Brazil imposes new fine, demands payments before letting X resume
SAO PAULO/BRASILIA BRAZIL — Brazil’s Supreme Court said on Friday that social platform X still needs to pay just over $5 million in pending fines, including a new one, before it will be allowed to resume its service in the country, according to a court document.
Earlier this week, the Elon Musk-owned U.S. firm told the court it had complied with orders to stop the spread of misinformation and asked it to lift a ban on the platform.
But Judge Alexandre de Moraes responded on Friday with a ruling that X and its legal representative in Brazil must still agree to pay a total of $3.4 million in pending fines that were previously ordered by the court.
In his decision, the judge said that the court can use resources already frozen from X and Starlink accounts in Brazil, but to do so the satellite company, also owned by Musk, had to drop its pending appeal against the fund blockage.
The judge also demanded a new $1.8 million fine related to a brief period last week when X became available again for some users in Brazil.
X, formerly known as Twitter, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to a person close to X, the tech firm will likely pay all the fines but will consider challenging the fine that was imposed by the court after the platform ban.
X has been suspended since late August in Brazil, one of its largest and most coveted markets, after Moraes ruled it had failed to comply with orders related to restricting hate speech and naming a local legal representative.
Musk, who had denounced the orders as censorship and called Moraes a “dictator,” backed down and started to reverse his position last week, when X lawyers said the platform tapped a local representative and would comply with court rulings.
In Friday’s decision, Moraes said that X had proved it had now blocked accounts as ordered by the court and had named the required legal representative in Brazil.
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Women’s choir promotes Ukrainian culture in Brussels
After Russia invaded Ukraine, Yuliia Lebedynska moved to Brussels with her daughter and granddaughter. She was an entrepreneur in Ukraine but in Belgium, she found herself in a Ukrainian women’s choir. Valentina Vasileva has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: David Gogokhia
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Statue of American music legend Johnny Cash unveiled at US Capitol
Washington — Johnny Cash now stands among the most famous politicians, trailblazers and activists of American history as he became the first professional musician to be honored with a statue in the U.S. Capitol.
Congressional leaders from both parties and members of the Cash family were among the several hundred guests who gathered Tuesday for the unveiling of the statue. They shared their memories of a man who grew up on an Arkansas cotton farm and turned a love of music into a decades-long career that gave voice to the struggles and triumphs of everyday Americans.
“Some may ask: Why should a musician have a statue here in the halls of the great American republic?” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at the unveiling ceremony. “The answer is pretty simple. It’s because America is about more than laws and politics.”
Each state selects two statues to place within the Capitol. The Cash statue is the second new figure Arkansas has sent to replace two existing images that had represented the state at the U.S. Capitol for more than 100 years. Another statue depicting civil rights leader Daisy Bates was unveiled at the Capitol earlier this year. Bates mentored the nine Black children who desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
The state’s legislature in 2019 voted to replace Arkansas’ two prior statues, which depicted little-known figures from the 18th and 19th centuries, with Bates and Cash.
Known as the “The Man in Black,” Cash was a vivid storyteller who sang with a deep voice songs like “I Walk The Line,” “Ring of Fire,” “Jackson” and “A Boy Named Sue.” The statue depicts the singer with a guitar slung across his back and a Bible in his hand. Little Rock sculptor Kevin Kresse created the statue.
Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said artistic creativity is an important part of the country’s growth, and Cash’s “substance” and “swagger” inspired generations of artists from every genre imaginable. He quoted singers such as Bob Dylan and Snoop Dogg about Cash’s impact.
“He called Johnny Cash a real American gangster. That a compliment from Snoop Doggy Dogg,” Jeffries said as the audience laughed. “What a life, what a legend, what a legacy.”
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders led a group of Arkansas lawmakers at the ceremony. She said she grew up in a musical family where “after God and country, came Johnny Cash.” She noted how Cash struggled with addiction but went on to perform for prisoners and held a deep religious faith. She described him as a “hymn-singing Christian” who also experienced difficult times.
“When so much in today’s world is fake, Johnny Cash was very real,” Sanders said.
