Month: October 2018

Sean “Diddy” Combs has pledged $1 million to a network of charter schools for a new location in the Bronx.

 

Capital Preparatory Schools has been approved to open in September with 160 6th and 7th graders. The goal is to expand to 650 students in grades six through 11 over five years, according to an announcement Tuesday.

 

The music mogul and Harlem native is a longtime education advocate. He worked closely with Capital Prep founder Steve Perry to expand the network that already has schools in Harlem and Bridgeport, Connecticut.

 

Diddy says he knows firsthand from his own upbringing the importance of access to free quality education. He said the school will provide historically disadvantaged students with the college and career skills they need to succeed.

 
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Graffiti covers the ruins of Cyrene in eastern Libya, a city founded by Greeks more than 2,600 years ago that once attracted tourists but is now neglected and the target of vandals.

Insecurity and looting has hit Libya’s archaeological sites in the chaos and fighting that has followed the overthrow of Muammar Gadhafi in 2011, as rival groups struggle to consolidate control of the country.Libya is home to five of UNESCO’s World Heritage sites, listed for their outstanding universal value. The sites include the ruins of the Roman city of Leptis Magna and Sabratha, which is famous for its amphitheater.

There are also prehistoric rock carvings in the Akakous mountains deep in the southern Sahara desert near the border with Algeria.

In the east, tourists once trekked to Cyrene, a site founded by Greeks and later expanded by Romans, nestled in the mountains some 200 km (124 miles) east of Benghazi.

But with foreign tourists gone and the sites visited only by Libyan families on weekend trips, locals have seized land at the sites and vandals have even smeared graffiti on columns and walls.

That presents a challenge to local authorities trying to protect the ruins located in the small community of Shahat.

“In Cyrene, instead of speaking to one owner, now we speak to 50 with different backgrounds,” said Ahmad Hussein, the head of the antiquities department of a parallel administration in charge of eastern Libya.

“Some of the owners have built houses on these sites,” he said.

The challenge is worsened by a law in 2013 that allowed people to reclaim land confiscated under Gadhafi. Some people took that literally and annexed what they felt they deserved.

Hussein wants to hold those who seized land accountable.

Two governments, few visitors

The effort to preserve ruins is further hampered by the fact that Libya has two governments. One administration backed by the United Nations sits in Tripoli, while the east has a parallel government.

In a rare positive sign, Hussein said that about 1,700 artifacts had been returned since 2011 after they were looted inside the country. Many other items are smuggled abroad though.

Leptis Magna in northwestern Libya has been able to escape vandalism thanks to local history fans and relative security at its location near the city of Misrata.

Sabratha has been repeatedly hit by fighting between rival factions and UNESCO last year issued an appeal to protect the site. The site received no help.

In the capital Tripoli, a lone director is trying to preserve some 18 Roman graves, dating back some 1,700 years which were found in 1958 in the western suburb of Janzour.

“There is no support for this site,” said al-Amari Ramadan Mabrouk, director of the Janzour antiquities office.

Libyan families come occasionally but otherwise spiders and dust cover the graves.

“I cannot give a number for tourists who visit Libya… but I can say that, before 2011, tourism was popular in Libya,” he said.
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French film star Catherine Deneuve received Japan’s most prestigious art award on Tuesday at a ceremony in Tokyo, where she was greeted by Emperor Akihito.

Deneuve received the Praemium Imperiale for her achievement in film and theater performances.

 

The 84-year-old Akihito, who is abdicating at the end of April, shook hands with Deneuve at a reception afterward and congratulated her, according to Japan’s Kyodo News agency.

 

Deneuve has appeared in more than 100 films during a career spanning over 60 years.

 

Deneuve, 75, is currently working on a new film by Japanese award-winning director Hirokazu Koreeda in Paris.

 

She said at a news conference Monday that she’s lucky to be able to work with Koreeda and thanked him for giving her a break to pick up her award.

 
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When Washington’s $500 million Museum of the Bible held its grand opening in November 2017, attended by Vice President Mike Pence, there were questions even then about the authenticity of its centerpiece collection of Dead Sea Scrolls.

Now the museum has been forced to admit a painful truth: Technical analysis by a team of German scholars has revealed that at least five of the museum’s 16 scroll fragments are apparent forgeries.

