Month: April 2018

Diane Kacprowski showed up at 57th Street Books in Chicago early on Tuesday on a mission to be one of the first to snap up a copy of James Comey’s scalding memoir about his time at the helm of the FBI and his abrupt firing by President Donald Trump.

“A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership” went on sale at midnight, and customers scrambled to bookstores around the country to buy the tell-all book that sparked a Twitter war between Trump and the man he fired.

“I’m buying it for the same reason I bought ‘Fire and Fury,'” Kacprowski, a 62-year-old airline employee and realtor said, referring to Michael Wolff’s scathing book about the Trump White House. “To stick it to Trump.”

She was fortunate to have arrived early. The bookstore sold out all its stock within 20 minutes of opening for business. At other bookstores, owners said sales were slower and the publisher, Macmillan, would not release initial sales figures.

Conservative commentators, such as Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have attacked Comey as partisan and indecisive in his handling of the email scandal that dogged Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Others, like former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, have denounced Comey for leaking memos about his discussions with Trump.

Macmillan, Comey’s publisher, ordered 850,000 copies to meet expected demand compared with Wolff’s first print run of 150,000.

At some stores, however, early sales of Comey’s book were slower than Wolff’s blockbuster.

“I was very concerned that we wouldn’t have enough,” said Judy Hirsch, a saleswoman at a small, independent bookstore in New York’s Greenwich Village. It ordered 25 books but had sold only four copies by late afternoon.

In the nation’s capital, shopper Phillip Carlisle rushed to buy the book at Washington’s Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe when it was released just after the stroke of midnight.

“I was excited to read a book by somebody who I think is a fundamentally honest person,” said Carlisle, who described himself as a “pretty far-left person.”

Comey’s firing by Trump last year led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate allegations that Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election and possible collusion between Russians and the Trump campaign.

In the memoir, Comey described an intelligence briefing in which Trump and his team were told about evidence of Russia’s interference in the election. In response, the president-elect had only one question, Comey writes: “But you found there was no impact on the result, right?”

The release capped a weeklong media blitz to publicize the book. In an ABC News interview on Sunday, Comey said Trump was a dangerous and “morally unfit” leader doing “tremendous damage” to U.S. institutional and cultural norms.

For his part, Trump repeatedly hurled insulting tweets at Comey in the run-up to the release, challenging accusations made in the book and the author’s integrity.

“Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack (he is not smart!), will go down as the WORST FBI Director in history, by far!” Trump wrote early on Sunday in one of five Twitter posts aimed directly at Comey.

At The Strand in New York, Denise Thomas grabbed a copy of the book, which features a staid black cover with silver lettering, saying she hoped it would make sense of the barrage of news from Washington.

“I’m hoping to be able to sift through just one person’s telling,” said Thomas, 52, an administrative assistant from Longmeadow, Massachusetts, vacationing in New York.

“Every day there’s not only one scandal, there’s multiple scandals that are just flying at us,” she said.
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Asia Argento said he raped her during the Cannes Film Festival. Mira Sorvino said he chased her around a hotel room at the Toronto International Film Festival. Rose McGowan’s encounter happened at the Sundance Film Festival. 

Just as Harvey Weinstein did at the Oscars, the disgraced movie mogul lorded over the festival world, which provided the glitzy, champagne-flowing setting for many of his alleged crimes. And in the aftermath of Hollywood’s sexual harassment scandals, film festivals have done some soul searching.

Codes of conduct have been rewritten, selection processes have been re-examined and, in many cases, gender equality efforts have been redoubled.

When the curtain goes up on the 17th annual Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday, the festival will boast more female filmmakers than ever before. After last year accounting for a third of the slate, films directed by women make up 46 percent at this year’s festival.

Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the festival and chief executive of Tribeca Enterprises, particularly wanted to launch this year’s festival with the premiere of a film directed by a woman, about a woman. Lisa Dapolito’s Love, Gilda, about the comedienne Gilda Radner, will kick things off Wednesday at New York’s Beacon Theatre. The first episode of Liz Garbus’ Showtime documentary series The Fourth Estate, about The New York Times covering the first year of the Trump administration, will close the festival. On April 28, the festival will hold a day’s worth of conversations with Time’s Up, including Ashley Judd and Julianne Moore, to benefit the legal defense fund and gender equality initiative.

