Young artists everywhere struggle to earn a living but that’s especially true in South Africa, where youth unemployment is more than 43 percent. The International Public Art Festival is trying to help bridge that gap by connecting young artists with companies seeking creative marketing. Vicky Stark reports from Cape Town, South Africa.
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U.S. National Security Agency director Paul Nakasone on Tuesday expressed concern about Chinese-owned video app TikTok’s data collection and potential to facilitate broad influence operations.
In response to a lawmaker’s question about any concerns he has on the influence of TikTok on American children, Nakasone told a Senate hearing, “TikTok concerns me for a number of different reasons.”
Nakasone said his concerns include “the data that they have.”
“Secondly is the algorithm and the control of who has the algorithm,” Nakasone added.
Nakasone ended his comments by asserting that the TikTok platform could enable sweeping influence operations. Nakasone said his concern is not only the fact that TikTok can proactively influence users, but also its ability to “turn off the message,” and noted its large number of users.
The app is used by more than 100 million Americans.
The NSA, part of the Defense Department, is the agency responsible for U.S. cryptographic and communications intelligence and security.
A TikTok representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
TikTok, a unit of China’s ByteDance, has come under increasing fire over fears that user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, undermining Western security interests. TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew is due to appear before the U.S. Congress on March 23.
A bipartisan group of 12 U.S. senators is set to introduce legislation on Tuesday that would give Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo new powers to ban TikTok and other foreign-based technologies if they are found to pose national security threats.
The U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a powerful national security body, in 2020 unanimously recommended ByteDance divest TikTok because of fears that user data could be passed on to China’s government.
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Several hundred thousand Russian citizens are thought to have fled their home country since February of last year, when the Kremlin launched its invasion of Ukraine. While no official figures exist, some estimates put the figure at close to one million people.
The exodus includes Russian citizens seeking to avoid mandated military service, as well as political activists, journalists and artists. Critics of the war face imprisonment for “discrediting” the Russian military or spreading what the Kremlin calls “unreliable information.”
Those who fled Russia’s government crackdown include Pavel Otdelnov, an artist whose works often critique Soviet and Russian history and politics. The 43-year-old found sanctuary in London and just completed an exhibition for Pushkin House, a Russian cultural center in the British capital.
‘Acting out’
Otdelnov said the exhibition, “Acting Out,” was about the humanitarian catastrophe associated with the war in Ukraine, along with an attempt to find the signs hidden in history that led to the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine.
One of the first works, a painting titled “Money,” showed old Soviet banknotes stored inside an unused missile silo, something that actually happened with the collapse of communism. The work is embellished with fragments of real bank notes.
“In 1991, under [then-Prime Minister Valentin] Pavlov, monetary reform led to the impoverishment of the population,” Otdelnov explained.
“Many people lost their savings as they had to exchange the old-style bank notes for the new-style bank notes within only three days, and the amount to be exchanged was very limited. All the rest [of the cash] turned into worthless paper that was stored in warehouses and bank deposits in different parts of the Soviet Union and Russia, and later in missile silos,” Otdelnov said.
‘Humiliated’
Otdelnov grew up through the collapse of communism. His art works parody Russia’s feeling of injustice at the outcome of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union broke up.
“This is a narrative that is very actively used in today’s propaganda — this conviction that we were humiliated, that we were put on our knees, and that we are now finally getting up from our knees and showing the whole world how powerful we are. Putin’s phrase that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century is very characteristic of this,” Otdelnov told VOA, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russian laws
Shortly after launching its invasion of Ukraine, Russia passed a law criminalizing dissent against the war, punishable with huge fines and imprisonment. Thousands of people have been arrested at anti-war demonstrations and for voicing their opposition.
Otdelnov has exhibited his provocative works across Russia for decades. But like hundreds of thousands of other Russians, he feared for his liberty and safety. He left Russia shortly after the invasion began last year and was given a visa to live in Britain under the country’s Global Talent program.
Another of his works in the Pushkin House exhibition showed forlorn human figures lost in a vast sea of fog, apparently mirroring his experience. Otdelnov said the exhibit, “A Generation,” was about “those people who left their country, who do not see any prospects, do not see an opportunity to continue to live and progress and work there.”
Invasion of Ukraine
The final works in the exhibition addressed Russia’s war in Ukraine. One of the most powerful, “Cargo 200,” showed a railway wagon standing in a flat, snowy field — the winter landscape of eastern Ukraine.
“This is the refrigerated railway wagon that transports the bodies of the dead,” Otdelnov said. “This is the last work for this exhibition, and I decided to paint it when Putin announced mobilization,” he said.
“I thought about the fate of those people who will go to war, who will take up arms and who will be killed.”
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Japan’s new medium-lift rocket failed on its debut flight in space on Tuesday after the launcher’s second-stage engine did not ignite as planned, in a blow to its efforts to cut the cost of accessing space and compete against Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
The 57-metre tall H3 rocket lifted off without a hitch from the Tanegashima space port, a live-streamed broadcast by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) showed.
But upon reaching space, the rocket’s second-stage engine failed to ignite, forcing mission officials to manually destroy the vehicle.
“It was decided the rocket could not complete its mission, so the destruct command was sent,” a launch broadcast commentator from JAXA said. “So what happened? It’s something we will have to investigate looking at all the data.”
The failed attempt followed an aborted launch last month.
“Unlike the previous cancellation and postponement, this time it was a complete failure,” said Hirotaka Watanabe, a professor at Osaka University with expertise in space policy.
