Arts

A travel company is offering a chance for well heeled travelers to dive the wreck of the RMS Titanic.

Beginning in May of next year, Blue Marble Private says it will offer a chance for nine travelers to dive some 4,000 meters below the surface of the ocean to see the famous wreck.

According to the company’s website, customers will dive “in a specially designed titanium and carbon fiber submersible, guided by a crew of experts.”

“You will glide over the ship’s deck and famous grand staircase capturing a view that very few have seen, or ever will,” the company added.

Tourists will also “explore Titanic’s massive debris field, home to numerous artifacts strewn across the ocean floor, nearly undisturbed for over a century,” according to Blue Marble Private founder Elizabeth Ellis.

According to CNN, the first trip is already sold out. The price for the eight-day adventure? $105,129 per person, which is about double the price charged by Deep Ocean Expeditions charged when it brought tourists to the wreck in 2012.

Time to visit the famous wreck may be running out.

CNN reported that a 2016 study said “extremophile bacteria” will likely dissolve what’s left of the ill-fated ship within 15 to 20 years.

In the early hours of April 15, 1912, the “unsinkable” Titanic struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic while making its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City. On board were 2,224 passengers, more than 1,500 of whom died as the ship quickly sunk.

The wreckage was first discovered 32 years ago.
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An Australian couple with roots in Alaska has bought more than two dozen radio stations in three states, marking the first time federal regulators have allowed full foreign ownership of U.S. radio stations.

The Federal Communications Commission recently approved a request by Richard and Sharon Burns through their company Frontier Media to increase their interest in 29 radio stations in Alaska, Texas and Arkansas from 20 percent to 100 percent.

The agency long took what some viewed as a hard line in limiting foreign ownership under a 1930s law that harkened to war-time propaganda fears. But in 2013, it acknowledged a willingness to ease up after broadcasters complained the rules were too restrictive of outside investment.

The Burnses are citizens of Australia but have lived and worked in the U.S. since 2006, on special visas offered for Australians.

A family who owned six of the Alaska stations provided the opportunity that brought the couple to the U.S. The family wanted someone with international experience to operate the stations and help move the company forward, Richard Burns said. The stations in the Lower 48 were purchased later.

The Burnses’ request to acquire full ownership was unopposed. The acquisition includes AM and FM stations and relay stations known as translators that help provide reception.

Richard Burns said he and his wife consider Alaska home and are pursuing U.S. citizenship.

“Our life is here in Juneau, Alaska, every single day,” said Burns, who serves on the board of the Juneau Chamber of Commerce and in 2010 was named its citizen of the year.

Sharon Burns co-hosts a morning show on a Juneau country station the couple owns, and does on-air work for two of their other stations in southeast Alaska and one in Texas, her husband said. Richard Burn is the stations’ CEO and a host on their Juneau classic hits station.

The federal law restricting foreign ownership dates to the 1930s and initially was seen as a way to thwart the airing of foreign propaganda during wartime, according to the FCC. It restricts to 25 percent foreign ownership or voting interests in a company that holds a broadcast license when the commission finds that limit is in the public interest.

In 2013, in response to broadcasters, interest groups and others who considered the commission’s application of the law too rigid, the FCC clarified it has the authority to review on a case-by-case basis requests exceeding that threshold, and it is open to doing so.

The commission last year adopted rules for publicly traded companies following a case involving Pandora Media and questions about its level of foreign ownership as it pursued acquisition of a South Dakota radio station. Then-FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said the case underscored the need for more clarity for broadcasters and investors in the review process.

It’s unclear how many other foreign citizens have a stake in U.S. radio stations. The FCC said it does not keep a comprehensive accounting because stations generally don’t have to disclose smaller or nonvoting interest holders.

Lisa Scanlan, deputy chief of the FCC’s audio division, said that as part of its public interest analysis, the commission consults with executive branch agencies that do independent reviews on issues including trade and foreign policy, national security and law enforcement.

Jessica Gonzalez is deputy director and senior counsel for the group Free Press, which has concerns about media consolidation. She said she’s not opposed to the Burnses’ case. But she said the larger the company, the more skeptical she becomes.

“I’m not fond at all of the idea of giant foreign companies or giant domestic companies buying up a bunch of radio stations,” she said. “It’s problematic.”

She said an owner’s nationality doesn’t make a difference to her. “It’s just a matter of whether or not they are actually going to serve their community,” she said.

Richard Burns agreed. He said it’s critical for radio station owners to be invested in the communities they serve.

He cited his wife, who does her show from Texas when she’s there. Around Christmas last year, Sharon Burns delivered cookies to and spent time with first responders.

