Month: May 2018

As the sun sets Tuesday, Muslims will begin observing the fasting month of Ramadan, the holiest on the Islamic calendar.  They abstain from food and water from dawn to dusk, pray, and recite Quran.

But, there is also a fun, festive side of the observance.  That’s the social gatherings for family and friends when they break their fast each evening, known as “Iftar.”  There are also special treats for kids who haven’t yet reached the age when they are required to fast.  And many Muslim families put up Ramadan decorations.

Though it’s not a religious requirement, decorating the house for Ramadan is a lovely, must-do tradition for Inas El Ayouby, who lives in Vienna, Virginia, with her family.

“It gives my house such a nice, warm feeling and it makes it an extra special time,” she explains.  “And it’s amazing how the decorations have the ability to create such a great delightful atmosphere and joyful mood throughout the month.”

Decorations, she adds, are especially important for children, teaching them about the month and making them love and anticipate it every year.

To El Ayouby, who loves decorating her house for various occasions, from birthdays and Thanksgiving to Easter and the Fourth of July, says decorations are part of any celebration.  Growing up in Egypt, El Ayouby recalls how her mother used to be creative, designing and making Ramadan decorations herself, as they were not sold in stores.

That’s what she did when her two kids were young, growing in America, when Ramadan was not a well-known event to non-Muslims.

“I used to get most of my Ramadan decorations from Egypt where it’s become a huge business and lucrative market.  I also used to go to nearby craft stores.  I also used to go on line and get beautiful post cards with different scenes of Ramadan, really beautiful.  I print them out and put them in colorful frames, like red, blue and yellow to add to the decorations.”

Party City makes it easier

This year, when the U.S. retail chain Party City introduced its Ramadan decorations line, El Ayouby was excited.

“Everybody just went crazy.  I can see all my friends on Facebook saying, go to Party City, go buy Ramadan stuff, you’re going to find lovely things.”

“I was able to get the hanging decorations, the balloons, the napkins and plates, which is great because in the past, I used to get solid red-color paper plates and use colorful napkins to go with it to add some coloring.  Now, we have the whole theme from Party City.  That’s really great.”

Ryan Vero, Party City’s president of retail, says the company created its Ramadan line based on requests from customers.  “We always look to support our customers in all of their party needs, for every type of celebration or event,” he says.  “We listened to our customers and recognized an opportunity to fill this underserved category of party good items.”

And, he notes, it’s a lucrative market, with about five million Muslims living in North America, according to a 2014 study by the American Muslim Consumer Consortium.

The new line includes tableware, banners, decals, gift bags and balloons in purple, blue, green and gold, embellished with mosques, stars and crescent drawings.  Beside Ramadan decorations, the company also offers similar items commemorating Eid, the end of month celebration.

“At this time, our decorations are predominantly sold out, both online, and in our stores,” Vero says.  “We were extremely pleased with the response and are working to get them back in stores.”

Ramadan decorations in the classroom

El Ayouby also bought Ramadan decorations for her grandson, Jad, who is in second grade.

“Over the past few years, his mother has been doing in-class Ramadan presentations.  She takes the decorations like the balloons, the plates and stuff in addition to food, juice and paper activity to his classroom. She takes a basket full of dates, and she tells all about Ramadan.”

With major public attention paid to the Christmas and Hanukkah holidays, she says this recognition gives Muslim children a sense of inclusion.

“With the decorations and other stuff, they feel they are integral part of the community and that their religious occasions are explained and celebrated.”
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Drake is going on tour.

The 31-year-old announced the “Aubrey and The Three Amigos Tour” on Monday. Drake will be joined by “Walk It Talk It” collaborators Migos and special guests on the North American leg through the summer and fall.

The 41-date tour starts July 26 in Salt Lake City.

Drake has released the singles “God’s Plan” and “Nice For What” ahead of his anticipated fifth studio album “Scorpion.”
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Viewers hoping Wim Wenders’ documentary about Pope Francis will be a critical portrait of the head of the Catholic Church will be disappointed. The German director makes no excuses for the fact this is a work of love for a man he respects.

