Robots are becoming commonplace in many areas of society — from manufacturing to medicine to our homes. Now, a robot has taken to the stage, in a British play called “Spillikin.” A humanoid robot plays the male companion of a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
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Folks on Sesame Street have a way of making everyone feel accepted.
That certainly goes for Julia, a Muppet youngster with blazing red hair, bright green eyes — and autism. Rather than being treated like an outsider, which too often is the plight of kids on the spectrum, Julia is one of the gang.
Look: On this friendliest of streets (actually Studio J at New York’s Kaufman Astoria Studios, where Sesame Street lives) Julia is about to play a game with Oscar, Abby and Grover. In this scene being taped for airing next season, these Muppet chums have been challenged to spot objects shaped like squares or circles or triangles.
“You’re lucky,” says Abby to Grover. “You have Julia on your team, and she is really good at finding shapes!”
Group skedaddles
With that, they skedaddle, an exit that calls for the six Muppeteers squatted out of sight below them to scramble accordingly. Joining her pals, Julia (performed by Stacey Gordon) takes off hunting.
For more than a year, Julia has existed in print and digital illustrations as the centerpiece of a multifaceted initiative by Sesame Workshop called Sesame Street and Autism: See Amazing in All Children.
She has been the subject of a storybook released along with videos, e-books, an app and website. The goal is to promote a better understanding of what the Autism Speaks advocacy group describes as “a range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech and nonverbal communication, as well as by unique strengths and differences.”
But now Julia has been brought to life in fine Muppet fettle. She makes her TV debut on Sesame Street in the Meet Julia episode airing April 10 on both PBS and HBO. Additional videos featuring Julia will be available online.
Years of consultation
Developing Julia and all the other components of this campaign has required years of consultation with organizations, experts and families within the autism community, according to Jeanette Betancourt, Sesame Workshop’s senior vice president of U.S. Social Impact.
“In the U.S., one in 68 children is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder,” she says. “We wanted to promote a better understanding and reduce the stigma often found around these children. We’re modeling the way both children and adults can look at autism from a strength-based perspective: finding things that all children share.”
Julia is at the heart of this effort. But while she represents the full range of children on the spectrum, she isn’t meant to typify each one of them: “Just as we look at all children as being unique, we should do the same thing when we’re looking at children with autism,” Betancourt says.
It was with keen interest that Stacey Gordon first learned of Julia more than a year ago. “I said, ‘If she’s ever a puppet, I want to BE Julia!’ ”
No wonder. Gordon is a Phoenix-based puppeteer who performs, conducts classes and workshops, and creates whimsical puppets for sale to the public.
She also has a son with autism, and, before she started her family, was a therapist to youngsters on the spectrum.
Although she figured her chances of landing the dream role of Julia were nil, her contacts in the puppet world paid off: Two friends who worked as Muppeteers on Sesame Street dropped her name to the producers. After submitting tapes, then coming to New York for an audition, she was hired.
In the introductory segment, Julia is having fun with Abby and Elmo when Big Bird walks up. He wants to be her new friend, but she doesn’t speak to him. He thinks she doesn’t like him.
“She does things just a little differently, in a Julia sort of way,” Abby informs him.
Different-but-fun way
Julia, chuckling, then displays a different-but-fun way of playing tag, and everyone joins in. But when a siren wails, she covers her ears and looks stricken.
“She needs to take a break,” Big Bird’s human friend Alan calmly explains. Soon, all is well and play resumes.
“The Meet Julia episode is something that I wish my son’s friends had been able to see when they were small,” says Gordon. “I remember him having meltdowns and his classmates not understanding how to react.”
Gordon says her son, now 13, isn’t drawn to puppetry. “He’s more interested in math and science, and plays the piano brilliantly,” she says with pride.
But she’s having a blast being part of the show that helped hook her, as a child, on puppeteering.
“It is so much fun to be on set with everyone, and get to play up all the positive things I’ve seen with the kids that I’ve worked with,” Gordon says. “At the same time, I come at this with a reverence. I don’t want to let the autism community down.”
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The eastern U.S. city of Philadelphia has canceled this year’s celebration of Cinco de Mayo, an event that attracts as many as 15,000 people.
Edgar Ramirez, one of the event’s organizers, said the unanimous decision by the planners was “sad,” but it was the “responsible” thing to do because of “the severe conditions affecting the immigrant community.”
Ramirez said the organizers were afraid federal immigration officers would stage a raid on the annual festival in Philadelphia — the country’s fifth-largest city.
U.S. President Donald Trump has called for Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to step up the arrests and deportations of people living illegally in the U.S.
Cinco de Mayo — or the Fifth of May — commemorates the Mexican army’s 1862 victory over France at the Battle of Puebla during the Franco-Mexican War. In the United States, Cinco de Mayo has evolved into a celebration of Mexican culture and heritage, particularly in areas with large Mexican-American populations.
