As U.S. voters prepare to head to the polls Nov. 6, all eyes are on how Facebook is grappling with giving people a platform to speak but also keeping misinformation in check. Michelle Quinn reports from San Francisco.
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We’ve all heard about how surveillance robots can scope out an area before police or rescue personnel head into a potentially dangerous situation. But some K-9 officers in the U.S. states of Oregon and Wisconsin are getting great help from camera equipped dogs. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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El Cajon, California, is home to a large number of Iraqi Chaldean Christians. Over the past nearly two decades, the Chaldean population in California has become a thriving immigrant community. But many say their hearts and minds are still with their home country of Iraq. VOA Kurdish Service’s Yahya Barzinji spent time in El Cajon and has this report, narrated by Bezhan Hamdard.
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A hungry American economy powered by a strong U.S. dollar saw record imports in September, driving the U.S. trade deficit to its highest level in seven months, the government reported Friday.
And amid President Donald Trump’s trade war with Beijing, the U.S. trade deficit with China swelled again, as crucial soybean exports — a sore spot for Republicans in next week’s midterm elections — continued to suffer.
With rising wages and low unemployment, Americans purchased more foreign-made telecommunications equipment, computers, mobile phones, aircraft engines, clothing and toys, the Commerce Department said.
The U.S. trade deficit posted its fourth straight monthly increase, rising 1.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted $54 billion, significantly overshooting analyst forecasts, as imports hit $266.6 billion, the highest level ever recorded. Exports also rose to $212.6 billion.
The U.S. trade gap has increased a steep 10.1 percent so far this year.
The expanding trade gap should weigh on GDP calculations in the third quarter, although many estimates may already have factored in the trade drag.
Record imports from China
Trade with China, a central target of Trump’s aggressive economic agenda, was a clear culprit, as the deficit in goods with the world’s second-largest economy jumped $3 billion to $37.4 billion, seasonally adjusted.
Goods imports from China hit a record of $47.7 billion, seasonally adjusted, an increase of $3.5 billion from August.
The trade report showed American producers sold more gold, petroleum products and civilian aircraft, but exports of soybeans fell $700 billion from August, also largely the result of the trade spat with China.
U.S. imports rose faster than exports on robust spending by companies and consumers — driving the U.S. goods deficit to its highest level ever recorded at $76.3 billion.
U.S. goods imports also were the highest ever, at $217.6 billion.
Analysts say recent tax cuts and fiscal stimulus should support demand that outstrips domestic production, keeping imports high and allowing the trade gap to widen further.
Excluding oil and aircraft, U.S. exports fell at an annual rate of 8.6 percent, something Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics called “grim.”
Trump said Thursday that he had spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping about trade confrontation, and the leaders are expected to meet late this month at the Group of 20 summit in Argentina.
That will be a chance for the two to work toward ending a deadlock, which has imposed steep tariffs on hundreds of millions of dollars in two-way trade.
No high hopes
However, senior White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow poured cold water on expectations for a breakthrough.
“Look, there’s no massive movement to deal with trade,” Kudlow told CNBC on Friday.
Markets, manufacturers and importers are bracing for a stiff increase in U.S. duties on Chinese goods, which are due to rise to 25 percent on January 1.
Trump has slapped tariffs on more than $250 billion in imports from China, alleging massive state intervention and technological theft, and has sought leverage in talks by threatening to put duties on all Chinese imports.
Wall Street interrupted this week’s rally, closing down sharply on fears the U.S.-China trade war could worsen.
“The risks from a trade war remain our biggest concern in light of recent events,” Oxford Economics said in a research note.
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A federal judge in Boston heard closing arguments Friday in a highly publicized lawsuit alleging that elite Harvard discriminates against Asian-Americans.
Much of the spotlight has been on affluent Chinese-Americans with stellar academic scores who say the college rejects Asians in favor of lesser-qualified applicants. They say factoring in race hurts Asian-Americans.
But others in the Asian community say that a race-blind process relying solely on academic scores would also hurt Asian-Americans. Southeast Asians, for example, who largely came over as refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, are underrepresented in higher education.
“The narrative right now is very focused on a very specific segment within the Asian-American community that does not represent the larger Asian-American community,’’ said Quyen Dinh, executive director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center.