“If you’re a good radio operator, I don’t think it matters if you’re foreign or not, as long as you engage in the community and you understand it,” he said.

 
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Chuck Barris, whose game show empire included The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and that infamous factory of cheese, The Gong Show, died at 87.

Barris died of natural causes Tuesday afternoon at his home in Palisades, New York, according to publicist Paul Shefrin, who announced the death on behalf of Barris’ family.

Barris made game show history right off the bat, in 1966, with The Dating Game, hosted by Jim Lange. The gimmick: a young female questions three males, hidden from her view, to determine which would be the best date. Sometimes the process was switched, with a male questioning three females. But in all cases the questions were designed by the show’s writers to elicit sexy answers.

Future celebrities

Celebrities and future celebrities who appeared as contestants included Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Martin and a pre-Charlie’s Angels Farrah Fawcett, introduced as “an accomplished artist and sculptress” with a dream to open her own gallery.

After the show became a hit on both daytime and nighttime TV, the Barris machine accelerated. New products included The Newlywed Game, The Parent Game, The Family Game and even The Game Game.

At one point Barris was supplying the television networks with 27 hours of entertainment a week, mostly in five-days-a-week daytime game shows.

The grinning, curly-haired Barris became a familiar face as creator and host of The Gong Show, which aired from 1976 to 1980.

Patterned after the Major Bowes Amateur Hour show that was a radio hit in the 1930s, the program featured performers who had peculiar talents and, often, no talent at all. When the latter appeared on the show, Barris would strike an oversize gong, the show’s equivalent of vaudeville’s hook. The victims would then be mercilessly berated by the manic Barris, with a hat often yanked down over his eyes and ears, and a crew of second-tier celebrities.

Occasionally, someone would actually launch a successful career through the show. One example was the late country musician BoxCar Willie, who was a 1977 Gong Show winner.

Known as

He called himself “The King of Daytime Television,” but to critics he was “The King of Schlock” or “The Baron of Bad Taste.”

As The Gong Show and Barris’ other series were slipping, he sold his company for a reported $100 million in 1980 and decided to go into films.

He directed and starred in The Gong Show, a thundering failure that stayed in theaters only a week.

Afterward, a distraught Barris checked into a New York hotel and wrote his autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, in two months. In it, he claimed to have been a CIA assassin.

The book (and the 2002 film based on it, directed by George Clooney) were widely dismissed by disbelievers who said the creator of some of television’s most lowbrow game shows had allowed his imagination to run wild when he claimed to have spent his spare time traveling the world, quietly rubbing out enemies of the United States.

“It sounds like he has been standing too close to the gong all those years,” quipped CIA spokesman Tom Crispell. “Chuck Barris has never been employed by the CIA and the allegation that he was a hired assassin is absurd,” Crispell added.

Barris, who offered no corroboration of his claims, was unmoved.

“Have you ever heard the CIA acknowledge someone was an assassin?” he once asked.

Wrote a book

Seeking escape from the Hollywood rat race, he moved to a villa in the south of France in the 1980s with his girlfriend and future second wife, Robin Altman, and made only infrequent returns to his old haunts over the next two decades.

Back in the news in 2002 to help publicize “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” Barris said his shows were a forerunner to today’s popular reality TV series.

Born in Philadelphia in 1929, Charles Barris was left destitute, along with his sister and their mother, when his dentist father died of a stroke.

After graduating from the Drexel Institute of Technology in 1953, he took a series of jobs, including book salesman and fight promoter.

After being dropped from a low-level job at NBC, he found work at ABC, where he persuaded his bosses to let him open a Hollywood office, from which he launched his game-show empire. He also had success in the music world. He wrote the 1962 hit record Palisades Park, which was recorded by Freddy Cannon.

Barris’ first marriage, to Lynn Levy, ended in divorce. Their daughter, Della, died of a drug overdose in 1998. He married his third wife, Mary, in 2000.
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Paul McCartney’s “Flowers in the Dirt” box is as much an archeology project as a reissue, in which listeners can discover the bones of a landmark album that could have been made but wasn’t.

 

Two of the reissue’s three audio discs are devoted to McCartney’s songwriting collaboration with Elvis Costello in 1987 and 1988, which produced some 15 songs. Listening to the work, some of it first made available this week, it’s hard not to wonder why they didn’t make a duet album like Costello later did with Burt Bacharach. Instead, they decided not to alter their original plan.

 

The mythical disc could have started with “My Brave Face” and “Veronica,” two of each man’s biggest hits of the 1980s. And that was only the beginning.

 

“Looking back, you could say that,” McCartney told The Associated Press. “If we’d just done a few more of these demos, we could have made a crazy album. But we didn’t. That was as far as we got.”