“This will have a serious impact on Japan’s future space policy, space business and technological competitiveness,” he added.
Japan’s first new rocket in three decades was carrying the ALOS-3, a disaster management land observation satellite, which was also equipped with an experimental infrared sensor designed to detect North Korean ballistic missile launches.
H3 builder Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd (MHI) said it was confirming the situation surrounding the rocket with JAXA and did not have an immediate comment.
MHI has estimated that the H3’s cost per launch will be half that of its predecessor, the H-II, helping it win business in a global launch market increasingly dominated by SpaceX’s reusable Falcon 9 rocket.
A company spokesperson said earlier that it was also relying on the reliability of Japan’s previous rockets to gain business.
In a report published in September, the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the cost of a Falcon 9 launch to low Earth orbit at $2,600 per kilogram. The equivalent price tag for the H-II is $10,500.
A successful launch on Tuesday would have put the Japanese rocket into space ahead of the planned launch later this year of the European Space Agency’s new lower-cost Ariane 6 vehicle.
Powered by a new simpler, lower-cost engine that includes 3D-printed parts, the H3 is designed to lift government and commercial satellites into Earth orbit and will ferry supplies to the International Space Station.
As part of Japan’s deepening cooperation with the United States in space, it will also eventually carry cargo to the Gateway lunar space station that U.S. space agency NASA plans to build as part of its program to return people to the moon, including Japanese astronauts.
Shares of MHI fell 1.8% in morning trade, while the broader Japanese benchmark index was up 0.4%.
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All eyes will be on Hollywood Sunday when the Academy Awards, or Oscars, will honor the best in filmmaking. From Los Angeles, Mike O’Sullivan has a preview.
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A group of attorneys general from 45 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., demanded Monday that social media app TikTok produce materials as part of an investigation into its effect on young users’ mental health.
“We know that social media is taking a devastating toll on young people’s mental health and well-being, and through our investigation we are getting a clearer sense of TikTok’s role,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement.
The investigation began last year when eight states, including California, Massachusetts and Tennessee, launched a bipartisan probe of TikTok, focusing on whether the popular video-sharing app is endangering young people and violating state consumer protection laws.
On Monday, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti asked a Tennessee court to order TikTok to produce subpoenaed materials sought by the investigation. Attorneys general from across the United States filed a brief in support of the motion to compel TikTok to hand over the information.
The Tennessee court petition alleges that TikTok has failed to preserve potentially relevant evidence in the investigation, including internal employee chat messages.
It says TikTok has shared some internal messages in response to its request but said the company has rendered them “unrecognizable and nearly incomprehensible.”
TikTok has not commented on the case.
“We need to know more about the company’s business practices so we can keep our kids safe,” North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein said in a statement Monday.
California’s Department of Justice said in a statement that heavy use of social media is “strongly associated with self-harm, depression, and low self-esteem in teens — and every additional hour young people spend on social media is associated with an increased severity of the symptoms of depression.”
The latest court challenge comes as TikTok, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, faces security concerns. The United States, Canada and the European Union have all banned the use of the app on government-issued devices.
Like other social media apps, TikTok has also received criticism that it is not doing enough to protect younger users from inappropriate content.
Last week, TikTok said it was developing a tool that would allow parents to block certain content on the app. The company also said parents will now be able to set time limits on the app for their teens, depending on the day of the week.
Some information in this report came from Reuters.
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Several hundred thousand Russian citizens are thought to have fled their home country since February 2022, when the Kremlin launched the invasion of Ukraine. Critics of the war face imprisonment for “discrediting” the Russian military. Henry Ridgwell spoke to a Russian artist who has found sanctuary in London, and whose latest work addresses the war in Ukraine.
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Twitter users reported a string of problems with the social media site on Monday, including broken links and images not loading.
The company’s tech support account said in a tweet, “Some parts of Twitter may not be working as expected right now. We made an internal change that had some unintended consequences. We’re working on this now and will share an update when it’s fixed.”
Twitter’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, tweeted Monday: “This platform is so brittle (sigh). Will be fixed shortly.”
The problems appeared to be resolved about an hour after they began.
“Things should now be working as normal,” the company tweeted around 1 p.m. Eastern time.
The glitches started around midday Monday, with users around the world saying they were unable to read links to articles from outside websites.
Internet observation group NetBlocks said the issue was also affecting image and video content.
Musk tweeted later Monday in response to another user, “A small API change had massive ramifications. The code stack is extremely brittle for no good reason. Will ultimately need a complete rewrite.”
API, or Application Programming Interface, refers to software that is made available to outside developers and defines how two software components — in this case, those of Twitter and those belonging to outside platforms — can communicate with each other.
Musk has held several rounds of layoffs at Twitter, letting go more than half of the company’s staff. Some former employees have raised concerns that the mass layoffs could lead to technical problems for the platform.
Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, following a deal to buy the company for $44 billion.
Some information in this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence-France Presse.
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In 2012, UNESCO, the U.N. body tasked with promoting arts and culture, identified the traditional xylophone known as the balafon as an important part of humanity’s cultural heritage. Today, in Ivory Coast, informal workshops with students are underway to promote the instrument and highlight its African origins. Alain Amontchi looks at this unique instrument in this story narrated by Salem Solomon. Video editor: Betty Ayoub.
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The battle to find baseball’s global champions gets under way this week when the pandemic-delayed World Baseball Classic returns after a six-year absence with Shohei Ohtani hoping to inspire Japan to a record third title.
