Month: December 2019

In Uganda, performance horse-riding, or equestrian sports, are known as a pastime for the rich. But in recent years, less well-off Ugandans have started to embrace equestrian sports with the hopes of competing internationally. Halima Athumani reports from Wakiso, Uganda.
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Stirring a giant vat in a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Palestinian Christian Maryam Salem prepares a special festive dish — not for Christmas, but the St Barbara’s Day festival.It is celebrated every December 17 in Aboud, which residents believe is the last resting place of Saint Barbara, a third century woman killed for refusing to renounce her Christian faith.The special dessert, named after Barbara and given to hundreds of people, looks a little like rice pudding but includes wheat, anise, fennel, cinnamon, almonds, raisins and sugar.Salem says it takes several days to prepare, starting with soaking the wheat for 24 hours.”We cook it and gradually add the rest of the ingredients and keep stirring until the ingredients are well mixed,” said Salem, who has been preparing the dish for the festivities for 12 years.The exact details of Barbara’s story are disputed but the legend of the story is well-known.The beautiful daughter of a pagan born in the third century, she secretly converted to Christianity.Once her father found out she fled but was eventually caught.Her furious father murdered her but was struck by lightning and died shortly after.The pastor of Aboud’s Greek Orthodox Church, Father Emmanuel Awwad, said some accounts suggest the final scenes took place in the village, while others placed them in the city of Baalbek in modern day Lebanon.BagpipesCelebrations began before sunset on Monday, with a special prayer held in the church in the village centre.Afterwards the clergy and local residents, both Christian and Muslim, marched through the village down streets flanked by olive trees and cactuses, while a group of scouts played bagpipes and drums.The march culminated at the saint’s tomb, located on a rocky hill where on a clear day you can see through Israeli territory to the Mediterranean Sea.There families and visitors lit candles in the darkened room in honor of the saint.”We ascend to the tomb with a march befitting the saint’s standing and greatness as a martyr,” Awwad said.He said the march was “affirming their affiliation to the land,” referencing Israeli attempts to take control of the area.More than 400,000 Israelis live in West Bank settlements, considered illegal under international law, alongside 2.7 million Palestinians.Hanna Khoury, head of the village council, recalled how in 2002 during the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, Israeli forces blew up the site under the pretext it was being “used to prepare for commando operations.”The army later apologized, saying it had not realized the religious significance of the site.Muslims also eat the Barbara dish after a six-day fast and on other occasions, noted Hamzah al-Aqrabawi, a researcher in Palestinian heritage.”Barbara is a popular ritual that Palestinian peasants have had for 2,000 years,” he said.Eight-year-old Riad Zaarour was wrapped in a traditional Palestinian kuffiyeh, or scarf, as he waited for the dish.”The best thing in the festival is Barbara. We eat it and celebrate. I feel happy.”  
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Members of the Japan soccer team that won the Women’s World Cup in 2011 will be the first to carry the torch for the Tokyo Olympics when the relay opens its Japanese leg on March 26, 2020.The relay is to begin in J-Village in Fukushima prefecture, located about 250 kilometers (150 miles) north of Tokyo. The area was devastated on March 11, 2011, by an earthquake, tsunami, and the subsequent meltdown of three nuclear reactors.Organizers made the announcement on Tuesday but did not say which player – or players – would be the first to carry the torch. The torch will go to all 47 Japanese prefectures.Former coach Norio Sasaki has also been asked to be part of the relay.Organizers and the International Olympic Committee chose to start the relay in Fukushima to show how the area is recovering from the disaster almost nine years ago.The torch will go through much of the Fukushima prefecture, although some parts are still off limits to the general public.The torch relay will take in several World Heritage Sites including Mt. Fuji and the Itsukushima shrine – known as the “Floating Shrine” – in Hiroshima prefecture.The torch will be lit on March 12 in Greece.