 

McCartney initiated the partnership at the suggestion of his manager. The former Beatle was looking for varied sounds, styles and producers as he began work on a new album. McCartney and Costello worked for a few weeks in a room above McCartney’s studio in Sussex, England, where they’d write a song a day and immediately go downstairs to record it, sitting with acoustic guitars and singing together.

 

“There were many echoes, working with Elvis and working with John [Lennon], because I know Elvis is a big Beatles fan,” McCartney said. “He was a John fan, he wears glasses, he plays guitar right-handed.”

 

They’re all from Liverpool, too. McCartney worked with Costello as he did with Lennon, two men with acoustic guitars sitting across from one another. With McCartney left-handed, it felt to him like looking into a mirror.

 

“I think the key was not to turn up in short trousers with my Fan Club card sticking out of my top pocket,” Costello said. “I’d been asked to write songs in 1987, knowing what I know, having done what I’d done for that whole 10 years, which seemed like a long time then. Paul knows what he’s done and he knows I love him.

 

“That said, you’re bound to look up sometimes and think, ‘Bloody hell, it’s him!’,” he said.

 

In this week’s reissue, one disc contains nine of those 15 songs, recorded the day they were written. Another disc features the same songs produced by the two men later with a band added, primarily sung by McCartney since it was his album, after all.

 

To a certain extent, something is lost in translation.

 

Take the song “Tommy’s Coming Home,” for instance. Inspired fun with McCartney and Costello singing together, the tempo slows and the song drags in the full band version.

 

“I didn’t realize until looking back later that these demos had a special groove and a freshness and, I think on a few of the recorded versions, we lost some of that freshness,” McCartney said. “It gives an idea of the spontaneity of the writing. There’s a time that you regret that we didn’t just say, ‘This is it, this is good enough.’ Often when you don’t think you’re making the final record, you’re a bit looser … I think some of those performances are better than the ones on the record.”

 

The two-man recordings “have a lot of charm and a good deal of cheek,” Costello said. “You can almost hear us laughing at loud at what I call, ‘the Mersey cadences.’ It’s in the blood. It’s in the water. It’s in him and it’s got to come out.”

 

Since both are strong-willed men used to being in charge of their music, you’d have to wonder whether the easy creativity of the songwriting sessions would have lasted through the grunt work of making polished recordings. The two dismiss the suggestion that there would have been trouble, or that they would have needed another producer to referee. Costello said it wouldn’t have been as much fun as producing it themselves.

 

The songs they wrote were dispersed between the two men, or left on the shelf. Four were included on “Flowers in the Dirt,” including the stately “That Day is Done” and the call-and-response “You Want Her Too.” Costello later recorded “So Like Candy” and “Pads, Paws & Claws.” Some demos creeped out through the years.

 

“My Brave Face” could have been as big as anything he and Lennon had written, McCartney said. His pride in some of the songs he had written without Costello is one reason “Flowers in the Dirt” took shape the way it did. But you can hear another reason between the lines listening to him talk. Perhaps he didn’t want to pull Costello into the weight of comparisons that he felt for all of his post-Beatles career.

 

“Because John and I had such a successful collaboration and all the work we did was when we were young, often your first output like that can be your best,” he said. “I wouldn’t say it worries me, or I wouldn’t continue to write. But I do get the feeling that it would have been very hard to come up to the standards of the ones I wrote with John, like ‘It’s Getting Better’ or ‘She’s Leaving Home.”’

 

Costello, for his part, doesn’t look back with regret at the album that never was. He points to McCartney’s reissue.

 

“You could say, ‘this is it,”’ he said. “There’s a whole disc of me and Paul singing together. What can you say about that?”
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A barber-turned-rapper has been crowned the winner of an Afghan talent show that offered its audience some relief from daily stories of insurgents and suicide bombs.

Sayed Jamal Mubarez, from Afghanistan’s long-marginalized Hazara ethnic minority, won viewers over with lyrics capturing both the hope and despair of young people living through a war against Taliban militants now in its sixteenth year.

Afghan Star, modeled on singing contests popular across the world, is in its 12th season on Afghanistan’s biggest private television network, Tolo.

This year’s edition stood out after a woman — 18-year old singer Zulala Hashimi from the deeply conservative east of the country — reached the final for the first time, defying widespread attitudes against female performers.

But Mubarez emerged the winner later on Tuesday, looking every bit the budding rapper with his tilted red baseball cap and razor-trimmed beard.

“I am so happy. … I would have been happy if Zulala had won it because in Afghanistan women are living in a restricted situation,” the 23-year old said after accepting his award at a television studio housed behind wire-topped blast walls in Kabul’s diplomatic enclave.