There’s a bromance brewing between actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds.
The Hollywood stars say they hit it off so well during the filming of their new sci-fi thriller called Life that a genuine friendship has blossomed. The movie, about a team of scientists aboard the International Space Station who find an alien life form from Mars, premiered Saturday at the South by Southwest festival in Austin.
The Brokeback Mountain and Deadpool stars were mostly all jokes during rounds of press interviews before the film’s premier, answering most questions with a back-and-forth comedy shtick. But they turned serious when asked about the connection formed on set.
‘A lucky thing’
“You do these films and get to work with really amazing people, really talented people and you think ‘oh I’m going to hang out with these people afterward and see them again,’” said Reynolds. “You don’t most of the time because you go on living your life. But with this guy, we’ve stayed friends. That’s a lucky thing. It doesn’t always happen.”
Some of the first signs of the newly forged bond came earlier this week when Reynolds gave high praise to Gyllenhaal on Good Morning America, calling him one of the most interesting actors currently working in Hollywood. Reynolds said Saturday that his co-star is “one the greatest actors of this generation.”
“I loved working with this guy,” he said. “I loved spending time with this guy. It’s not often you get this experience.”
Gyllenhaal was equally complimentary, saying Reynolds’s role last year as a foul-mouthed superhero is exactly what he strives for: a performance so authentic that it would be nearly impossible for another actor to duplicate.
“We sort of grew up in this business together without knowing each other until very recently,” Gyllenhaal said. “It’s hard in a business where … a lot of times we’re pretending to get closer to the truth and to find somebody who you feel is genuine. I feel that way about him, so we’re friends.”
Parallels classic thriller
The movie plot draws some notable parallels to Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic Alien, tracking a team of scientists on a spaceship who encounter an alien life form that wreaks havoc. Their discovery — the first evidence of extraterrestrial life on Mars — turns out to be a threat not only to the crew but to all life on Earth.
But even with the backdrop of a sci-fi heart pounder, Gyllenhaal says he and Reynolds found some levity throughout the filming.
“This experience of what’s happening right now was consistent to what it felt like while we were shooting,” Gyllenhaal said in between puns served as answers to questions. “We had really scary situations in the movie and scenes that were really tense, but we were laughing constantly and it was so much fun.”
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One of the kings of American rock ’n’ roll, Chuck Berry, has died. He was 90.
The legendary African-American musician, a native of St. Louis, Missouri, gave his first performance in high school. Since then, he forged a life that included three years in reform school, 20 months in prison, and decades in the spotlight, pioneering a musical form that has become synonymous with American music.
Charles Edward Anderson Berry, who went by the nickname Chuck, was famous for such 1950s hits as Maybellene, Roll Over Beethoven, Sweet Little Sixteen, and Johnny B. Goode. The singles — revolutionary combinations of pop, country music and blues — were dance hits in high school gymnasiums and music clubs across the United States. His musical style helped give birth to the age of the American teenager, all hormones and energy and optimism.
Influence for many musicians
Berry’s hit Maybellene was a rock ’n’ roll treatment of a country song known as Ida Red. Berry wrote in a memoir that his music label, Chess, “couldn’t believe that a … hillbilly song could be written and sung by a black guy.”
His music influenced most of the popular musicians that came after him, including such well-known music legends as the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys and the Grateful Dead. Referring to Berry in the mid-1980s, Rolling Stone’s Keith Richards famously quipped, “I’ve stolen every lick (guitar improvisation) he ever played.”
Born in the Midwest
Berry was born into a middle-class family in Missouri and gave his first performance at Sumner High School, historic in its own right as the first African-American high school west of the Mississippi River, a dividing line that separates the eastern third of the country from the West.
Berry is credited with originating many quirks exclusively associated with the rock ’n’ roll genre, including a rollicking, danceable beat, his famous “duck walk” and a heavy, rhythmic guitar style that he may well have been described in the song Johnny B. Goode: “just like he’s ringin’ a bell.” Legend has it that he developed his duck walk as a means of hiding the wrinkles in the one good suit he had brought on tour.
As for Johnny B. Goode — originally meant to be about a black boy, but changed to “country boy” for wider appeal — countless bands covered it, among them the Beatles, country star Buck Owens and heavy metal band Judas Priest.
Run-ins with the law
Berry’s brushes with the law came early and late. In high school, he was arrested for armed robbery and spent three years in a reformatory, between 1944 and 1947. He emerged to go to work in an automobile factory, but he was playing music publicly with the Johnnie Johnson Trio by 1953. A meeting in Chicago with famed blues musician Muddy Waters led to the release of Maybellene, national fame and a string of hits.