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The Hallmark Channel, reversing what it called a “wrong decision,” said Sunday it will reinstate commercials featuring same-sex couples that it had pulled following a complaint from a conservative group.The earlier decision by Crown Media, Hallmark’s parent company, to pull several ads for the wedding planning site Zola featuring two brides kissing at the altar had launched a storm of protest. Celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and William Shatner criticized the move and the hashtag (hash)BoycottHallmarkChannel was trending on Twitter at one point.”The Crown Media team has been agonizing over this decision as we’ve seen the hurt it has unintentionally caused,” said a statement issued Sunday evening by Hallmark Cards CEO Mike Perry. “Said simply, they believe this was the wrong decision. … We are truly sorry for the hurt and disappointment this has caused.”Zola, the wedding planning site that made the ads, said it was relieved that the decision to pull them had been reversed. In an email to The Associated Press, the company said it would be in touch with Hallmark “regarding a potential return to advertising.””We are humbled by everyone who showed support not only for Zola, but for all LGBTQ couples and  families who express their love on their wedding day, and every day,” said a statement Sunday evening from the company’s chief marketing officer, Mike Chi.The LGBT advocacy group GLAAD also expressed relief at the reversal. Its president and CEO, Sarah Kate Ellis, said Hallmark’s “decision to correct its mistake sends an important message to LGBTQ people and represents a major loss for fringe organizations like One Million Moms, whose sole purpose is to hurt families like mine.”It was a complaint by One Million Moms, part of the American Family Association, that had led to the initial decision to pull the the Zola ads.  A post on the group’s website Saturday said that Crown Media CEO Bill Abbott had spoken by telephone with the group and “reported the advertisement aired in error.” It also said: “The call to our office gave us the opportunity to confirm the Hallmark Channel will continue to be a safe and family-friendly network.” The group had not commented on the reversal as of late Sunday night.Zola had submitted six ads, with four including a lesbian couple. After Hallmark pulled those ads, but not two featuring only opposite-sex couples, Zola withdrew its remaining ads.Molly Biwer, senior vice president for public affairs at Hallmark, said in an interview Sunday night that from the time the initial decision had been made, “Crown Media had been in agony over the hurt that this had caused. Hallmark has an unwavering commitment to diversity and inclusion.”She added that the reversal, and not the original decision, “truly reflects who we are as a company. We celebrate all families.”Hallmark’s statement said the network will be “working with GLAAD to better represent the LGBTQ community” and would be reaching out to Zola to reestablish its partnership.”Across our brand, we will continue to look for ways to be more inclusive and celebrate our differences,” Perry said. In one of the pulled ads, two brides stand at the altar and wonder aloud whether their wedding would be going more smoothly if they had used a planning site like Zola. The lighthearted ad ends with the just-married couple sharing a quick kiss.DeGeneres had quickly assailed the original decision, asking on Twitter: “Isn’t it almost 2020?” Actress Sandra Bernhard, who played one of the first openly bisexual characters on network TV in “Roseanne,” had also criticized the move.”All the groovy gay ladies i know won’t be watching your Christmas schlock,” she wrote on Twitter.The Hallmark decision was also mocked on “Saturday Night Live,” and Netflix US tweeted stills from a TV show and movie that it labeled “Titles Featuring Lesbians Joyfully Existing And Also It’s Christmas Can We Just Let People Love Who They Love.” 
  
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The spirit of Christmas is featured again at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, DC.  This year’s annual holiday event showcases displays highlighting the beauty of America’s public gardens.  They include recreations of garden conservatories, fountains and other sculptures made from plant-based materials.  VOA’s Deborah Block takes us on a tour to see the diverse gardens that include chugging toy trains.
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The promise of reparations to atone for historical ties to slavery has opened new territory in a reckoning at U.S. colleges, which until now have responded with monuments, building name changes and public apologies.Georgetown University and two theological seminaries have announced funding commitments to benefit descendants of the enslaved people who were sold or toiled to benefit the institutions.While no other schools have gone so far, the advantages that institutions received from the slavery economy are receiving new attention as Democratic presidential candidates talk about tax credits and other subsidies that nudge the idea of reparations toward the mainstream.The country has been discussing reparations in one way or another since slavery officially ended in 1865. This year marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first slave, launching the violence afflicted on black people to prop up the Southern economy.University of Buffalo senior Jeffrey Clinton said he thinks campuses should acknowledge historical ties to slavery but that the federal government should take the lead on an issue that reaches well beyond higher education.