Cash’s daughter, Rosanne Cash, said her father would have viewed the statue “as the ultimate” honor in his life. She said her father’s hard upbringing instilled in him a strong work ethic and that he loved the idea of America as a place of dreams and refuge.
“This man was a living redemption story,” Rosanne Cash said. “He encountered darkness and met it with love.”
Cash was born in Kingsland, a tiny town about 100 kilometers south of Little Rock. He died in 2003 at age 71. His achievements include 90 million records sold worldwide spanning country, rock, blues, folk and gospel. He is among the few artists inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Cash’s statue will be the newest added to the Capitol since one from North Carolina depicting the Rev. Billy Graham was unveiled in May.
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CrowdStrike executive apologizes to Congress for July global tech outage
WASHINGTON — An executive at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike apologized in testimony to Congress for sparking a global technology outage over the summer.
“We let our customers down,” said Adam Meyers, who leads CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence division, in a hearing before a U.S. House cybersecurity subcommittee Tuesday.
Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike has blamed a bug in an update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to push bad data out to millions of customer computers, setting off a global tech outage in July that grounded flights, took TV broadcasts off air and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.
“Everywhere Americans turned, basic societal functions were unavailable,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green said. “We cannot allow a mistake of this magnitude to happen again.”
The Tennessee Republican likened the impact of the outage to an attack “we would expect to be carefully executed by a malicious and sophisticated nation-state actor.”
“We’re deeply sorry and we are determined to prevent this from ever happening again,” Meyers told lawmakers while laying out the technical missteps that led to the outage of about 8.5 million computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Meyers said he wanted to “underscore that this was not a cyberattack” but was, instead, caused by a faulty “rapid-response content update” focused on addressing new threats. The company has since bolstered its content update procedures, he said.
The company still faces a number of lawsuits from people and businesses that were caught up in July’s mass outage.
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Former executive gets 2 years in prison for role in FTX fraud
new york — Caroline Ellison, a former top executive in Sam Bankman-Fried’s fallen FTX cryptocurrency empire, was sentenced to two years in prison on Tuesday after she apologized repeatedly to everyone hurt by a fraud that stole billions of dollars from investors, lenders and customers.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said Ellison’s cooperation was “very, very substantial” and “remarkable.”
But he said a prison sentence was necessary because she had participated in what might be the “greatest financial fraud ever perpetrated in this country and probably anywhere else” or at least close to it.
He said in such a serious case, he could not let cooperation be a get-out-of-jail-free card, even when it was clear that Bankman-Fried had become “your kryptonite.”
“I’ve seen a lot of cooperators in 30 years here,” he said. “I’ve never seen one quite like Ms. Ellison.”
She was ordered to report to prison on November 7.
Ellison, 29, pleaded guilty nearly two years ago and testified against Bankman-Fried for nearly three days at a trial last November.
At sentencing, she emotionally apologized to anyone hurt by the fraud that stretched from 2017 through 2022.
“I’m deeply ashamed with what I’ve done,” she said, fighting through tears to say she was “so so sorry” to everyone she had harmed directly or indirectly.
She did not speak as she left Manhattan federal court, surrounded by lawyers.
In a court filing, prosecutors had called her testimony the “cornerstone of the trial” against Bankman-Fried, 32, who was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
In court Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon called for leniency, saying her testimony was “devastating and powerful proof” against Bankman-Fried.
The prosecutor said Ellison’s time on the witness stand was very different from Bankman-Fried, who she said was “evasive, even contemptuous, and unable to answer questions directly” when he testified.
Attorney Anjan Sahni asked the judge to spare his client from prison, citing “unusual circumstances,” including her off-and-on romantic relationship with Bankman-Fried and the damage caused when her “whole professional and personal life came to revolve” around him.
FTX was one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, known for its Superbowl TV ad and its extensive lobbying campaign in Washington before it collapsed in 2022.
U.S. prosecutors accused Bankman-Fried and other executives of looting customer accounts on the exchange to make risky investments, make millions of dollars of illegal political donations, bribe Chinese officials, and buy luxury real estate in the Caribbean.
Ellison was chief executive at Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency hedge fund controlled by Bankman-Fried that was used to process some customer funds from FTX.