Teams from 20 countries are participating in the fifth edition of the tournament, with the four first round groups hosted at venues in Taiwan, Tokyo, Arizona and Florida before the bulk of the knockout rounds get under way in the United States.
The tournament was last staged in 2017, with the United States finally winning the title for the first time with victory over Puerto Rico at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced the postponement of the tournament in 2021, meaning the United States are only now launching their title defense with a team bristling with stars from Major League Baseball.
The American roster includes some of the biggest names in the MLB, with Los Angeles Angels slugger Mike Trout joining the likes of the Philadelphia Phillies’ Kyle Schwarber and Trea Turner, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Mookie Betts and the Colorado Rockies’ Nolan Arenado.
Team USA manager Mark DeRosa believes the American line-up is conceivably the “greatest USA team ever assembled” and is relishing the fact that the defending champions will head into the tournament as the team everyone wants to beat.
“We’ll be the hunted,” DeRosa acknowledged in a recent interview, adding that he is hoping to build an atmosphere of excitement amongst the US squad as they get the rare opportunity to join forces in an international setting.
“I want there to be a buzz,” DeRosa said. “This is an opportunity to grow, and be great, and to represent your country and get to meet some guys you may never be in a batting practice group with.”
Ohtani leads Japan challenge
The U.S. will face Mexico, Colombia, Canada and Great Britain in Pool C, with all games taking place at Chase Field in Phoenix, the home of the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Yet the star-studded U.S. roster is by no means the only one in the tournament with box office appeal.
Japan, who won the inaugural classic in 2006 and successfully defended the title three years later, will be chasing a record third world crown with all eyes on two-way star Ohtani.
Los Angeles Angels ace Ohtani, the 2021 American League Most Valuable Player, leads a Japan team that will play all of its first-round games at the Tokyo Dome, which is hosting Pool B.
Ohtani says playing in the classic for Japan had been a dream ever since watching the tournament as a fan in 2006.
“Just watching the best players in Japan playing together as a team against the best in the world was so exciting,” he said earlier this year. “Now that I’m in that position, I want to show people what I can do.”
Other teams in the group include South Korea, Australia, China and the Czech Republic.
Ohtani, who is expected to command a record-breaking contract when he enters free agency after this season, will be playing in front of Japanese fans for the first time in more than five years.
The 28-year-old was originally due to play in the 2017 World Baseball Classic but was ruled out with an ankle injury.
The Dominican Republic, meanwhile, the 2013 champions, are also looming large as one of the favorites for the title.
The Dominicans’ largely MLB-based squad boasts the likes of San Diego Padres duo Manny Machado and Juan Soto although Toronto Blue Jays slugger Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has withdrawn from the roster. Guerrero pulled out on Saturday citing knee soreness.
The Dominican Republic head a stacked Pool D staged at Miami’s LoanDepot Park which includes a powerful Puerto Rico team, Venezuela, Israel and Nicaragua.
The tournament opens on Wednesday with Pool A games in Taiwan. Pool A includes Taiwan, Netherlands, Cuba, Italy and Panama.
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“Creed III” punched above its weight at the domestic box office in its first weekend in theaters. The MGM release knocked “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” out of first place and far surpassed both industry expectations and the opening weekends of the first two movies in the franchise.
Playing in 4,007 locations in North America, “Creed III” earned an estimated $58.7 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday. Going into the weekend, analysts expected the film to open in the $30 million range. The first “Creed” debuted at $29 million in 2015 and “Creed II” opened to $35 million in 2018.
Michael B. Jordan made his directorial debut with “Creed III,” which pits his character Adonis against a childhood friend, Dame, played by Jonathan Majors. It’s the first in the Rocky/Creed films to not feature Sylvester Stallone, who chose not to return because of creative differences.
“This is beyond all of our expectations. And we knew that we had something special — we tested the movie and it tested great, but the public responded so resoundingly to it,” said Erik Lomis, MGM’s head of distribution. “Everything went right here starting with the movie itself … It was just up to us not to break it when they gave it to us, and we didn’t.”
Strong reviews helped “Creed III,” which is currently sitting at an 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, while audiences gave it an A- CinemaScore. The audience was largely male (63%), diverse (36% Black, 28% Latino, 23% white and 13% Asian/other) and young (55% between 18 and 34) according to exit polls.
Over 80% of the general audience said the film was a “definite recommend.” With Black audiences, that number ballooned to 89%.
“I’ve been doing this a long time and that’s rarefied air,” Lomis said. “People love the movie.”
It’s also the most expensive “Creed” film, with a reported production budget of $75 million, compared to the others which cost $35 million and $50 million. Internationally, “Creed III” earned $41.8 million from 75 markets, making its global debut $100.4 million.
It’s a big moment for Amazon, who acquired MGM for $8.5 billion last year, and could have simply released “Creed III” on its streaming service with a limited theatrical run. But they chose theatrical, and it paid off.
“Amazon threw their weight behind this movie like only they can do,” Lomis said. “They supercharged the campaign with marketing support across all their verticals on the platform and beyond the platform. That shows a commitment to the theatrical business model from Amazon and MGM, which I think should be exciting to everybody.”
The company’s next major theatrical release is the Ben Affleck-directed “Air,” starring Matt Damon, out next month.
“Ant-Man 3″ slipped to a distant second in its third weekend in theaters with $12.5 million from North America and $22 million internationally. The Marvel and Disney film’s global cume now stands at $419.5 million.
Third place went to Universal’s ” Cocaine Bear,” which added $11 million in its second weekend in theaters to bring its domestic total to $41.3 million.