The announcement has serious implications not only for the Bible Museum but for other evangelical Christian individuals and institutions who paid top dollar for what now seems to be a massive case of archaeological fraud.

Jeffrey Kloha, chief curator for the Museum of the Bible, said in a statement that the revelation is “an opportunity to educate the public on the importance of verifying the authenticity of rare biblical artifacts, the elaborate testing process undertaken and our commitment to transparency.” 

The scrolls are a collection of ancient Jewish religious texts first discovered in the mid-1940s in caves on the western shore of the Dead Sea in what is now Israel. The massive cache of Hebrew documents is believed to date back to the days of Jesus. With more than 9,000 documents and 50,000 fragments, the entire collection took decades to fully excavate.

Most of the scrolls and fragments are tightly controlled by the Israeli Antiquities Authority. But around 2002, a wave of new fragments began mysteriously appearing on the market, despite skepticism from Biblical scholars.

These fragments, they warned, were specifically designed to target American evangelical Christians, who prize the scrolls. That appears to be exactly what happened; a Baptist seminary in Texas and an evangelical college in California reportedly paid millions to purchase alleged pieces of the scrolls.

Also eagerly buying up fragments was the Green family — evangelical Oklahoma billionaires who run the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores and who famously sued the Obama administration on religious grounds, saying they didn’t want to pay to provide their employees access to the morning-after pill or intrauterine devices.

The Greens are the primary backers of the Museum of the Bible and went on an archaeological acquisition spree in the years leading up to the museum’s opening. In addition to the alleged Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, the Greens ran afoul of the Justice Department, which said they had acquired thousands of smuggled artifacts looted from Iraq and elsewhere. The family agreed last year to return those artifacts and pay a $3 million fine.
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For 150 years, the British Museum has housed one of the iconic, heavy-browed stone figures that Chile’s Easter Island is famous for.

Now the islanders are hoping desperately to get it back.

They plan to build a copy of the four-ton monolith and, potentially swap it for the real thing.

The statue, known as a “moai” and named the Hoa Hakananai’a, is one of hundreds originally found on the island. Carved by Polynesian colonizers somewhere between the 13th and 16th centuries, each of the big-headed figures was considered to represent tribal leaders or deified ancestors.

About a dozen have been removed from the island over the years. Now Camilo Rapu, president of the island’s Ma’u Henua community, said it’s time Hoa Hakananai’a was returned.

The Ma’u Henua community, with Chilean government support, launched a campaign in August to persuade the British Museum and Queen Elizabeth II to return the famous moai — in exchange for an exact replica to be carved on Easter Island.

“Our expert carvers will make a copy in basalt, the original stone used in the Hakananai’a moai, as an offering to Queen Elizabeth in exchange for the original,” Rapu told reporters in Santiago.

The Ma’u Henua have signed an agreement with the Bishop Museum — Hawaii’s largest museum, with a huge collection of Polynesian artifacts — to produce a polycarbonate copy of the Hakananai’a, to be ready by November 3.

The actual carving of the statue will take place on Easter Island, using thousand-year-old Rapa Nui techniques — combined with some modern technology to allow the job to be completed in seven months.

The Hakananai’a moai in the British Museum stands 2.4 meters tall (eight feet) and weighs about four tons.

On November 23, a committee of islanders and Chilean officials plans to travel to London in hopes of negotiating the moai’s return.

“This is a historic demand of the Rapa Nui people,” said Rapu. The Rapa Nui were the island’s aboriginal settlers, and their descendants still make up a large part of the population.

“This moai has a spiritual value; it is part of our family and our culture. We want her (the queen) to understand that for us, this is its value — not as a museum piece,” he said.

The islanders will bring with them a book, in support of their demand, signed by some of the thousands of tourists who every year visit the Pacific island paradise some 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) off Chile’s mainland.

 
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78th Street in Cleveland, Ohio, has been transformed from an industrial area into an art mecca. Once home to a car manufacturer, its old metal doors and freight elevators serve as a setting for bright paintings and abstract sculptures. Maxim Moskalkov has the story.
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It’s been a mystery in the United States since the Great Depression: Who are the 11 men pictured in a famous photograph called “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper”? In the 1932 photo, the construction workers are enjoying their lunch break on a metal beam, 256 meters up in the air above New York City streets. That skyscraper is now part of the Rockefeller Center complex, and that’s where Boris Koltsov went in search of answers. Anna Rice narrates his report.
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Halloween may still be a few weeks away, but New York City is getting ready to be frightened. The Morgan Library and Museum is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s book “Frankenstein,” one of the most famous horror novels of all time. VOA’s Elena Wolf went to the exhibition and got a look at the original Frankenstein manuscript.
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Melissa Madara was not surprised to receive death threats Friday as her Brooklyn witchcraft store prepared to host a public hexing of newly confirmed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh this weekend.

