There is an entire industry of add-ons that are designed to keep your cellphone screen from cracking. And yet broken screens are the main reason cellphones fail. But one Japanese researcher may have solved the problem. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Quietly, Bonna Neang Weinstein wept. Her husband, Howard Weinstein, sitting next to her, held her hand, comforting her.
“It reminded me of everything and myself,” she said of a December 15 performance of “Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia” at the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). The first major symphonic work to remember the deaths of an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians under the rule of the Khmer Rouge regime undid Weinstein, a survivor, who arrived in the U.S. in 1984.
“I could not believe that I lived through that,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
The production is the first collaboration between composer Him Sophy and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Rithy Panh, who directed and designed the production.
Both artists survived the Khmer Rouge, which by some estimates killed 90 percent of Cambodia’s artists.
The two are in the forefront of Cambodia’s cultural renaissance, a movement to revive and preserve the ancient arts that were nearly excised, while educating new generations about their cultural heritage. Because of the Khmer Rouge genocide from 1975-1979, half of Cambodia’s population is younger than 25.
The production presented in New York is also aimed at the Cambodian diaspora. It has played on tour in Australia, where the Sydney Morning Herald described it as “light after utter darkness, a promise of resurgence…” and, after sold-out performances in Boston, it is headed to the Philharmonie de Paris next year before opening in Cambodia in 2019, the 40th anniversary of the end of the Khmer Rouge era.
Named after ceremony
“Bangsokol” is named after a ceremony performed at Cambodian funerals. A bangsokol is both the white cloth placed over the body of the deceased and the act of its removal, which signified the passage into the next life, where the spirits of the dead find rest. Bangsokol is also remembering the dead at a watt, the Buddhist temple, with prayer and offerings.
Each audience member found a bangsokol draped across their seat with a note: “We invite you to place this shroud around your shoulders for the duration of the performance.”
“Bangsokol” weaves Khmer traditional music enhanced by a Western orchestra and a Taiwanese chorus performing the libretto by Trent Walker.
Throughout the one-hour production, archival footage — the faces of Cambodian refugees and Khmer Rouge victims, black-clad Cambodians working in fields — flickered across three flat screens hung high behind the performers. Footage of aerial bombings was followed by a clip of then-U.S. President Richard Nixon saying, “Cambodia is the Nixon Doctrine in its purest form.”
“Whatever the film showed, it took me there,” Bonna Neang Weinstein said. “It has been more than 30 years, almost 40 years, but I still dream that I am in the Pol Pot regime.”
For many in the audience, the power of the past showed as quick swipes with damp tissues wiping away silent tears.
“If I’d know this was about the Khmer Rouge, I would not have come,” said a weeping To Voeun, 79, of Alexandria, Virginia. The Khmer Rouge killed her husband, leaving her to raise seven children alone, two of whom remain in Cambodia.
For Bonna Neang Weinstein, the owner of the Khmer Art Gallery in Philadelphia who attended “Bangsokol” with her husband and her three children, the Nixon clip hit home.
She explained: “I cried because I am hurt that the U.S. government bombed my country,” an event that many believe gave rise to the Khmer Rouge.
‘I cannot let it go’
“The U.S. has not admitted anything and not even apologized to us,” said Weinstein, who lost eight family members to the Khmer Rouge. “It mentions at the end ‘Let it all go.’ But I cannot let it go because the perpetrators have not acknowledged their guilt and apologized.”
Sophy Him, who composed the rock opera Where Elephants Weep, told VOA Khmer that his requiem does more than commemorate those who died under the Khmer Rouge.
“We remember the deaths, but also wish and encourage people in the world to have hope and love each other,” said Sophy Him, who lost two older brothers to the regime.
“This performance is for all people in the world who have suffered from genocides and wars,” he said. “This performance is also a warning to the world about the impact of war and genocide.”
That warning was not lost on Jonathan Hulland, a senior program officer at the American Jewish World Service in New York City, who told VOA after the performance that by putting on the white shroud, he felt he was part of the performance.
Hulland, who has been to Cambodia four times, most recently in October, appreciated the warning implicit in the performance.
“I felt some shame and some guilt,” said Hulland, who was born in the United Kingdom and is now an American citizen. “I am an American now, and I do feel like this country has such a responsibility for what happened.”
Joseph Melillo, BAM’s executive producer, said, “BAM plays a very significant role, not only here in New York City, but in this country of introducing to our culture, the work of other cultures.”
Melillo, who has been to Cambodia twice, said he decided to bring “Bangsokol” to BAM because of Phloeun Prim, the executive director of Cambodian Living Arts (CLA), “who has a clear vision of what he wants for his country.”
The performance was commissioned by CLA, a nonprofit group that works to support the revival of traditional art forms.
Mary Read, who serves on the CLA board of directors, said, “Bangsokol” showed “that there is compassion.”
“Art comes to the heart,” said Read, an Australian known internationally for her Sydney fashion boutique and online store. “By healing the heart, you can heal the spirit of the country.”
The performance ends with Chhay Yam, a joy-filled Cambodian dance accompanied by singing. Two Cambodian-American children of the production’s volunteer helpers participated, learning the steps and how to play traditional musical instruments.
Hollywood luminary Angelina Jolie, who holds Cambodian citizenship and directed First They Killed My Father with Rithy Panh, recently saw the performance with her children Maddox Jolie-Pitt, whom she adopted as a baby in Cambodia, and Shiloh Jolie-Pitt. They all wore white shirts and black pants, traditional Khmer funeral dress.