Crunchyroll’s “Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba – To The Swordsmith Village” placed fourth with $10.1 million. The series is based on Koyoharu Gotouge’s manga about a boy avenging his family.
Lionsgate and Kingdom Story Company’s “Jesus Revolution” rounded out the top five with $8.7 million. The film starring Kelsey Grammer as a pastor in the 1970s has made $30.5 million in two weekends in theaters against a $15 million production budget.
Opening outside of the top five was Guy Ritchie’s “Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre,” a spy caper with Jason Statham, Hugh Grant and Aubrey Plaza that made $3.2 million from 2,168 locations this weekend. The film, originally an STX release, was in distribution limbo for some time. Lionsgate recently stepped in to oversee the domestic rollout.
The success of “Creed III” bodes well for other releases coming in March, including “John Wick Chapter 4” and “Shazam! Fury of the Gods.”
“We’re going to have an incredible March,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “It’s going to feel more like summer than spring with hits coming one after the next that will create incredible momentum for the summer movie season.”
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore, with Wednesday through Sunday in parentheses. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
“Creed III,” $58.7 million.
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” $12.5 million.
“Cocaine Bear,” $11 million.
“Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba – To The Swordsmith Village,” $10.1 million. 5. “Jesus Revolution,” $8.7 million.
“Avatar: The Way of Water,” $3.6 million.
“Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre,” $3.2 million.
“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” $2.7 million.
“Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” $1.2 million.
“80 for Brady,” $845,000.
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Only a third of people in the world’s poorest countries can connect to the internet, the U.N. telecoms agency said Sunday, but low-flying satellites could bring hope to millions, especially in remote corners of Africa.
Tech giants including Microsoft have pledged to help populations hobbled by poor internet services to “leapfrog” into an era of online connectivity, with satellites set to play a key role as rival firms send thousands of new generation transmitters into low level orbit.
At the moment just 36% of the 1.25 billion people in the world’s 46 poorest countries can plug into the internet, the International Telecommunication Union said. By comparison, more than 90 percent have access in the European Union.
The ITU condemned the “staggering international connectivity gap” that it said had widened over the past decade.
The divide has been a key complaint at a U.N. summit of Least Developed Countries in Doha, where UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told their leaders that “you are being left behind in the digital revolution.”
The digital dearth is particularly acute in some African countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, where barely a quarter of the population of nearly 100 million can connect.
While internet access is easy in major DRC cities such as Kinshasa, huge rural zones and swathes of territory battled over by rival rebel groups for more than two decades are digital deserts.
The launch of thousands of Low-Earth Orbit satellites could bring speedy change and boost African hopes, tech experts promised at the Doha summit.
‘Leapfrog other nations’
Satellite coverage will play a key role in Microsoft’s vow to bring internet access to 100 million Africans by 2025, which was outlined ahead of the summit.
Microsoft announced a first phase for five million Africans in December and last week added a commitment to cover another 20 million people.
The initial five million will be served by Viasat, one of the companies sending constellations of satellites into space to compete with land-based fibre broadband.
Elon Musk’s Space X and Starlink are also putting thousands of satellites into an orbit between 400 and 700 kilometers (250 to 430 miles) above Earth.
Microsoft president Brad Smith told AFP that when he first saw the 20 million figure proposed by his team last year, he asked “is this real?”, but that he was now convinced it is possible.
“The technology costs have come down substantially and will continue to drop,” he said. “That is part of what makes it possible to move this fast to reach this size of population.
“Countries in Africa have the opportunity to leapfrog other nations when it comes to the regulatory structure for something like wireless communications,” he added.
“We can reach many more people than we could with fixed line technologies five or 10 or 15 years ago.”
Bandwidth bonanza
Richer countries have already largely allocated the available bandwidth for telecoms and television.
“In Africa the spectrum isn’t being used and so it is available and the governments are moving faster to bring this connectivity to more people,” Smith said.
Microsoft is working with Africa telecoms specialist Liquid Intelligent Technologies to provide internet for the second segment of 20 million people.
Providing internet and digital skills training for thousands of Africans was part of an effort to provide a private-sector alternative to “foreign aid”, Smith said, declaring that “we are bullish on what we believe digital technology can do for development.”
But the Microsoft president acknowledged that the private sector is “woefully under-developed and under-invested” in many LDC economies.
Liquid Intelligent says it has 100,000 kilometers (62,000 miles) of land fibre across Africa but is building a major satellite footprint.
“In hard-to-reach areas,” said Nic Rudnick, its deputy chief executive, “satellite is often the only technology or the most reliable technology for fast broadband that always works.”
Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein, Alexandra Alonso Rojas and many others produce their collections with hand-knitted products made by Ukrainian women. It’s been a year since Russia invaded Ukraine, but despite the war, Ukrainian women continue to work. Nina Vishneva has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. VOA footage by Vladimir Badikov, Natalia Latukhina.
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Ukrainian diver Stanislav Oliferchyk proudly bears the name of his late grandfather, who died in brutalized Mariupol. Russia’s troops turned the Ukrainian port city into a killing zone in the process of capturing it. The elder Stanislav could no longer get the cancer treatment he needed in the ruins, his grandson says. He was 74 when he died last October.
Another victim of the months-long Russian siege of Mariupol was its gleaming aquatic center. Oliferchyk had planned to use the refurbished sports complex as his training base for the 2024 Paris Olympics. But it was bombed the same day last March as the city’s drama theater. The theater airstrike was the single deadliest known attack against civilians to date in the year-old Russian invasion. An Associated Press investigation determined that close to 600 people died.
