoral rules violations, among others. Majiwa adds that the monitoring will improve systems for future elections.
“We will make recommendations for future preparedness, we can make recommendations if there are violent areas especially women and girls. We can make recommendations for prosecution. We will have to follow up whether prosecutions are happening, and we will make recommendations to political parties as well.”
In 2013, ELOG monitored the elections in Kenya and projected President Uhuru Kenyatta’s victory at 49.7 percent, while the official figures from IEBC stood at 50.07 percent.
Kenya is scheduled to vote August 8.
The Western state of Utah is home to stunning red rock formations shaped by geological forces over millions of years. Some of the most beautiful are at five of the state’s most popular national park sites, known as “The Mighty 5.” At Arches National Park alone, there are more than 2,000 natural sandstone arches, making up the world’s largest collection. National parks traveler Mikah Meyer shared highlights of his visit to Arches, and two other Mighty 5 sites, with VOA’s Julie Taboh.
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The U.S. Army has ordered its members to stop using drones made by Chinese manufacturer SZ DJI Technology Co Ltd because of “cyber vulnerabilities” in the products.
An Aug. 2 Army memo posted online and verified by Reuters applies to all DJI drones and systems that use DJI components or software. It requires service members to “cease all use, uninstall all DJI applications, remove all batteries/storage media and secure equipment for follow-on direction.”
The memo says DJI drones are the most widely used by the Army among off-the-shelf equipment of that type.
DJI said in a statement that it was “surprised and disappointed” at the Army’s “unprompted restriction on DJI drones as we were not consulted during their decision.”
The privately held company said it would contact the Army to determine what it means by “cyber vulnerabilities” and was willing to work with the Pentagon to address concerns.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs and Oppenheimer estimated in 2016 that DJI had about 70 percent share of the global commercial and consumer drone market. Goldman analysts estimated the market, including military, to be worth more than $100 billion over the next five years.
The Army was considering issuing a statement about the policy, said Army spokesman Dov Schwartz.
The move appears to follow studies conducted by the Army Research Laboratory and the Navy that said there were risks and vulnerabilities in DJI products.
The memo cites a classified Army Research Laboratory report and a Navy memo, both from May as references for the order to cease use of DJI drones and related equipment.
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Steve Jobs – who helped usher in the era of personal computers – has been the subject of movies and books, but his complicated life, and the ubiquitous objects he left behind, also turn out to be the stuff of opera.
“Steve Jobs’ life was complicated and messy,” notes Grammy-nominated composer Mason Bates. “He had a daughter that he didn’t acknowledge for many years; he had cancer – you can’t control that. He was while a very charismatic figure, quite a hard driving boss, and his collisions with the fact that he wanted to make everything sleek and controllable, yet life is not controllable, is (a) fascinating topic for an opera.”
Bates, who has composed dozens of symphonies and chamber works, felt that Jobs was the right subject for his first opera. Mark Campbell, one of the most prolific librettists in contemporary American opera, was not so sure.
“I’ve had a number of socialist friends of mine saying, ‘Why would you write an opera about Steve Jobs? He was the worst capitalist!'” he recalls. His response? “Reach in your pocket; you probably have an iPhone there.”
Rather than creating a chronological life story, Campbell says the collaborators opted for a fragmented narrative to reflect the man and his machines. “Steve Jobs did have a mind that just jumped from idea to idea to idea – it was very quick. And we wanted to tell an opera that is also very quick, that jumps around.”
So The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, which premiered at the Santa Fe Opera last month, shifts back and forth in time over the course of 18 scenes. And the composer created a different musical world for each character. Since Jobs played guitar, and spent much of his time dealing with electronics, Bates gave him “this kind of busy frenetic quicksilver world of acoustic guitar and electronica.”
Jobs’ wife, Laurene, had a calming influence, helping him focus – and her sound reflects that. “Completely different space, of these kind of oceanic soulful strings.”
Other characters depicted include Jobs’ partner, Steve Wozniak, and the Japanese-born Zen priest, Kobun Chino Otogawa, who led Jobs to convert to Buddhism, and served as a mentor for much of his life. Bates says he has an “almost purely electronic world of prayer bowls and processed Thai gongs.”