‘Fairly easy’ results

“For us it was, on one hand, business as usual,” said Rosenthal, pointing to previous efforts Tribeca has made to promote female filmmakers, like its Nora Ephron Award. “But we tasked ourselves early on with: Can you get to 50-50? Can we have 50 percent women filmmakers at the festival? We got to 46. I would say that it was fairly easy for us. Those pictures would probably have been in the festival without that kind of mandate.”

Efforts to improve the movie business’ record on gender equality have been ongoing at many, though not all, major film festivals in recent years. Pursuing parity has seemed at times like an arms race, with various festivals touting their male-to-female ratios. The festival world is far ahead of the industry (only eight of last year’s top 100 films at the box office were directed by women) and the Academy Awards (where Greta Gerwig became just the fifth woman ever nominated for best director this year).

Thirty-seven percent of the 122 features at this year’s Sundance were directed by women, including Seeing Allred, about women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred. For the first time, all four of the festival’s directing prizes went to female filmmakers. The festival’s top prize, the Grand Jury Prize, went to Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post.

At SXSW in March, eight of the 10 films in the narrative competition were directed by women. At last fall’s Toronto film festival, one third of entries were made by female filmmakers and a five-year, $3 million campaign dubbed “Share Her Journey” was launched to support female filmmakers.

Hot Docs

The Hot Docs Festival, a well-regarded documentary festival held annually in Toronto, reached gender parity for the first time this year. A year after a program in which 48 percent of the projects were directed by females, this year’s 246 films and 16 interdisciplinary projects are 50/50 on gender. The festival on Tuesday also added the premiere of Barry Avrich’s Weinstein documentary The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret.

Shane Smith, director of programming at Hot Docs, which begins April 26, said reflecting the diversity and the demands of the audience is imperative for “cultural gatekeepers” like film festivals.

“We were hoping we could get to gender parity,” said Smith. “Once we started screening the work that was coming in, and the quality of the films and the stories that were being told by female filmmakers, we saw that it was a goal that was achievable this year,” Smith said. “We weren’t going to force this to happen if the work wasn’t there. But given the strides that have happened in the last few years, it was easy, actually.”

The Cannes Film Festival, which opens May 8, has applied a different strategy. Its artistic director, Thierry Fremaux, has regularly responded to complaints about the number of female filmmakers selected for its prestigious Palme d’Or competition by saying it’s not a festival’s place to consider anything but a submission’s merit — that progress can only come further up the pipeline at studios and production companies.

Critics say Cannes’ track record (only one female filmmaker, Jane Campion, has ever won the Palme) speaks for itself. Fremaux last week announced Cannes’ main slate with three female filmmakers — Nadine Labaki, Alice Rohrwacher and Eva Husson — disappointing some who thought Cannes might adapt in the age of #MeToo.

“The question of a quota in no case concerns the artistic selection of a festival. Films are chosen for their quality,” Fremaux said at a news conference last week. “There will never be a selection made by positive discrimination.”

Weinstein, who has denied allegations of sexual assault, was for years a dominant wheeler-and-dealer at Cannes. His fall was felt acutely there. “The Cannes Film Festival will never be the same again,” said Fremaux, who vowed to re-examine the festival’s own gender parity in salaries and jury selections.

Backlash at Austin

Other festivals have had even tougher questions to answer. Last September’s Fantastic Fest, the Austin-based genre film festival, caused a backlash after it was revealed that the festival’s host, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, had rehired blogger Devin Faraci a year after he stepped down following an accusation of sexual assault. Fox Searchlight pulled Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri from the festival.

Weinstein had less of a connection with the Tribeca festival, but the scandal still hit close to home. The Weinstein Co. is based in the same Tribeca building as the Tribeca Enterprises headquarters. “It was: ‘Who’s the stranger next door?’ ” said Rosenthal, Robert De Niro’s longtime producing partner.

But as a Time’s Up member herself, Rosenthal is hopeful that the industry is waking up to overdue change. Festivals don’t have direct sway over what gets made and what sells, but they can play a vital role in showcasing filmmaking talent and sparking conversation.