The center signed on to a “friend of the court” brief by the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, siding with Harvard’s use of what the university calls a “holistic’’ review of an applicant.
The case brought by Students for Fair Admissions could wind up before a newly reconstituted and more conservative U.S. Supreme Court, which only narrowly re-affirmed the use of race in college admissions two years ago.
Here are some of the issues surrounding Asian-Americans and affirmative action:
Who are Asian-Americans?
There are at least 18 million people in the U.S. who are of Asian descent from about 20 countries. Asian-Americans are about 6 percent of the U.S. population, but make up nearly 23 percent of this year’s freshman class at Harvard, 22 percent of the same class at Princeton, and are the fastest growing minority in the country.
Chinese-Americans are the largest sub-group with at least 4.3 million people, followed by Indian-Americans at 4 million and Filipino-Americans at 3 million.
Chinese started migrating to the country in the 19th century as labor for the growing West. More recent waves include refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, as well as highly skilled workers from China and India.
The term “Asian-American” was coined by young civil rights activists marching alongside Latinos and African Americans for social justice in the 1960s.
Ellen D. Wu, a history professor and director of the Asian American Studies Program at Indiana University in Bloomington, says that political identity has now evolved largely into a demographic designation for “a very diverse group.’’
What is the Asian American Coalition for Education?
Students for Fair Admissions filed the lawsuit against Harvard in 2014. Actively supporting it is the Asian American Coalition for Education, which filed federal complaints in 2015 alleging discrimination. The coalition’s president is Yukong Zhao, a corporate strategist who immigrated to the U.S. from China in 1992 to pursue a master’s degree in business.
Zhao is part of a new generation of wealthier Chinese immigrants who are active on social media and opposed to affirmative action.
Conservative strategist Edward Blum, who is president of Students for Fair Admissions, was behind the last affirmative action admissions case, which accused the University of Texas of discriminating against white students. Blum lost that case at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Does affirmative action help or hurt Asian-Americans?
Depends on whom you ask.
Julie J. Park, author of “Race on Campus: Debunking Myths with Data” and past consultant to Harvard in the lawsuit, says underrepresented Asians such as Cambodians and Hmong can get a boost from a review that goes beyond test scores. The same goes for lower-income Asian-Americans whose grades may not reflect their potential. Park also says colleges want students with different backgrounds so Asian-Americans may be more coveted in fields or colleges with few Asians. It depends on the situation.
Students for Fair Admissions, on the other hand, argues the system in place at Harvard puts unfair weight on race, primarily at the expense of academically talented Asian-Americans. It also alleges that Harvard intentionally uses a vague “personal rating’’ to reject Asian-American applicants in favor of students from other racial backgrounds.
Supporters of affirmative action say it’s possible that Harvard is biased against Asian-Americans, but that doesn’t mean race-conscious policies should be scrapped.
Why are Asians called the ‘model minority’?
The stereotype of Asian-Americans as hard-working, educated and free of societal problems started in the 1960s. Wu, the history professor, says it was a way for whites to establish a racial order that was defined, most importantly, by not being black.
Asian-Americans were also responsible for perpetuating the myth, she said, adding that the “consequences of that have long functioned to justify anti-black racism and anti-black policies.”
Is there any truth to the model minority myth?
Overall, the numbers look good for Asian-Americans. Their household median income is $83,000, compared with $60,000 for the U.S. More than 50 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 32 percent for the country, according to the 2017 American Community Survey put out by the U.S. Census Bureau.
But there are large disparities within the group.
For example, while 75 percent of Indians held a bachelor’s degree or higher, only 16 percent of Laotians and 20 percent of Cambodians had done so. Among Chinese, the figure is 55 percent.
Indian households have the highest median income at $114,000 while at the other end are Burmese households, at $40,000. About 6 percent of Filipino individuals live in poverty, compared with 21 percent of Nepalese and 31 percent of Burmese.
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Everything about the city of Barrow, Alaska, is special. The northern-most city in the U.S., it is home to indigenous carvers, fishermen, researchers and teachers doing their best to preserve the native Inupiaq language. But at the center of Inupiat culture is the whale: It is its food, its symbol, and its soul. Natasha Mozgovaya set off to Alaska to see what life is like in this frozen place. Anna Rice narrates her story.