The sole breadwinner at his home in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, Mubarez said he discovered rap in Iran and spits lyrics while cutting hair.

The contest has been held inside a fortified compound for the last two series after the Taliban last year killed seven Tolo employees in a suicide attack on a staff minibus.

Newer musicians can struggle to make it big in Afghanistan, where the Taliban once banned music and many disapprove of Western-style popular culture, and artists often seek the safety and freedom of a life abroad.

Mubarez told Reuters he intends to turn professional if he can find financial support, and would otherwise return to his barber shop while rapping on the side.
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The friendly Labrador retriever has retained its long-held title as the most popular dog breed in the United States, while the fearless Rottweiler has climbed to its highest ranking in 20 years.

The nation’s most sought after dogs of 2016 were unveiled in New York City on Tuesday by the American Kennel Club, a purebred dog registry that releases a list of top dog breeds each year.

Labs have held their slot as the most popular breed for each of the past 26 years, making them the longest-reigning leader of the pack.

“Labs, they’re just great with people. They’re great with everyone,” said Theresa Viesto, who breeds Labs in Newtown, Connecticut, and is registered with the club. “You never hear about a Lab getting into a dogfight.”

Viesto and her 4-year-old yellow Lab, Reggie, attended the news conference alongside a roomful of stretching, scratching and wrestling dogs and puppies representing the top 10 breeds.

 

Placing second, third and fourth were the German shepherd, golden retriever and bulldog, respectively. Beagles were fifth most popular, while French bulldogs placed sixth. The top six breeds remained the same as in 2015.

Poodles were seventh and Rottweilers eighth, each jumping one spot higher than the last lineup. Yorkshire terriers dropped two spots to place ninth and boxers held firm in the 10th spot.

While the most popular list is generally a reshuffling of longtime top breeds, Rottweilers have seen a resurgence in popularity recently after falling out of favor in the late 1990s, said Gina DiNardo, AKC vice president.

It was not clear why Rottweilers were making a comeback — the last time the breed placed at its current level was in 1997 — but a strong economy generally prompts people to seek bigger and costlier dogs, including Rottweilers, DiNardo said.

Rottweiler owner Alexandra Niles, from Scotch Plains, New Jersey, said it was the breed’s devoted nature that won her heart. “They’ll pretty much do anything for you,” said Niles, with her hefty 4-year-old Rottweiler, Talos, sprawled out on the floor next to her.

“He never leaves my side,” Niles said about her companion, adding that he enjoys swimming and “doesn’t mind” being dressed up in costumes.

The American Kennel Club maintains the country’s largest registry of purebred dogs. Once a breed is added to the list of some 200 breeds and varietals currently recognized by the club, it is eligible to compete in the prestigious Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show.

Westminster has never selected a Labrador retriever as winner in the show’s 141-year history. “Hopefully, someday they will be,” DiNardo said.
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Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department apologized on Tuesday for briefly detaining Grammy-winning hip hop artist Wyclef Jean in handcuffs during a robbery investigation, after Jean said he was “treated like a criminal” by law enforcement officers.

The sheriff’s department released a statement describing its investigation in the early hours of Monday morning into a violent robbery in West Hollywood, a trendy municipality neighboring Los Angeles, and apologized “for any inconvenience this process caused Mr. Jean.”

“It is unfortunate that Mr. Jean was detained for six minutes during this investigation, as he had no involvement whatsoever in this violent crime,” the sheriff’s department said.

Representatives for Jean did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The sheriff’s department said the suspects allegedly attacked and held up a man and a woman at gunpoint and robbed them of their possessions before driving away. Jean was pulled over shortly after the incident because the vehicle he was in matched the description of the suspects’ car.

The statement said Jean was placed in handcuffs because he displayed “furtive movements and demeanor,” such as walking towards the trunk of the car despite deputies asking him not to.

The suspects in the robbery were later arrested.

In tweets and video of the incident posted to his Instagram and Twitter feed, Jean, the Haitian-born former Fugees singer, said he appeared to have been the victim of “another case of mistaken identity” and threatened to sue.

“I was treated like a criminal until other police showed up and pointed out they had wrong person,” Jean, 47, wrote on Twitter.

“I am sure no father wants his sons or daughters to see him in Handcuffs especially if he is innocent,” he added.

Jean emigrated to the United States from Haiti at the age of 9 but has maintained his Haitian citizenship.

Tuesday’s incident comes amid heightened sensitivity about racial issues and the U.S. justice system following a spate of shootings by police of unarmed black people.
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The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam welcomed home two paintings by the Dutch master Tuesday, more than 14 years after they were ripped off the museum’s wall in a nighttime heist.