Jolie told VOA after the performance, “I think this was a deeply moving performance. I think it is brilliantly done. I think it is very powerful. It put you into a meditation. It’s like an hourlong prayer to pay respect, to remember, and to help us think of Cambodia the past, the ancient past, the more recent past, the present, and take us forward into a more hopeful future.”
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The Guinea-Bissau Writers Association gathers dozens of people from different backgrounds who share the same goal: to improve the literature of a small West African country with one of the world’s lowest literacy rates.
The authors and poets trickle in one by one, to the meeting of minds taking place at a plain-looking educational building. Among them is a dancer. Another is an officer in the country’s military.
Despite their differences, they are all here for the Guinea-Bissau Writers Association’s poetry gathering. At these regular meetings, the nearly 40 members come to share their thoughts and help one another hone their craft. Many hope this will, in turn, help develop their country.
But with only a 55 percent literacy rate, it is hard for authors to reach a large audience, say association members.
“The reading community is not that big, so we cannot expect to make money writing books, at least not for a living,” said Abdulai Sila, an author and the association’s president.
First step: Imagine it
Sila said that despite the challenges, the writers’ shared vision of improving their country and forging a national identity through literature keeps them going.
“For someone to be able to fight for something, first of all he needs to be able to imagine it,” he said. “One of the tasks of the writers association and the writer is to draw that image that then can be shared by the rest of the citizens. If you are able to imagine something, you can be able to fight for it.”
The former Portuguese colony has been plagued by military coups and instability since its independence in 1974. Today it is ranked among the bottom 10 countries on the U.N. Human Development Index. Currently, the country’s president and ruling party are locked in a political battle that has left parliament out of session for more than two years and caused stagnation.
Of the 40 members of the group, at least half are poets — a style that meshes well with the region’s rich history of oral storytelling. The genre also provides a practical platform for shorter works for those authors who are busy with day jobs.
One of those poets is Manuel da Costa, a major in Guinea-Bissau’s army.
Da Costa began writing during the country’s fight for independence, and more recently he has also written about drug trafficking in the country. The military officer said the genre allows him to be subjective and leave things open to interpretation. When asked whether he thought that writing about trafficking conflicted with his day job as a member of the military — a branch often implicated in the country’s drug underbelly — he said he did not worry about getting into trouble because of poetry’s nature.
“Poetry language is subjective. When are you writing, it’s only you who knows what you are writing. Anyone who is reading it can have their own interpretation,” he said.
Language choice
Da Costa, as most other poets in the group haved done, chose to write in the country’s Portuguese-based Kriol language.
Association member and author Antonio Afonso Te has just published a book focused on how to write in Kriol. He said learning how to write in Kriol and integrating that into the national education program can help develop the country — and its literary scene.
IN PHOTOS: Writers Seek to Form National Identity Through Literature for Guinea-Bissau
“Kriol should be introduced for education in Guinea-Bissau, because most people speak Kriol. And another thing that is important is the teachers,” Te said, adding that they have more mastery of Kriol than the other languages that they use for teaching.
Whether it’s poetry or novels, in Kriol or Portuguese, the writers of this country say they hope they can use their craft to help Guinea-Bissau turn a new page toward improved development.
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Spectators at the home stadium of Real Madrid saw its team’s hopes to keep La Liga title fade away Saturday as Barcelona rolled to a 3-0 El Clasico victory, opening a 14-point lead over the current champions.
Luis Suarez, Lionel Messi and Aleix Vidal each scored, while Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema missed first-half chances.
“They did really well in the second half. The first half was terrible, in my opinion. They [Barcelona] had very little possession [of the ball],” Joe Villanueva, a Barcelona fan, told VOA.
Barcelona’s win, however, went beyond the European soccer classic. The soccer match came two days after elections in Catalonia in which separatist parties claimed a majority of the votes. Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia and its largest city, while Madrid is Spain’s capital.
Saturday’s El Clasico was the first meeting between Madrid and Barca since the banned October referendum on Catalan independence.
Club allegiances do not necessarily dictate political opinions. Still, Villanueva thought they would play a bigger role in the match.
WATCH: A Barcelona Fan’s Take on the Game
“I thought the match would get ugly, especially after they were down 2-0 and they had a player down,” he said. “I thought it would get ugly, but they were composed. Both sides were composed. Usually Real Madrid gets pretty rowdy, especially when they’re losing, but they did well.”
‘An infinite stalemate’
After the political convulsions of the past three months, Catalonia and Spain are back to square one, said Xabier Barrena, a political columnist for the El Periodico newspaper.
“Catalonia is living in an infinite stalemate. There was a considerable increase in participation in the parliamentary elections this time, and despite this, the result is the same as in 2015. Both then and now, the solution must be a legitimate referendum,” Barrena said.
The most likely election outcome remains a coalition of the three pro-independence parties, but their options appear limited, Barrena said. “Any unilateral declaration [of independence] would elicit a violent response from the state,” he said. “So they will avoid that course.”
In the meantime, Barca coach Ernesto Valverde said a long stretch of the season remained.
“The league isn’t finished. We haven’t even completed the first half of the season,” Valverde said.
Madrid coach Zinedine Zidane acknowledged it was a defeat “that hurts.”
“Madrid never gives up, whatever happens,” he said. “It is a difficult moment because we’ve lost by three goals. I could say we don’t deserve it, but that is football.”