Wenders, who won the Palme d’Or for “Paris, Texas” in 1984, has made several successful documentaries, including “Buena Vista Social Club” about the Cuban music scene, and “Pina” on dance choreographer Pina Bausch – subjects that, like the pope, are things he has great affection for.

“I didn’t want to make a critical film about him, other people do that really well, television does it all the time,” Wenders told Reuters in Cannes where “Pope Francis – a Man of His Word” had its premiere.

“My documentaries are expressions of love and affection for something that I want to share with the world … Right now I think there is nobody who has more important things to say to us [than] the pope, so I wanted to share that.”

“We are living in an utterly immoral time and our political leaders, powerful leaders, are emotional dwarfs. So I wanted to have this emotional giant talk to us.”

Jorge Mario Bergoglio, born in Argentina in 1936, became pope in 2013 after the unexpected resignation of Pope Benedict.

He chose his papal name after Francis of Assisi, a figure Wenders calls “a revolutionary” for his work with the poor and nature.

“Today Saint Francis would be the first ecologist of the world. Pope Francis took on a heavy duty prog by choosing that name,” Wenders said.

He filmed four two-hour interviews with Francis in which the pope talked directly into camera.

He said a kind of “teleprompter in reverse” allowed him to get that intimate look, by imposing Wenders’ face on a transparent screen with a camera behind it “so by looking into my eyes he sees everybody’s eyes”.

“This man communicates in such an honest direct and spontaneous way … even with the greatest actors you find that very rarely,” Wenders said.

With no prerequisites from the Vatican, Wenders insists his film is more than a promotional video.

“It is not propaganda,” he said.

“It’s not a commission. I was free to do what I wanted to do and this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to give a platform for his work, period.”

The Cannes Film Festival runs to May 19.

 
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 Margot Kidder, the Canadian actress who starred as a salty and cynical Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve in the “Superman” film franchise of the 1970s and 1980s, has died. She was 69.

 

Kidder’s manager Camilla Fluxman Pines said she died peacefully in her sleep on Sunday. Police in Livingston, Montana, said in a statement that officers were called to Kidder’s home, where they found her dead. An autopsy will be performed to determine the cause, but no foul play is suspected.

 

“Superman,” directed by Richard Donner and released in 1978, was a superhero blockbuster two decades before comic book movies became the norm at the top of the box office. Makers of today’s Marvel and D.C. films cite “Superman” as an essential inspiration.

 

Kidder, as ace reporter Lane, was a salty, sexually savvy adult who played off of the boyish, farm-raised charm of Reeve’s Clark Kent, though her dogged journalism constantly got her into dangerous scrapes that required old-fashioned rescues.

 

Kidder had many of the movies’ most memorable lines, including “You’ve got me?! Who’s got you?!” when she first encountered the costumed hero as she and a helicopter plunged from the top of a Metropolis building.

 

Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige called the moment “the best cinematic superhero save in the history of film” at an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences event honoring Donner last year.

 

Kidder and Reeve were relative unknowns when they got their leading parts in the first of the films in 1978, which also included big names Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando.

 

Kidder and Reeve went on to star in three more “Superman” movies, the fourth and last in 1987.

 

She said she and Reeve, who died in 2004, were like brother and sister, both in their affection and animosity for each other.

 

“We quarreled all the time,” Kidder said May 9 in an interview on radio station WWJ in Detroit, where she had been scheduled to appear at Motor City Comic Con later this month. “The crew would be embarrassed. They would look away. Then we’d play chess or something because we were also really good friends.”

 

Both would remain known almost entirely for their “Superman” roles and struggled to find other major parts.

 

Kidder also had a small part in 1975’s “The Great Waldo Pepper” with Robert Redford, and starred as conjoined twins in Brian De Palma’s 1973 “Sisters,” and as the mother of a terrorized family opposite James Brolin in 1979’s “The Amityville Horror.”

Mark Hamill was among those tweeting tributes to Kidder on Monday.

 

“On-screen she was magic,” the “Star Wars” actor said. “Off-screen she was one of the kindest, sweetest, most caring woman I’ve ever known.”

 

B-movie buffs say 1974’s “Black Christmas,” with Kidder as a sorority sister, is a must-watch.