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The road to riches in the United States can take many routes.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos became a billionaire 132 times over by creating a business few would have conceived of just 25 years ago.
Thanks to his mammoth online marketplace, Bezos is not only Washington State’s wealthiest resident, but also the richest person in America.
Nebraska’s wealthiest person is businessman Warren Buffett.
He’s also the second richest person in the entire country. How did Buffett accumulate so much money? Via his company, Berkshire Hathaway, which owns some iconic U.S. companies like GEICO, Fruit of the Loom, and Dairy Queen. Buffett also owns shares of Heinz, Apple, and American Express.
Mark Zuckerburg is California’s wealthiest resident and the nation’s third wealthiest.
The Harvard dropout has his social media bases covered. Since founding Facebook, he’s also bought Instagram and the internationally popular communication application Whatsapp.
A number of the nation’s wealthiest people inherited their riches.
That’s what happened with the richest people in both Arkansas and Texas. The brother and sister duo of Alice and Jim Walton are the children of Sam Walton, one of the founders of Walmart, the world’s largest retailer.
Heiress Jacqueline Mars comes out on top in Virginia. She’s the daughter and granddaughter of the founders of the American candy company Mars.
Forbes did the research and then career development website Zippia developed the map below of 2018’s richest people in each state.
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U.S. employers added a stellar 250,000 jobs last month and boosted average pay by the most in nearly a decade in an effort to attract and keep workers.
The Labor Department’s monthly jobs report, the last major economic data before the Nov. 6 election, also shows the unemployment rate remained at a five-decade low of 3.7 percent.
The influx of new job-seekers lifted the proportion of Americans with jobs to the highest level since January 2009.
Consumers are the most confident they have been in 18 years and are spending freely and propelling brisk economic growth. The U.S. economy is in its 10th year of expansion, the second-longest such period on record, and October marks the 100th straight month of hiring, a record streak.
San Francisco Google employees joined a worldwide company walkout Thursday in protest of what they are calling the mishandling of sexual misconduct allegations. Deana Mitchell reports.
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A website popular with racists that was used by the man charged in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre was shut down within hours of the slaughter, but it hardly mattered: Anti-Semites and racists who hang out in such havens just moved to other online forums.
On Wednesday, four days after 11 people were fatally shot in the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history, anonymous posters on another website popular with white supremacists, Stormfront, claimed the bloodshed at Tree of Life synagogue was an elaborate fake staged by actors. The site’s operator, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, said traffic has increased about 45 percent since the shooting.
The anti-Semitic rhetoric was just as bad on another site popular with white supremacists, The Daily Stormer, where a headline said: “Just go, Jews. You’re not welcome.”
Trying to stop the online vitriol that opponents say fuels real-world bloodshed is a constant battle for groups that monitor hate, and victories are hard to come by. Shut down one platform like Gab, where the shooting suspect posted a message shortly before the attack, and another one remains or a new one opens.
The problem dates back to the dawn of the internet, when users connected their computers to each other by dialing telephone numbers. A report issued by the New York-based Anti-Defamation League in 1985 found there were two online “networks of hate” in the United States, both run by neo-Nazis who spread anti-Semitic, racist propaganda.
Today, the vastness of the online world is a big part of the problem, said Oren Segal, director of the ADL’s Center for Extremism. Determining how many hate sites exist is nearly impossible, he said.
“It’s really difficult to put an actual number on it, but I would say this: There are thousands of hate sites and there are dozens and dozens of platforms in which hate exists,” Segal said.
A new study by the VOX-Pol Network of Excellence, composed of academic researchers who study online extremism, said the exact number of far-right adherents on just one platform, Twitter, is impossible to determine. But at least 100,000 people and automated accounts are aligned with radicals commonly referred to as the “alt-right,” the study found, and the true number is probably more than twice that.
An ADL report released a day before the shooting said extremists had increased anti-Semitic harassment against Jewish journalists, political candidates and others ahead of the midterm elections. Researchers who analyzed more than 7.5 million Twitter messages from Aug. 31 to Sept. 17 found almost 30 percent of the accounts repeatedly tweeting derogatory terms about Jews appeared to be automated “bots” that spread the message further and faster than if only people were involved.