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The Guinea-Bissau Writers Association gathers dozens of people from different backgrounds who share the same goal: to improve the literature of a small West African country with one of the world’s lowest literacy rates.
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For millions of Britons, a traditional Christmas Day includes turkey, Brussels sprouts, Christmas pudding, and a special seasonal episode of “Doctor Who.”
The global success of the venerable sci-fi series means that fans around the world will also tune in Monday to watch Peter Capaldi’s final adventure as the space-hopping Time Lord known as the Doctor. (Americans can see it on BBC America at 9 p.m. Eastern).
The show has had a dozen Doctors over its 54-year history, and this is one of those bittersweet moments when one lead actor hands over to another. At episode’s end, viewers will see Capaldi transform, through a Time Lord process known as regeneration, into Jodie Whittaker, the first woman to play the part.
First, adventure
Before that comes a rollicking and poignant adventure that moves from the World War I trenches to the South Pole, features mysterious creatures made of glass and (of course) involves a jaunt in the Tardis, a time-and-space machine shaped like an old-fashioned British police phone box.
The episode loops back into the show’s own history, featuring an appearance by the very first Doctor, a white-haired gent who appeared on TV screens in 1963. He was played by William Hartnell, who died in 1975; David Bradley fills the role here.
Mark Gatiss, a regular writer for the show who guest stars in the episode as a British Army officer marooned in time, said there was “a valedictory feel” on the set of the finale.
“The sense of eras ending all over the place was very profound but at the same time it was actually a very happy experience,” Gatiss told The Associated Press in an interview.
Gatiss has loved “Doctor Who” since childhood and has written for it since 2005.
BBC hit
He’s better placed than almost anyone to explain the enduring allure of a show that survived early years of wobbly production values and a 16-year absence from screens between 1989 and 2005 to become a childhood touchstone, an emblem of British culture, and a money-making export for the BBC.
Partly, he says, it’s due to the Doctor, an eccentric and “slightly off-kilter” hero. Partly it’s “the randomness of the adventures,” which have sent the Doctor to ancient Rome and the Stone Age, distant galaxies and the end of time.
And partly it’s the show’s “slightly ramshackle Britishness, in the very idea of an amazing space-time machine which looks like a beaten up old box.”
“And somewhere deep down in its absolute essentials, something genuinely magical,” he added.
World-view changing
The episode is also the swansong of Steven Moffat, who has been the show’s executive producer and chief writer since 2009.
Moffat, who also co-created detective series “Sherlock” with Gatiss, has no doubt about the show’s place in television history. He told audience members at a recent preview screening that “Doctor Who” is “the greatest television show ever made.”
“People change their view of the world and what they are capable of because of a silly show about a man who travels around in time and space in a police box,” Moffat said.
“Count the scientists, the musicians, the scholars, the writers, the directors, the actors, who became what they are because of this show. Count, as you might say, the hearts that beat a little faster because of ‘Doctor Who.’ I don’t even know what is in second place, but without doubt and by that most important measure ‘Doctor Who’ is the greatest television series ever made.”
New Doctor, new mood
“Doctor Who” fans have become accustomed to changes of actor, and the shifts in mood that go with each new Doctor. The announcement that Whittaker (best known from detective series “Broadchurch”) would be the next occupant of the Tardis was front-page news in Britain. Many fans were delighted, though some grumbled at the idea of a Time Lady.
Gatiss, currently working with Moffat on a new adaptation of “Dracula,” thinks the naysayers come mostly from that never-satisfied subset of fans “who will definitely watch it 28 times just to make sure they hate it.”
“This is a series about an alien with two hearts who lives in a transcendental phone box, and yet somehow can’t change sex?” he said. “That is not an argument for 2017.”
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What’s a bitcoin worth? Lately nobody knows for sure, but after a wild ride Friday, it’s worth a good deal less than it was Thursday.
After losses over the last few days, the digital currency fell as much as 30 percent overnight in Asia, and the action became so frenzied that the website Coinbase suspended trading. It later made up much of that ground, and slumped 9.5 percent to $14,042 Friday, according to the tracking site CoinDesk.
Experts are warning that bitcoin is a bubble about to burst, but things might get crazier before it does: A lot of people have heard of bitcoin by now, but very few people own it.
“Bubbles burst when the last buyers are in,” said Brett Ewing, chief market strategist for First Franklin. “Who are the last buyers? The general public, unfortunately.”
1,000 people own 40 percent
Ewing said 40 percent of bitcoin belongs to just 1,000 people, and hedge funds and other major investors are going to start buying it soon. But those funds may buy bitcoin and also protect themselves by placing bets that it will fall. Retail investors may just buy it only to see it fall.
“I think investors should approach it with caution and I think many people will dive into it not understanding what it is,” he said.
As bitcoin skyrocketed this month, the volume of trading was unprecedented as investors hoping to catch a ride up piled in. Prices have risen so fast, the fall on Friday returned the price of bitcoin only to where it was trading two weeks ago.
From tea to blockchain overnight
The volatility has created a circuslike atmosphere. Some companies that have added the word “bitcoin” or related terms to their names to get in on the action. The craziest thing is, it’s worked.
Long Island Iced Tea Corp. until this week had been known for its peach-, raspberry-, guava-, lemon- and mango-flavored drinks. Then, on Thursday, the company announced a radical rebranding. It’s changing its name to Long Blockchain Corp., shifting its primary focus from iced tea to “the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology.”
Blockchain is a ledger where transactions of digital currencies, like bitcoin, are recorded.