 

“It introduced some elements that are now genre tropes and she’s fantastic in it,” comedian and actor Kumail Nanjiani said on Twitter Monday.

 

Kidder had a debilitating car accident in 1990 that left her badly in debt, confined her to a wheelchair for most of two years and worsened the mental illness she had struggled with for much of her life.

 

That struggle became public in 1996 when she was found dazed and filthy in a yard not far from the studio where she once filmed parts of “Superman.”

 

She fought through her illness and continued working, however, appearing in small films and television shows and amassing credits until 2017, most notably “R.L. Stine’s the Haunting Hour,” which earned her a Daytime Emmy Award as outstanding performer in a kids’ series in 2015.

 

“I don’t act much anymore unless I’m broke, and then I’ll take a job,” she told the Detroit radio station with a laugh.

 

She spent the last decades of her life living in Montana and engaging in political activism, including protesting the U.S. military action in Iraq.

 

Kidder was born in Yellowknife, Canada, and graduated from a Toronto boarding school before pursuing acting.

 

She dated then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1980s, calling him the “love of my life, my true love” in her radio interview last week.

 

Kidder was married and divorced three times, including a brief marriage to actor John Heard, and is survived by a daughter, Maggie McGuane.
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Fans of the high school musical Grease are in for a treat if they can make it to the French Riviera this week.

The movie will be screened on the beach Wednesday to celebrate its 40th anniversary. And fans might get a glimpse of its star, John Travolta, who is back in Cannes promoting his new film, Gotti, about a New York gangster.

In 1978, Travolta, already a global sensation thanks to Saturday Night Fever, came to the Cannes Film Festival to promote Grease, a huge hit that also made him a music star with songs from the soundtrack dominating the charts.

“The mid-point was Pulp Fiction, so it was 40 year, 20 year and now today,” Travolta reminisced.

“My mother always told me when I was younger: ‘Don’t rush things, it’s going to go very fast’, and boom, here I am,” he told Reuters.

“I’ve lived a long life, but it has really gone fast.”

Cult crime flick Pulp Fiction won Cannes’ Palme d’Or top prize in 1994, giving a second wind to Travolta’s career.

In his new film, Travolta plays John Gotti, a gangster boss who died in 2002. Travolta’s wife, Kelly Preston, co-stars as Gotti’s wife and the mother of their son who refuses to follow his father into the mob.

“He is very different from what I am and who I am and how I think and my values,” Travolta said of playing the gangster.

“It’s a completely different person — that’s something fun to play.”

Getting the film made, he said, was far less fun: “The challenges kept on knocking us down — different directors, different casts, different scripts — one was too shoot-’em-up, one was too family,” he said.

“People like challenges and I was willing to stay with it ’til we saw it through.”

The Cannes Film Festival runs until May 19.
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People in her hometown of Los Angeles remember actress Meghan Markle as a charitable young girl who sparkled on stage. Next week the entire world will be watching Markle as she officially ties the knot to England’s most eligible bachelor. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo takes a look at Markle’s fairy tale life and the prince that some say is the lucky one.
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There’s a push to level the playing field for women in India, where women account for 42 percent of university graduates but only 24 percent are hired as entry level professionals. Of these, 19 percent are likely to reach senior level management. To make matters worse, the number of women who leave the work force is also higher than men. As Ritul Joshi reports, a specially designed management course for women in New Delhi is teaching them to make their way in a male dominated work force.
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The Eurovision song contest has concluded for 2018, with the top prize going to Israel’s Netta Barzilai and her quirky girl-power song Toy.

The Eurovision contest is an international tradition pitting performers from 43 nations against each other and decided by viewers all over the world. Along with European nations, Australia and Israel are allowed to compete.

Barzilai’s song, a fast-paced pop number, featured throaty singing and unconventional mouth noises, including squeaks, pops and clucks, as she protested to her listeners that she would not be used as a plaything. Meanwhile, her backup singers cavorted and preened in a manner that was, at times, reminiscent of chickens strutting and flapping their wings.

Some viewers responded negatively online to the performer’s antics, but in the end, her unorthodox performance and #MeToo-friendly message won the day.