As the business began to falter, Ellison divulged the massive fraud to employees who worked for her even before FTX filed for bankruptcy, trial evidence showed.
Ultimately, she also spoke extensively with criminal and civil U.S. investigators.
Sassoon said prosecutors were impressed that Ellison did not “jump into the lifeboat” to escape her crimes but instead spent nearly two years fully cooperating.
Since testifying at Bankman-Fried’s trial, Ellison has engaged in extensive charity work, written a novel, and worked with her parents on a math enrichment textbook for advanced high school students, according to her lawyers.
They said she also now has a healthy romantic relationship and has reconnected with high school friends she had lost touch with while she worked for and sometimes dated Bankman-Fried from 2017 until late 2022.
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Biden proposes banning Chinese vehicles from US roads with software crackdown
Washington — The U.S. Commerce Department on Monday proposed prohibiting key Chinese software and hardware in connected vehicles on American roads due to national security concerns — a move that would effectively bar nearly all Chinese cars from entering the U.S. market.
The planned regulation, first reported by Reuters, would also force American and other major automakers in the coming years to remove key Chinese software and hardware from vehicles in the United States.
The Biden administration has raised serious concerns about the collection of data by Chinese companies on U.S. drivers and infrastructure through connected vehicles as well as about potential foreign manipulation of vehicles connected to the internet and navigation systems. The White House ordered an investigation into the potential dangers in February.
The prohibitions would prevent testing of self-driving cars on U.S. roads by Chinese automakers and extend to vehicle software and hardware produced by other U.S. foreign adversaries including Russia.
“When foreign adversaries build software to make a vehicle that means it can be used for surveillance, can be remotely controlled, which threatens the privacy and safety of Americans on the road,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told a briefing.
“In an extreme situation, a foreign adversary could shut down or take control of all their vehicles operating in the United States all at the same time causing crashes, blocking roads.”
The move is a significant escalation in the United States’ ongoing restrictions on Chinese vehicles, software and components. Earlier this month, the Biden administration locked in steep tariff hikes on Chinese imports, including a 100% duty on electric vehicles as well as new hikes on EV batteries and key minerals.
There are relatively few Chinese-made cars or light-duty trucks imported into the United States. But Raimondo said the department is acting “before suppliers, automakers and car components linked to China or Russia become commonplace and widespread in the U.S. automotive sector… We’re not going to wait until our roads are filled with cars and the risk is extremely significant before we act.”
Nearly all newer cars and trucks are considered “connected” with onboard network hardware that allows internet access, allowing them to share data with devices both inside and outside the vehicle.
A senior administration official confirmed the proposal would effectively ban all existing Chinese light-duty cars and trucks from the U.S. market, but added it would allow Chinese automakers to seek “specific authorizations” for exemptions.
The United States has ample evidence of China prepositioning malware in critical American infrastructure, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told the same briefing.
“With potentially millions of vehicles on the road, each with 10- to 15-year lifespans the risk of disruption and sabotage increases dramatically,” Sullivan said.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington last month criticized planned action to limit Chinese vehicle exports to the United States: “China urges the U.S. to earnestly abide by market principles and international trade rules, and create a level playing field for companies from all countries. China will firmly defend its lawful rights and interests.”
The proposal calls for making software prohibitions effective in the 2027 model year while the hardware ban would take effect in the 2030 model year or January 2029.
The Commerce Department is giving the public 30 days to comment on the proposal and hopes to finalize it by Jan. 20. The rules would apply to all on-road vehicles but exclude agricultural or mining vehicles not used on public roads.
The Alliance For Automotive Innovation, a group representing major automakers including General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen and Hyundai, has warned that changing hardware and software would take time.
The group noted connected vehicle hardware and software are developed around the world, including China, but could not detail to what extent Chinese-made components are prevalent in U.S. models.
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Micro dramas shake up China’s film industry, aim for Hollywood
ZHENGZHOU, China — On a film set that resembles the medieval castle of a Chinese lord, Zhu Jian is busy disrupting the world’s second-largest movie industry.