The planned casting of an anti-Kavanaugh spell, one of the more striking instances of politically disgruntled Americans turning to the supernatural when frustrated by democracy, has drawn backlash from some Christian groups but support from like-minded witch covens.

“It gives the people who are seeking agency a little bit of chance to have that back,” Madara said. The ritual was to be livestreamed on Facebook and Instagram at 8 p.m. EDT Saturday (1200 GMT Sunday).

Seated at a desk phone among bird skulls and crystal balls at Catland Books, the occult shop she co-owns, Madara said the Kavanaugh hex is expected to be the most popular event the store has hosted since its 2013 opening, including spells aimed at President Donald Trump. Madara declined to provide details of what the latest ritual will entail.

More than 15,000 people who have seen Catland Books promotions on Facebook have expressed interest in attending the event, vastly exceeding the shop’s 60-person capacity.

​Irate, threatening calls

Not everyone is a witchcraft fan. Madara said she had fielded numerous irate calls from critics, with at least one threatening violence. 

“Every time we host something like this there’s always people who like to call in with death threats or read us scripture,” she said.

As far as supporters go, some are sexual assault survivors still angry that the U.S. Senate confirmed Kavanaugh’s lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court despite accusations that he had sexually assaulted multiple women.

Kavanaugh has denied the allegations, and an FBI investigation failed to corroborate his accusers’ accounts.

Democrats hope lingering outrage over Kavanaugh, particularly among women, will translate into election gains for them Nov. 6. Republicans are likewise trying to seize on anger among conservatives at how they perceive Kavanaugh was mistreated.

Counter hexes and prayers

Believers in mysticism on both sides of the political divide are taking matters into their own hands.

Plans for the Catland Books event have sparked “counter hexes” around the country by those seeking to undo the spell that the Brooklyn witches cast against Kavanaugh, Madara said.

Even mainstream clergy was joining the fray. Rev. Gary Thomas of the Diocese of San Jose in California said Friday that he would include Kavanaugh in his prayers at Saturday mass.
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Majority-Hindu Bali has long been considered more tolerant of different sexual identities compared with other parts of Indonesia, especially amid recent anti-LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) crackdowns in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country. 

But a beauty pageant promoting HIV education and equality was this month shutdown by Islamic hardliners, sparking concern among some in the LGBT community that Bali is no longer a safe place.

Organized by the Bali-based Gaya Dewata Foundation, which provides testing, counseling and support on HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, the pageant has been held annually for the past three years. But this year, anti-LGBT Muslim groups reportedly harassed the owners of the Bhumiku Convention Hall in Denpasar, Bali’s capital. 

“We had to call off our event, due to the owners of the venue canceling it,” Christian Supriyadinata, the director of Gaya Dewata, told VOA.

“I thought Bali will have that space for us to be ourselves,” said Agung a Balinese native who recently moved back to the island from Muslim-majority Java. He chose to be identified by one name to protect his identity. Agung told VOA it, “actually turns out to be Bali doesn’t have that immunity anymore, doesn’t have that bubble anymore to protect ourselves.”

LGBT events canceled

Lini Zurlia, an Indonesian queer activist who works for the regional LGBT organization ASEAN SOGIE Caucus, said this was not first LGBT event to be canceled in Bali. Many public events for the Straits Games, a sports event for the gay community from across Asia, were canceled last year after pressure from certain quarters, she said. 

“It was not only from hard-line groups but also from the police,” she said. “Since then, we think Bali isn’t all that friendly [to LGBT people] after all. Maybe it’s just friendly because it’s a center for tourism in Indonesia.”

The local chapter of the Indonesian Council of Ulama (MUI) was among the groups that opposed the event and reported it to the police. 

“This is clearly very alarming, because the [pageant] is clearly contrary to moral and religious values in Indonesia,” the Bali MUI chairman, Muhammad Taufik Asadi, told the conservative-leaning newspaper Republika.