Shares in Long Island Iced Tea soared 200 percent in one day.
The Hicksville, New York, company did what investors are doing, hitching a ride on a currency that raced from less than $10,000 at the end of November to almost $20,000 on Sunday. And it cost less than $1,000 at the beginning of the year.
Crash every three months
The rise of price of bitcoin, which is still difficult to use if you actually want to buy something, has led to heated speculation about when the bubble might burst.
The currency has been, if nothing else, highly elastic, bouncing back every time it crashes, which occurs about once every quarter.
It fell 11.5 percent over two days in early December and 21.5 percent over five days in November.
Curiosity has now driven bitcoin to the futures market, where investors bet on which direction it will go.
Bitcoin futures started trading on two major exchanges, the Cboe and CME, this month. Those futures fell about 8 percent Friday.
Investor beware
If people get burned, it won’t be because they were not warned.
The Securities and Exchange Commission put out a statement last week warning investors to be careful with bitcoin and other digital currencies. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission has proposed regulating bitcoin like a commodity, similar to gold or oil.
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a financial watchdog, issued a similar warning recently.
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A reused SpaceX rocket carried 10 satellites into orbit from California on Friday, leaving behind a trail of mystery and wonder as it soared into space.
The Falcon 9 booster lifted off from coastal Vandenberg Air Force Base, carrying the latest batch of satellites for Iridium Communications.
The launch in the setting sun created a shining, billowing streak that was widely seen throughout Southern California and as far away as Phoenix.
Calls came in to TV stations as far afield as San Diego, more than 200 miles south of the launch site.
Cars stopped on freeways in Los Angeles so drivers and passengers could take pictures and video.
The Los Angeles Fire Department issued an advisory that the “mysterious light in the sky” was from the rocket launch.
Jimmy Golen, a sports writer for The Associated Press in Boston who was in Southern California for the holidays, said he and other tourists saw the long, glowing contrail while touring Warner Bros. studio in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank.
“People were wondering if it had something to do with movies, or TV or a UFO,” he said. “It was very cool.”
The same rocket carried Iridium satellites into orbit in June. That time, the first stage landed on a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean. This time, the rocket was allowed to plunge into the sea.
It was the 18th and final launch of 2017 for SpaceX, which has contracted to replace Iridium’s system with 75 updated satellites. SpaceX has made four launches and expects to make several more to complete the job by mid-2018.
The satellites also carry payloads for global real-time aircraft tracking and a ship-tracking service.
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The sounds of the holidays have a familiar ring in cities across the United States, and in cities in South Korea, Japan, Chile and many European countries. In November and December, bell ringers stand next to Red Kettles belonging to the Protestant Salvation Army organization. VOA’s Deborah Block takes us to Alexandria, Virginia, outside Washington, where bell ringers were collecting donations that will be put into local communities to help the needy.
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Mention “the fat one” in the United States in December, and someone might think you were referring cheekily to Santa Claus. But say it in Spain, and it’s a reference to the world’s richest lottery prize.
Spanish schoolchildren drew this year’s numbers for the Spanish Christmas Lottery on Friday, for a prize worth a total of $2.8 billion.
But not all the bounty goes to one winner. Multiple buyers can choose the same numbers, meaning the prize is divided among its multiple winners. Smaller prizes are also available in the lottery, which dates back to 1812. In all, thousands of prizes are awarded.
Holders of this year’s lucky number, 71198, are still coming forward. One town, the Costa del Sol capital of Malaga, has been reported to have racked up a total of nearly $152 million in prize money among 32 tickets.
At 200 euros each full lottery tickets are not cheap — but they can be subdivided into tenths, known as decimos, which sell for a more affordable 20 euros each. That makes playing the lottery a group activity.
After weeks of ticket sales, the winning numbers are read out by schoolchildren in a nationally televised broadcast from Madrid’s Teatro Real opera house. Watching the broadcast with family and friends is a Spanish holiday tradition.
Spain began a national lottery in 1763 as a fundraiser for charity, but the Spanish Christmas Lottery that continues today began in 1812 and benefits the Spanish government and the merchants who sell the tickets, who make a 4 percent commission on each ticket sold.
Luckily for the losers, the Spanish Christmas Lottery is not the only one of the year. Those who failed to make their fortune in the Dec. 22 contest have another chance coming up: the El Nino drawing, held before the Feast of the Epiphany on Jan. 6.
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Over the next month, Christians of all kinds will celebrate the birth of Jesus. The world has been wondering about the reality of his existence, his life, death, and the question of his divinity for thousands of years. But the place considered to be his tomb has been dated to the time he is believed to have walked the earth. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A U.S. jury has convicted two former soccer officials from South America on charges of corruption, the first trial verdicts in a U.S. investigation into world soccer’s governing body, FIFA.
The federal jury in New York deliberated for a week before Friday’s verdict and will continue deliberations next week for a third soccer official.
The jurors convicted Jose Maria Marin, former head of Brazil’s soccer confederation, and Juan Angel Napout, former head of Paraguayan soccer, of racketeering conspiracy, the top charge against the men. Marin was convicted on six of seven counts and Napout on three out of five.
Deliberations in the case of the former president of Peru’s soccer federation, Manuel Burga, who faces one count of racketeering conspiracy, will continue.
The three soccer officials were arrested in 2015, accused of agreeing to take millions of dollars in bribes to bestow television and marketing rights to soccer matches.