The 69-year-old actor is playing the patriarch of a wealthy family celebrating his birthday with a lavish banquet. But unbeknownst to either of them, the servant in the scene is his biological granddaughter.
A second twist: Zhu is not filming for cinema screens.
“Grandma’s Moon” is a micro drama, composed of vertically shot, minute-long episodes featuring frequent plot turns designed to keep millions of viewers hooked to their cellphone screens — and paying for more.
“They don’t go to the cinema anymore,” said Zhu of his audience, which he described as largely composed of middle-aged workers and pensioners. “It’s so convenient to hold a mobile phone and watch something anytime you want.”
China’s $5 billion a year micro drama industry is booming, according to Reuters’ interviews with 10 people in the sector and four scholars and media analysts.
The short-format videos are an increasingly potent competitor to China’s film industry, some experts say, which is second in size only to Hollywood and dominated by state-owned China Film Group. And the trend is already spreading to the United States, in a rare instance of Chinese cultural exports finding traction in the West.
Three major China-backed, micro-drama apps were downloaded 30 million times across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play in the first quarter of 2024, grossing $71 million internationally, according to analytics company Appfigures.
“The audience only has that much attention. So obviously, the more time they spend in short videos, the less time they have for TV or other longer-format shows,” said Ashley Dudarenok, founder of a Hong Kong-based marketing consultancy.
The leader in the space is Kuaishou, an app that accounted for 60% of the top 50 Chinese micro dramas last year, according to media analytics consultancy Endata.
Kuaishou vice president Chen Yiyi said at a media conference in January that the app featured 68 titles that notched more than 300 million views last year, with four of them watched over a billion times.
Some 94 million people — more than the population of Germany — watched more than 10 episodes a day on Kuaishou, she said. Reuters was not able to independently verify the data.
Initial episodes on such apps are often free, but to complete a micro drama like “Grandma’s Moon,” which has 64 clips, audiences may pay tens of yuan.
Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok that is owned by internet technology firm Bytedance, is also popular with micro drama fans.
Alongside other major Chinese social media apps like Instagram-like Xiaohongshu and YouTube competitor Bilibili, it has announced plans to make more.
In the United States, micro drama platform ReelShort, whose parent company is backed by Chinese tech giants Tencent and Baidu, has recently outranked Netflix in terms of downloads on Apple’s U.S. app store, according to market researcher Sensor Tower.
“China discovered this audience first,” said Layla Cao, a Chinese producer based in Los Angeles. “Hollywood hasn’t realized that yet, but all the China-based companies are already feeding the content.”
‘Low-brow and vulgar’
Many popular micro dramas, including “Grandma’s Moon,” have narratives that revolve around revenge or Cinderella-like rags-to-riches journeys.
Tales of how circumstances at birth are deterministic and can only be changed by near-miracles have struck a chord with viewers at a time when upward mobility in China is low and youth unemployment high.
The micro dramas often “show people who one day are lower class and the next day become upper class — you get so rich that you get to humiliate those who used to humiliate you,” said a 26-year-old screenwriter known by her pen name of Camille Rao.
Rao recently left her poorly paid job as a junior producer in the traditional film industry for what she described as the more dynamic and less hierarchical world of micro dramas. She now writes and adapts scripts for the U.S. market.
“Social mobility is actually very difficult now. Many people perceive this as a social reality,” said Xu Ting, associate professor of Chinese language and literature at Jiangnan University.
This has fueled interest in stories about billionaires and wealthy families, she added: “Everyone desires power and wealth, so it is normal for these type of stories to be popular.”
In the U.S. market, by contrast, fantasy stories about werewolves and vampires are particularly popular, several creators told Reuters.
The boom in micro dramas in China has brought scrutiny from the Communist Party.
Between late 2022 and early 2023, the National Radio and Television Administration regulator said it organized a “special rectification campaign” during which it removed 25,300 micro dramas, totaling close to 1.4 million episodes, due to their “pornographic, bloody, violent, low-brow and vulgar content.”
As Chinese leader Xi Jinping promotes values such as loyalty to the Communist Party and heteronormative marriages, the state-owned China Women’s News outlet in April complained that some micro dramas “portray unequal and twisted marriage and family relationships as a common phenomenon” and “deviate from mainstream social values.”