The opera’s set echoes Jobs’ creations, says director Kevin Newbury. After a prologue in a replica of the iconic garage where Jobs’ ideas first took shape, the garage walls explode into six moving cubes with screens…which look a lot like iPhones.
“We’re doing something called projection mapping where all of the scenic units have little sensors, so the video actually moves with them. We wanted to integrate it so seamlessly into the design because that’s what Steve Jobs and Apple did with the products themselves.”
Jobs’ sense of design was influenced by Japanese calligraphy, including the ensō – a circle that depicts the mind being free to let the body create. Bates says that also figures in the opera’s title: The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, with the capital “R” in parentheses.
“Of course, there’s the revolution of Steve Jobs in his creations and his devices. There’s also the evolution from a countercultural hippie, to a mogul of the world’s most valuable company. And there’s the revolution in a circle of Steve Jobs as he looks at the ensō, this piece of Japanese calligraphy, and finds that when he can kind of come full circle, he reaches the kind of completion that he sought so long in his life.”
Audiences have been wildly enthusiastic about the opera, even if the reviews from critics have been mixed. Now, it’s headed to Seattle – home to rival tech company Microsoft! – and then San Francisco, which will bring the piece full circle to the Bay area, where Steve Jobs grew up.
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Agatha Christie lived here once, but only memories remain of the time the world’s best-selling fiction writer spent among the ruins of the ancient Iraqi city of Nimrud.
The mud-brick house where the British author of Murder on the Orient Express once stayed is long gone. If she were alive today, she would probably be shocked by what has befallen the Assyrian city where she worked alongside her archaeologist husband five decades ago.
Islamic State attacked Nimrud with bulldozers, jackhammers and dynamite three years ago as part of their general assault on Iraq’s cultural heritage.
Iraqi military forces retook the site early in their campaign to drive the jihadists out of Mosul, which lies about 30 km (20 miles) north.
The house where Christie lived on site was knocked down some years before that, and the people who knew her have all died.
But her name still stirs recognition among locals, although most do not know what she is famous for.
“We just know that she was British,” said Abu Ammar, who lives in the closest village to the ruins.
Famed for her detectives — Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot — Christie is listed by Guinness World Records as the best-selling fiction author of all time. Her 78 crime novels have sold 2 billion copies in 44 languages.
Christie first visited Iraq before it gained independence from Britain in 1932 and met the man she would marry on an archaeological dig in the south.
The couple spent time in Mosul, and eventually moved to Nimrud.
“What a beautiful spot it was,” she wrote. “The Tigris was just a mile away, and on the great mound of the Acropolis, big stone Assyrian heads poked out of the soil. It was a spectacular stretch of country — peaceful, romantic and impregnated with the past.”
That description stands in contrast to the present.
The mound on which the ruins are situated has a fresh crown of razor wire to keep looters out, and until recently, corpses floated down the river Tigris from battlefields upstream.
Winged bull statues
Colossal winged bull statues — or lamassus — that stood guard at the entrance to a palace lie dismembered in a heap.
“Look, there’s a foot,” said Iraqi army Captain Ali Adnan, pointing out a giant talon carved from a slab of stone. Feathers and cuneiform letters are chiseled into other fragments.
Much of it was unearthed during the 1950s by Christie’s husband, Max Mallowan, who wrote the book Nimrud and its Remains.
Christie’s own interest in archaeology is evident in Death on the Nile and Murder in Mesopotamia.
Christie began writing her autobiography in Nimrud. However, she spent most of her time there documenting Mallowan’s work in photographs, and cleaning ivories dug up from the ruins, using her own face cream to coax dirt out of the crevices.
Mohammed Saeed is too young to have met Christie, but he is familiar with her legend.
A local man, he has worked on excavations at Nimrud since 1996, and used to show tourists around in less turbulent times.
“Here was Agatha Christie’s room,” he said, standing on a nondescript patch of scorched ground at the edge of the mound. “Now nothing is left.”
Bulldozers, destruction
Saeed was present when Islamic State took over and remained as a guard at the site until he started receiving threats from the militants.
Over the following months, he saw bulldozers at work on the mound, and at night, cars came and went. He suspected they were traders inspecting what could be sold to fill Islamic State’s coffers. A year later, the militants blew up the site.
“I can’t describe how I felt. My brothers thought I was going to die,” said Saeed. “The ruins are a symbol — a civilization. They represent this nation.”