“I’ve had a women’s lunch for 15 years at the festival,” said Rosenthal. “Now, it’s going to be very crowded.”
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Senegal has a small but ambitious circus. It began as a local association offering arts and acrobatics workshops to disadvantaged kids from poor neighborhoods around the capital. The circus troupe has grown from there and now performs abroad, though some of the acrobats continue to face resistance from their families. Chika Oduah reports for VOA from Dakar.
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FIFA charged World Cup host Russia with fan racism Tuesday, less than two months before the tournament begins.

Monkey chants were aimed at black French players, including Paul Pogba, during France’s 3-1 friendly win over Russia in St. Petersburg last month.

“Disciplinary proceedings have been opened against the Russian Football Union for this incident,” FIFA said.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, who is overseeing World Cup preparations, told state news agencies Tuesday that Russia was cracking down on racist fans.

“We’ll do anything so there are no discrimination cases,” he said. “But if that happens … there should be zero tolerance for these people.”

The RFU said it is cooperating with the FIFA investigation.

“A request has been made to the Interior Ministry to identify several persons who were involved in these incidents,” RFU anti-discrimination officer Alexei Smertin was quoted as saying Monday by the Tass news agency. “If these people’s guilt is proven, then there’s a high likelihood they won’t be allowed to attend World Cup and Russian league games.”

Russia was previously charged with racist behavior by its fans at the last two European Championships. On both occasions, the RFU paid a fine.

It’s the third racism case this season at St. Petersburg Stadium, which will host a World Cup semifinal match. Zenit St. Petersburg has twice faced UEFA charges for racism by its fans in Europa League games.

Zenit fans flew a banner praising convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic when playing a Macedonian club in November and are accused of using a racially charged term to mock an injured black player in a game against Leipzig. The second case is due to be heard by UEFA on May 31, two weeks before the World Cup begins.
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California rapper Kendrick Lamar on Monday became the first rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, one of the most prestigious arts awards in the United States.

Lamar, 30, won the Pulitzer for his 2017 album “DAMN.” and was also the first music winner in the 100-year history of the Pulitzers to come from outside of the world of classical or jazz.

Rap officially surpassed rock in 2017 as the biggest music genre in the United States.

Lamar’s fusion of jazz, poetry and blues with social themes and love songs has made him one of the most innovative rappers of his generation.

The Pulitzer board on Monday hailed “DAMN.,” which was released in April 2017, as “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.”

Previous Pulitzer music winners include jazz musicians Wynton Marsalis and Ornette Coleman.

“DAMN.,” Lamar’s fourth album deals with religion, love, personal struggles and racial politics. It topped the Billboard 200 album charts for three weeks on its release last year and powered Lamar to five wins at the Grammy Awards in New York in January.

But the album failed to win the top Grammy prize – album of the year – in what was seen as a snub by music industry voters for the rap genre despite its rising popularity.

Only two hip-hop albums have ever won the Grammy for album of the year: Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” in 1999 and Outkast’s “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” in 2004.

Lamar was born and raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Compton, the home of hip-hop pioneers NWA, and started making music as a 16-year-old.

He also produced the soundtrack for the 2018 superhero box-office hit film “Black Panther,” and performed the lead single “Pray For Me” with The Weeknd.
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The New York Times and The New Yorker won the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for breaking the Harvey Weinstein scandal with reporting that galvanized the #MeToo movement and set off a worldwide reckoning over sexual misconduct in the workplace.

 

The Times and The Washington Post took the national reporting award for their coverage of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and contacts between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.

The Press Democrat of Santa Rosa, California, received the breaking news reporting award for coverage of the wildfires that swept through California wine country last fall, killing 44 people and destroying thousands of homes.

The Washington Post also won the investigative reporting prize for revealing decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct against Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama. The Republican former judge denied the accusations, but they figured heavily in Doug Jones’ victory as the first Democrat elected to the Senate from the state in decades.

One of the biggest surprises of the day came in the non-journalism categories when rap star Kendrick Lamar was awarded the Pulitzer for music, becoming the first non-classical or non-jazz artist to win the prize.

The Pulitzers, American journalism’s most prestigious awards, reflected a year of unrelenting news and unprecedented challenges for U.S. media, as Trump repeatedly branded reporting “fake news” and called journalists “the enemy of the people.”

