Month: September 2020

The first volume of former President Barack Obama’s memoir is coming out Nov. 17, two weeks after Election Day. It’s called “A Promised Land” and will cover his swift and historic rise to the White House and his first term in office.  
The publication date for the second volume has not yet been determined.  
“I’ve spent the last few years reflecting on my presidency, and in ‘A Promised Land’ I’ve tried to provide an honest accounting of my presidential campaign and my time in office: the key events and people who shaped it; my take on what I got right and the mistakes I made; and the political, economic, and cultural forces that my team and I had to confront then — and that as a nation we are grappling with still,” Obama said in a statement Thursday.
“In the book, I’ve also tried to give readers a sense of the personal journey that Michelle and I went through during those years, with all the incredible highs and lows. And finally, at a time when America is going through such enormous upheaval, the book offers some of my broader thoughts on how we can heal the divisions in our country going forward and make our democracy work for everybody — a task that won’t depend on any single president, but on all of us as engaged citizens.”
Obama’s book, like his previous ones, will be released by Crown.  
The 768-page book is the most anticipated presidential memoir in memory, as much or more because of the quality of the writing than for any possible revelations. He has been called the most literary president since Abraham Lincoln and has already written two highly praised, million-selling books: “Dreams from My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope,” both of which have been cited as aiding his presidential run in 2008 and making him the country’s first Black president.  
Even with a substantial list price of $45, “The Promised Land” is virtually guaranteed to sell millions of copies. But it will face challenges far different from most presidential memoirs, and even from former first lady Michelle Obama’s blockbuster book, “Becoming,” which came out two years ago. Because of the pandemic, the former president will likely be unable to have the spectacular arena tour that Michelle Obama had.  
Barack Obama also may find his book coming out at a time when the Nov. 3 election is still undecided and the country is far more preoccupied with who the next president will be than with events of the past.
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Only about six percent of the world’s professional classical music orchestras are headed by women. But in France, there is a drive to change that, including La Maestra – an international competition for women conductors in Paris.  The winner of the contest, which attracted more than 200 applicants from Asia, Europe and the Americas, will be announced later this month.Laurent Bayle, director of the Paris Philharmonic which is co-hosting La Maestra, said the victor and runner-ups will get two years of intensive mentoring and other support.Experts say there is a need for that kind of encouragement. While women head nearly 40 percent of Belgian orchestras, just three percent of French orchestras have female conductors.  In the U.S., only eight percent of orchestras are led by women. The Philharmonic is doing better— 30 percent of its visiting conductors this current season are women, an uptick from a few years ago.A mix of factors hamper women’s advancement in the field, from historical to cultural. Bayle said that in France, for example, the country’s theoretically egalitarian, so-called “Republican values” frown on affirmative action initiatives supporting women and other minorities.  Claire Gilbault is one of France’s rare female conductors, heading the Paris Mozart Orchestra, which is co-hosting this event. She noted that men head all major musical institutions — and share power among themselves. This contest is breaking new ground in another way: the jury is headed by a female conductor and is gender balanced.Of course, for this all-women competition, performance is the key criteria.Italian Sara Caneva competes in La Maestra. She is both a conductor and classical music composer. (L. Bryant/VOA)Twenty-nine-year-old Sara Caneva from Italy faced extra stress as the first candidate to perform. The coronavirus pandemic has not helped.”It’s the first, it’s after a long time without conducting because of the lockdown, and all the potential commitment that just vanished,” she said.Holly Hyun Choe from the U.S. felt better about her performance. She is currently a conductor in Switzerland.”My first goal is to be an international conductor, to be conducting at the highest level possible,” Choe said. “Of course that has to come with a lot of luck and a lot of hard work, and your own talent. And I also have to be honest with myself…can I make it to the top, do I have what it takes? …But I think to dream big is always good.”The Philharmonic’s Bayle said this contest’s ultimate goal is not just to hand out prizes, but rather to encourage other European orchestras to invite these conductors to perform and, as Choe puts it, to dream big.
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A Paris court has sentenced former World Athletics chief Lamine Diack to four years in prison on charges of corruption, money laundering and abuse of confidence.  The charges stemmed from a Russian doping scandal, and for accepting Russian money to finance the 2012 election campaign of a Senegalese president.
 