The show, staged in Lisbon, Portugal, was not without other controversies: British singer SuRie was interrupted onstage when a protester grabbed her microphone. The protester was quickly subdued and SuRie finished her performance, with viewers online lauding her for her calm response and strong finish.

An Australian broadcaster narrating the event, however, accidentally uttered an expletive on the air, prompting a storm of chatter on Twitter.

A Chinese video service, Mango TV, was barred by the European Broadcast Union from airing the event, after it edited out of Tuesday’s semifinal a performance featuring a romantic dance sequence by two men. It also reportedly blurred out images of rainbow flags in the audience.

Some 200 million viewers were expected to view Saturday’s performances.
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A former Australian Rules Footballer of Nigerian descent is taking legal action against the sport for alleged racial, sexual and religious discrimination.  Joel Wilkinson says the abuse he suffered was a “continuous breach of human rights” and insists that racism is rife in Australia’s most popular professional sport.  It is thought to be the first case of its kind in Australia.

In 2014, Wilkinson appeared in an anti-discrimination advert sponsored by the Australian Football League, the AFL in which he spoke of the abuse he had suffered on the field.

“I actually felt like he was trying to make me feel like I was a little kid, a little black kid, a little piece of dirt.”

But the former Gold Coast Suns player now alleges that the League’s public stance on racism is very different from what he says is a “much darker reality.”  He insists that his career ended abruptly in 2013 because he was so outspoken about the mistreatment he endured.

He is taking his case for compensation to Australia’s Human Rights Commission after talks with the AFL failed to reach an agreement.

“I have suffered extreme racism  during my time in the AFL and post my career in the AFL until this very day,” said Wilkinson. “My career was taken from me.  My rights were violated due to racism, religious vilification and racially-motivated sexual harassment that I experienced for many years.”

The AFL said in a statement that it was sorry the ex-player “had suffered experiences of racial abuse” during his time as a footballer, and that it was committed to resolving his complaint.

In 2013,  a famous Aboriginal AFL player was taunted by a young spectator who called him an ape.’  The 13-year old girl later apologized for her behavior.

The competition is Australia’s most-watched professional sport.  Matches in the city of Melbourne attract up to 100,000 fans.  The Australian Football League has more than 80 Indigenous players, about 10 per cent of the total.   It has also featured players with Jamaican, Lebanese and Sudanese heritage.

Rights groups have previously praised the League’s efforts to tackle racism in Australia.
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The Everett House, which serves as the Turkish ambassador’s residence, is a Washington landmark. It is also famous as the one-time home of the Ertegun family, the brothers who would go on to found Atlantic records and change the sound of American jazz and pop music. But the Erteguns also played a role in Washington history by standing with African Americans in what was, at the time, a deeply segregated city. VOA’s Ozlem Tinaz reports.
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Peggy and David Rockefeller’s lavish artworks and other treasures set a new world record this week at a Christie’s auction, topping $800 million as the priciest single-owner collection.

That’s about twice the previous record of $484 million from a 2009 Paris sale of designer Yves Saint Laurent’s estate.

The three-day live sale of the late couple’s belongings ended Thursday with a $115 million star lot — a Picasso painting called “Fillette a la corbeille fleurie” of a naked girl holding a basket of flowers that once belonged to the writer Gertrude Stein, estimated to be worth $100 million. The runner-up, at $84 million, was a Monet canvas with his famed water lilies, “Nimpheas en fleur,” which surpassed its $50 million estimate and set a record for his art at auction against a previous high of $81 million.

Matisse’s “Odalisque Couchee aux Magnolias,” depicting a woman in a Turkish harem, sold for $80.8 million, topping the $70 million estimate and setting a new record for a Matisse, whose highest price at auction had been $48.8 million.

​Rockefeller Mania

In what one art publication dubbed “Rockefeller Mania,” Christie’s said 100 percent of the 893 Rockefeller lots offered live had sold, for a total of $828 million, as well as all of the more than 600 lots sold online for $4.6 million.

Diego Rivera’s 1931 “The Rivals” went for the highest price ever paid for a Latin American artwork on the block, $9.8 million against a pre-auction estimate of $5 million to $7 million.