In June, the government began requiring some creators to register micro dramas with NRTA. The regulator didn’t respond to Reuters’ questions for this story.
Key to the commercial success of these films are plot twists that keep people paying as they scroll while commuting or in line at a grocery store. Episodes often end with a hook — such as a boyfriend walking in on his partner with another man — and viewers have to pay for the next episode to find out what happened.
“The plot of these micro dramas is exaggerated,” said Zhu, the actor. “It has plot reversals, it’s nonsensical, so it catches people’s attention and a large audience wants to see them.”
Zhu is a lover of cinema and an avid fan of Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.” Like many of his colleagues in micro dramas, he thinks the genre has limited artistic value. “I see it as fast food: a longer drama is a kind of sumptuous meal, and a micro drama is fast food.”
But its dedicated viewers disagree. Huang Siyi, a 28-year-old customer service agent, said she enjoyed watching romantic micro dramas because “the acting is good and the male and female leads are good-looking.”
“It’s easy to be obsessed with micro dramas,” she said.
Explosive growth
Vertical filming and distribution through social media apps mean micro dramas can be made with small overhead costs. Budgets for such films range from between $28,000 and $280,000, according to market researcher iResearch.
In the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, “Grandma’s Moon” is being made with a compressed budget and timeline. When Reuters visited the set in July, the filming day stretched until 2 a.m. The crew then moved to a new location and began shooting again at 7 a.m.
The show was shot in just six days, and Zhu, a muscular man with a wide smile and boundless energy, says he plays table tennis after hours to keep up with the young crew on set.
“We’d need to take two to three years to distribute one traditional TV series of film, but we only need three months to distribute a micro drama, saving us a lot of time,” said Zhou Yi, a showrunner at Chinese gaming giant NetEase, which also makes micro dramas.
As micro dramas gain in popularity, actors’ salaries have also grown. Leading roles used to pay $280 a day, said Zhu, adding that main actors in big productions can now make more than double the rate, though extras earn as little as $17 daily.
A retired railway employee who started acting in the 1970s in a theater troupe attached to the unit where he worked, Zhu now lives off his pension and occasional acting gigs.
Many Chinese micro drama producers have their eye on Western markets, where cultural exports from China have often struggled. NetEase last year started making productions for the U.S. that it distributes via an app called LoveShots; the made-for-export films aren’t typically available in China.
Micro dramas designed for the West are often made by production and acting crews in Los Angeles and shot on location. The scripts, which are in English, may also revolve around themes of wealth, cheating partners and miracles.
One of the latest micro dramas on LoveShots is about a woman who, after years of being paralyzed, miraculously regains her ability to move — and walks in on her husband cheating on her.
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US to propose ban on Chinese software, hardware in connected vehicles, sources say
Washington — The U.S. Commerce Department is expected on Monday to propose prohibiting Chinese software and hardware in connected and autonomous vehicles on American roads due to national security concerns, two sources told Reuters.
The Biden administration has raised serious concerns about the collection of data by Chinese companies on U.S. drivers and infrastructure as well as the potential foreign manipulation of vehicles connected to the internet and navigation systems.
The proposed regulation would ban the import and sale of vehicles from China with key communications or automated driving system software or hardware, said the two sources, who declined to be identified because the decision had not been publicly disclosed.
The move is a significant escalation in the United States’ ongoing restrictions on Chinese vehicles, software and components. Last week, the Biden administration locked in steep tariff hikes on Chinese imports, including a 100% duty on electric vehicles as well as new hikes on EV batteries and key minerals.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in May the risks of Chinese software or hardware in connected U.S. vehicles were significant.
“You can imagine the most catastrophic outcome theoretically if you had a couple million cars on the road and the software were disabled,” she said.
President Joe Biden in February ordered an investigation into whether Chinese vehicle imports pose national security risks over connected-car technology — and if that software and hardware should be banned in all vehicles on U.S. roads.
“China’s policies could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security,” Biden said earlier. “I’m not going to let that happen on my watch.”