So it takes no leap of the imagination to understand why Mariupol-born Oliferchyk is horrified by the idea that he and other war-traumatized Ukrainian athletes might have to put their anger and consciences aside and compete against counterparts from Russia and ally Belarus at next year’s Olympics.
“I’m angry most of the time. I just can’t stand it anymore when shelling happens,” said the 26-year-old Oliferchyk, a European champion in 3-meter mixed synchronized diving in 2019. “I want Russia to let us live in peace and stay away from us.”
Defying fury from Ukraine and misgivings from other nations, the International Olympic Committee is exploring whether to allow Russians and Belarusians back into international sports and the Paris Games. The IOC says it is mission-bound to promote unity and peace — particularly when war is raging. It also cites United Nations human rights experts who argue, on non-discrimination grounds, that athletes and sports judges from Russia and Belarus shouldn’t be banned simply for the passports they hold.
For Ukrainian athletes setting their sights on Paris, the possibility of sharing Olympic pools, fields and arenas with Russian and Belarusian competitors is so repellent that some say they’d not go if it happens.
Sisters Maryna and Vladyslava Aleksiiva — who won Olympic bronze in artistic swimming’s team competition at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 — are among those who say they’d have to boycott.
“We must,” Maryna said during an Associated Press interview at their training pool in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
Russia is the giant of their sport, previously called synchronized swimming, having won all the gold medals at the past six Olympics.
Completing each other’s sentences, the Ukrainian twins added: “Our moral feelings don’t allow us to stand near … these people.”
Oliferchyk worries that enmity could spill over if Ukrainians encounter Russians and Belarusians in Paris — a likely scenario given that Olympians will be housed and dine together in accommodation overlooking the River Seine in the city’s northern suburbs.
“Anything can happen, even a fight,” Oliferchyk said. “There simply cannot be any handshakes between us.”
Having to train in the midst of war also puts Ukraine’s Olympic hopefuls at a disadvantage. Russian strikes have destroyed training venues. Air raids disrupt training sessions. Athletes have lost family members and friends, or are consumed by worries that they will. Because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also closed the country’s airspace, traveling to international competitions has become an arduous odyssey — often of long train rides to neighboring Poland, for onward flights from there.
“Our athletes train while cruise missiles are flying, bombs are flying,” Ukrainian Sports Minister Vadym Guttsait said in an AP interview.
He recalled a meeting he took part in between IOC president Thomas Bach and Ukrainian cyclists given refuge in Swizterland.
“Bach asked one of the cyclists how she was doing,” the minister recounted. “She started crying. He asked why. She said that day they (Russian forces) attacked her city, where her parents were, and she was very nervous.”
“This is how every athlete feels about what is happening in Ukraine,” the minister said.
Ukraine’s artistic swim team, including the Aleksiiva sisters, used to train in the Lokomotiv sports center in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city. A Russian strike with powerful S-300 missiles wrecked the complex in September, the region’s governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said at the time. He posted photos showing a giant crater and severe damage to the exterior.
Maryna Aleksiiva said they used to think of the sports center as “our second home.” Their substitute pool in Kyiv doesn’t have the same broad depth of water, making it less suitable for practicing their underwater acrobatics, the sisters said. On a recent morning when they spoke to the AP, air raid sirens interrupted their training and they had to get out of the pool and take refuge in a bomb shelter until the all-clear sounded.
The power also flickered briefly off at times. Russia has been systematically bombarding Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure for months. When attacks shut off the pool’s heating, the water gets so cold that the sisters train in full-body wetsuits — far from ideal for their elegant sport.
“It’s hard to move,” Vladyslava said.
The terrors of war also take a mental toll.
“Every day we read the news — explosion, explosion, air alert,” Maryna said. “We feel so nervous about our relatives.”
Oliferchyk said he cannot imagine a handshake between Ukrainian and Russian athletes for “the next 50, 100 years.”
The Neptune arena in Mariupol where he wanted to train for Paris was wrecked by a Russian strike last March 16. As with Mariupol’s drama theater also destroyed that day, civilians were sheltering at the sports complex from bombardments. They included pregnant women who moved there after a Russian strike the previous week devastated a city maternity hospital. Video posted on Facebook by the region’s governor showed the Neptune’s shattered front and a gaping hole in its roof.
The IOC’s possible pathway out of sports exile for Russians and Belarusians would see them compete as “neutral athletes,” without national flags, colors or anthems.
That idea is a non-starter for Ukraine’s sports minister and athletes who resent that would-be Olympians from Russia and Belarus aren’t taking a stand against the invasion.
“They just do nothing and say nothing. And precisely because of their silence and inaction, all this horror is happening,” Oliferchyk said. “A neutral flag is not an option. It is not possible.”
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An international archeological mission has uncovered the remnants of what is believed to be a 5,000-year-old restaurant or tavern in the ancient city of Lagash in southern Iraq.
The discovery of the ancient dining hall — complete with a rudimentary refrigeration system, hundreds of roughly made clay bowls and the fossilized remains of an overcooked fish — announced in late January by a University of Pennsylvania-led team, generated some buzz beyond Iraq’s borders.
It came against the backdrop of a resurgence of archeology in a country often referred to as the “cradle of civilization,” but where archeological exploration has been stunted by decades of conflict before and after the U.S. invasion of 2003. Those events exposed the country’s rich sites and collections to the looting of tens of thousands of artifacts.
“The impacts of looting on the field of archeology were very severe,” Laith Majid Hussein, director of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage of Iraq, told The Associated Press. “Unfortunately, the wars and periods of instability have greatly affected the situation in the country in general.”