U.S. prosecutors have indicted 42 officials and marketing executives as part of the investigation that shook up FIFA. At least 24 people have pleaded guilty.
The U.S. government’s main witness, a former marketing executive from Argentina, Alejandro Burzaco, testified that he and his company arranged to pay $160 million in bribes over the course of several years.
The defense argued that the former soccer officials had been framed by Burzaco and other witnesses who were trying to get leniency in their own cases.
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IPhone owners from several states sued Apple Inc. for not disclosing sooner that it issued software updates deliberately slowing older-model phones so aging batteries lasted longer, saying Apple’s silence led them to wrongly conclude that their only option was to buy newer, pricier iPhones.
The allegations were in a lawsuit filed Thursday in Chicago federal court on behalf of five iPhone owners from Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and North Carolina, all of whom say they never would have bought new iPhones had Apple told them that simply replacing the batteries would have sped up their old ones. The suit alleges Apple violated consumer fraud laws.
A similar lawsuit was filed Thursday in Los Angeles. Both suits came a day after Apple confirmed what high-tech sleuths outside the company already observed: The company had deployed software to slow some phones. Apple said it was intended as a fix to deal with degraded lithium-ion batteries that could otherwise suddenly die.
“Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices,” an Apple statement said. It said it released the fix for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE and later extended it to iPhone 7. Apple didn’t respond to a message Friday seeking comment.
The Chicago lawsuit suggests Apple’s motive may have been sinister, though it offers no evidence in the filing.
“Apple’s decision to purposefully … throttle down these devices,” it says, “was undertaken to fraudulently induce consumers to purchase the latest” iPhone.
Plaintiff Kirk Pedelty, of North Carolina, contacted Apple as his frustration grew. However, the lawsuit says: “Nobody from Apple customer support suggested that he replace his battery to improve the performance of his iPhone. … Frustrated by slowdowns and intermittent shutdowns of his iPhone 7, Pedelty purchased an iPhone 8.”
The lawsuit seeks class-action status to represent thousands of iPhone owners nationwide.
Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi said she believes the tech giant was seeking to help consumers extend the lives of the older phones — though it would have been better to disclose what it was doing and why right away.
“Even if you are trying to do something good for your customers, it is going to be perceived as you are sneaking around behind their backs if you don’t tell them about it first,” she said.
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Every year around the holidays, there is a spike in the viewership of Christmas movie classics. According to the American Film Institute, Frank Capra’s 1947 heartwarming drama It’s A Wonderful Life tops the list of all-time Christmas favorites.
The story centers on George Bailey, a generous man driven to bankruptcy. When George, played by Jimmy Stewart, wishes he’d never been born, an angel named Clarence comes to Earth and fulfills his wish. Suddenly George is able to view how life in his hometown of Bedford Falls would have been if he had never existed.
His wife, played by Donna Reed, is a single, lonely woman. His mother has been made bitter by the loss of her only son, Harry, who drowned as a child because George was not there to save him. The town, once peaceful and flourishing, now seedy and sad, is ruled by a ruthless businessman.
When George realizes how precious life is, he recants his wish and Clarence returns him back to life, where friends and family pull together and bail him out.
When the film was first released, it did not do well in the theaters, said Todd Hitchcock, director of programming and associate director at AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. But it saw a revival through yearly television broadcasts during an era where there were only three TV networks and about 30 million people were tuning in.
“By the time that my generation comes around in the ’70s and ’80s, it’s grown year by year into this institution, this traditional screening that you watch at least once in the lead-up to Christmas with your family, and now it’s just taken for granted that it’s this established Christmas classic,” he said.
A Christmas message from Santa
Nostalgia and tradition are important factors in the making of a classic, but so is the message of a film. An example is Miracle on 34th Street, by George Seaton.
In this favorite, also from 1947, a man who goes by the name Kris Kringle, played by Edmund Gwenn, takes a job as a department store Santa in New York City. He tries to remind the store’s events director, a single mother played by Maureen O’ Hara, that Christmas is more than just gifts and spending. It’s a frame of mind.
The stress from Christmas commercialization is also the theme of animated holiday films produced for TV in the 1960s, such as A Charlie Brown Christmas; The Grinch that Stole Christmas, based on the Dr. Seuss book; and Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. These productions became so popular, they launched franchises of further installments. Eventually, Hitchcock said, they joined the pantheon of Christmas classics.
“Number one, they are really good. Number two, repetition, repetition, repetition. They did well the first year, so they bring it back the next year,” he said. “The viewership is huge and it remains consistent year to year. One generation grows up on it, they have children, the next generation grows up on it.”
In 1983, another classic was born. Set in the 1940s, Bob Clark’s comedy A Christmas Story focuses on young Ralphie, who tries to convince his parents, and Santa, that a Red Ryder BB gun really is the perfect Christmas gift.
“That film directly engages with nostalgia and gently tweaks it,” said Hitchcock. “There is a lot of ’80s comedy sensibility woven into it that looks at this sepia-tone, ’40s-’50s growing-up period. And it works fantastically well with A Christmas Story, and as you know, it has become just as much of an institution.”
Not just carols and lights
Throughout the years, more film genres have been incorporated into the Christmas favorites list, such as horror and action films. Hitchcock offers the 1988 action flick Die Hard as an example. He said the film was a success because it was well done, and because of its Christmas scenes, many viewers connected it with the Christmas season, though it was not made exclusively for the holiday.
“So I think a great definition about a Christmas classic is the film I like to watch on Christmas, whether or not it is explicitly a Christmas film,” he said.