“They’re back,” said museum director Axel Rueger. He called their return one of the “most special days in the history of our museum.”

The paintings, the 1882 “View of the Sea at Scheveningen,” and 1884-85 work “Congregation leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen,” were discovered last year by Italian police investigating suspected Italian mobsters for cocaine trafficking.

It wasn’t an easy find. The two paintings were wrapped in cotton sheets, stuffed in a box and hidden behind a wall in a toilet, said Gen. Gianluigi D’Alfonso of the Italian financial police, who was on hand at the museum to watch the ceremonial unveiling.

They were found in a farmhouse near Naples as Italian police seized some 20 million euros worth of assets, including villas, apartments and even a small airplane. Investigators contend the assets are linked to two Camorra drug kingpins, Mario Cerrone and Raffaele Imperiale.

“After years shrouded in darkness, they can now shine again,” Dutch Minister for Education, Culture and Science Jet Bussemaker said as an orange screen slid away to reveal the two paintings behind a glass wall.

Italy’s Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said last year the paintings were “considered among the artworks most searched for in the world, on the FBI’s list of the Top 10 art crimes.”

They are now back on display at the museum before being taken to its conservation studio for repair, although they suffered remarkably little damage as thieves who had clambered up a ladder and smashed a window to get into the museum in 2002 ripped them out of their frames and fled.

“It is not only a miracle that the works have been recovered but it’s even more miraculous almost that they are in relatively unharmed condition,” Rueger said.

The museum director was on vacation when the call came last year from Italian authorities who believed they had recovered the paintings. He didn’t celebrate right away; he’d had calls like this before.

“I was hopeful but also a little hesitant because over the course of the years we had multiple occasions when people phoned us, contacted us, claiming that they knew something about the whereabouts of the works and each time it was false, the trace went cold,” he said. “So … the way has been peppered with disappointment.”

But museum experts dispatched to Italy to check the authenticity of the works quickly turned Rueger’s doubts into delight.

“It was something we had secretly been hoping for for all those years,” he said.

The two small works are not typical of Van Gogh’s later and better-known works, but are still vital pieces for the museum’s collection, Rueger said.

The Scheveningen seascape, with a fishing boat and rough sea under a typically gray, cloudy Dutch sky, is one of Van Gogh’s earliest works and the only painting in the museum’s collection painted during his time in The Hague. It suffered a missing rectangular chip from the bottom left-hand corner.

The painting of the church in Nuenen portrayed the village where his parents lived.

“He had painted as a gift to his mother, so it’s a very personal and emotional connection,” Rueger said.

Rueger said the paintings are now back for good at a museum which is home to dozens of works by Van Gogh, whose paintings fetch millions of dollars on the rare occasions they come up for auction.

“The security, I can assure you, is of Triple-A quality now so I’m very confident that everything is safe in the museum,” he said.

 
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Japan’s cherry blossom season kicked off on Tuesday, when the Japanese Meteorological Agency confirmed the flowers were in bloom in Tokyo.      

Despite the drizzling rain, agency officials counted more than five flowers blooming on a sample tree at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine, and confirmed that the cherry blossom could therefore be considered in bloom.

      

Visitors were busy taking photos of the cherry blossom flowers, but trees were still looking rather bare.

       

The beginning of the cherry blossom season in Tokyo came before anywhere else in Japan, and about five days before the average date.

       

The flower tends to first bloom in southern Japan, where the climate is warmer.

       

The flowers are expected to reach full bloom in about a week.

 
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Actor George Clooney has startled an 87-year-old fan in Britain by showing up at her assisted living facility with flowers and a card to wish her a happy birthday.

 

The 55-year-old popped in for a chat and a picture with admirer Pat Adams on Sunday at the Sunrise of Sonning Retirement and Assisted Living Facility in Reading. Linda Jones, a worker there, posted a picture of herself and the beaming pair on Facebook.

 

Jones wrote: “The lady in the picture, loves George Clooney and mentions everyday how she would love him to meet him, especially as he lives so near to where I work.”

 

A letter was sent to Clooney asking if he could make a “dream to come true.”

 

Clooney owns a home near the facility in Berkshire.

 
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A group of celebrities led by Hollywood actor Ben Stiller has joined a social media campaign to send food and water to Somalia through Turkish Airlines.

Last weekend, the group raised more than $1 million online in less than 24 hours. Stiller said in a Twitter message posted Monday that the money has been used to purchase 60 tons of food that the airline will fly to Somalia next week. 

Somali diaspora youth groups have been spearheading a similar movement online, following warnings from the U.N. that more than six million Somalis are at risk of severe malnourishment and starvation because of drought. 