The judgment has 87-year-old Senegalese Lamine Diack, ex-World Athletics, or IAAF chief, serving two years in jail, with an additional two-year suspended sentence. The court also fined him nearly $600,000, the maximum under French law.  
 
Diack’s lawyers say they will appeal what they describe as a profoundly unfair verdict. Either way, Diack appears unlikely to go to jail. The presiding judge predicted a conditional release, given his age.  
 
Diack’s Dakar-based son, Papa Massata Diack, got a tougher sentence in absentia — five years in prison, along with a nearly $1.2 million fine. The younger Diack is accused of overseeing a vast network of corruption as a former IAAF marketing adviser.  
 
Papa Massata Diack refused to attend the Paris trial. Speaking to reporters in Dakar earlier this week, he insisted he was innocent. In addition, an investigation against him is underway in Senegal.  
 
During the Paris trial, the senior Diack also denied corruption. He admitted to slowing the handling of Russian doping allegations, but he said it was to snag lucrative Russian sponsorship deals that would help shore up the organization’s finances.  
 
Furthermore, the senior Diack denied charges of taking Russian funds to finance the successful 2012 election campaign of Senegalese President Macky Sall.   
 
Trial observers say Diack’s testimony was often confusing. One of Diack’s lawyers urged leniency, saying it was important he die in dignity in his native land. Prosecutors argued Diack’s behavior deeply tarnished the IAAF.  
 
A once-powerful figure in the sports world, Diack headed the IAAF for 16 years, before stepping down in 2015. Olympic gold medalist Sebastian Coe took over as head of the organization, which has been renamed World Athletics.  
 