As TV and online broadcast platforms multiply, so does competition for viewership, making it difficult for many of these films, especially the oldies, to reach the wide audiences they could boast of in the past. Hitchcock said curating these films in art theaters such as AFI Silver is one of the ways to safeguard their staying power, starting with It’s A Wonderful Life.
“For many people, seeing it on the big screen is a novelty because they grew up with it as a television thing,” he said. “And they are surprised how much more impactful it is when they come to see it in the theater on the big screen, and they cry. Some people know they are going to cry. Some people are surprised when they cry. It’s that kind of movie.”
It’s a Christmas classic.
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Indonesia’s foremost hard-line Islamist group, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), has announced a Christmas Day boycott of Facebook and the Whatsapp instant messaging service, as well as a live protest at Facebook’s Indonesia office in the near future.
They say Facebook — like other major social media outlets such as Twitter and Instagram — has blocked several FPI accounts, and that Facebook allows pro-LGBT and anti-Sharia pages to stay on its site. The group also plans to protest at Indonesia’s Ministry of Communications and Information in the new year.
While the boycott is unlikely to make a major impact on Facebook, it underscores that FPI’s official accounts are blocked on many major platforms, leading some to speculate the move was at the national government’s request.
That’s unlikely, said Ross Tapsell, who researches media in Southeast Asia at Australian National University.
“There is a misperception, both within FPI and outside of it, that the Indonesian government calls up social media companies like Facebook and Twitter and asks for certain pages to be taken down and these companies simply comply,” he said. “That isn’t how this works. Social media companies have their own codes of conduct and it is through fairly extensive and rigorous internal debates that these decisions are ultimately made.”
He suggested that Facebook likely shut down FPI’s pages, which have in the past engaged in hate speech and advocated for violence, for violating its terms and policies.
This is an ambiguous moment for the FPI, which has risen rapidly from a fringe group, founded in 1999 after the fall of Suharto, to a mainstream organization that swayed the Jakarta gubernatorial election.
In late 2016, the FPI organized mass protests in Jakarta against its Chinese Christian governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, for allegedly insulting the Quran. The eventually triumphant candidate, Governor Anies Baswedan, openly allied with the FPI during his campaign.
Crackdown on Islamist groups
“On the issue of internal regulation, Twitter and Facebook have involved many social organizations from Indonesia to become their trusted flaggers [of problematic content], not only the government,” said Damar Juniarto, a coordinator of the Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network. He suggested the decision to block FPI happened after numerous complaints from different sources.
“Various FPI members have posted videos of violence, bullying and harassing people who criticized them or their leader in 2017, and these videos would have been given as evidence for the need to ban them on Facebook,” Tapsell said.
In June, a Chinese-Indian teenager in Jakarta was physically abused by FPI members for posting memes about its leader.
Facebook and Twitter could not be immediately reached for comment.
Beyond social media, other Indonesian hard-liners have been the target of crackdowns this year. In July, the government banned the international Islamist organization Hizbut Tahrir because it threatened the nation’s pluralist state ideology, known as Pancasila. Hizbut Tahrir advocates for a global Islamic caliphate.
Vague leadership
Today, FPI’s leader, Habib Rizieq Shihab, is a fugitive in Saudi Arabia; he was charged shortly after the Jakarta election under the nation’s pornography law for allegedly texting explicit photos with a woman who is not his wife. It is a far cry from late 2016, when he enthralled hundreds of thousands of Muslims who brought Jakarta to a grinding halt to attend the “peaceful actions” that Rizieq and FPI organized against the governor.
FPI also has had trouble expanding its brand beyond Java, like in West Kalimantan province in Borneo, where the group failed to hold a similar rally last summer.
Support for FPI increased from 15.6 percent to 23.6 percent between June 2016 and August 2017, according to a recent report from researchers Marcus Mietzner, Burhanuddin Muhtadi and Rizka Halida.
As the year draws to a close, FPI’s agenda is once more trained on local and domestic actions, where it started as Indonesia’s unofficial moral police. For instance, it has promised to raid establishments that make their staff wear Christmas hats. It remains to be seen whether FPI will return to influence the national political discourse in the new year, or whether the group’s stature has peaked.
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Every year around the holidays there is a spike in the viewership of Christmas movie classics. According to the American Film Institute, Frank Capra’s 1947 heartwarming drama It’s A Wonderful Life tops the list of all time Christmas favorites. VOA’s Penelope Poulou spoke with Todd Hitchcock, Associate Director of the American Film Institute’s Silver Theater and Cultural Center, about landmark Christmas films and what makes a movie classic.
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Toshiba Corp.’s energy systems unit on Friday unveiled a long telescopic pipe carrying a pan-tilt camera designed to gather crucial information about the situation inside the reactor chambers at Japan’s tsunami-wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant.
The device is 13 meters (43 feet) long and designed to give officials a deeper view into the nuclear plant’s Unit 2 primary containment vessel, where details on melted fuel damage remain largely unknown.
The Fukushima plant had triple meltdowns following the 2011 quake and tsunami. Finding details about the fuel debris is crucial to determining the right method and technology for its removal at each reactor, the most challenging process during the plant’s decades-long decommissioning.
Toshiba officials said the new device will be sent inside the pedestal, a structure directly below the core, to investigate the area and hopefully to find melted debris. The mission could come as soon as late January.