 

In announcing the journalism prizes, Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy said the winners “uphold the highest purpose of a free and independent press, even in the most trying of times.”

 

“Their work is real news of the highest order, executed nobly, as journalism was always intended, without fear or favor,” she said.

 

A string of stories in The Times and The Washington Post shined a light on Russian interference in the presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign and transition — ties now under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. The president has branded the investigation a “witch hunt.”

The Pulitzer judges commended the two newspapers for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest.”

 

In stories that appeared within days of each other in October, The Times and The New Yorker reported that movie mogul Weinstein faced allegations of sexual harassment and assault from a multitude of women in Hollywood going back decades and had secretly paid settlements to keep the claims from becoming public.

 

The Pulitzer judges said The Times’ Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey and The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow produced “explosive, impactful journalism that exposed powerful and wealthy sexual predators, including allegations against one of Hollywood’s most influential producers, bringing them to account for long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing, thus spurring a worldwide reckoning about sexual abuse of women.”

The stories led to Weinstein’s ouster from the studio he co-founded, and he now faces criminal investigations in New York and Los Angeles. He has apologized for “the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past” but denied any non-consensual sexual contact.

The stories’ impact soon spread beyond Weinstein to allegations against other prominent men in entertainment, politics and elsewhere, toppling such figures as “Today” show host Matt Lauer, actor Kevin Spacey, newsman Charlie Rose and Sen. Al Franken.

 

Men and women, famous or not, have spoken about their own experiences of sexual harassment and assault in what has become known as the #MeToo movement.

 

Weinstein spokeswoman Holly Baird declined to comment on the Pulitzer award except to suggest similar recognition should be afforded to Tarana Burke, an activist who founded the #MeToo movement on Twitter about a decade ago to raise awareness of sexual violence.

 

In other categories, the Arizona Republic and USA Today Network won the explanatory reporting prize for a multi-format look at the challenges and consequences of building the Mexican border wall that was a centerpiece of Trump’s campaign. The project included footage from a helicopter flight along the entire, 2,000-mile border, a podcast and a virtual reality component.

 

The local reporting award went to The Cincinnati Enquirer for what judges called “a riveting and insightful” narrative and video about the heroin epidemic in the area. The paper deployed more than four dozen reporters and photographers for an intense dive into the drug’s toll over one week.

 

Work like that and the Press Democrat’s wildfire coverage show “you don’t have to have a huge budget to have a big impact,” Canedy said.

Clare Baldwin, Andrew R.C. Marshall and Manuel Mogato of Reuters won the international reporting award for their coverage of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly crackdown on drugs, and the news agency’s photographers received the feature photography prize for their images of the plight of Rohingya refugees who have fled Myanmar.

 

The breaking news photography award went to Ryan Kelly of The Daily Progress of Charlottesville, Virginia, who captured the moment that a car plowed into counter-protesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally in the Virginia college town. The car killed one of the counter-demonstrators, Heather Heyer.

Kelly made the photo on his last day at the newspaper before moving on to a job at a brewery. In a text Monday, Kelly described the prize as an “incredible honor” but added: “Mostly I’m still heartbroken for Heather Heyer’s family and everybody else who was affected by that tragic violence.”

 

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, a freelance writer for GQ magazine, took the feature writing award for a profile of Dylann Roof, the avowed white supremacist convicted of killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina.

 

The commentary award went to John Archibald of Alabama Media Group in Birmingham, Alabama, for pieces on politics, women’s rights and other topics. Art critic Jerry Saltz of New York magazine won the criticism award for what the judges called his “canny and often daring perspective.”

 

Andie Dominick of The Des Moines Register received the editorial writing prize for pieces about the consequences of privatizing Iowa’s administration of Medicaid.

 

Freelance writer Jake Halpern and freelance cartoonist Michael Sloan were awarded the editorial cartooning prize for a graphic narrative in The New York Times about a family of refugees fearing deportation.

 

The Pulitzers were announced at Columbia University, which administers the prizes. This is the 102nd year of the contest, established by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer.