In 1961, Berry got in trouble for transporting a 14-year-old girl across state lines and served 20 months in prison, a period in his life that friends said changed him forever. In 1979, he served 120 days in prison for tax evasion.
Berry’s music evolved at a time when racism was running high; blacks and whites were segregated into different schools, businesses, churches and public facilities. But his music attracted fans of all ethnicities.
Music for everyone
“I made records for people who would buy them,” he said once. “No color, no ethnic, no political — I don’t want that, never did.”
Despite his troubles with the law and the conditions of the times, Berry rose to the top of his profession.
He received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1984, became one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, and was given a Kennedy Center Honors Award in Washington in 2000 for his lifetime of contributions to American cultural life.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame announced March 16 that Berry’s work will be featured in a new exhibit alongside that of Elvis Presley and other rock ’n’ roll greats, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the music magazine Rolling Stone.
Berry said the musical genres that inspired him were swing and big band, the music of the 1940s. In an appearance on The Tonight Show in 1987, Berry said he originally wanted to play the more traditional musical styles.
“The main guy was Louis Jordan. I wanted to sing like Nat Cole, with lyrics like Louis Jordan, with the swing of Benny Goodman, with Charlie Christian on guitar playing Carl Hogan’s riffs with the soul of Muddy Waters,” he said.
But Berry knew a good thing when he saw it. Married to his wife, Themetta Suggs, since 1948 and with four children to support, Berry embraced the musical style that made his career. In the 1957 hit Rock and Roll Music, Berry sang, “It’s gotta be rock ’n’ roll music, if you wanna dance with me.”
Berry’s final original album, titled Chuck, is expected to be released by Dualtone Music Group later this year.
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Mention New Orleans and most people will immediately associate it with jazz, a genre of music that originated among African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
And that distinctly American music can be heard everywhere throughout the famed city – and in most other areas of the state of Louisiana.
The ‘Big Easy’
National parks traveler Mikah Meyer recently visited New Orleans to soak up some of those sounds and learn about the city’s other cultural highlights.
“There’s the New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park, which basically celebrates the contribution of the culture of New Orleans, to this music that is authentically and originally American…a relatively new genre that is distinctly American,” he said.
“So it’s a bunch of little sites basically all scattered throughout the French Quarter in the older parts of the city that celebrate this heritage.”
Wild wetlands
Just south of the city is the Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve, named in honor of a French pirate who helped General Andrew Jackson defend New Orleans against the British in the final battle of the War of 1812.
Meyer spent time in the wetlands paradise that’s home to an impressive variety of plants and wildlife.
“The Preserve was a really good example of a lot of the sites I had seen throughout the whole Gulf Coast,” Meyer observed. “Everything from the Everglades, northwest up through Tampa, through Pensacola, all the way to New Orleans. It was a good example of that ecosystem that lives in between the ocean and easily habitable land.”
The National Park Service describes the six sites of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve as representing “a treasure trove of south Louisiana’s historical and cultural riches. People from nearly every country, ethnic group, language and religion have come to the lower Mississippi River delta and left traces of their passing.”
Ancient culture
Traces of a prehistoric culture that made the lower Mississippi River Delta home are preserved at Poverty Point National Monument. The 3,400-year-old Native American settlement is now a World Heritage site. Meyer noted the unique geometric design that is considered a masterpiece of engineering.
“It has six lines of slightly raised ground, which they believe is where people lived, and then it has a bunch of different mounds – basically like man-made hills with millions of pounds of dirt.”
Poverty Point, once at the center of a huge trade network, is one of North America’s most important archeological sites.
Creole influence
At the Cane River Creole National Historical Park, the fourth of Louisiana’s national parks, Meyer learned that the state’s culture was not just influenced by the French.
“It’s very heavily influenced by all the people and all the countries and cultures that did trade in New Orleans, so Spanish, British, French… and so this Creole culture that developed out of that melting pot in the melting pot of America is a very unique thing,” he said.
Even though they’re part of the U.S., Meyer says the southern states he has visited so far show just how diverse America can be.
“If someone is looking to understand the unique culture and portion of American History, along with topography, whether it’s from the western edge of the Everglades all the way over to Louisiana, the Gulf Coast offers that chance,” he said.
Meyer invites you to learn more about his travels across America by visiting his website, Facebook and Instagram.
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Depeche Mode’s new album kicks off with a dire warning that we’re going backward as a society. Things go quickly downhill from there.
“Spirit” then tells us we’ve been lied to and advocates revolution, convicts everyone of treason and urges selfish scum to turn their guns on themselves – and that’s just the first four songs.
“First and foremost, we wanted to make a fun album,” deadpans chief songwriter Martin Gore. “That was a joke.”