The device looks like a giant fishing rod about 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) in diameter, from which a unit housing the camera, a dosimeter and thermometer slowly slides down. The probe, attached by a cable on the back, can descend all the way to the bottom of the reactor vessel if it can avoid obstacles, officials said.
Two teams of several engineers will be tasked with the mission, which they will remotely operate from a radiation-free command center at the plant.
A simpler predecessor to the pipe unveiled Friday had captured a limited view of the vessel during a preparatory investigation in February. A crawling robot sent in later in February struggled with debris on the ground and stalled in the end due to higher-than-expected radiation, its intended mission incomplete.
The upgraded probe has been co-developed by Toshiba ESS and International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning, a government-funded unit of construction and nuclear technology companies over the past nine months.
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Bitcoin plunged by a quarter to below $12,000 on Friday as investors dumped the cryptocurrency in manic trading after its blistering ascent to a peak close to $20,000 prompted warnings by experts of a bubble.
It capped a brutal week that had been touted as a new era of mainstream trading for the volatile digital currency when bitcoin futures debuted on CME Group Inc, the world’s largest derivatives market on Sunday.
Friday’s steep fall bled into the U.S. stock market, where shares of companies that have recently lashed their fortunes to bitcoin or blockchain — its underlying technology — took a hard knock in early trading.
The biggest and best-known cryptocurrency had seen a staggering twentyfold increase since the start of the year, climbing from less than $1,000 to as high as $19,666 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange on Sunday and to over $20,000 on other exchanges.
Bitcoin has fallen each day since, with losses accelerating on Friday.
In the futures market, bitcoin one-month futures on Cboe Global Markets were halted due to the steep price drop, while those trading on the CME hit the limit down threshold.
In the spot market, bitcoin fell to as low as $11,159, down more than 25 percent on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange, its largest one-day drop in nearly three years. For the week, it was down around a third — its worst performance since April 2013.
“After its parabolic-like rally, a crash was imminent and so it has proved,” said Fawad Razaqzada, market analyst at Forex.com in London. “Investors may have also been put off buying bitcoin at those elevated levels amid repeated warnings from experts about the way it had climbed near $20,000.”
“A manic upward swing led by the herd will be followed by a downturn as the emotional sentiment changes,” said Charles Hayter, founder and chief executive of industry website Cryptocompare in London. “A lot of traders have been waiting for this large correction.”
“With the end of the year in sight a lot of investors will be taking profits and saying thank you very much and closing their books for the holiday period,” he added.
Warnings about the risks of investing in the unregulated market have increased — Denmark’s central bank governor called it a “deadly” gamble — and there have been worries about the security of exchanges on which cryptocurrencies are bought and sold.
South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Youbit said on Tuesday it is shutting down and is filing for bankruptcy after it was hacked for the second time this year.
Coinbase, a U.S. company that runs one of the biggest exchanges and provides digital “wallets” for storing bitcoins, said on Wednesday it would investigate accusations of insider trading, following a sharp increase in the price of a bitcoin spin-off hours before it announced support for it.
Crypto-rivals
As rival cryptocurrencies slid along with bitcoin, the total estimated value of the crypto market fell to as low as $440 billion, according to industry website Coinmarketcap, having neared $650 billion just a day earlier.
But other cryptocurrencies surged this week, with investors moving into cheaper digital coins, rather than cashing out of the sector.
Ethereum, the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market size, soared to almost $900 earlier in the week, from around $500 a week earlier. Ripple, the third-biggest, has more than quadrupled in price since Monday.
Stephen Innes, head of trading in Asia-Pacific for retail FX broker Oanda in Singapore, said that there have also been moves out of bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash, a clone of the original cryptocurrency. Oanda does not handle trading in bitcoin.
“Most of it is unsophisticated retail traders getting burned badly,” Innes said on bitcoin’s recent retreat.
While some say the launch by CME and its rival Cboe Global Markets of bitcoin futures over the last two weeks has given the digital currency some perceived legitimacy, many policymakers remain skeptical.
Bitcoin is known to go through wild swings. In November, it tumbled almost 30 percent in four days from $7,888 to $5,555. In September, it fell 40 percent from $4,979 to $2,972.
Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss in New York and Jemima Kelly in London; Additional reporting by Shinichi Saoshiro in Tokyo; Editing by Keith Weir and Susan Thomas.
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Russian television anchor Pavel Lobkov was in the studio getting ready for his show when jarring news flashed across his phone: Some of his most intimate messages had just been published to the web.
Days earlier, the veteran journalist had come out live on air as HIV-positive, a taboo-breaking revelation that drew responses from hundreds of Russians fighting their own lonely struggles with the virus. Now he’d been hacked.
“These were very personal messages,” Lobkov said in a recent interview, describing a frantic call to his lawyer in an abortive effort to stop the spread of nearly 300 pages of Facebook correspondence, including sexually explicit messages. Even two years later, he said, “it’s a very traumatic story.”
The Associated Press found that Lobkov was targeted by the hacking group known as Fancy Bear in March 2015, nine months before his messages were leaked. He was one of at least 200 journalists, publishers and bloggers targeted by the group as early as mid-2014 and as recently as a few months ago.
The AP identified journalists as the third-largest group on a hacking hit list obtained from cybersecurity firm Secureworks, after diplomatic personnel and U.S. Democrats. About 50 of the journalists worked at The New York Times. Another 50 were either foreign correspondents based in Moscow or Russian reporters like Lobkov who worked for independent news outlets. Others were prominent media figures in Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics or Washington.