The Commerce Department plans to give the public 30 days to comment before any finalization of the rules, the sources said. Nearly all newer vehicles on U.S. roads are considered “connected.” Such vehicles have onboard network hardware that allows internet access, allowing them to share data with devices both inside and outside the vehicle.
The department also plans to propose making the prohibitions on software effective in the 2027 model year and the ban on hardware would take effect in January 2029 or the 2030 model year. The prohibitions in question would include vehicles with certain Bluetooth, satellite and wireless features as well as highly autonomous vehicles that could operate without a driver behind the wheel.
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers in November raised alarm about Chinese auto and tech companies collecting and handling sensitive data while testing autonomous vehicles in the United States.
The prohibitions would extend to other foreign U.S. adversaries, including Russia, the sources said.
A trade group representing major automakers including General Motors, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen, Hyundai and others had warned that changing hardware and software would take time.
The carmakers noted their systems “undergo extensive pre-production engineering, testing, and validation processes and, in general, cannot be easily swapped with systems or components from a different supplier.”
The Commerce Department declined to comment on Saturday. Reuters first reported, in early August, details of a plan that would have the effect of barring the testing of autonomous vehicles by Chinese automakers on U.S. roads. There are relatively few Chinese-made light-duty vehicles imported into the United States.
The White House on Thursday signed off on the final proposal, according to a government website. The rule is aimed at ensuring the security of the supply chain for U.S. connected vehicles. It will apply to all vehicles on U.S. roads, but not for agriculture or mining vehicles, the sources said.
Biden noted that most cars are connected like smartphones on wheels, linked to phones, navigation systems, critical infrastructure and to the companies that made them.
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‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ scares off ‘Transformers’ for third week as box office No. 1
Los Angeles — It’s a three-peat for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
The Tim Burton legacy sequel to his 1988 horror comedy topped the North American box office charts for the third straight weekend with $26 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.
It edged out the animated new release “Transformers: One,” which brought in $25 million. The Optimus Prime origin story from Paramount Pictures features the voices of Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry and Scarlett Johansson.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” a Warner Bros. release with Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder returning as stars, has earned more than $226 million domestically in its three weeks after a monster opening of $110 million — the third best of the year — and a second weekend of $51.6 million.
Third place went to the James McAvoy horror “Speak No Evil,” which came in at $5.9 million in its second week for a total of $21.5 million.
On the whole, the box office was in a quiet phase that is expected to break when ” Joker: Folie à Deux ” dances its way onto the big screen on Oct. 4.
The year’s second-highest grosser ” Deadpool & Wolverine ” remained in the top 5 in its ninth weekend with another $3.9 million and a domestic total of $627 million. Only Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” has earned more.
The Demi Moore-starring, Coralie Fargeat-directed body horror “The Substance,” which made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival, brought in $3.1 million on limited screens in its first weekend for the sixth spot.
The Daily Wire movie “Am I Racist?” — in which conservative columnist Matt Walsh goes undercover as a “DEI trainee” — stayed in the top 10 after a fourth place finish last week, earning $2.9 million for seventh place and a two-week total of $9 million.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
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“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” $26 million.
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“Transformers One,” $25 million.
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“Speak No Evil,” $5.9 million.
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“Never Let Go,” $4.5 million.
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“Deadpool & Wolverine,” $3.9 million.
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“The Substance,” $3.1 million.
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“Am I Racist?” $2.5 million.
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“Reagan,” $1.7 million.
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“JUNG KOOK: I AM STILL,” $1.4 million.
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“Alien Romulus,” $1.3 million.
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Japan cracks down on bad-faith buyers as temple, shrine sales surge
SANBAGAWA, Japan — Benmou Suzuki’s dilapidated 420-year-old temple, located deep in the forest near a tiny Japanese mountain village, hardly looks like prized real estate.
Yet the monk was recently approached by two men, who said they were real estate brokers and wanted to know if he was interested in selling.
He suspects they weren’t really interested in the ornate building at the trailhead of a sacred mountain, but the special tax status that comes with running a religious property.