The gloomy British electronic trio resurfaced this month with its first new music in four years and the timing seems impeccable. The dozen new dark songs seem the perfect soundtrack to a world rocked by Brexit and Donald Trump.
“It’s a little bit of a heavy listen,” acknowledges lead singer Dave Gahan. “Look, that’s what we do. It’s about creating these atmospheres with this backdrop of the world we’re living in.”
“Spirit” continues the band’s evolution in alternative-rock under the new guidance of producer James Ford, who has worked with Florence and the Machine and the Arctic Monkeys.
Band member Andy Fletcher said Ford, who also played drums on many of the tracks, managed to “freshen us up a bit.” The songs are drenched in dread, slithering synths and strong hooks, exploring everything from trickle-down economics to heartbreak.
Gore, who had a hand in nine of the tracks, said the album might sound like a reaction to recent political and cultural shocks but was actually written in the second half of 2015 and early 2016.
“The world was still in a mess then and it was quite depressing to me. I felt that I couldn’t just ignore it. If I was going to actually write and be honest to myself I had to kind of like face it,” he said.
“I wanted to say that I feel that we’ve lost our way a bit, that mankind has lost its way spiritually. I’m not talking from any denomination here. I just mean in a general sense and by pointing that out, maybe it just gets people to think a bit.”
Depeche Mode will go on the road – their Live Nation-backed, 28-show North American tour starts in Salt Lake City in August – mixing the new songs with their go-to anchors, including “I Feel You” and “Walking In My Shoes.”
“I try and find songs from some other albums that will relate to what we’re doing now,” said Gahan, who mused that “Everything Counts” would sit nicely with the new tracks. “Hopefully, there will be a couple of little surprises.”
Depeche Mode was part of a wave of English pop-synthesizer bands to sweep into America in the 1980s with light-hearted songs like “Just Can’t Get Enough.” They matured with edgier, socially conscious tunes like “People Are People” and “Blasphemous Rumours” before hitting big success with 1990’s “Violator,” which produced the singles “Personal Jesus,” “Enjoy the Silence” and “Policy of Truth.”
The band found itself this year on the list of potential inductees to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but failed to make the cut for the Class of 2017.
“To be honest, we were surprised. We never aimed to be in it. We think, ‘An electronic band in the Rock and Roll Hall?”’ Fletcher said. “To be nominated is quite good, really. I don’t know if we’ll eventually go in. It’s not really on the top list of our wishes. It would be nice if it happened, I suppose.”
If it ever happens, it would be a remarkable crowning for a group of acknowledged misfits from East London that made its reputation making symphonies from smacking pots and pans and wearing eyeliner, nail polish and black leather.
“Definitely, we were not the cool kids in town,” said Gahan. “We were those weirdos, the ones that got chased home from school.” Now their songs have been covered by the likes of Johnny Cash and Susan Boyle, and Depeche Mode’s influences are heard everywhere, from airy Scandinavian pop to EDM.
“I think we’ve been lucky enough to have made some timeless records at certain points. Some of them, not so timeless,” said Gahan, laughing. “I feel like you get led somewhere and you’ve got to take that risk to jump in. I feel like ‘Spirit’ is an album that we’ve been led to.”
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War-torn Iraq may never recover unless the Western world learns to connect and identify with the people of the Middle Eastern nation, a Kurdish-Norwegian filmmaker said on Friday.
His documentary film “Nowhere to Hide” could help Westerners to understand and empathize with the suffering of Iraqi families, Zaradasht Ahmed told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview.
Filmed in northern Iraq over five years, “Nowhere to Hide” recounts the rise of Islamic State that in 2014 took over the town of Jalawla, northeast of Baghdad, through the eyes of a young medic working in a hospital.
Forced to flee, the medic and his family live in a displacement camp and are frightened to return home.
Promoting his film at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London, Ahmed said he would like outsiders to see struggling Iraqis as fellow human beings, not set them apart as refugees.
“There is nothing called the refugee crisis,” he said. “There are humanitarian crises. There are economic crises. There are war crises.”
The film director is pessimistic about the future of Iraq, which he said was permanently scarred by the invasion in 2003 of U.S. and British forces set on ousting its leader Saddam Hussein.
Now, he said, those Western nations do not recognize problems they started and “look at Iraq as a failure state without feeling like they had a hand on it.”
“We have to have more solidarity and try to think of Iraq as also part of this planet,” the filmmaker said.
Film Trailer:
Much of “Nowhere to Hide” was filmed by the medic, Nori Sharif, whom Ahmed taught to use a camera.
Sharif began filming in 2011 and recorded the retreat of the Iraqi Army from Jalawla in 2013 because of growing militant activity.
The director was born and raised in northern Iraq. His film on illegal immigration to Europe, made for SVT, Swedish public television, was screened at a number of film festivals.