With relative calm prevailing over the past few years, the digs have returned. At the same time, thousands of stolen artifacts have been repatriated, offering hope of an archeological renaissance.
“‘Improving’ is a good term to describe it, or ‘healing’ or ‘recovering,'” said Jaafar Jotheri, a professor of archeology at University of Al-Qadisiyah, describing the current state of the field in his country.
Iraq is home to six UNESCO-listed World Heritage Sites, among them the ancient city of Babylon, the site of several ancient empires under rulers like Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar.
In the years before the 2003 U.S. invasion, a limited number of international teams came to dig at sites in Iraq. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, Jotheri said, the foreign archeologists who did come were under strict monitoring by a suspicious government in Baghdad, limiting their contacts with locals. There was little opportunity to transfer skills or technology to local archeologists, he said, meaning that the international presence brought “no benefit for Iraq.”
The country’s ancient sites faced “two waves of destruction,” Jotheri said, the first after harsh international sanctions were imposed following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and desperate Iraqis “found artifacts and looting as a form of income” and the second in 2003 following the U.S. invasion, when “everything collapsed.”
Amid the ensuing security vacuum and rise of the Islamic State militant group, excavations all but shut down for nearly a decade in southern Iraq, while continuing in the more stable northern Kurdish-controlled area. Ancient sites were looted and artifacts smuggled abroad.
The first international teams to return to southern Iraq came in 2014 but their numbers grew haltingly after that.
The digs at Lagash, which was first excavated in 1968, had shut down after 1990, and the site remained dormant until 2019.
Unlike many others, the site was not plundered in the interim, largely due to the efforts of tribes living in the area, said Zaid Alrawi, an Iraqi archeologist who is the project manager at the site.
Would-be looters who came to the area were run off by “local villagers who consider these sites basically their own property,” he said.
A temple complex and the remains of institutional buildings had been uncovered in earlier digs, so when archeologists returned in 2019, Alrawi said, they focused on areas that would give clues to the lives of ordinary people. They began with what turned out to be a pottery workshop containing several kilns, complete with throwaway figurines apparently made by bored workers and date pits from their on-shift snacking.
Further digging in the area surrounding the workshop found a large room containing a fireplace used for cooking. The area also held seating benches and a refrigeration system made with layers of clay jars thrust into the earth with clay shards in between.
The site is believed to date to around 2,700 BC. Given that beer drinking was widespread among the ancient Sumerians inhabiting Lagash at the time, many envisioned the space as a sort of ancient gastropub.
But Alrawi said he believes it was more likely a cafeteria to feed workers from the pottery workshop next door.
“I think it was a place to serve whoever was working at the big pottery production next door, right next to the place where people work hard, and they had to eat lunch,” he said.
Alrawi, whose father was also an archeologist, grew up visiting sites around the country. Today, he is happy to see “a full throttle of excavations” returning to Iraq.
“It’s very good for the country and for the archeologists, for the international universities and academia,” he said.
As archeological exploration has expanded, international dollars have flowed into restoring damaged heritage sites like the al-Nouri mosque in Mosul, and Iraqi authorities have pushed to repatriate stolen artifacts from countries as near as Lebanon and as far as the United States.
Last month, Iraq’s national museum began opening its doors to the public for free on Fridays — a first in recent history. Families wandered through halls lined with Assyrian tablets and got an up-close look at the crown jewel of Iraq’s repatriated artifacts: a small clay tablet dating back 3,500 years and bearing a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh that was looted from an Iraqi museum 30 years ago and returned from the U.S. two years ago. The tablet is among 17,000 looted artifacts returned to Iraq from the U.S.
Ebtisam Khalaf, a history teacher who was one of the visitors to the museum on its first free day, said, “This is a beautiful initiative because, we can see the things that we only used to hear about.”
Before, she said, her students could “only see these antiquities in books. But now we can see these beautiful artifacts for real.”
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Archaeologists say they have uncovered a “unique” cache of well-preserved spices, from strands of saffron to peppercorns and ginger, on the wreck of a royal ship that sank off Sweden’s Baltic coast more than 500 years ago.
The wreck of the Gribshund, owned by King Hans of Denmark and Norway, has lain off the coast off Ronneby since 1495, when it is thought to have caught fire and sank as the monarch attended a political meeting ashore in Sweden.
Rediscovered by sports divers in the 1960s, sporadic excavations of the ship have taken place in recent years. Previous dives recovered large items such as figureheads and timber. Now an excavation led by Brendan Foley, an archaeological scientist at Lund University, has found the spices buried in the silt of the boat.
“The Baltic is strange – it’s low oxygen, low temperature, low salinity, so many organic things are well preserved in the Baltic where they wouldn’t be well preserved elsewhere in the world ocean system,” said Foley. “But to find spices like this is quite extraordinary.”
The spices would have been a symbol of high status, as only the wealthy could afford goods such as saffron or cloves that were imported from outside Europe. They would have been travelling with King Hans as he attended the meeting in Sweden.
Lund University researcher Mikael Larsson, who has been studying the finds, said: “This is the only archaeological context where we’ve found saffron. So, it’s very unique and it’s very special.”
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Tom Sizemore, the “Saving Private Ryan” actor whose bright 1990s star burned out under the weight of his own domestic violence and drug convictions, died Friday at age 61.
The actor had suffered a brain aneurysm on Feb. 18 at his home in Los Angeles. He died in his sleep Friday at a hospital in Burbank, California, his manager Charles Lago said.