“There are people out there who want a temple, even a mountain temple like this. In fact, considering the value of the religious corporation status, this temple could fetch quite a lot of money,” said 52-year-old Suzuki.
As Japan’s population falls and interest in religion declines, there are fewer people to contribute to the upkeep of the country’s numerous temples and shrines. Suzuki’s Mikaboyama temple, for example, is located in Sanbagawa — an area a three-hour drive from Tokyo with only 500 residents and which also has three other Buddhist temples, one Shinto shrine and a church.
A surge in religious properties coming up for sale has Japanese authorities worried that prospective buyers are not interested in them for heavenly purposes. Rather they fear many are out to dodge taxes or possibly even launder money.
“It’s already a sense of crisis for us and the religious community,” said an official at Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, which oversees religious sites.
Cases of temple or shrine properties being extensively repurposed have triggered public outrage. In Osaka, a temple sold in 2020 was later razed and dozens of graves were relocated to make way for a property development. In Kyoto, a case about a temple that was demolished and turned into a parking lot made headlines this year.
Owning a temple, shrine or church recognized as a religious corporation in Japan can confer sizeable tax benefits. Businesses under such corporations that offer religious services such as funerals do not have to pay taxes while other non-religious businesses also enjoy preferential tax rates. A wide range of undertakings are allowed from restaurants to hair salons to hotels.
Japan had about 180,000 religious sites with corporation status as end-2023, according to the agency’s data. The number of so-called inactive corporations — such as those with no religious events for more than a year — jumped by a third to more than 4,400.
When monks or priests die without a successor, the overseeing religious group will usually appoint someone to take over or voluntarily relinquish the site’s corporation status.
However, there are around 7,000 religious sites that operate independently of these groups and are considered easy to acquire, according to the agency and specialist brokers.
The cultural affairs agency said it has stepped up efforts to dissolve the corporation status of inactive religious sites to stop them from being targeted by dubious buyers.
And when big earthquakes hit, often damaging temples and shrines, agency officials visit religious groups in those areas, warning them about falling prey to such buyers.
Last year, 17 religious corporations were voluntarily dissolved and six were ordered to dissolve. The agency said the number would increase this year and next year as it ratchets up scrutiny.
It might seem easier for Japan to change its laws to more strictly control the criteria for purchasing religious sites. But the agency said the government is wary about amending laws related to religion as that could be seen as impinging on religious freedom which is guaranteed by Japan’s constitution.
Reuters checks of six websites specializing in brokering the sale of religious properties showed hundreds on the market. Most are only obliquely described online with brokers saying sellers prefer to conduct sales as privately as possible.
Osaka-based broker Takao Yamamoto told Reuters interest is surging. A religious corporation license alone can fetch 30 million yen ($210,000), he adds. Some religious sites, especially those with profitable graveyards, are advertised for millions of dollars.
“Anyone can buy independent sites as long as you have money…even foreigners can buy them. Recently, a lot of Chinese people are trying to buy them,” Yamamoto said.
For his part, Suzuki says he has no intention to sell Mikaboyama temple and is working on ideas to raise funds to maintain it. “Temples are places for local people to gather and forge connections. We just can’t get rid of them,” he said.
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Dedicated artists keep Japan’s ancient craft of temari alive
KAWARAMACHI, Japan — Time seems to stop here.
Women sit in a small circle, quietly, painstakingly stitching patterns on balls the size of an orange, a stitch at a time.
At the center of the circle is Eiko Araki, a master of the Sanuki Kagari Temari, a Japanese traditional craft passed down for more than 1,000 years on the southwestern island of Shikoku.
Each ball — known as a “temari” ball — is a work of art, with colorful geometric patterns carrying poetic names like “firefly flowers” and “layered stars.” A temari ball takes weeks or months to finish. Some cost hundreds of dollars (tens of thousands of yen), although others are much cheaper.
These kaleidoscopic balls aren’t for throwing or kicking around. They’re destined to be heirlooms, carrying prayers for health and goodness. They might be treasured like a painting or piece of sculpture in a Western home.
The concept behind temari is an elegant otherworldliness, an impractical beauty that is also very labor-intensive to create.