Celebrities got involved at the urging of French Snapchat star Jerome Jarre, who launched a movement called Love Army for Somalia last Wednesday.

After the group began raising donations online, they convinced Turkish Airlines to help deliver one immediate aid shipment to Somalia’s most vulnerable people, prompting the airline to create a Twitter hashtag, #TurkishAirlinesHelpSomalia.

Celebrities who have made donations include American football quarterback Colin Kaepernick, NBA player Wilson Chandler, YouTube star Casey Niestat and Scottish record producer Calvin Harris.

“And Jerome wants to keep this thing going, because he believes we can raise a lot more money and do a lot more good and really make a dent in what’s going on over there,” Stiller said Monday.

Total donations had risen to more than $1.8 million as of Monday, according to the “Love Army for Somalia” site on GoFundMe, a social fundraising platform.

“For the first flight, we will buy the food in Istanbul, as a thank you to our Turkish friends that support the movement!” said a message on the page. “Later on, we are hoping to learn how to buy food directly from local businesses in Somalia. We want to support the Somalian economy.”

Turkish Airlines was the first carrier outside East Africa to establish regular service to the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

Turkey has become one of the most prominent donors in Somalia, eclipsing many traditional donors both in quantity and quality of its assistance.

Likewise, Ankara has become a major trading partner with Somalia, particularly in the construction, transportation and service sectors, according to a report by Heritage Institute for Policy Studies, a Mogadishu-based research group.
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An 18-year-old female novice singer and a 23-year old barber-turned-rapper are the unlikely finalists of a televised talent contest providing Afghans a welcome distraction from the daily bloodshed in their country.

The two are vying to become the next “Afghan Star.” This year’s season is the most tradition-breaking yet in a deeply conservative country where the Taliban once outlawed music and Western-style popular culture is widely frowned upon.

Originally due to be broadcast live, the final will instead be pre-recorded following a wave of Islamist attacks in Kabul, with the winner announced on Tuesday night.

Finalist Zulala Hashimi, from a militant-plagued province in the east, quit school and overcame resistance from relatives unhappy with her singing publicly. When Hashimi auditioned, she was one of only two women out of three hundred contestants.

“I showed people that a woman can do it. I ask every woman to make an effort to reach this point,” she told Reuters, her mother by her side between rehearsals at a television studio protected behind blast walls and Kalashnikov-wielding guards.

Wowing audiences with bright traditional outfits and jewel-encrusted tiaras, and off-stage sporting brown-rimmed Ray Bans, Hashimi’s songs in Pashto and Dari have won her thousands of fans, who vote by text message and on Facebook.

Up against Hashimi is Sayed Jamal Mubarez, a barber from the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif who spent several years in Iran, one of thousands from Afghanistan’s Hazara minority that sought refuge across the country’s western border.

Having ditched his shalwar kameez in early auditions for jeans, a zipped black jacket and a “Street Swagg” baseball cap, Mubarez said he discovered rap in Iran and has been writing his own lyrics ever since.

“My parents are illiterate, but when I was singing they were encouraging me, so I believed that I could win people’s support,” he said backstage. “But I never thought of being a finalist.”

Inside a compound

Afghan Star, now in its twelfth season, is produced by the private television channel Tolo. Tolo’s reporting has earned it the wrath of the Taliban, who last year killed seven Tolo employees in a suicide attack on a staff minibus.

The contest was moved to inside a compound in Kabul’s city center.

Obaid Juenda, a judge on the show who now lives in London, said the percentage of women auditioning had fallen sharply to five percent amid the deteriorating security.

Juenda hoped the show gave contestants a springboard for a career, but in a country where opportunities for public performances are limited, past winners have faded into obscurity.

“There isn’t an industry here. We have too many people here who love female singers but we can’t sell our music legally. They can’t perform in public,” he told Reuters.

Hashimi said she had received nothing but support so far.

“Right now I don’t have any problem,” she said, her eyes darting nervously to her mother.  “If in the future there are some challenges I’ll try to cope with them to fulfil my dreams.”

 
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A 59.60-carat diamond known as “The Pink Star” is returning to auction next month and could fetch a record $60 million, three years since it was sold for even more – only for the buyer to pull out of the deal.

The diamond was presented by Sotheby’s in London ahead of the auction in Hong Kong on April 4.

In November 2013, a Geneva auction of the stone fetched a world record $83 million but the buyer, New York-based diamond cutter Isaac Wolf, could not pay up and defaulted.

However, after some more successful auctions of colored diamonds in recent years, the auction house said that now was a good time to try again.

“The last few years we’ve had colored diamonds perform extremely well, many new records been created at auction for the colored diamonds, pinks and blues mainly, so we thought it was a good time to bring it to the market,” David Bennett, worldwide Chairman of Sotheby’s Jewelry Division, told Reuters.