On Friday, the sale wasn’t over until the online-only bids were in. Anyone with a few hundred dollars could go for a piece of the opulence that surrounded the late Rockefeller couple, by bidding on, say, cufflinks or jewelry. A 14-carat gold money clip once filled with Rockefeller cash sold for $75,000 against an estimate of $800 to $1,200.

Eclectic tastes

The total 1,564 Rockefeller lots reflected the couple’s eclectic tastes in everything from fine furniture, porcelain and ceramics to duck decoys and blue-chip art that graced their various properties and David’s bank office. Paintings filled the walls of their Maine home, their Manhattan townhouse and a country mansion in the Pocantino Hills north of the city, complete with horses and cows.

For a whiff of that life, buyers were willing to pay prices way above the pre-auction estimates.

A rare Chinese blue and white “dragon” bowl from the Maine kitchen cabinet, valued at up to $150,000, went for $2.7 million. A bronze figure of the Buddhist deity Amitayus realized $2.5 million, against a $600,000 high estimate.

A 256-piece Sevres dessert service commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte sold for $1.8 million — more than six times its high estimate.

Six George III “Gothick” Windsor Armchairs sold for $336,500 against a top estimate of $80,000, and an English wicker picnic hamper soared to $212,500, against a high estimate of $10,000.

​Proceeds go to charity

All prices include buyers’ premiums. Christie’s bolstered the auction by guaranteeing the whole Rockefeller collection, not disclosing the minimum price at which a work would have to sell or buyers’ names. Many came from abroad, drawn to the New York power name that dominated the city’s privileged, philanthropic society for a century.

Peggy died in 1996, and David in 2017, as the last surviving grandson of the oil baron John D. Rockefeller. The couple’s son, David Rockefeller Jr., said auction proceeds would go to charity.

The collection ended up, appropriately, in Rockefeller Center off Fifth Avenue where Christie’s is located. John D. Rockefeller Jr. had helped finance and build the grand complex in the 1930s.
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The latest “Star Wars” movie did not have a smooth flight to the screen, but the director and cast of “Solo” say the scramble to remake the movie ultimately paid off, with early reaction ahead of the May 25 launch largely positive.

Original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were fired from “Solo: A Star Wars Story” midway through production, and Walt Disney Co. asked Ron Howard to come in to oversee extensive reshoots.

The film, which tells the origin story of Han Solo, premiered in Hollywood on Thursday and drew cheers and applause throughout from the crowds in two historic theaters, the first large audiences to see the finished product.

“We went so fast to get the movie ready,” Howard said in an interview with Reuters on Friday. “I was really on pins and needles, and I was so gratified to hear laughs and hear cheers in all the places I hoped and I dreamed that they would be. It was a good night. I slept well last night.”

Alden Ehrenreich, 28, stepped into the role of cowboy smuggler Han Solo, made famous by Harrison Ford in the original “Star Wars” trilogy that began in 1977. Ehrenreich plays a younger Solo just beginning his pilot training and seeking his own spaceship when he becomes involved in a dangerous mission in the galaxy far, far away.

“Game of Thrones” star Emilia Clarke, who portrays Solo’s childhood friend Qi’ra, said the change of directors produced less drama than people may think.

“Something that on paper sounds horrific was not in reality at all for someone who was in it and experienced and was living through it,” Clarke said. “Everyone who handled it was seamless and graceful.”

Fans around the world have debated how Ehrenreich, little known beyond a well-received performance in quirky 2016 comedy “Hail, Caesar,” would handle one of cinema’s most loved characters.

Ehrenreich confirmed he had signed a contract to play Solo in three movies and said he was anxious to step into the role again in future installments.

“By the end of the movie, he’s more like the guy we know, and that’s fun,” Ehrenreich said.
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A biopic about the man who founded one of Brazil’s largest evangelical churches has sold more tickets than any other film in recent memory in the South American country. But some have accused the church of cooking the books.

The film tells the story of Bishop Edir Macedo, who founded the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in the 1970s. Macedo is a powerful and controversial figure in Brazil who owns a media empire and has been dogged by accusations of malfeasance — allegations that the film portrays as a plot by the Catholic Church and Brazilian establishment to limit his power.