Sizemore became a star with acclaimed appearances in Natural Born Killers and the cult-classic crime thriller Heat. But serious substance dependency, abuse allegations and multiple run-ins with the law devastated his career, left him homeless and sent him to jail.
As the global #MeToo movement wave crested in late 2017, Sizemore was also accused of groping an 11-year-old Utah girl on set in 2003. He called the allegations “highly disturbing,” saying he would never inappropriately touch a child. Charges were not filed.
Despite the raft of legal trouble, Sizemore had scores of steady film and television credits — though his career never regained its onetime momentum. Aside from Black Hawk Down and Pearl Harbor, most of his 21st century roles came in low-budget, little-seen productions where he continued to play the gruff, tough guys he became famous for portraying.
“I was a guy who’d come from very little and risen to the top. I’d had the multimillion-dollar house, the Porsche, the restaurant I partially owned with Robert De Niro,” the Detroit-born Sizemore wrote in his 2013 memoir, By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There. “And now I had absolutely nothing.”
The book’s title was taken from a line uttered by his character in Saving Private Ryan, a role for which he garnered Oscar buzz. But he wrote that success turned him into a “spoiled movie star,” an “arrogant fool” and eventually “a hope-to-die addict.”
He racked up a string of domestic violence arrests. Sizemore was married once, to actor Maeve Quinlan, and was arrested on suspicion of beating her in 1997. While the charges were dropped, the couple divorced in 1999.
Sizemore was convicted of abusing ex-girlfriend Heidi Fleiss in 2003 — the same year he pleaded no contest and avoided trial in a separate abuse case — and sentenced to jail. The former Hollywood madam testified that he had punched her in the jaw at a Beverly Hills hotel, and beaten her in New York to the point where they couldn’t attend the Black Hawk Down premiere.
The sentencing judge said drug abuse was likely a catalyst but that testimony had revealed a man who had deep problems dealing with women. Fleiss called Sizemore “a zero” in a conversation with The Associated Press after his conviction.
Sizemore apologized in a letter, saying he was “chastened” and that “personal demons” had taken over his life, though he later denied abusing her and accused her of faking a picture showing her bruises.
Fleiss also sued Sizemore, saying she suffered emotional distress after he threatened to get her own probation revoked. Fleiss had been convicted in 1994 of running a high-priced call-girl ring. That lawsuit was settled on undisclosed terms.
Sizemore was the subject of two workplace sexual harassment lawsuits related to the 2002 CBS show Robbery Homicide Division, in which he played a police detective. He was arrested as recently as 2016 in another domestic violence case.
Sizemore ended up jailed from August 2007 to January 2009 for failing numerous drug tests while on probation and after Bakersfield, California, authorities found methamphetamine in his car.
“God’s trying to tell me he doesn’t want me using drugs because every time I use them I get caught,” Sizemore told The Bakersfield Californian in a jailhouse interview.
Sizemore told the AP in 2013 that he believed his dependency was related to the trappings of success. He struggled to maintain his emotional composure as he described a low point looking in the mirror: “I looked like I was 100 years old. I had no relationship with my kids; I had no work to speak off. I was living in squat.”
He appeared on the reality TV show Celebrity Rehab and its spinoff Sober House, telling the AP that he did the shows to receive help, but also partly to pay off accumulated debts that ran into the millions.
Many of Sizemore’s later-career films had a sci-fi, horror or action bent: In 2022 alone, he starred in movies with such titles as Impuratus, Night of the Tommyknockers and Vampfather. But Sizemore still nabbed a few meaty roles — including in the Twin Peaks revival — and guest spots on popular shows like Entourage and Hawaii Five-O.
A stuntman sued Sizemore and Paramount Pictures in 2016, saying he was injured when the allegedly intoxicated actor ran him over while filming USA’s Shooter. State records obtained by the AP showed that Sizemore was only supposed to be sitting in the unmoving car and that he “improvised at the end of the scene and drove away in his car.” Sizemore was fired from Shooter, and the stuntman’s lawsuit was settled on undisclosed terms.
In addition to his film and TV credits, he was part of the voice cast for 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City video game. He also taught classes at the LA West Acting Studio, according to recent advertisements.
He is survived by his 17-year-old twin sons, Jayden and Jagger, and his brother Paul, all of whom were by his side when he died.
“I’ve led an interesting life, but I can’t tell you what I’d give to be the guy you didn’t know anything about,” Sizemore wrote in his memoir.
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The second half-century for the world’s most famous sled dog race is getting off to a rough start.
Only 33 mushers will participate in the ceremonial start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on Saturday, the smallest field ever to take their dog teams nearly 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) over Alaska’s unforgiving wilderness. This year’s lineup is smaller even than that of the 34 mushers who lined up for the very first race in 1973.
The small pool of mushers is raising concerns about the future of an iconic race that has taken hits from the pandemic, climate change, inflation and the loss of deep-pocketed sponsors, just as multiple big-name mushing champions are retiring with few to take their place.
The largest field ever was 96 mushers in 2008; the average number of mushers starting the race over the last 50 years was 63.
“It’s a little scary when you look at it that way,” said four-time winner Martin Buser, 64, who retired after completing his 39th race last year. “Hopefully it’s not a state of the event and … it’s just a temporary lull.”
The Iditarod is the most prestigious sled dog race in the world, taking competitors over two mountain ranges, the frozen Yukon River and treacherous Bering Sea ice in frigid temperatures before ending in the old Gold Rush town of Nome. The roughly 10-day event begins with a “ceremonial start” in Anchorage on Saturday, followed by the competitive start in Willow, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) to the north, on Sunday.