In 2015 the “Blue Moon of Josephine” sold for $48.5 million in Geneva. At 12.03 carats, it set a price-per-carat record.

“The Pink Star” is the largest Internally Flawless Fancy Vivid Pink diamond ever graded by the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), the auction house said, yet the sparkling stone is still small enough to fit onto a ring.

Sotheby’s said that the mixed-cut diamond was initially mined by De Beers in 1999 in Botswana as a 132.5 carat rough diamond before being cut and polished.

Its refined form is now set to be the most valuable polished diamond ever offered at auction.

“The extraordinary size of this 59.60-carat diamond, paired with its richness of color, surpasses any known pink diamond record in history,” Bennett said.

Bennett said the current record for a pink diamond was held by the “Graff Pink”. At 24.78 carats it is half the size of The Pink Star and was sold in Geneva for $46.2 million in 2010.

 
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The young Palestinian women don baseball caps on top of their Islamic headscarves and field tennis balls with fabric gloves, giving a decidedly local feel to the great American pastime.

They are trying to bring baseball to the Gaza Strip, an effort that is still in its early innings.

The players, who work out on a small soccer pitch in a southern Gaza town, admit they are still trying to understand the rules of the complicated sport. With pitches lobbed underhand, the game they play is closer to softball.

“I only know it through TV,” said Valentina Shaer, a 23-year-old English literature student.

Mahmoud Tafesh, the team’s coach, said he has dreamed of bringing baseball to Gaza since he was introduced to the game last year.

Although baseball is a fringe sport throughout the soccer-crazy Middle East, the game has grown in popularity. Iraq has a national team, and one of the country’s coaches introduced Tafesh to baseball last year while both were in Egypt, which now boasts a baseball and softball federation.

Tafesh admits he still has much to learn. He is unfamiliar with any of the teams or players in Major League Baseball and gets most of his knowledge from YouTube videos.

When he returned to Gaza, he was concerned about the lack of equipment and whether the conservative society, which is governed by the Islamic militant group Hamas, would accept the idea of girls playing the sport.

He first approached girls at the only sports education college in Gaza. To his surprise, he found interest in baseball was stronger among girls than boys.

“We targeted this group because they had permission from their families to play sport as sports students. Through them, we started to spread, attracting girls from other fields such as journalism and accountants,” he said after finishing a two-hour training session for the girls.

The women say their families had no objection, and some parents even encouraged them. But the society overall has not been as receptive.

Shaer said people “on social media had a bad idea about us,” noting abusive comments when their pictures first appeared.

On Sunday, the team, which includes 20 to 30 members, had its weekly practice on a soccer pitch in the female section of Al-Aqsa University, built on lands that were part of Jewish settlements before Israel withdrew its troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005.

There were no males except for the coach, and some other students gathered to watch the women playing catch and taking batting practice. The batters took wild swings, often missing but occasionally making solid contact.

The players wore headscarves as well as long-sleeve running tops and loose pants, in keeping with local norms.

“While we face difficulties, we would like a specialized softball field to learn it correctly and train freely without any obstacles,” said Iman Shahin, an athlete who studies sports education.

Israel and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza after Hamas seized power in 2007, heavily restricting travel and trade, and making it difficult to acquire specialized sports equipment.

Tafesh said he found just one baseball glove in all of Gaza, at the Sports Ministry building, and took it to local tailors who used it to make replicas out of black fabric.

With no proper bats in the territory, the team took a piece of wood and shaped it to look like one.

While seeking funding and real equipment, the women dream of eventually competing abroad.

“All of us share the same goal: participate and represent the name of Palestine outside and show that there are sports for the girls in Gaza,” said 24-year-old Iman Mughaier.
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David Rockefeller, the philanthropist billionaire whose family name is the very definition of American capitalism, died in his sleep Monday at age 101.

The former head of Chase Manhattan Bank was the last grandson of the legendary 19th-century founder of the Standard Oil empire, John D. Rockefeller.

David Rockefeller was the youngest of six children born to John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Aspects of the Rockefeller brothers’ upbringing became famous, including the 25-cent allowance, portions of which had to be set aside for charity and savings, and the inculcation that wealth brings great responsibility.

Throughout his life, David Rockefeller carried out the family name by his strong support for American-based global capitalism, but making sure no one was left behind.

“American capitalism has brought more benefits to more people than any other system in any part of the world at any time in history,” he once said. “The problem is to see that the system is run as efficiently and as honestly as it can be.”