A company that measures media penetration, comScore, says the film “Nada a Perder” — “Nothing to Lose” — sold more than 11.7 million tickets between its release March 29 and Thursday. That makes the film, which is being released Friday in the United States, the most attended since 2002, the first year for which comScore has Brazilian box office data. The next closest film, a 2016 movie about the life of Moses, sold more than 11.3 million tickets.

Blockbuster sales but empty seats

But the Brazilian press has accused the church of inflating sales by buying up tickets. The Folha de S.Paulo newspaper sent reporters to movie theaters during the film’s opening weekend and said the screening rooms weren’t full, despite the blockbuster ticket sales. The church denies that and, in turn, accused the Brazilian media of disseminating “fake news” to damage its reputation.

“The Universal (church) never bought tickets for the film ‘Nada a Perder,’” the church said in a statement to The Associated Press. “That said, part of the success of the film, and therein lies the hatred of some segments of the press, comes from the initiative of volunteers from Universal and other denominations and religions, who have organized so that the largest number of people possible can see the film.”

It added that other religions do exactly the same thing: recommending to their followers things they believe in.

The film, which was produced by Paris Entretenimento, is based on Macedo’s life and ends with a recorded message from the man himself. The church says it was not involved in the film’s production, though it has vigorously promoted it on its website as has Macedo’s Record TV network. Another part of Macedo’s media empire, Record Filmes, has helped to screen the film in prisons and for remote communities, including indigenous groups. A sequel is planned.

The second most-attended film since comScore started keeping track is “Os Dez Mandamentos,” which Record Filmes produced. The third film is “Tropa de Elite 2,” the sequel to a popular Brazilian film about gang violence and police corruption in Rio de Janeiro. But comScore data shows that “Nada a Perder” may not reign for long: “Avengers: Infinity War,” which opened April 26 in Brazil, has more than 10.4 million ticket sales so far.

Luis Fernando Rodrigues was among five people who saw “Nada a Perder” at a movie theater in Sao Paulo on Thursday afternoon.

“This film is part of a holy war” over the image of Macedo and his church, said the 57-year-old architect. Even the debate over how many people saw the film is part of that battle, he said.

Gesturing at the empty theater, he added: “We don’t know if it’s because of the time of day or if it’s a manipulation.”

Controversy has long surrounded Macedo, a colorful character who has won both adoration and notoriety for taking on two of Brazil’s most entrenched institutions: the Catholic church and the Globo media empire. Brazil is the world’s most populous Catholic country, but evangelicals are on the rise: They account for 1 in 5 people, up from 1 in 20 a few decades ago, and evangelical lawmakers make up a powerful voting bloc in Congress. Macedo’s Universal church has been one of the motors of the group’s growth.

​Fervent followers

Macedo was raised a Catholic, but the movie shows him searching for spiritual meaning elsewhere. In the film, his family experiments with traditional healers to cure his sister’s asthma and finally joins an evangelical church. But he ends up rejecting that church as too elitist and finally founds his own.

Over the years, he and his preachers have drawn the ire of Catholics for railing against their “idolatry” of saints and calling the pope the Antichrist.

But they have also drawn fervent followers, who have turned the Universal church into a powerful player in Brazilian politics and culture. Macedo’s nephew and a bishop in the church, Marcelo Crivella, was elected mayor of Rio de Janeiro in 2016, and the Universal church says it has 9 million followers in 110 countries, 7 million of whom are in Brazil.

Macedo himself has been dogged by accusations of financial crimes and exploiting his followers. He was briefly jailed in 1990s amid accusations of extortion, tax evasion and fraud, an episode portrayed in the film as proof of the power of his message and the great lengths that the Brazilian establishment will go to silence it.

In 2011, federal prosecutors accused Macedo of false representation, larceny by fraud, money laundering and forming a criminal association. A judge rejected some of those charges, and the statute of limitations expired for others. According to the Sao Paulo Federal Justice system, the money-laundering charge is still pending.

In a statement, the church said Macedo was the victim of “judicial persecution” and that it was sure that he would be found innocent in the remaining case.
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