The list of journalists provides new evidence for the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Fancy Bear acted on behalf of the Russian government when it intervened in the U.S. presidential election. Spy agencies say the hackers were working to help Republican Donald Trump. The Russian government has denied interfering in the American election.
Previous AP reporting has shown how Fancy Bear — which Secureworks nicknamed Iron Twilight — used phishing emails to try to compromise Russian opposition leaders, Ukrainian politicians and U.S. intelligence figures, along with Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and more than 130 other Democrats.
Lobkov, 50, said he saw hacks like the one that turned his day upside-down in December 2015 as dress rehearsals for the email leaks that struck the Democrats in the United States the following year.
“I think the hackers in the service of the Fatherland were long getting their training on our lot before venturing outside.”
‘Classic KGB tactic’
New Yorker writer Masha Gessen said it was also in 2015 — when Secureworks first detected attempts to break into her Gmail — that she began noticing people who seemed to materialize next to her in public places in New York and speak loudly in Russian into their phones, as if trying to be overheard. She said this only happened when she put appointments into the online calendar linked to her Google account.
Gessen, the author of a book about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, said she saw the incidents as threats.
“It was really obvious,” she said. “It was a classic KGB intimidation tactic.”
Other U.S.-based journalists targeted include Josh Rogin, a Washington Post columnist, and Shane Harris, who was covering the intelligence community for The Daily Beast in 2015. Harris said he dodged the phishing attempt, forwarding the email to a source in the security industry who told him almost immediately that Fancy Bear was involved.
In Russia, the majority of journalists targeted by the hackers worked for independent news outlets like Novaya Gazeta or Vedomosti, though a few — such as Tina Kandelaki and Ksenia Sobchak — are more mainstream. Sobchak has even launched an improbable bid for the Russian presidency.
Investigative reporter Roman Shleynov noted that the Gmail hackers targeted was the one he used while working on the Panama Papers, the expose of international tax avoidance that implicated members of Putin’s inner circle.
Fancy Bear also pursued more than 30 media targets in Ukraine, including many journalists at the Kyiv Post and others who have reported from the front lines of the Russia-backed war in the country’s east.
Nataliya Gumenyuk, co-founder of Ukrainian internet news site Hromadske, said the hackers were hunting for compromising information.
“The idea was to discredit the independent Ukrainian voices,” she said.
The hackers also tried to break into the personal Gmail account of Ellen Barry, The New York Times’ former Moscow bureau chief.
Her newspaper appears to have been a favorite target. Fancy Bear sent phishing emails to roughly 50 of Barry’s colleagues at The Times in late 2014, according to two people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential data.
The Times confirmed in a brief statement that its employees received the malicious messages, but the newspaper declined to comment further.
Some journalists saw their presence on the hackers’ hit list as vindication. Among them were CNN security analyst Michael Weiss and Brookings Institution visiting fellow Jamie Kirchick, who took the news as a badge of honor.
“I’m very proud to hear that,” Kirchick said.
The Committee to Protect Journalists said the wide net cast by Fancy Bear underscores efforts by governments worldwide to use hacking against journalists.
“It’s about gaining access to sources and intimidating those journalists,” said Courtney C. Radsch, the group’s advocacy director.
In Russia, the stakes are particularly high. The committee has counted 38 murders of journalists there since 1992.
Many journalists told the AP they knew they were under threat, explaining that they had added a second layer of password protection to their emails and only chatted over encrypted messaging apps like Telegram, WhatsApp or Signal.
Fancy Bear target Ekaterina Vinokurova, who works for regional media outlet Znak, said she routinely deletes her emails.
“I understand that my accounts may be hacked at any time,” she said in a telephone interview. “I’m ready for them.”
‘I’ve seen what they could do’
It’s not just whom the hackers tried to spy on that points to the Russian government.
It’s when.
Maria Titizian, an Armenian journalist, immediately found significance in the date she was targeted: June 26, 2015.
“It was Electric Yerevan,” she said, referring to protests over rising energy bills that she reported on. The protests that rocked Armenia’s capital that summer were initially seen by some in Moscow as a threat to Russian influence.
Titizian said her outspoken criticism of the Kremlin’s “colonial attitude” toward Armenia could have made her a target.
Eliot Higgins, whose open source journalism site Bellingcat repeatedly crops up on the target list, said the phishing attempts seemed to begin “once we started really making strong statements about MH17,” the Malaysian airliner shot out of the sky over eastern Ukraine in 2014, killing 298 people. Bellingcat played a key role in marshaling the evidence that the plane was destroyed by a Russian missile — Moscow’s denials notwithstanding.
The clearest timing for a hacking attempt may have been that of Adrian Chen.
On June 2, 2015, Chen published a prescient expose of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian “troll factory” that won fresh infamy in October over revelations that it had manufactured make-believe Americans to pollute social media with toxic rhetoric.
Eight days after Chen published his big story, Fancy Bear tried to break into his account.
Chen, who has regularly written about the darker recesses of the internet, said having a lifetime of private messages exposed to the internet could be devastating.
“I’ve covered a lot of these leaks,” he said. “I’ve seen what they could do.”
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For several decades Carol of the Bells or the Ukrainian Bell Carol has been an essential part of the American Christmas tradition – just like Christmas trees or presents. One can hear the song on radio or in TV-commercials, it has rock, jazz or metal versions. What makes it so memorable and popular? Mariia Prus and Dmitriy Savchuk addressed the question to professional musicians.
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