He was critical of fellow billionaires who sought ways to dodge taxes. Rockefeller didn’t say how much he paid in taxes and never spoke publicly about his personal worth. In 2015, Forbes magazine estimated his fortune at $3 billion.

Rockefeller also made sure the family fortune was used for philanthropic purposes, including funding for the arts and environmental causes.

To mark his 100th birthday in 2015, Rockefeller gave 1,000 acres of land next to a national park to the state of Maine.

As head of Chase Manhattan Bank, David Rockefeller opened the first offices of an American bank in Moscow and communist China. He also spurred the project that led to the World Trade Center.

But Rockefeller helped persuade then-President Jimmy Carter to allow the Shah of Iran to come to the U.S. for cancer treatment in 1979 — a move that led to the U.S. hostage crisis in Tehran.

Rockefeller’s philanthropy and other activities earned him a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 1998.

 

Rockefeller and his wife, the former Margaret McGrath, married in 1940 and had six children — David Jr., Richard, Abby, Neva, Margaret and Eileen. His wife, an active conservationist, died in 1996.

Some information for this report was provided by Associated Press.
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Norway displaced Denmark as the world’s happiest country in a new report released on Monday that called on nations to build social trust and equality to improve the well-being of their citizens.

The Nordic nations are the most content, according to the World Happiness Report 2017 produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), a global initiative launched by the United Nations in 2012.

Countries in sub-Saharan Africa, along with Syria and Yemen, are the least happy of the 155 countries ranked in the fifth annual report released at the United Nations.

“Happy countries are the ones that have a healthy balance of prosperity, as conventionally measured, and social capital, meaning a high degree of trust in a society, low inequality and confidence in government,” Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the SDSN and a special advisor to the United Nations Secretary-General, said in an interview.

The aim of the report, he added, is to provide another tool for governments, business and civil society to help their countries find a better way to wellbeing.

 

Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, Finland, Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden rounded out the top ten countries.

South Sudan, Liberia, Guinea, Togo, Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi and the Central African Republic were at the bottom.

Germany was ranked 16, followed by the United Kingdom (19) and France (31). The United States dropped one spot to 14.

 

Sachs said the United States is falling in the ranking due to inequality, distrust and corruption. Economic measures that the administration of President Donald Trump is trying to pursue, he added, will make things worse.

“They are all aimed at increasing inequality – tax cuts at the top, throwing people off the healthcare rolls, cutting Meals on Wheels in order to raise military spending. I think everything that has been proposed goes in the wrong direction,” he explained.

 

The rankings are based on six factors — per capita gross domestic product, healthy life expectancy, freedom, generosity, social support and absence of corruption in government or business.

“The lowest countries are typically marked by low values in all six variables,” said the report, produced with the support of the Ernesto Illy Foundation.

Sachs would like nations to follow United Arab Emirates and other countries that have appointed Ministers of Happiness.

“I want governments to measure this, discuss it, analyze it and understand when they have been off on the wrong direction,” he said.
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Robots are becoming commonplace in many areas of society — from manufacturing to medicine to our homes. But now, a robot has taken to the stage, in a British play called Spillikin, where a humanoid robot plays the male companion of a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. 

The “Robothespian,” as the droid is being called, plays the lead in an unconventional play.

 

“It’s a story about a robot maker. All of his life he builds robots, and he develops degenerative illness in mid-life,” Jon Welch, the writer and director, said. “And realizes he’s not going to live to remain a companion to his wife. His wife, by now, is developing early Alzheimer’s, so he builds his final creation, his final robot be a companion to his wife.”

British actress Judy Norman plays the woman with Alzheimer’s. During the performance, she mostly talks to the robot but also shares a kiss.

“When he looks at me, I know this going to sound weird, but he is very affectionate and I like him, I really like him,” Norman said.

Welch said the concept for the play came from a real robot maker.

“The idea for the play started with the robot maker approaching us and offering us the use of one of his incredible robot creations to use in a play,” he said. “He’s seen one of our plays before, he liked us as a local theatre company, and he’s been making robots for ten years. And you find him in science museums all over the world, but he’s never really had one of his robots as a character in a play.”

Norman has found the experience interesting.

“This show has proven to me that really working with a robot is seriously not that different than working with a normal actor,” she said.

What is not so normal is the time it takes to make sure the Robothespian is in sync during the one and a half hour play. The robot is connected to a cord that goes to a control room with a laptop.

“We have pre-programmed every single thing the robot says and every single thing the robot does — all the moves,” Welch said. “There’s about nearly 400 separate queues but they are made up of other files, all stuck together so there’s probably a couple of thousand cues in reality.

“So the robot will always say the same thing and move the same way, depending on what queue is been triggered at what particular time,” he said.

Spillikin is on now tour in Britain.
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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.

 
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