Sexuality and health

Many local cultures in Indonesia have traditionally had fluid understandings of sexuality beyond a binary of heterosexuality and homosexuality. This has, however, eroded in recent years with the rise of more conservative strains of Islam. Intensified anti-LGBT sentiment has also been accompanied by rising infection rates of HIV/AIDS.

According to UNAIDS, Indonesia had 48,000 new HIV infections and 38,000 AIDS-related deaths in 2016, an increase in AIDS-related deaths of 68 percent from 2010. 

“We want the community in Bali, especially our friends in the LGBT community, to understand the problem of HIV/AIDS and help with HIV/AIDS prevention,” Supriyadinata said.

Members of the LGBT community are disproportionately affected, with HIV prevalence rates of 25.8 percent for men who have sex with men and 24.8 percent of transgender people. 

“Cases of HIV/AIDS across the whole community [in Indonesia] have indeed increased, so information about HIV/AIDS is much needed,” Supriyadinata said.

​Moral panic

The Gaya Dewata pageant’s cancellation is just the latest in a string of anti-LGBT actions by the police and civil society groups across Indonesia. While gay sex is not a crime, the LGBT community is often targeted under the country’s strict anti-pornography laws.

Earlier this month, Jakarta police raided a so-called “gay party” and arrested four men on drug charges. Law enforcement publicly paraded the suspects and their faces were televised. Several social media accounts later further spread the men’s images to shame them.

Social media again exploded with the hashtag #UninstallGojek, with many netizens calling for a boycott of the local ride-sharing application Gojek after one of the company’s executives expressed support for diversity and tolerance of LGBT people on Facebook.

Indonesia’s minister for religion, Lukman Saifuddin, subsequently released a video on social media declaring that “all religions reject LGBT, that’s why I reject LGBT actions and behavior.”

“Although LGBT behavior is wrong, they should be treated with empathy so that they change their deviant ways,” he added. Survey results released by Saiful Mujani Research & Consulting in January showed that 81.5 percent of Indonesians believe gay and lesbian “behavior” is prohibited by religion, and a majority said they would object to having LGBT neighbors or in government. But only 58.3 percent of the respondents reported to know what LGBT meant.

​Election season

Some worry that anti-LGBT activity will further ramp up ahead of the country’s presidential elections in April 2019. The incumbent Joko Widodo’s running mate, the influential conservative cleric Ma’ruf Amin, has helped issue fatwas against LGBT people as a member of Indonesia’s Ulama Council. 

“We want a stern prohibition of LGBT activities and other deviant sexual activities and legislation that categorizes them as crime[s],” he was quoted as saying by the national news agency Antara in 2016.

Anti-LGBT themes also feature heavily in the rhetoric of supporters of opposition candidate Prabowo Subianto. According to Zurlia of ASEAN SOGIE Caucus, many of the Islamic groups who support Prabowo and opposition figure Fadli Zon claim that the LGBT movement is the product of Western influence and an import from countries like the United States.

“They’re good friends with the American president and praise Donald Trump and yet say that the LGBT movement comes from America,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
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Hundreds of people have lined up in New York City as rapper Cardi B handed out free winter coats.

The Bronx-born rapper met with residents and fans on Thursday evening at the Marlboro Houses in Brooklyn during brisk fall weather.

 

The 26-year-old also was given balloons and a cake to celebrate her recent birthday.

 

Cardi B says she cares a lot about kids and the community and feels it’s important to set a good example.

 

On Oct. 1, she got a summons in connection with a melee at a New York strip club. Her lawyer says the star didn’t cause any harm.

 

About three weeks earlier, Cardi B and Nicki Minaj were involved in an altercation at a New York Fashion Week party.

 
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Supermodel Karlie Kloss has married businessman Joshua Kushner.

 

Kloss posted a photo of her in a wedding dress and Kushner in a tuxedo – both of them beaming – on Instagram and Twitter Thursday night. People magazine reports the couple married at a small ceremony in upstate New York and will have a larger ceremony in the spring.

Kloss’ publicists did not return an email seeking details about the wedding Thursday.

 

Kushner is the younger brother of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and one of his senior advisers.

 

Kloss has modeled for Victoria’s Secret and numerous luxury brands, and will be the new host of “Project Runway.”

 
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