IDFA Interview with Zaradasht Ahmed:
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A vast collection of rare Beatles vinyl records, photos and other paraphernalia will go on auction in Paris on Saturday.
Beatles aficionado Jacques Volcouve began his collection in 1967 with the album “A Hard Day’s Night.” Decades later, it has grown to include nearly 15,000 records and more besides.
“Starting from 1967, I gave myself an absolutely impossible mission: own everything concerning the Beatles,” Volcouve told Reuters TV, as he was sorting through his collection in December.
The 60-year-old has decided to auction off his collection to fund his retirement.
Among the 332 lots up for auction on Saturday is the disc “Tony Sheridan and the Beatles 7: My Bonnie,” signed by Paul McCartney and George Harrison, with an estimated price of 6,000-10,000 euro ($6,450-10,740).
A lot of 11 alternate cover photos for the Grammy-winning Sergeant Pepper Lonely Hearts Club album is expected to go for 10,000 to 15,000 euros.
Volcouve has written books and given radio commentaries about the Liverpool foursome. Letters he received from Harrison and Ringo Starr in 1976, thanking him for articles he had written, could fetch up to 3,000 euros each.
A set of dolls of the Fab Four with their instruments is expected to sell for 200-400 euros.
Among other items up for sale are an “authentic Beatle wig,” a Yoko Ono/John Lennon wedding album box and posters.
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About two years ago, blues-folk artist Alice Phoebe Lou gave a performance in a park in Berlin, looking for donations as a street entertainer.
A listener invited her to perform at a function. Her career has since taken off. Last year, she released her debut record, and on Wednesday she played one of the world’s premier music festivals: the South by Southwest event in Texas.
Lou is just one of a growing list of South African musicians who’ve felt compelled to leave their homeland to be rewarded for their art. Another is Josie Field.
“I feel my sound and where I want to go musically, I’ve hit a ceiling in South Africa,” Field said. “The market is extremely niche for what I do.”
As they do for most musicians in South Africa, live gigs provide Field’s staple income. But, in a depressed economy, they’re limited.
Despite the struggles, Field said she’d never regret the past decade of making music in the country of her birth.
‘Take another step’
“I’ve had a wonderful time,” she said. “There’s no doubt that there are proper music fans here. But I’m now ready to take another step and hopefully explore how other parts of the world see my music, and also grow as an artist.”
Andre le Roux, director of the Southern African Music Rights Organization, said it’s “natural” for extremely talented artists to leave South Africa.
The Dave Matthews Band “is doing far better in the U.S. than they would have done, ever, in South Africa,” he said. “So when people grow a little bigger [than the South African music scene], it’s time to leave.”
But he added that “what isn’t natural” is that exceptional, and scrupulous, musicians like Field often can’t get airplay in South Africa.
“There is the reality of payola, which is corruption — taking money where you’re not supposed to take money to give people airplay when you’re not supposed to give them airplay,” he said.
Le Roux also said that South Africa’s national broadcaster, the SABC, was failing to fulfill its pledge to play 90 percent local music.
“Was it a policy that was put in place, or was it a statement that was made? In our view, it was very much a statement that was made, because we haven’t seen the policy position,” he said. “Which radio station do you know that has played 70, 80, 95 [percent local music]; who’s done the assessment?”
The SABC insists its stations are playing “mostly locally produced” music.
Lack of support seen
Le Roux is adamant that the state isn’t doing enough for music. Most public schools, for example, don’t teach it.
“Are those institutional tools in place to support an environment in which the arts and the artists can thrive?” he asked. “The honest answer to that is no.”
The government says it’s doing its best with “limited funding” to support arts.
Field said another reason for her leaving is her disenchantment with politics in South Africa — something reflected in her track “Born Under the Stars.”
“It’s a song that has a political edge to it, coming just out of frustration for the future of South Africa and the leaders that aren’t leading,” she said.
Pride in artists’ progress
Le Roux expects more of the cream of local music to leave the country — not necessarily because of politics or corruption, but because they’re simply “too big” for the nation’s small, underfunded music sector.
“We don’t have the ability to absorb them within our cultural space,” he said. “That’s the problem of the state. But do we like to see them grow? Yes. Those that go abroad, good for them. Those that stay here, let’s build an industry together.”
Ultimately, he said, South Africa should be proud that its artists, like DJ and rapper Spoek Mathambo, are successful worldwide, in bigger, ultracompetitive markets.
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French sculptor Auguste Rodin’s newly re-discovered marble masterpiece titled “Andromeda” will be up for sale in Paris in May, auction house, Artcurial, said on Friday.
The auctioning of the sculpture is of particular importance as it has remained in the hands of the same family for roughly 130 years, according to the director of Artcurial’s impressionist and modern art department, Bruno Jaubert.