It is a feeling he believes Christie would have shared: “She probably would have collapsed,” he said.
There is hope, however. Saeed said there were plans to begin excavating the southern palace next spring.
As Christie prepared to leave Nimrud, she wrote: “Now Nimrud sleeps. We have scarred it with our bulldozers. Its yawning pits have been filled in with raw earth. One day its wounds will have healed, and it will bloom once again with early spring flowers. … Who shall disturb it next? We do not know.”
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A New Orleanslike musical funeral procession with a band set in Vietnam and a transgender fire-eater are all a part of a multimedia traveling exhibit by a Ho Chi Minh City-based artist collective called The Propeller Group.
The exhibit is showing at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.
Vietnamese-American Brittany Trinh has seen the exhibit more than once. The film titled, The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music, is Trinh’s favorite piece in the exhibit.
“First it was the music and then the way that it was being filmed, and I just felt like I was a part of it.” Trinh said, “I just felt really connected to it in a strange way.”
The Propeller Group’s origins
Founded in 2006, three artists make up the core of The Propeller Group: Tuan Andrew Nguyen, Phu Nam Thuc Ha, and Matt Lucero. All have multicultural backgrounds.
Two of these founders were born in Vietnam and had to leave the country with their families because of the Vietnam War. Lucero is Native American with Spanish roots. All three grew up and were educated in countries including the United States and Singapore before going to Vietnam to live and work as artists.
“It was the end of the Vietnam War, and then the Cold War occupied so much of our kind of upbringing until, you know the early ’90s. And so that had always kind of affected how we thought and become something that haunted us,” Nguyen said.
These artists have backgrounds in filmmaking, but they found shooting video in public in Communist Vietnam was difficult, and their cameras were almost confiscated. To work around this, they formed an advertising firm that allowed them more freedom to shoot video in public.
“You’ll see propaganda and really slick advertising, and that was the space that Vietnam was in, and that was the space the Propeller Group came out of, looking at those kind of dichotomies and those collisions and ideologies,” Nguyen said.
“We were doing the advertising, the commercial work by day, and by night we were kind of developing our own artistic conceptual practice,” he said.
US exhibit
While the group rarely is allowed to show its work in Vietnam because of censorship, there is a traveling exhibit of its work showing in the United States. Themes of life and death can be seen in the pieces of multimedia works of art.
One film in the exhibit looks at the Vietnamese rituals surrounding funerals, which includes a transgender fire-eater.
“It’s a moment for them to perform and to express themselves without being stopped by the police. Then it becomes a moment of resistance in public as well, that’s one thing that kind of drew us to looking at these rituals and these traditions,” Nguyen said. “It’s (rituals) something that’s always in flux, and I think part of that comes from the many, many kinds of wars that Vietnam has been engaged in over the last few centuries,” he said.
How people die and live as a result of politics and ideologies and the impact of globalism also are themes seen in a time-lapse video of what happens when a motorcycle called the Honda Dream is left outside overnight in Vietnam. The motorcycle was stripped bare.
“So this motorbike that was once a symbol of the future and of economic mobility now is a symbol for something else. The Honda Dream becomes this physical manifestation of how ideas of capital and communism have kind of shifted over the last 10, 15, 20 years in a communist society,” Nguyen said.
Exhibit well received
The exhibit’s Houston curator says the city’s Vietnamese American community has been especially receptive to this exhibit.
“Houston is one of the most diverse cities in the United States. It’s also one of the cities that has one of the largest populations of Vietnamese. This exhibition will resonate and will bring forth questions and will open conversations about the identity of Vietnamese Americans,” said Javier Sanchez Martinez, Blaffer Art Museum’s Curatorial Fellow.
Nguyen says he hopes the exhibit will inspire the audience to re-examine how they think about history and the different narratives that affect their current way of thought.
The exhibit is organized by Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston’s Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Phoenix Art Museum.
The Propeller Group’s exhibit will travel next to the San Jose Museum of Art.
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There is an emerging contemporary art scene in Vietnam, and it includes a collective of Ho Chi Minh City-based artists who come from multicultural backgrounds called The Propeller Group. While the group rarely shows its work in Vietnam because of censorship, there is a traveling exhibit of its work in the U.S. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports on how themes of the Cold War, life and death are represented in the multimedia exhibit now in Houston’s Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.