And while the world-renowned race has the highest winner’s purse of any sled dog competition, the winner only pockets about $50,000 before taxes — a payout that is less appealing amid inflation and the continued reverberations of the pandemic.
Many mushers supplement their income by offering uniquely Alaska experiences to cruise ship passengers, but for several years the pandemic has meant fewer summer visitors to shell out money for a sled dog ride on a glacier.
“There’s a lot of kennels and a lot of mushers that rely on that to keep going,” said Aaron Burmeister, a Nome native who is sitting out this year’s race to spend more time with family. Burmeister, who works construction, has had eight top 10 finishes in the last decade.
“Being able to race the Iditarod and the expense of putting together a race team became more than they could bear to maintain themselves,” he said of mushers.
Inflation has also taken a toll, and several mushers said they’d like to see a higher prize purse to attract younger competitors.
Defending champion Brent Sass, who supplements his income as a wilderness guide, isn’t surprised some mushers are taking a break to build up bank accounts.
Sass, who has 58 dogs, orders 500 bags of high-quality dog food a year. Each bag cost $55 a few years ago, but that has swelled to $85 per bag — or about $42,500 total a year. That’s about how much money Sass pocketed from his Iditarod win last year.
“You got to be totally prepared to run Iditarod, and have enough money in the bank to do it,” said Sass, who lives in Eureka, about a four-hour drive north of Fairbanks.
With other race costs, Buser said running the Iditarod now can mean spending $250,000 to win a $40,000 championship.
The race itself has suffered under the increased inflation, Iditarod CEO Rob Urbach said. Supply costs have gone up about 30%, he said, and last year it cost nearly $30,000 to transport specially certified straw from the lower 48 for dogs to sleep on at race checkpoints.
The Iditarod also continues to be dogged by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which has targeted the race’s biggest sponsors. Over the past decade, Alaska Airlines, ExxonMobil, Coca-Cola and Wells Fargo have ended race sponsorships after being targeted by PETA.
PETA took out full-page newspaper ads in Anchorage and Fairbanks in February with a husky — the predominate sled dog breed — prominently featured with the headline, “We don’t want to go to the Iditarod. We just want the Iditarod to go.”
But Urbach said the race’s financial health is good, and payouts should be a little higher this year. The top 20 finishers receive payouts on a sliding scale, and every other finisher gets $1,049, reflecting the stated mileage of the race, though the actual mileage is lower.
Urbach noted they are paying “the healthiest prize money” among competitive sled dog races and called the PETA campaign “pretty offensive, I think, to most Alaskans.”
There’s also worry about the future of the race because of climate change.
The warming climate forced organizers to move the starting line 290 miles (467 kilometers) north from Willow to Fairbanks in 2003, 2015 and 2017 because of a lack of snow in the Alaska Range. Poor winter conditions and urban growth likewise led the Iditarod to officially move the start from Wasilla about 30 miles (48 kilometers) north to Willow in 2008, even though Wasilla last hosted the start in 2002.
Moving the start of the race north will likely become more common as global warming advances, said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Ice on Alaska’s western coast could also get thinner and more dangerous, he said.
“It doesn’t have to be that there’s waves crashing on the beach,” Thoman said of the impacts of ice melt. “It just has to be at the point where the ice is not stable.”
As challenges stack up, several veteran mushers with multiple championships have stepped away this year after decades of braving the frigid and windy conditions to train in the dead of the Alaska winter for the Iditarod. They are finding that few are willing to take their place, at least this year.
“I just got back from Cancun to see the Grateful Dead play on the beaches of Mexico,” said four-time champion Jeff King, who is now 67. “I first said I was going to retire at 40, and I ran the race at 66, so I don’t feel like I’m bailing on anybody.”
Five-time champion Dallas Seavey said last year’s race would be his last, at least for a while, to spend time with his daughter. Other past champions not racing include Dallas’ father, three-time champion Mitch Seavey, and Joar Leifseth Ulsom and Thomas Waerner, who have one title each.
Waerner said sponsors are holding back, and it’s too expensive to pay $60,000 to get his team from Norway to Alaska.
Lance Mackey, another four-time champion, died last year from cancer. He is the honorary musher for this year’s race, and his children, Atigun and Lozen, will ride in the first sled to leave the ceremonial start line in Anchorage and during the competitive start Sunday.
That leaves two former winners in this year’s field, Sass and Pete Kaiser.
Sass said he is confident the Iditarod will survive this downturn.
“If we can just keep the train rolling forward, I think it’s going to come back, and hopefully our world can get things under control and things maybe get a little less expensive,” Sass said. “I think that’s going to help get our numbers back up.”
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“The Red Suitcase,” a short film by Iranian-born filmmaker Cyrus Neshvad, will compete for an Oscar at the Academy Awards on March 12. The director and his star tell VOA’s Mike O’Sullivan that the film looks at a young woman’s struggle to determine her own future. Camera: Mike O’Sullivan.
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Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski was sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison by a Belarus court.
Bialiatski is the founder of Viasna, a prominent human rights group in Belarus that has provided legal and financial support to protesters, following a wave of unrest in 2020, following disputed election results that returned Belarus strongman President Alexander Lukashenko back into office, a position he has held for over 30 years.
Lukashenko, a frequent ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is often called Europe’s “last dictator.”
Bialiatski has said he is being persecuted for political reasons.
Bialiatski was among the three co-recipients of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, alongside a Russian and Ukrainian human rights group.
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