Rodin, renowned the world over for works like his bronze “The Thinker” and “The Kiss” made from marble, gave his sculpture of the mythical woman Andromeda to a friend and client, a Chilean diplomat living in Paris in the late 19th Century.
“The family who received it as a present from Rodin in 1888, from generation to generation, conserved it until 2017,” Jaubert explained, proudly adding that he and a colleague found it earlier this year during an inventory in Spain.
The sculpture is estimated to auction for between 800,000 and 1 million euros ($859,400 to $1.07 million U.S. dollars) and will be on exhibition at the auction house from March 18 to 28, coinciding with the centenary of Rodin’s death in 1917.
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Chelsea Clinton, daughter of losing presidential candidate Hillary, will publish a children’s book whose title is inspired by an attempt to silence a female U.S. senator that drew outrage from women’s rights activists.
She Persisted will feature stories of 13 American women who have overcome adversity to make important contributions to society, she said on Twitter.
Clinton’s announcement came over a month after U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, tried to silence his colleague Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, as she gave a speech. He later complained that “nevertheless, she persisted.”
His words soon became a battle cry for women — showing up on T-shirts, tattoos and social media.
“I wrote this book for everyone who’s ever wanted to speak up but has been told to quiet down — for everyone who’s ever been made to feel less than,” said Clinton in a statement. “With this book, I want to send a message to young readers around the country — and the world — that persistence is power.”
The women whose stories will be featured in the picture book include anti-slavery crusader Harriet Tubman, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and media mogul Oprah Winfrey, the book’s publisher Penguin Random House said in a statement.
The book will be published May 30, Clinton said.
Clinton, a 37-year-old mother of two and first daughter in the Bill Clinton White House, has previously published the New York Times bestseller It’s Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going, aimed at young teenagers.
Hillary Clinton lost the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 8 last year to Donald Trump.
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New Orleans, Louisiana, is considered the birthplace of American jazz, a genre of music that originated among African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. National parks traveler Mikah Meyer spent some time in the vibrant city before setting out to visit several national parks spread out across the state. He shared highlights of his experiences with VOA’s Julie Taboh.
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Beauty and the Beast is a tale for the ages. We’ve read it in fairytale books and watched it in numerous TV and movie adaptations. Maybe the most memorable of this classic was the iconic 1991 Disney animation. With its infectious songs and beautiful graphics, the film entered the popular mainstream worldwide.
Now, Disney is reviving its 1991 Beauty and the Beast rendition with live action heroes, making this Disney’s latest live action fairytale production, but by no means its last.
The film opens the same way as its 1991 predecessor. Emma Watson inhabits the role of Belle, the iconic character from the 1991 animated film. She says live action fairytales are likely to draw people of all ages into the theaters.
Watch: Beauty and the Beast, from Animation to Live Action
“As a child you love Disney, but as an adult you still love Disney because it sort of connects you with that childlike feeling that everything is going to be OK and there’s hope in the world,” Watson said.
$300 million investment
It was this nostalgia that made Disney invest $300 million in this lavish musical, with Oscar winning filmmaker Bill Condon at the helm. The film offers background stories that add depth to their characters, such as Belle.
“It really was the first modern Disney heroine,” the filmmaker said. “A Disney princess who doesn’t want to be a princess, who doesn’t care about finding the prince. Someone who’s more interested in books and seeing the world and kind of figuring out who she is than in finding a guy and getting married. She happens to do those things by the end, but it’s not because that’s her main interest.”
Watson says the evolution of the romance between Belle and the Beast also is more complex than it was in its previous incarnations.
“Beast and Belle really dislike each other at the beginning, they really don’t get on, and then they form a friendship and then they fall in love,” she said.
Wealth of talent
Apart from Watson, the film includes a long list of famous actors. Kevin Klein interprets Belle’s quirky father. Ewan McGreggor, who plays the enchanted candelabra, and others lend their voices to digitally generated characters.
New songs were added to the original ones by Alan Menken, Howard Ashman and Tim Rice. Such a wealth of raw talent in acting, production, costumes and music bolstered Disney’s decision to take the financial gamble. It also helped that the studio tested the market with a 90-second teaser trailer that generated a record 92 million views.
This is not the first time Disney has turned a beloved animated fairytale into a live action version.
Others became live action
The Jungle Book by acclaimed filmmaker Jon Favreau became a box office hit, received broad critical acclaim and won an Academy award. The jungle animals, all computer generated characters, provided a darker nuance to the story of Mowgli, the mancub who is raised by wolves and embarks on a journey of self-discovery.
Similarly, Maleficent — the dark fairy who wishes Princess Aurora into an endless sleep in Sleeping Beauty — got her own movie, with Angelina Jolie as the title character in Disney’s live 2014 action film. Scary and alluring, she is the three-dimensional character with an ax to grind that appeals to adults and children alike.