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Much has been written about the 102 Europeans who crossed the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower in 1620. Much less has been written about the Wampanoag Native American community the Europeans met on the other side. After four centuries, a new exhibition in the place where the ship set sail aims to highlight the largely ignored history of the Wampanoag people.In the year 1620, the Mayflower left the port of Plymouth in southern England and arrived 10 weeks later in what is now the U.S. state of Massachusetts. The story of the religious separatists and colonists has been well documented over the centuries, unlike the experiences of the Wampanoag Native American community that was already living there.An exhibition in Plymouth marking the 400-year anniversary of the Mayflower voyage is putting the history of the Wampanoag front and center.The newly renovated Mayflower II, a replica of the original ship that sailed from England in 1620, sails back to its berth in Plymouth, Massachusetts, Aug. 10, 2020.Steven Peters, a citizen of the Wampanoag tribe who is involved in curating the exhibit in Britain, said the arrival of the Mayflower has historically been told from a European point of view.“We think that once everyone has a chance to listen to all perspectives, and absorb the perspective of both the Europeans and the Native Americans, they can then come to an understanding of what this history was and what those impacts were on the native communities that that unfolding were colonized,” he said.The arrival of the Mayflower is commonly associated with the American tradition of Thanksgiving celebrations, the first of which was – according to history – in 1621 when Europeans and native Americans joined in celebration. But critics say the traditional Thanksgiving narrative overlooks how the arrival of the settlers ultimately meant loss of land, culture and lives for many Native Americans over the centuries that followed.An interior view of the Mayflower II, in Plymouth Mass., Nov. 11, 2008. (Wikimedia Commons photo by Kenneth C. Zirkel)Peters said working on projects having to do with the history of his ancestors is part of a difficult journey.“Often the history and the stories that that we’re retelling are tragic and there’s a lot of death and sickness. And so, it’s emotional for us,” he said.British curator Jo Loosemore of the Mayflower 400, Legacy and Legend exhibition hopes to fill knowledge gaps.Co-curator Jo Loosemore adjusts a display of the white and purple shells of whelks and quahog, the shells to make a wampum belt by members of the Wampanoag native American people, at the SeaCity museum in Southampton, England, Aug. 13, 2020.There is a wealth of information about the maritime journey, the religious perspective and the separatists’ movement. But she said that for most English people the story only begins in 1620.“What the Wampanoag people have enabled us to see is that the Mayflower certainly wasn’t the first ship to cross the Atlantic with traders or settlers or colonists. And also the story most definitely does not begin in 1620 years for the Wampanoag, you’re talking a 12,000-year civilization and society, a history and the culture,” she said.An estimated 30 million Americans can trace an ancestral connection to the Mayflower. 
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The massive El Dorado wildfire in the U.S. state of California was reportedly started by a reveal party, a growing trend in the United States in which couples come up with increasingly elaborate ways to announce the gender of their expected child. For some couples, the revelation of the baby’s gender has become an important milestone, like a baby shower. But some are saying reveal parties have gotten out of control, as couples vie for the most dramatic reveal and the accompanying social media attention. FILE – A helicopter prepares to drop water at a wildfire in Yucaipa, Calif., Sept. 5, 2020. The blaze is being blamed on a gender reveal party, when a pyrotechnical device sparked a wildfire that has burned thousands of acres.Jenna Karvunidis, whom the media call the inventor of the reveal party, says social media influencer clout and the money that can generate is pushing couples to extremes. “The problem is that it’s monetary,” she told the Daily Beast. “The platforms are rewarding this more extravagant content because that’s how you get the sponsorship opportunities. … And so, they have to up the ante with more and more spectacles.” It’s not clear if Karvunidis is, in fact, the inventor of the gender reveal party, but her 2008 post to social media helped cause the trend to go viral. Her idea was simple by today’s standards: Invite a few friends and family members over, bake a modest cake with pink icing in the center to indicate the unborn baby is a girl and post some photos on a blog. Karvunidis told the Daily Beast that her reveal party wasn’t to get attention from strangers but rather to celebrate a healthy pregnancy and get her estranged mother excited. Cakes no longer seem to cut it. One expecting couple hollowed out a watermelon, filled it with blue jello and then had an alligator chomp on it to reveal the gender. Another couple hired a small plane to dump small colored balls on attendees.Another aviation-themed reveal caused a plane crash when a small aircraft that was supposed to dump 1,300 liters of pink water flew too low and crashed. Luckily, no one was injured. Some are jumping out of planes to add to the drama. In one case, a man parachuted from a plane toward event guests with a smoke canister emitting colored smoke to reveal the gender. Yet another couple built a complex Rube Goldberg machine to reveal the gender of their coming baby. Some of the events have produced painful viral video, including a recent video of a Massachusetts man accidentally firing an explosive canister of blue smoke directly into his crotch. Flare hits dad-to-be in the crotch at a gender reveal party pic.twitter.com/tpkpNN9qOd— The Sun (@TheSun) September 13, 2020But now, the parties may be causing massive damage like the El Dorado fire, which started east of Los Angeles and has burned around 5,600 hectares so far. A massive 2018 fire in Arizona is also blamed on a gender reveal event gone wrong. It’s unclear if the fires will cause a pause to the gender reveal trend, but a quick online search reveals numerous resources for parents wanting to plan their event, and it’s likely most parties don’t involve gators, planes or explosive devices. There are also signs the trend is going global with a couple recently lighting up the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, in blue to announce they were expecting a boy. Karvunidis, however, says she has had enough. “Stop it. Stop having these stupid parties,” she wrote on Facebook. 
 