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The art of French painter Henri Matisse is enough to draw a visitor to any gallery. The painter was drawn to art himself and during his lifetime gathered a collection of objects from around the world that inspired his art. London’s Royal Academy of Arts has staged a unique exhibit showing Matisse’s art collection along with the paintings it inspired. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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This year’s Kennedy Center honorees will include two singers, a television writer, a dancer — and for the first time, a hip-hop artist.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on Thursday announced the recipients of the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors. They are: hip-hop artist LL Cool J, singers Gloria Estefan and Lionel Richie, television writer and producer Norman Lear and dancer Carmen de Lavallade. It’s the 40th year of the awards, which honor people who have influenced American culture through the arts.
The honorees will be celebrated at a gala Dec. 3, featuring performances and tributes from top entertainers and attended by President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump.
It’s tradition for the president and first lady to host a reception for honorees at the White House before the gala and sit with them at it. This year’s event will be the first for President Trump, who proposed cutting arts funding in his budget plan earlier this year.
“Given his indifference or worse regarding the arts and humanities, I don’t even know he’ll be there,’’ Lear said of the gala, though a Kennedy Center spokeswoman confirmed the president’s attendance. Lear told the Kennedy Center he won’t attend the White House reception.
Estefan, who once hosted a Democratic fundraiser attended by President Barack Obama but says she and her husband are not affiliated with a political party, said her personal politics will be on hold in accepting the honor. But she said the image of a Cuban immigrant being honored is important when Latino immigrants in particular have “taken a beating in the recent past.’’
“I’m happy to be a very clear example of the good things that immigrants have done in this country,’’ she said.
The awards gala will be recorded and broadcast Dec. 26 on CBS.
Here’s a look at this year’s honorees:
LL Cool J
“Yo, this is amazing.’’ That was LL Cool J’s reaction to being the first hip-hop artist awarded a Kennedy Center Honor.
“To be able to go from the corner in Queens beatin’ on a garbage can to getting a Kennedy Center Honor with this type of company and to be first is just an amazing feeling. You know, it just adds another level of legitimacy to hip-hop culture,’’ he said in a telephone interview.
LL Cool J, born James Todd Smith, began his rap career as a teenager. His debut album, “Radio,’’ was released in 1985 and more albums soon followed. In 1992, he won his first of two Grammy awards for best rap solo performance for “Mama Said Knock You Out.’’ He earned a second for “Hey Lover’’ in 1997.
Beyond music, he has branched out to working in television. Since 2015 he has hosted Spike TV’s reality show “Lip Sync Battle.’’ The show was nominated for an Emmy in 2016 and again in 2017. He also currently stars in the CBS drama “NCIS: Los Angeles,’’ where he plays special agent Sam Hanna.
Still, he says his “first love is hip-hop.’’
The 49-year-old is tied with Stevie Wonder, who was honored at the same age in 1999, for being the award’s youngest honoree.
Gloria Estefan
Singer Gloria Estefan was in a car on the way to the airport when she learned she’d be honored by the Kennedy Center. Her husband got the news first, she said, and before announcing it told her to prepare herself. “Buckle your seatbelt,’’ he said, even though she was already strapped in.
The Cuban-American artist has won three Grammy awards and four Latin Grammy awards and sold more than 100 million records worldwide. These days there’s little the 59-year-old hasn’t done. She’s acted, written two children’s books, and she and husband Emilio Estefan own businesses including restaurants and hotels as well as a minority share in the Miami Dolphins. The couple was honored by President Barack Obama with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
“I’d be greedy if I wanted anything else in life,’’ she said in a telephone interview.
Estefan shot to fame as the lead singer of the Miami Sound Machine, a group formed by the man who would become her husband. Her hits include: “Conga,’’ “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You,’’ “Get on Your Feet’’ and “1-2-3.’’ A musical based on the couple’s lives and music opened on Broadway in 2015 and closes later this month. Estefan called the show’s closing bittersweet. But a national tour of the show begins in the fall, what Estefan called a “new beginning.’’ The show will also make its international premiere in the Netherlands in October.
What hasn’t she done that she’d like to? “Take an extended vacation,’’ Estefan joked in an interview before adding that she’d like to write a book about how she got through a 1990 tour bus crash in which her back was broken. And, she said, she’d like perform in a “free Cuba,’’ one not led by Fidel or Raul Castro.