Disney is embracing the darker, more adult formula even at the cost of controversy. In Beauty and the Beast, it inserts a gay character in Le Fou, played by Josh Gad, the sidekick of handsome and conceited Gaston, interpreted by Luke Evans. The character interplay, although completely innocuous, led Malaysia to shelve the film.
Disney seems undaunted by these reactions, however, and continues with plans to turn at least a dozen iconic animated Disney films into live action musicals. Beauty and the Beast will be the most significant testing ground when it opens worldwide March 17.
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Beauty and the Beast is a tale for the ages. Maybe the most memorable version of this classic was the iconic 1991 Disney animation. Now, Disney is reviving its animated version rendition with live action heroes, making this Disney’s latest live action fairytale production, but by no means its last. VOA’s Penelope Poulou has more.
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When Dan Stevens met his “Beauty and the Beast” co-star Emma Watson in pre-production, she wanted to get to work analyzing the story and the themes. He just wanted to talk about her U.N. speech about gender inequality.
“It was so impressive and so mighty in its message. I was so blown away by it,” Stevens said recently.
He quickly realized that her ideas actually did apply to the film too. Between the spoiled Beast, the sleazy Gaston, the gracious Maurice and others, Stevens began to think about just how many different types of masculinity are on display in the film, which opens in theaters Friday.
“Looking at these little elements of the patriarchy that she can smash through on her quest through the movie and the challenges presented to her as a girl, they tally so beautifully with Emma’s project,” Stevens said. “I love storytelling and fairy tale and myth and getting to grips with those fundamental elements is something that I really get a kick out of.”
At 34, Stevens is perhaps still best known for his role as Matthew Crawley on the PBS period series “Downton Abbey,” which he somewhat infamously left five years ago to pursue other things stateside. In the interim, the English actor has found roles in edgy indies, like the home invasion thriller “The Guest,” and even in campier family fare like “Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb” as the overconfident Lancelot.
Now Stevens is on the verge of becoming a household name with a leading role on FX’s edgy comic book series “Legion” and, of course, “Beauty and the Beast” – by far his highest profile role since “Downton.” Ironically it’s also one where his face is largely hidden for most of the film.
“It’s still my face driving it,” Stevens said, insisting that his friends and family have said they can definitely tell its him behind the facial capture technology that turns the blonde-hair blue-eyed human male into a horned and hairy beast.
Besides, it allowed him to focus on the performance in the eyes – something he studied in Jean Marais’ performance in Jean Cocteau’s 1946 version of “”Beauty and the Beast” to prepare.
“It was very important to me to preserve the beast’s soul through the eyes,” Stevens said. “It’s kind of the last human quality that he has shining through.”
As a father to three children with wife and singer Susie Hariet – Willow (7), Aubrey (4), and Eden (10 months) – Stevens has an added interest in balancing hard R-rated genre work with more family-friendly fare.
“I almost certainly would have said yes to this whether I had kids or not, but it is a big factor and informs some of my choices for sure these days,” the actor said.
He would often bring his kids to the “Beauty and the Beast” set to see him in action.
“I love it when crew members or other cast members bring their kids on,” he said. “It helps you remember why you’re making it and who you’re making it for.”
It also made for some amusing observations from his children. Stevens’ costume consisted of stilts and a cumbersome grey muscle suit that the visual effects people would eventually use to morph him into the Beast in post-production.
“My daughter said I looked like a hippo,” he said. “It helped with that Beast feeling of feeling monstrous and like he didn’t fit in.”
With four other projects in various stages of post-production, from a role in a historical drama about Thurgood Marshall to the rom-com “Permission” and “Legion’s” renewal for a second season, Stevens is doing what he’s always wanted.
“I’m having a great time just exploring a number of different areas that I never dreamed I’d get to explore,” Stevens said. “And, hopefully, slipping into some quite unrecognizable roles.”
The Beast isn’t a bad start.
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Chinese conceptual artist and political activist Ai Weiwei has placed his latest refugee-themed installation — a black rubber boat with 258 figures onboard — in Prague, the capital of a European Union country that has opposed the bloc’s efforts to redistribute migrants among member nations.
The giant piece, titled “Law of the Journey,” attests to Ai’s concern with the plight of migrants who embark on the dangerous journey to Europe by sea. He visited 20 refugee sites across the world, including the Greek island of Lesbos, an entry point for many migrants trying to reach western Europe from Turkey.
“To refuse somebody so desperate is almost a crime,” Ai told The Associated Press. “It’s immoral, it’s short-sighted, and it is not going to benefit this nation. We cannot lose our fundamental beliefs in human rights and human dignity.”