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“Mulan” has been one of Jewher Ilham’s favorite movies since she was a little girl. She says she remembers sitting with her dad and watching Disney’s 1998 animated version of the tale of a Chinese woman who disguises herself as a man and wins acclaim as a warrior.“I was so excited about the live-action remake, until one of my favorite actresses, Liu Yifei, publicly supported the Hong Kong police against pro-democracy protesters,” she said. Liu, the leading actress and a naturalized U.S. citizen, posted a pro-police comment on Chinese social media platform Weibo in 2019 that was welcomed by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Cast member Liu Yifei poses at the European premiere for the film “Mulan” in London, March 12, 2020.It’s not only Liu’s remarks that disappointed Jewher. The live-action “Mulan” filmed some of its scenes in Xinjiang, and Disney thanked eight local government bodies in its credits, including the Turpan Municipal Bureau of Public Security, which was sanctioned by the U.S. Commerce Department for administrating the internment camps in Xinjiang.“Because I have relatives and friends in the concentration camps. They might be in a camp near where the movie was shot,” she said.Jewher’s father, Ilham Tohti, is a Uighur economist and former university lecturer who in 2014 was sentenced to life in prison in China on separatism-related charges. Officials accused him of using his lectures to incite violence and overthrown the Chinese Communist Party leadership.Washington-based lawyer Rayhan Asat is advocating for the release of her brother Ekpar Asat, a Uighur entrepreneur who disappeared upon returning to China from a U.S. State Department program.Rayhan said Disney’s actions amount to indirect funding of the Communist Party institutions that imprison Uighurs and has violated corporate social responsibility standards.To her, the rollout of “Mulan” marks the latest example of Hollywood’s hypocrisy and willingness to sacrifice values to do business in China.“Disney is publicly endorsing the Xinjiang government in thanking them in credits. Disney wants to profit by a movie that empowers woman, but it’s praising governments who are committing crimes against woman, against humanity. It’s so hypocritical,” she told VOA.“In my eyes, the Uighur women who are voicing out for their parents, brothers, sisters, and loved ones, they are the real Mulan,” she added.”Mulan” has become a political flashpoint since it was released on Disney+ in the U.S. on September 4. #BoycottMulan is trending on Twitter. Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, last week published a letter addressed to Disney CEO Bob Chapek, accusing the company of “whitewashing” the “ongoing Uighur genocide.” Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, also requested the company explain why it chose to film part of the movie in Xinjiang.Children play next to a poster of the Disney movie “Mulan” outside a cinema in Beijing on September 11, 2020.Disney’s CFO Christine McCarthy last Thursday acknowledged that the film’s ties to China had created “a lot of issues” for the company, yet Disney declined to comment further on the current controversy.Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian on Friday said it’s “very normal for the film to thank the convenience provided by the government of Xinjiang.” He also praised lead actress Liu Yifei, calling her the real “daughter of the Chinese nation.” China has maintained that the camps in Xinjiang at the center of the controversy are training facilities aimed at combating terrorism in the region.Officials and civic groups have growing concerns about the influence China has had over Hollywood in recent years.A new report by Pen America accused Hollywood of censoring films to avoid losing access to China’s lucrative box office market. It said key players in Hollywood are increasingly making decisions about their films “based on an effort to avoid antagonizing Chinese officials who control whether their films gain access to the booming Chinese market.”It said that in some instances, filmmakers or directors have directly invited Chinese government censors onto their film sets to advise them on “how to avoid tripping the censors’ wires.”Beijing has the world’s second-largest box market behind the U.S. According to the Hollywood Reporter, American films earned $2.6 billion in China last year.Despite the political backlash, “Mulan” premiered as the top movie in China last week, where theaters are open. Preliminary estimates show “Mulan” grossed $23.2 million, which some considered a disappointment.The film received lukewarm reviews online, scoring only 4.9 out of 10 on the country’s movie rating site Douban. Users criticized the film’s handling of feminism and its portrayal of Chinese culture.In other markets, Disney canceled plans to release “Mulan” in theaters because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The company hasn’t revealed how many people have purchased the movie since it became available September 4 in the U.S.
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