Lionel Richie
Lionel Richie could be forgiven for being tired by the time of the Kennedy Center Honors in December. The four-time Grammy winner is in the middle of his “All the Hits’’ tour and still has more than two dozen scheduled performances in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand before the tour ends in late October. Mariah Carey is joining the singer-songwriter on tour, and Richie says “so far she has killed it.’’
As for Richie, fans are there to see him perform some of his most popular songs including: “Three Times a Lady,’’ “Hello,’’ “All Night Long,’’ “Dancing on the Ceiling’’ and “Say You, Say Me,’’ which won him a Golden Globe award and an Oscar. Then there’s “We Are The World,’’ which he wrote with Michael Jackson.
Outside of music, Richie is involved in other ventures. He has a homeware line and is an investor in an app that lets people request a doctor come to their home. He’s also producing a movie about entertainer Sammy Davis Jr.
Richie, 68, says it’s good to be busy.
“I always say that the word ‘busy’ in show business is the most important word. You want to be busy,’’ he said in a telephone interview.
Richie said there’s no better word than “honored’’ to describe how he feels about being given a Kennedy Center Honor: “Lionel Richie just had to stop and go ‘oh my God,’’’ he said.
“You’re just going to catch a guy who’s going to just sit down and enjoy the show and from time to time kind of restrain myself from crying,’’ he said.
Norman Lear
At 95, Norman Lear ties the record for oldest honoree. Born in 1922 in New Haven, Connecticut, Lear served in World War II before beginning his career in television writing. In the 1970s and 1980s he produced “All in the Family,’’ “Good Times,’’ “One Day at a Time’’ and “The Jeffersons,’’ among other shows.
Ask him for television recommendations these days, though, and he’s at something of a loss.
“There’s too much of everything and I can’t keep up with it all,’’ he said in a telephone interview before mentioning “Orange is the New Black,’’ “Black-ish,’’ and the work of Jill Soloway, creator of “Transparent’’ and “Six Feet Under.’’
He said it was a “thrill of thrills’’ to be honored by the Kennedy Center but he was skeptical about meeting the president.
“I have absolutely no idea at this moment what I would say to the president, but whatever I feel passionate about at the moment I have no hesitation saying,’’ he said.
Lear’s work extends beyond television. In 1981, he joined with the late Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan and others to found People for the American Way, a nonprofit founded to “to fight right-wing extremism and defend constitutional values under attack.’’
Lear, the winner of four Emmy awards, was honored with the National Medal of Arts by President Bill Clinton in 1999 and a Peabody Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017.
Playwright and director George Abbott, who was honored by the Kennedy Center in 1982, was also 95 when he was honored.
Carmen de Lavallade
Dancer, choreographer and actress Carmen de Lavallade has been going to the Kennedy Center for 30 years and performed a solo show on its stage in 2014. She was still “a little speechless’’ when told she’d be honored there, she said.
Now 86, the Los Angeles native made her dancing debut at 17. She has appeared on and off Broadway and in films, and was one of the first African-Americans dancers with the Metropolitan Opera.
Over her career she worked with a range of influential choreographers including Alvin Ailey, John Butler, Lester Horton and Glen Tetley. She also taught movement for actors at Yale. Most recently she has toured a work about her life called “As I Remember It.’’
De Lavallade met her late husband Geoffrey Holder in the cast of “House of Flowers,’’ her Broadway debut. Like his wife he was a multi-talented dancer, choreographer and actor. Their marriage was portrayed in the 2005 documentary “Carmen & Geoffrey.’’ He died in 2014.
De Lavallade says these days she’s doing a lot of mentoring of other performers. She said her advice is always: “Don’t compete. Be yourself.’’
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Upmarket fashion magazine Vogue has featured an unexpected new model in its latest edition — London’s first female police chief.
Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick has posed in her uniform for the glossy magazine as part of a feature that celebrates women at the top of their game.
Dick, 56, is the first female commissioner in the London police force’s 188-year history and began leading the organization of 43,000 officers and staff in April this year.
Dick, an experienced counterterrorism officer, had a turbulent start to her new role with London’s emergency services, having to cope with a devastating fire which engulfed the Grenfell tower block in central London, killing about 80 people.