The New York-based ADL said that before the 2016 election of President Donald Trump anti-Semitic harassment was rare, but afterward it became a daily occurrence. It commissioned a report in May that estimated about 3 million Twitter users posted or re-posted at least 4.2 million anti-Semitic tweets in English over a 12-month period ending Jan. 28.
Gab shutdown
The story of Gab, the platform where Robert Gregory Bowers allegedly wrote an ominous message early Saturday before the shooting, shows how new sites spring up in a hate-filled environment.
Created in 2016 to counter what founder Andrew Torba viewed as liberal censorship on social networks, Gab gained popularity among white supremacists and other right-wing radicals after tech companies clamped down on racist sites following the deadly clash at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The Daily Stormer was offline briefly after the violence but re-emerged on a new host.
With Gab now shut down after the synagogue shooting, Torba is portraying the platform not as a hate-filled corner of the internet, but as a bastion of free speech that’s working with federal authorities “to bring justice to an alleged terrorist.”
A message posted by Torba said Gab was trying to get back online, and Segal has few doubts it will succeed.
Don Black, the former Klan leader who runs Stormfront, said traffic is up partly because of the Gab shutdown and partly because of increased interest among users. His site, which has been in operation since 1995 and has about 330,000 registered users, has only had one “prolonged” shutdown — a month following the Charlottesville melee, he said.
“I expect all sorts of more trouble now because of the Pittsburgh shooting,” Black said.
Free speech
Purging hateful content from the internet is a challenge. The Constitution’s guarantee of free-speech provides a roadblock to banning hate speech in the United States, according to the First Amendment Center, a project of the Washington-based Freedom Forum Institute.
“Political speech receives the greatest protection under the First Amendment, and discrimination against viewpoints runs counter to free-speech principles. Much hate speech qualifies as political, even if misguided,” said an essay by center scholar David L. Hudson Jr. and Mahad Ghani, a fellow with the center.
Some advocate other tactics for curbing hate.
Three days before the synagogue attack, a coalition that includes the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, a liberal advocacy organization that monitors hate groups, released a proposed framework aimed at social media companies.
The plan is geared around a model terms-of-service policy that states that platform users “may not use these services to engage in hateful activities or use these services to facilitate hateful activities engaged in elsewhere.” Next year, sponsors plan to begin posting report cards showing how sites are doing at quelling hate speech.
No company has publicly announced plans to adopt the coalition’s guidelines, but Segal said the ADL separately has talked with several social media companies about limiting hate speech. Companies have been welcoming but solutions remain elusive, he said.
Segal added: “The commitment to eradicating hate from platforms is not always matched by the ability to do so because there is just so much content out there.”
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It was a protest that went around the globe.
From Singapore to Dublin, Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Pryor, Oklahoma, Google employees walked out of their offices to protest the internet search giant’s handling of sexual discrimination cases, and express their frustration with its workplace culture.
In San Francisco, where Google has several offices, hundreds of workers congregated at a plaza where they gave speeches and held signs. One read: “I reported and he got promoted.”
The unusual protest — tech companies are not unionized and typically keep strife about personnel matters behind closed doors — riveted Silicon Valley, which has struggled in recent years over the treatment of women in the industry.
Resignation, severance
The Google protest was spurred by a New York Times story that outlined allegations against high-profile leaders at the firm, including Andy Rubin, known as “the father of Android,” who was reportedly paid $90 million in severance. Rubin has denied the allegations in the article, as well as reports of his severance amount.
Richard DeVaul, a director at X, a unit of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, resigned from the company on Tuesday. He was accused of making unwanted advances to a woman who was a job applicant at the firm.
List of demands
“We are a small part of a massive movement that has been growing for a long time,” protest organizers said in an article published in the online magazine The Cut. “We are inspired by everyone — from the women in fast food who led an action against sexual harassment to the thousands of women in the #metoo movement who have been the beginning of the end for this type of abuse.”
Leaders of the protest issued a list of demands, including that Alphabet add a worker-representative to its board of directors and that the firm internally disclose pay equity information.
They also asked the company to revise its human resources practices to make the harassment claims filing process more equitable, and to create a “publicly disclosed sexual harassment transparency report.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an email to employees that “as CEO, it’s been personally important to me that we take a much harder line on inappropriate behavior. … We have taken many steps to do so, and know our work is still not done.”
Social media protest
The global protest unfolded on Twitter and Facebook as employees from offices around the world posted photos of themselves walking out at the appointed time of 11:10 a.m.