“It doesn’t have to be trillions of dollars … but at least address the inequities and attack the racial wealth gap between African Americans and white Americans and really everybody else, because this is an American-made institution. We didn’t immigrate here,” said Clinton, a descendant of slaves who lives in Bay Shore, New York.A majority of Georgetown undergraduates voted in April for a nonbinding referendum to pay a $27.20-per-semester “Reconciliation Contribution” toward projects in underprivileged communities that are home to some descendants of 272 slaves who were sold in 1838 to help pay off the school’s debts.Georgetown President John DeGioia responded in October with plans instead for a university-led initiative, with the goal of raising about $400,000 from donors, rather than students, to support projects like health clinics and schools in those same communities.Elsewhere, discussions of reparations have been raised by individual professors, like at the University of Alabama, or by graduate students and community members, like at the University of Chicago.At least 56 universities have joined a University of Virginia-led consortium, Universities Studying Slavery, to explore their ties to slavery and share research and strategies.In recent years, some schools, like Yale University, have removed the names of slavery supporters from buildings. New monuments have gone up elsewhere, including Brown University’s Slavery Memorial sculpture — a partially buried ball and chain — and the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers under construction at the University of Virginia.“It’s a very diffused kind of set of things happening around the nation,” said Guy Emerson Mount, an associate professor of African American history at Auburn University. “It’s really important to pay attention to what each of these are doing” because they could offer learning opportunities and inform national discussions on reparations.Virginia Theological Seminary in September announced a $1.7 million endowment fund in recognition of slaves who worked there. It said annual allocations would go toward supporting African American clergy in the Episcopal church and programs that promote justice and inclusion.The Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey followed with a $27.6 million endowment after a historical audit revealed that some founders used slave labor.“We did not want to shy away from the uncomfortable part of our history and the difficult conversations that revealing the truth would produce,” seminary President M. Craig Barnes said in October.In an October letter to Harvard University’s president, Antigua and Barbuda’s prime minister noted the developments at Georgetown and the seminaries and asked the Ivy League school to consider how it could make amends for the oppression of Antiguan slaves by a plantation owner whose gift endowed a law professorship in 1815. Harvard’s president wrote back that the school is determined to further explore its historical ties to slavery.Harvard in 2016 removed a slave owner’s family crest from the law school seal and dedicated a plaque to four slaves who lived and worked on campus.At the University of Buffalo, some have urged the public school to consider the responsibility it bears having been founded by the 13th U.S. president, Millard Fillmore, who signed the Fugitive Slave Act to help slave owners reclaim runaways. Students have not formally raised the idea of reparations, according to a school spokesman, but they led a discussion on the topic as part of Black Solidarity Week last month.William Darity, a Duke University public policy professor and an expert on reparations, said the voices of college students have helped bring attention to reparations in a way that hasn’t been seen since Reconstruction.But he has warily watched what he sees as a piecemeal approach to an issue he believes merits a congressional response.“I don’t want anybody to be under the impression that these constitute comprehensive reparations,” Darity said.Supporting a reparations program for all black descendants of American slaves “would be the more courageous act,” he said.Few Americans support reparations, according to a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll. It showed that only 29% say the government should pay cash reparations to descendants of enslaved black people.University of Buffalo associate professor Keith Griffler, who specializes in African and African American studies, said he sees the cusp of a movement on college campuses.“And it’s probably not surprising that some of the wealthier private institutions have been the first to take those kinds of steps, because public universities still have their funding issues.“The conversations, just acknowledging these kinds of things,” Griffler said, “I think would go a long way toward making students feel that at least their voices are being heard.”
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On Dec. 1, a band of assailants opened fire on worshippers at a small-town Protestant church in Burkina Faso, an impoverished West African country where the Christian minority is increasingly a target of attacks. The victims included the pastor and several teenage boys; regional authorities attributed the attack to “unidentified armed men” who, according to witnesses, got away on motorcycles.The slaughter merited brief reports by international news outlets, then quickly faded from the spotlight — not surprising in a year where attacks on places of worship occurred with relentless frequency. Hundreds of worshippers and many clergy were killed at churches, mosques, synagogues and temples.People line up for a human chain around the Jewish synagogue and the cemetery during the Sabbath celebrations in Halle, Germany, Oct. 11, 2019.A two-week span in January illustrated the scope of this somber phenomenon. In Thailand, a group of separatist insurgents attacked a Buddhist temple, killing the abbot and one of his fellow monks. In the Philippines, two suicide attackers detonated bombs during a Mass in a Roman Catholic cathedral on the largely Muslim island of Jolo, killing 23 and wounding about 100. Three days later, an attacker hurled a grenade into a mosque in a nearby city, killing two Muslim religion teachers.The worst was yet to come.On March 15, a gunman allegedly fueled by anti-Muslim hatred attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, killing 51 people. The man arrested for the killings had earlier published a manifesto espousing a white supremacist philosophy and detailing his plans to attack the mosques.At a national remembrance service two weeks later, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said New Zealanders had learned the stories of those impacted by the attacks — many of them recently arrived immigrants.