 

Winners of the public service award receive a gold medal; the other awards carry a prize of $15,000 each.
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The latest cinematic installment of the smash hit “Millennium series” will reveal more details about mysterious hacker heroine Lisbeth Salander, and delve into her past, director Fede Alvarez said.

Filming for the The Girl in the Spider’s Web is under way in Sweden with British actress Claire Foy cast as the young tattooed Salander, an introvert who endures a complex relationship with journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason).

“What I really wanted to do was to send her into a place of her life and, in this case, to her past to confront things that will hopefully reveal a bit more about who she truly is,” said the Uruguayan director behind Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe.

“When you think you know, when you think you have figured her out, she does something that changes everything you thought you knew. That’s what’s fun about her.”

The film, set for a November release, is based on the book by new author David Lagercrantz who took the series on after the death of Stieg Larsson, the author of the original best-selling trilogy.

Lagercrantz’s sequel, released in 2016, features spies from the U.S. National Security Agency and Salander’s long-missing twin sister Camilla, who has taken over their father’s criminal network.

The role of Salander was previously portrayed by American Rooney Mara in the 2011 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Foy, who won critical acclaim for her role as Britain’s Queen Elizabeth in the Netflix series The Crown, said she was excited to play the dark character alongside Gudnason, who replaces James Bond actor Daniel Craig.

“I think inside she knows who she is, but the outside have always seen her as a victim,” said Golden Globe winner Foy, showing off her new short haircut for the role in Stockholm.

“People have been taking advantage of that and I think she’s just a survivor and non-judgmental and just … I love her. I love her.”
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On the back of wide praise for her two-hour performance at the Coachella music festival, Beyonce on Monday said she was offering $100,000 in scholarship money to students at four historically black colleges and universities.

The Homecoming Scholars Award Program for the 2018-19 academic year will give away $25,000 in scholarship money to a student at Xavier University of Louisiana, Wilberforce University in Ohio, Tuskegee University in Alabama and Bethune-Cookman University in Florida, the “Lemonade” album singer’s foundation said.

Beyonce’s performance at the Coachella festival in the Southern California desert on Saturday was billed as a homage to education and black American culture, featuring a marching band, performance art, choir and dance. She was supported by more than 150 performers on stage.

It was the first time a black woman headlined the two-weekend festival, one of the biggest U.S. music gatherings of the year.

“We honor all institutions of higher learning for maintaining culture and creating environments for optimal learning which expands dreams and the seas of possibilities for students,” Ivy McGregor, who administers the singer’s BeyGood foundation, said in a statement announcing the scholarship.

The more than 100 historically black U.S. colleges and universities were all established before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when white-dominated institutions of higher education could bar African-American students.

Last year, the 36-year-old singer established a merit scholarship program to support young women.

The “Formation” singer’s Coachella performance, which was streamed live on YouTube, was hailed as an “unprecedented celebration of black cultural influence in America” by NBC News.

Trade publication Variety called Beyonce’s show, her first in more than a year, a “musical, visual and physical triumph.”

Beyonce will perform again at Coachella this Saturday, and she and her husband, rapper Jay Z, are set to begin a U.S. and European tour together in June.
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An American woman has won the women’s title at the Boston Marathon for the first time since 1985.

Desiree Linden, a two-time Olympian and runner up in the 2011 Boston Marathon, finished the 42-kilometer race in two hours, 39 minutes, 54 seconds – a full four minutes faster than the second-place runner.

The last American woman to win the Boston Marathon was Lisa Larsen Weidenbach.

Japanese runner Yuki Kawauchi won the men’s title Monday, winning his fourth marathon this year and earning Japan’s first Boston Marathon win since 1987.

 

 
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Evictions have been called a silent threat to America’s cities. Every week, thousands of Americans are forced from their homes, for non-payment. An exhibit on U.S. housing evictions opens in Washington D.C. this weekend, based on a book by Princeton University professor Matthew Desmond, which explores the problem by following the lives of several families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as they struggle to pay the rent. From Washington, VOA’s Jill Craig takes a look at the exhibit.
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Betty Rosenbaum was only 2 years old when her mother and brother were sent to a concentration camp in eastern Poland in 1943. She never saw them again. Today, a new digital exhibition at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, features a treasured letter her mother wrote to her more than 75 years ago. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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