The greatest concentration of Google workers is in the San Francisco area. In San Bruno, 12 miles south of San Francisco, employees at YouTube, which is part of Google, walked out, as did those in Mountain View, company headquarters.
“As a woman, I feel personally unsafe, because if something were to happen, what accountability measures will be in place to make sure that justice is sought?” said Google employee Rana Abdelhamid at the San Francisco protest.
Christian Boyd, another Google employee, was angry about what she said was protecting the powerful, even in the face of credible allegations.
“It’s sad to see that what we consider the best companies are not immune to this, as well,” Boyd said.
After 30 minutes of speeches, the workers went back to their offices but vowed to continue pressuring Google to change.
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Washington ratcheted up pressure on Venezuela’s leftist President Nicolas Maduro on Thursday with new measures aimed at disrupting the South American country’s gold exports, U.S. national security adviser John Bolton said.
Bolton promised a tough stance by the Trump administration toward “dictators and despots near our shores” and singled out Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua in a speech in Miami, which is home to large numbers of migrants from Cuba and Venezuela.
He spoke days before U.S. elections next week that include close races for a Senate seat and the governorship in Florida.
His remarks were likely to be well received by those Cuban-Americans and other Hispanics in Florida who favor stronger U.S. pressure on Cuba’s Communist government and other leftist governments in Latin America.
In his prepared remarks for the speech, Bolton said President Donald Trump had signed an executive order to ban U.S. persons from dealing with entities and individuals involved with “corrupt or deceptive” gold sales from Venezuela.
“Many of you in the audience today have personally suffered unspeakable horrors at the hands of the regimes in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, only to survive, fight back, conquer, and overcome,” Bolton said in his prepared remarks.
“The troika of tyranny in this hemisphere – Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua – has finally met its match,” he said.
Bolton spoke at Freedom Tower – a building where Cuban refugees were welcomed in the 1960s following Fidel Castro’s revolution – a day after Trump campaigned in Florida for Republican candidates in tight Senate and gubernatorial races.
Florida has traditionally been a swing state and former President Barack Obama was scheduled to rally Democrats in Miami on Friday ahead of the Nov. 6 elections.
Trump has taken a harder line on Cuba after Obama sought to set aside decades of hostility between Washington and Havana. He has rolled back parts of Obama’s 2014 detente by tightening rules on Americans traveling to the Caribbean island and restricting U.S. companies from doing business there.
On Thursday, the U.S. State Department added more than two dozen entities to a list of Cuban organizations associated with country’s military and intelligence services, Bolton said in his prepared remarks. U.S. persons and companies are banned from doing business with the restricted companies.
Bolton said Cuba is aiding Maduro’s government in Venezuela, referring to the close ties between the two countries since Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, came to power in 1999.
‘Robust sanctions’
Almost 2 million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2015, driven out by food and medicine shortages, hyperinflation, and violent crime. Thousands have made their way to south Florida.
Maduro, who denies limiting political freedoms, has said he is the victim of an “economic war” led by U.S.-backed adversaries.
Venezuela exported 23.62 tonnes of gold worth $900 million to Turkey in the first nine months of this year, compared with zero in the same period last year, official Turkish data showed – an illustration of how the South American country is shifting its pattern of trade following a wave of U.S. sanctions that
began last year.
Bolton also singled out Nicaragua for criticism over leftist President Daniel Ortega’s crackdown on political opponents, saying its government “will feel the full weight of America’s robust sanctions regime.”
Colombian President Ivan Duque and Brazil’s president-elect, Jair Bolsonaro, are “likeminded leaders,” Bolton said, adding the United States would partner with them and leaders in Mexico, Argentina and other Latin American nations to boost security and the economy in the region.
Also on Thursday, the United Nations General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted its 27th annual resolution calling for an end to the U.S. economic embargo on Cuba after a failed attempt by Washington to amend the text to push Cuba to improve its human rights record.
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U.S. stocks rose on Thursday, as robust earnings reports supported a third day of recovery from a bruising selloff in October, but a drop in Apple’s shares ahead of results kept technology stocks under pressure.
Chemicals producer DowDuPont Inc rose 6.6 percent after quarterly profit topped estimates and the company announced a $3 billion share buyback.