“They were stories of those who were born here, grew up here, or who had made New Zealand their home. Who had sought refuge or sought a better life for themselves or their families,” she said. “They will remain with us forever. They are us.”On Easter Sunday — April 21 — bombs shattered the celebratory services at two Catholic churches and a Protestant church in Sri Lanka.Sri Lankan Navy soldiers stand guard in front of the St. Anthony’s Shrine a day after the series of blasts, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, April 22, 2019.Other targets, in coordinated suicide attacks by local militants, included three luxury hotels. But Christian worshippers at the three churches — including dozens of children — accounted for a large majority of the roughly 260 people killed.The victims at St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo included 11-month-old Avon Gomez, his two older brothers and his parents.The day’s biggest death toll — more than 100 — was at St. Sebastian’s, a Catholic church in the seaside town of Negombo. It’s known as “Little Rome” due to its abundance of churches and its role as the hub of Sri Lanka’s small Catholic community.The attacks surprised many in the predominantly Buddhist country, where the Christian community totals about 7% of the population and has long avoided involvement in bitter ethnic and religious divides.Six days after Easter, more than 9,400 miles (15,000 kilometers) from Sri Lanka, a gunman opened fire inside a synagogue in Poway, California, as worshippers celebrated the last day of Passover. A 60-year-old woman was killed; an 8-year-old girl and two men, including the Chabad of Poway’s rabbi, were wounded.Some congregation members said the slain woman, Lori Kaye, blocked the shooter by jumping in front of rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, whose two index fingers were injured.The man charged with murder and attempted murder in the attack, John T. Earnest, could face the death penalty if he is convicted of murder, although prosecutors haven’t yet said whether they will pursue capital punishment.At a court hearing in September, prosecutors played a 12-minute recording of Earnest calmly telling a 911 dispatcher that he had just shot up a synagogue to save white people from Jews.The attack occurred exactly six months after 11 people were killed at a Pittsburgh synagogue in the deadliest assault on Jews in U.S. history.An additional anti-Semitic bloodbath was narrowly averted in October when an armed assailant tried to blast his way into a synagogue in Halle, Germany, where scores of worshippers were attending services on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism.Unable to break through a locked door, the gunman went on a rampage in nearby streets, killing two people and wounding two others.Authorities said the 27-year-old German man who has confessed to the attack had posted an anti-Semitic screed before the assault and broadcast the shooting live on a popular video game site.  In contrast to the Poway and Halle attacks, where authorities have identified suspects and motives, some of the worst attacks on houses of worship unfold without arrests or claims of responsibility.In October, for example, more than 60 people were killed in a bombing during Friday prayers at a mosque in the village of Jodari in eastern Afghanistan.No group claimed responsibility and authorities offered conflicting explanations of how the bombing was carried out.One common element of all the attacks: Dismay that many people of faith now have reason for apprehension as they gather for worship.“No one should have to fear going to their place of worship,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom after the Poway attack. ”No one should be targeted for practicing the tenets of their faith.”
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Ninety-eight percent of The Weinstein Co.’s creditors are joining a tentative settlement that plaintiffs say includes $25 million for over two dozen actresses and former employees who claim Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed them, a lawyer said Thursday. The attorney, Karen Bitar, provided the estimate to U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer as she said the deal would cover the overwhelming number of individuals and entities potentially owed money. Additional money, she said, would be set aside for anyone who did not accept the terms of the settlement. The agreement, which would be limited to $500,000 per person, would require court approval that is unlikely to come before the spring. The Weinstein Co. is currently proceeding in bankruptcy court, where any deal would face review. Canosa lawsuitThe discussion of the deal revealed by lawyers a day earlier arose during a hearing in Manhattan pertaining to a lawsuit filed against the company and the disgraced movie mogul by former Weinstein consultant Alexandra Canosa. Canosa, who has not joined the proposed settlement, has alleged that Weinstein on multiple occasions from 2010 to 2017 raped, sexually abused, intimidated and harassed her during what he maintained were business meetings in New York, Los Angeles, Malaysia and Budapest. Scores of women have accused the movie mogul of sexual misconduct. He has denied nonconsensual sex allegations. He faces a January 6 trial on rape and sexual assault charges in state court, where he has pleaded not guilty. Engelmayer agreed that depositions needed before a trial in Canosa’s case against Weinstein could wait to be taken until several weeks after his criminal trial ends. The testimony would include questioning of Canosa and Weinstein by lawyers in the case as they prepare to present evidence to a jury. ‘Most courageous client’Canosa’s lawyer, Thomas Giuffra, said outside court that most women who have sued Weinstein were agreeing to settle because the statute of limitations applied to their cases. They're getting a half-million [dollars] for an out-of-statute case,'' he said. Canosa, he said, was determined to fight on. At least two other women were doing the same, he added. They assumed we would just go along with the herd,” he said of other lawyers. “She’s the most courageous client I’ve ever had.” 
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Environmentalists and climate change activists worldwide are hailing Time magazine’s decision to make Greta Thunberg its 2019 Person of the Year. The teenage activist has attracted the world’s attention with her eloquent calls on political and industrial leaders to make courageous decisions on climate change. Her actions have inspired young people worldwide to fight for the protection of the planet. But as VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports, there are critics who say Thunberg’s mission and her celebrity status are all wrong
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