“There is something about putting the uniform on. You’ve got a role to play, to be calm, to lead other people, to go forward when everyone else is running away. It gives you a sense of, not of courage but, ‘It’s my job,'” Dick told Vogue.
Dick joined the London force, known as Scotland Yard, in 1983 as a constable and made her way up the ranks to become Britain’s most senior counterterrorism officer and national director for security during the 2012 London Olympic Games.
In the Queen’s 2015 New Year Honour’s List, she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
Dick said the Grenfell fire and recent fatal attacks in Westminster and by London Bridge had meant long working hours, but the police force’s morale has stayed high.
“It’s brought the public supporting the police, even more than before. You can’t walk down the road without people coming up to you and shaking your hand and saying thank you for what you’re doing. All the staff say the same,” she said.
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Finding underground gas leaks is now as easy as finding a McDonalds, thanks to a combination of Google Street View cars, mobile methane detectors, some major computing power and a lot of ingenuity.
When a city’s underground gas lines leak, they waste fuel and release invisible plumes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. To find and measure leaks, Colorado State University biologist Joe von Fischer decided to create “methane maps,” to make it easier for utilities to identify the biggest leaks, and repair them.
“That’s where you get the greatest bang for the buck,” he pointed out, “the greatest pollution reductions per repair.”
Knowing that Google Maps start with Google Street View cars recording everything they drive by, along with their GPS locations, von Fischer’s team thought they would just add methane detectors to a Street View car. It turned out, it was not that simple.
“Squirrelly objects”
The world’s best methane detectors are accurate in an area the size of a teacup, but methane leaks can be wider than a street. Also, no one had ever measured the size of a methane leak from a moving car.
“If you’ve ever seen a plume of smoke, it’s sort of a lumpy, irregular object,” von Fischer said. “Methane plumes as they come out of the ground are the same, they’re lumpy squirrelly objects.”
The team had to develop a way to capture data about those plumes, one that would be accurate in the real world. They set up a test site in an abandoned airfield near campus, and brought in what looked like a large scuba tank filled with methane and some air hoses. Then they released carefully measured methane through the hose as von Fischer drove a specially equipped SUV past it, again and again.
They compared readings from the methane detectors in the SUV to readings from the tank.
“We spend a lot of time driving through the plumes to sort of calibrate the way that those cars see methane plumes that form as methane’s being emitted from the ground,” von Fischer explained.
With that understanding, the methane detectors hit the road.
Turning data into maps
But the results created pages of data, “more than 30 million points,” said CSU computer scientist Johnson Kathkikiaran. He knew that all those data points alone would never help people find the biggest leaks on any map. So he and his advisor, Sanmi Peracara, turned the data into pictures using tools from Google.
Their visual summaries made it easy for utility experts to analyze the methane maps, but von Fischer wanted anyone to be able to identify the worst leaks. His teammates at the Environmental Defense Fund met that challenge by incorporating the data into their online maps. Yellow dots indicate a small methane leak. Orange is a medium-size one. Red means a big leak – as much pollution as one car driving 14,000 kilometers in a single day.
Von Fischer says that if a city focuses on these biggest leaks, repairing just 8 percent of them can reduce methane pollution by a third.
“That becomes a win-win type scenario,” he said, “because we’re not asking polluters to fix everything, but we’re looking for a reduction in overall emissions, and I think we can achieve that in a more cost effective way.”
After analyzing a methane map for the state of New Jersey, for example, the utility PSE&G has prioritized fixing its leakiest pipes there first, to speed the reduction of their overall pollution.
“To me that was a real victory, to be able to help the utility find which parts were leakiest, and to make a cost effective reduction in their overall emissions,” von Fishcher said.
Von Fischer envisions even more innovation ahead for mapping many kinds of pollution… to clean the air and save energy.
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U.S. security agents have arrested the British hacker known for discovering a “kill switch” that nullified a widespread ransomware attack earlier this year.
Marcus Hutchins, a 23-year-old malware researcher who uses the name Malware Tech, was detained by the FBI on Wednesday at the Las Vegas airport, where he was preparing to return to Britain after attending two hacking conferences in the city.
Court documents unsealed on Thursday indicated Hutchins was arrested on hacking charges unrelated to the ransomware attack known as WannaCry.