NXP Semiconductors climbed 8.6 percent after the chipmaker topped profit and revenue estimates, while American International Group Inc gained 4.7 percent after the insurer posted a smaller-than-quarterly loss.
Markets also got a lift after U.S. President Donald Trump said in a tweet he had a “very good” talk with Chinese President Xi Jinping on trade and North Korea and that the two planned to meet at the upcoming G-20 summit.
The rebound comes after the benchmark S&P 500 in October posted its worst monthly performance since September 2011, battered by worries over rising borrowing costs, global trade disputes and a possible slowdown in U.S. corporate profits.
“Over the past few days, we’ve seen the pressure valve taken off the selling which certainly helps from a sentiment perspective,” said Michael Antonelli, managing director, institutional sales trading at Robert W. Baird in Milwaukee.
The S&P technology index slipped 0.1 percent after two days of solid gains, with Apple, last among the major technology names to report earnings, falling 0.2 percent ahead of earnings after markets close.
Netflix, Facebook and Alphabet also fell, pushing the communication services index down 0.3 percent.
Shares in Spotify Technology fell about 10 percent after the paid music streaming service reported quarterly revenue and margins in line with expectations and a modest rise in premium subscribers.
S&P 500 companies are on pace to have posted a 26.3 percent rise in third-quarter earnings with more than half of the constituents having reported, according to IBES data from Refinitiv. Despite the big overall profit increase, some high-profile companies have issued disappointing reports.
At 10:12 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 147.40 points, or 0.59 percent, at 25,263.16, the S&P 500 was up 12.40 points, or 0.46 percent, at 2,724.14. The Nasdaq Composite was up 23.57 points, or 0.32 percent, at 7,329.47.
Eight of the 11 major S&P sectors were higher, with a 2 percent jump in the materials index leading the gainers after DowDuPont’s results.
Health insurer Cigna Corp rose 3.1 percent after beating quarterly profit estimates and raising its full-year earnings forecast on tight cost controls.
Advancing issues outnumbered decliners by a 2.99-to-1 ratio on the NYSE. Advancing issues outnumbered decliners by a 2.28-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.
The S&P index recorded 6 new 52-week highs and 2 new lows, while the Nasdaq recorded 12 new highs and 29 new lows.
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We tend to think of opera singers as a voluptuous breed: it’s not over until the fat lady sings, or so the old saying goes. But as star soprano Lisette Oropesa knows all too well, directors are increasingly pressuring female stars into losing weight.
Back in 2005, the Cuban-American singer — sought by some of the world’s most prestigious opera houses — weighed 95 kilograms (210 pounds). Now, she weighs just 56.
“That’s a lot to lose. It took five years to get to this weight,” Oropesa told AFP.
The 35-year-old was used to being called fat — she’d suffered such taunts since she was a schoolgirl in New Orleans.
But as a singer, she soon found that her weight was blocking her from winning certain roles.
“I was told, ‘You need to fix the weight problem if you want to have any chance at all’,” she said of an early experience at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.
Cutting the fat girls
She admits she was “very upset for a while” at being told this — but with her career on the line, Oropesa bit the bullet.
There’s a practical element to the push for slimmer singers, says the soprano, who is currently performing at the Paris Opera. In contemporary productions, “they want people to be agile — we are dancing, jumping, and people carry you,” she said.
“If they have a thousand girls to choose from, the first ones they are going to cut are the fat girls.”
She notes, however, that her male colleagues don’t come in for anything like the same pressure. For tenors, of whom there are far fewer vying for jobs, “as long they appear and come to work, they are okay.”
The most famous case of dramatic weight loss in the opera world is that of legendary Maria Callas. Described as “monstrously fat” by one impresario in 1951, the soprano eventually shed 36 of her 91 kilos.
At the other end of the spectrum, Montserrat Caballe — the Spanish star who died in October aged 85 -— remained throughout her career the archetypal curvaceous soprano.
Looks over voice?
In recent years, debate has risen to a crescendo over how much contemporary opera is favoring looks over larynxes. In 2003 London’s Royal Opera House sparked an outcry by sacking Deborah Voigt, one of the world’s best-known sopranos, because she couldn’t fit in her dress.
She used her severance pay to fund gastric bypass surgery — a decision which eventually led to new roles.