His largest piece so far, the 70-meter (230-foot)-long black rubber boat hangs from the ceiling at the National Gallery’s Trade Fair Palace. The site-specific installation that went on exhibit Thursday was made in a Chinese factory that produces dinghies used by actual refugees, Ai said.
The 59-year-old artist has exhibited similar works elsewhere. He used 14,000 discarded life vests collected from the beaches of Lesbos to wrap the columns of Berlin’s Konzerthaus and to create lotus blossoms floating on a pond in Vienna’s Belvedere park.
The artist also posed as Alan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler whose lifeless body was famously photographed lying face-down on a Lesbos pebble beach. Ai was criticized for exploiting the child’s tragic death.
More than 1.2 million people have crossed the Mediterranean to Europe since 2015, data from the International Organization for Migration show. According to the European Commission, the Czech Republic has so far accepted 12 migrants for relocation.
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Demi Lovato is celebrating five years of sobriety.
The 24-year-old singer celebrated with an Instagram post on Wednesday. She writes that “it’s been quite the journey,” adding, “so many times I wanted to relapse but sat on my hands and begged God to relieve the obsession.”
Lovato’s personal struggles have been well-documented. In 2010, she left a tour with the Jonas Brothers and entered rehab for an eating disorder and self-mutilation. She has also said that she used drugs and alcohol to self -medicate.
Lovato says she has bipolar disorder and has been an advocate for mental health awareness.
Britain’s Prince William is taking flak for going on a ski holiday instead of attending a major royal engagement with his family.
Criticism mounted after footage emerged of 34-year-old William busting late-night dance moves in the Verbier, Switzerland, this week.
It has fueled claims from the tabloid press that the second in line to the throne does not work hard enough. The tabloid Sun used the headline “Throne Idle.”
William was skiing while his 90-year-old grandmother Queen Elizabeth II and other senior royals attended a Commonwealth Day service in London on Monday.
An official record of royal engagements says William has carried out royal duties on 13 days this year, compared with 18 for Prince Harry and 24 for the queen.
William also works part-time as an air ambulance pilot.
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Expanding ties between China and the United States form the backdrop of Lisa See’s latest novel, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, a book about China’s growing prosperity, cross-cultural adoption and, the author says, the enduring bond between mothers and daughters.
See chronicled the Chinese experience in California in a 1995 book, On Gold Mountain, and she says the West Coast state remains a cultural crossroads. It is also the source of ideas for fictional stories like that in her new novel.
“My husband and I were walking to the movies,” See said, “and we saw ahead of us an older white couple with their teenaged Chinese adopted daughter walking between them.”
The image of a carefree family, with the daughter’s long pony tail swaying back and forth, would lead to a tale of inter-cultural adoption amid growing commercial ties between the United States and China.
See is the author of such best-selling novels as Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Shanghai Girls.
Precise research
Her books are all based on on-the-ground research. A tea-tasting demonstration in the United States would inspire her to visit Yunnan Province, China, a tea-growing region near the Burmese border, which also led to the writing of this novel.
“They have more varieties of plant life in that one province of China than all together in the rest of the northern hemisphere,” she said. “They have more species of animals in that one province of China, which is only 4 percent of China’s overall land mass.”
The biodiversity also applies to human beings: Yunnan is home of half of China’s 55 ethnic minorities, and includes a tea-growing hill tribe called the Akha. See met an Akha family whose daughter collected stories from village elders, and the writer was fascinated.
“She just told us these unbelievable stories about her family, about the neighbors, about her own experience,” See said. By the end of one day, she knew that she wanted to write about the Akha.
Not ‘precious enough’
See’s novel concerns an Akha woman named Li-yan who gives birth to a daughter out of wedlock. Defying a local custom that calls for the child’s death, she takes the infant to an orphanage, and the girl, renamed Haley, is adopted and raised by an American family. Over time, Haley questions her identity, as do the real-life adoptees that See met in her research.
“There was one girl who summed it up for me when she said, ‘I know I’m lucky and I know my parents love me and I know I’m the most precious person in our family, but I wasn’t precious enough for my birth parents to keep.’”
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane explores this tension as the story unfolds in both America and China, where Haley’s birth mother rides a wave of prosperity when Chinese products, including a rare local tea, find a worldwide market.
The separate paths of mother and daughter bring both to Los Angeles, where See says she is inspired in her writing by her own family connections and her partial Chinese background.
“I have red hair and freckles,” she said, “but I actually grew up in a very large Chinese American family here in Los Angeles. I have about 400 relatives here,” she said, “about a dozen that look like me. The majority are still full Chinese.”
See’s books tell the stories of Chinese and Chinese Americans, and her fiction focuses on women. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane follows these themes as it looks at changes that prosperity has brought to one ethnic community in China.
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