Reuters news agency reports Hutchins is accused of advertising, distributing and profiting from malware code known as Kronos that stole online banking credentials and credit card data between July 2014 and July 2015.
Hutchins has not made a public statement, but his mother told London’s Telegraph newspaper that she expected to be “rather busy tonight,” trying to find out where her son is being held.
Hutchins became an overnight hero in May after disabling the WannaCry worm, which infiltrated software in hundreds of thousands of computers in hospitals, schools, factories and shops in more than 150 countries. Parts of Britain’s National Health Service were infected, as well as the FedEx delivery company, German rail Deutsche Bahn and Spain’s Telefonica.
The attack first became evident May 12, 2017, and continued over the weekend. By May 15, Hutchins had discovered a so-called “kill switch” that disabled the worm.
The malware operators demanded the owners of the computers pay a fee of $300 to $600 to regain control of their computers.
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Facebook is to send more potential hoax articles to third-party fact checkers and show their findings below the original post, the world’s largest online social network said on Thursday as it tries to fight so-called fake news.
The company said in a statement on its website it will start using updated machine learning to detect possible hoaxes and send them to fact checkers, potentially showing fact-checking results under the original article.
Facebook has been criticized as being one of the main distribution points for so-called fake news, which many think influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The issue has also become a big political topic in Europe, with French voters deluged with false stories ahead of the presidential election in May and Germany backing a plan to fine social media networks if they fail to remove hateful postings promptly, ahead of elections there in September.
On Thursday Facebook said in a separate statement in German that a test of the new fact-checking feature was being launched in the United States, France, the Netherlands and Germany.
“In addition to seeing which stories are disputed by third-party fact checkers, people want more context to make informed decisions about what they read and share,” said Sara Su, Facebook news feed product manager, in a blog.
She added that Facebook would keep testing its “related article” feature and work on other changes to its news feed to cut down on false news.
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We’re in the mix with the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending August 5, 2017.
Lo and behold, we get a new song this week to supercharge our lineup. It happens in fifth place, where French Montana and Swae Lee jump four slots with “Unforgettable.”
Number 5: French Montana & Swae Lee “Unforgettable”
French Montana is Karim Karbouch – born in Morocco, he was 13 when his family immigrated to New York City. French made his first mix tape in 2007, and three weeks ago dropped his sophomore studio album “Jungle Rules.” This marks French Montana’s first appearance in the Top Five. Swae Lee is one-half of the rap duo Rae Sremmurd. You probably know them best from last year’s huge chart-topper “Black Beatles.”
Number 4: Dj Khaled Featuring Justin Bieber, Quavo, Chance The Rapper & Lil Wayne “I’m The One”
Our next artist is a first-generation citizen of the United States. While DJ Khaled was born in New Orleans, his parents had immigrated from Palestine.
Khaled backtracks a slot to fourth place with his former champ “I’m The One” featuring Justin Bieber, Quavo, Chance the Rapper, and Lil Wayne. On August 5, Chance will be in his hometown of Chicago for the annual Lollapalooza festival. In fact, all of the artists have concerts booked, except for Bieber.
Number 3: Bruno Mars “That’s What I Like”
Bruno Mars and DJ Khaled keep trading places in the Top Five, and this week, Bruno re-takes third place with “That’s What I Like.”
Bruno is currently on the North American leg of his world tour. In November, he and DNCE visit South America for six dates, and then next year it’s on to New Zealand and Australia. May 3, 2018, will also see Bruno perform at the Mall of Asia in the Philippines. It will be his third visit to his ancestral homeland.
Number 2: DJ Khaled Featuring Rihanna and Bryson Tiller “Wild Thoughts”
DJ Khaled remains in the runner-up slot with “Wild Thoughts” featuring Rihanna and Bryson Tiller. On July 26, Rihanna met with President Emmanuel Macron of France. They met in Paris to discuss educational initiatives. Rihanna is the global ambassador for the Global Partnership for Education.
Number 1: Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee Featuring Justin Bieber “Despacito”
Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber hold the Hot 100 title for an impressive 11th week with “Despacito.”
Justin recently canceled the remaining dates of his world tour and days later hit a photographer with his truck. The man wasn’t seriously injured. Justin’s biological father, Jeremy, flew from Toronto to Los Angeles to spend some quality time with his boy.
That’s it for now — we hope you’ll join us for next week’s lineup.
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