Russia’s Anna Netrebko, another global star, meanwhile shocked some of her fans after returning from maternity leave 13 kilos heavier. She retorted that she’d never sung better.
And there was widespread anger in Britain among colleagues of mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught when words like “dumpy” and “stocky” littered press coverage of her performance at the Glyndebourne festival.
“There was little comment on her musicianship, dramatic commitment or her ability to communicate to an audience and to move that audience to tears,” wrote fellow mezzo Jennifer Johnstone.
Some critics shot back that opera is a visual artform, and that people need to be believable as the characters they are playing.
But “body-shaming is not acceptable,” insisted Oropesa, who is sick of rich patrons saying “‘Oh, I am so glad you’re not fat, like so and so’ — because they think they are entitled to say things like that.”
Whether or not there’s a link between sopranos’ weight and their performance is still disputed.
Some fans believe Callas’ voice deteriorated because she lost weight, but specialists contest this.
Oropesa believes it’s a myth that “you should be fat to able to sing.”
And while she stresses that she doesn’t care about how thin people are, she also says she’s seen nothing but benefits to her change in lifestyle.
To slim down, Oropesa didn’t resort to drastic surgery or a starvation diet — she started running marathons.
“I have done six marathons and I run almost four to five days a week,” she said.
These days, “when I run round the stage it doesn’t make me feel sweaty, or dying out of breath, because I run a lot.”
After Paris, Oropesa heads to Rome where she’s performing Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” then to Barcelona for Handel’s “Rodelinda” before shows in Brussels and Pittsburgh.
“It is non-stop — a real vocal marathon,” she said with a smile.
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China is exporting its methods of strict internet controls to governments around the world that are employing them to stifle dissent and free flow of information, and tighten their grip on power, according to U.S.-based Freedom House.
In an annual report issued Wednesday, the rights watchdog said global internet freedom had declined for the eighth consecutive year in 2018, with democratic governance under threat from what it called “digital authoritarianism.”
Freedom House says Beijing has held sessions on managing online content with 36 of the 65 countries tracked in the report, and provided internet monitoring equipment to governments of many of those nations. The group also says many governments have passed or proposed new laws restricting internet information and access in the name of fighting “fake news.”
The report also expressed dismay over efforts in the United States to reverse “net neutrality” rules that ensure internet service providers treat all data equally, and not manipulate them into “faster” or “slower” speeds.
Shamsia Hassani is widely recognized as Afghanistan’s first female graffiti artist. Being a graffiti artist anywhere in the world is a challenge and that is especially true for a woman living in war-torn Kabul. Dorian Jones caught up with the 30-year-old Hassani at an international street art festival in Istanbul and has more on her story.
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Thirty-year-old Shamsia Hassani is widely recognized as Afghanistan’s first, if not only, female graffiti artist. Being a graffiti artist anywhere in the world is a challenge, but in war-torn Kabul, it carries its own unique difficulties.
An invitation to an Istanbul cartoon and street art festival allowed Hassani to share her pieces with a broader audience. The large mural she worked on for three days features a regular character of her work, a cool, fashionably dressed young woman playing an instrument.
“This character is always in my work with different compositions, and she has different messages and different colors,” Hassani explains. “She can use her musical instrument to talk to people, to speak louder and to get more attention, as she has no mouth.
“But this musical instrument gives her power to speak in society,” she adds “Her eyes are closed because usually, she has nothing good around her to see, she does not want to see anything around, and she cannot see her future. However, it does not mean she cannot see.”
Welcome respite in Istanbul
The opportunity to attend the Istanbul festival is welcomed, Hassani says, given the increasingly difficult environment in Afghanistan.
“Recently the situation is getting very bad, and I usually am feeling hopeless sometimes because I see that nothing has changed and I could not change anything, that’s very hopeless,” she said.
“Still, I am trying to work to give power to people and how they can stay strong in a society like Afghanistan,” she said.
Late to graffiti
Hassani has struggled in her pursuit of art. Born in Iran to Afghan parents who had fled the war in Afghanistan, she was prevented from studying art in Iran, she says, because of her Afghan heritage. Eventually, her parents moved back to Kabul so she could pursue her art studies at Kabul University, where she now teaches. Hassani’s love of graffiti came relatively late, however, thanks to an international initiative.
“I just started to make graffiti at a graffiti workshop in Kabul,” she said. “They brought a teacher from the U.K. by the name of Chu, and he teaches us how to do graffiti. It was a very good experience, and after that I was just trying to paint on walls, and I wanted to do graffiti.”
A luxury of time
Working on a mural for a few days at the Istanbul festival is a rare luxury for Hassani. Being a graffiti artist in one of the world’s most dangerous cities carries its own unique challenges, especially if you are a woman.
“I am really scared of public spaces; I am really scared for explosions happening all the time. Specifically, it’s difficult for women to do graffiti and street art because usually, people are not happy with women’s activity,” Hassani said.
“My family is very supportive, my parents and my husband, they always support me in my works. All the time I am careful,” she adds with a nervous laugh. “I usually work in Kabul, but usually on the small walls, not the big walls, because I cannot finish them. I need to run away as soon as I can.”
It’s not only the risk of bombs and hostility toward women artists, that Hassani faces. Artistic differences with the owners of the walls upon which she paints also can be a problem.
“I am trying to get permission, but sometimes it’s difficult. Usually the owner of the wall never gives me permission to paint something — fantasy like this” Hassani said, pointing to her mural. “They usually like me to paint some portrait or some landscape or something that they like. So that’s why it’s difficult to find a wall and location, as well.”
At the Istanbul festival she received a warm reception as she held a seminar, sharing her experiences with a full and appreciative audience that peppered her with questions. Hassani says the support and interest at the seminar is welcome because in Kabul, few dare to offer her public support.
“When I am working, sometimes I listen to people, and they usually use bad words,” she said. “But there are just a few people who say OK, it’s nice, or some people never say anything, they just pass by. But when I post my pictures on social media, I see a lot of support there. However, while working (outside) no support from people.”
Love, power of art
When asked what keeps her going, Hassani says it is her love of art and the power it has for good.
“I think I can introduce art to people in Afghanistan because we don’t have galleries and exhibitions, and it’s good way that I can just show them artwork,” Hassani said. “And I also think that I can change people’s minds with my artwork and sharing my ideas with people, that’s the thing I really like to do.”
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Governments around the world are increasing control over use of the internet and social media, according to the latest report by the Freedom House organization. In 2017, officials in many countries accused dissidents of spreading fake news as a pretext to silence them. Online propaganda and uncontrolled harvesting of personal data have permeated the internet in the past year. A Freedom House expert told VOA these trends are a major threat to democracy. Zlatica Hoke has this story.
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U.S. President Donald Trump has not “set in stone” any decisions on escalating tariffs on Chinese goods and may withdraw some duties if there are promising policy discussions with China, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Wednesday.
Kudlow said on CNBC that the meeting agenda between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the end of November in Buenos Aires has not yet been worked out, but “we may have a very good meeting in Argentina with President Xi.”
Asked about whether Trump would proceed with tariffs if the meeting fails to ease trade tensions, Kudlow said: “I would say nothing is set in stone right now. By the way, the president on one of the cable shows, did say – it didn’t get picked up – that if some kind of amicable deal with China were to happen, then a lot of tariffs might be pulled back.”
Kudlow, who heads the White House’s National Economic Council, added that Trump wasn’t making a promise, but giving a “very important hypothetical.”
Bloomberg reported on Monday that the Trump administration was preparing to announce tariffs on the remaining Chinese imports, about $257 billion worth, if the meeting fails to ease the U.S.-China trade war, citing unnamed sources.
Trump has long threatened to impose tariffs on all $500 billion-plus goods imports from China if Beijing fails to meet his demands for sweeping changes to its policies on intellectual property, technology transfers, industrial subsidies and local market access.
Kudlow said there was no specific trigger point for a decision to impose more tariffs on Chinese goods. “The policy talks determine this, not an arbitrary timetable. If the policy talks go well, then we’ll have a much better situation. If the policy talks don’t, it may deteriorate,” Kudlow said.
He said Trump said in a recent interview that if there are “promising policy discussions, I don’t know about a full fledged deal, but if things go well, maybe some tariffs get withdrawn and maybe not.”
Kudlow did not specify the interview to which he was referring.
In an interview on Fox News Channel’s “The Ingraham Angle” show on Monday, Trump did not specifically mention the potential withdrawal of tariffs, but said he expects “a great deal” with China.
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