“Out of nothing, something this beautiful is born, bringing joy,” said Araki. “I want it to be remembered there are beautiful things in this world that can only be made by hand.”
Natural materials
The region where temari originated was good for growing cotton, warm with little rainfall, and the spherical creations continue to be made out of the humble material.
At Araki’s studio, which also serves as head office for temari’s preservation society, there are 140 hues of cotton thread, including delicate pinks and blues, as well as more vivid colors and all the subtle gradations in between.
The women dye them by hand, using plants, flowers and other natural ingredients, including cochineal, which is a bug living in cacti that produces a red dye. The deeper shade of indigo is dyed again and again to turn just about black. Yellow and blue are combined to form gorgeous greens. Soy juice is added to deepen the tints, a dash of organic protein.
Outside the studio, loops of cotton thread, in various tones of yellow today, hang outside in the shade to dry.
Creating and embroidering the balls
The arduous process starts with making the basic ball mold on which the stitching is done. Rice husks that are cooked then dried are placed in a piece of cotton, then wound with thread, over and over, until, almost magically, a ball appears in your hands.
Then the stitching begins.
The balls are surprisingly hard, so each stitch requires a concentrated, almost painful, push. The motifs must be precise and even.
Each ball has lines to guide the stitching — one that goes around it like the equator, and others that zigzag to the top and bottom.
Appealing to a new generation
These days, temari is getting some new recognition, among Japanese and foreigners as well. Caroline Kennedy took lessons in the ball-making when she was United States ambassador to Japan a decade ago.
Yoshie Nakamura, who promotes Japanese handcrafted art in her duty-free shop at Tokyo’s Haneda airport, says she features temari there because of its intricate and delicate designs.
“Temari that might have been everyday in a faraway era is now being used for interior decoration,” she said.
“I really feel each Sanuki Kagari Temari speaks of a special, one-and-only existence in the world.”
Araki has come up with newer designs that feel both modern and historical. She is trying to make the balls more accessible to everyday life — for instance, as Christmas tree ornaments. A strap with a dangling miniature ball, though quite hard to make because of its size, is affordable at about 1,500 yen ($10) each.
Another of Araki’s inventions is a cluster of pastel balls that opens and closes with tiny magnets. Fill it with sweet-smelling herbs for a kind of aromatic diffuser.
A tradition passed down through generations
Araki, a graceful woman who talks very slowly, her head cocked to one side as though always in thought, often travels to Tokyo to teach. But mostly she works and gives lessons in her studio, an abandoned kindergarten with faded blue paint and big windows with tired wooden frames.
She started out as a metalwork artist. Her husband’s parents were temari masters who worked hard to resurrect the artform when it was declining in the modern age, at risk of dying out.
They were stoic people, rarely bestowing praise and instead always scolding her, she remembers. It’s a tough-love approach that’s common in the handing down of many Japanese traditional arts, from Kabuki acting to hogaku music, that demand lifetimes of selfless devotion.
Today, only several dozen people, all women, can make the temari balls to traditional standards.
“The most challenging aspect is nurturing successors. It typically takes over 10 years to train them, so you need people who are willing to continue the craft for a very long time,” Araki said.
“When people start to feel joy along with the hardship that comes with making temari, they tend to keep going.”
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California governor signs law to protect children from social media addiction
SACRAMENTO, California — California will make it illegal for social media platforms to knowingly provide addictive feeds to children without parental consent beginning in 2027 under a new law Governor Gavin Newsom signed Friday.
California follows New York state, which passed a law earlier this year allowing parents to block their kids from getting social media posts suggested by a platform’s algorithm. Utah has passed laws in recent years aimed at limiting children’s access to social media, but those have faced challenges in court.
The California law will take effect in a state home to some of the largest technology companies in the world. Similar proposals have failed to pass in recent years, but Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation law in 2022 barring online platforms from using users’ personal information in ways that could harm children.
It is part of a growing push in states across the country to try to address the impact of social media on the well-being of children.
“Every parent knows the harm social media addiction can inflict on their children — isolation from human contact, stress and anxiety, and endless hours wasted late into the night,” Newsom, a Democrat, said in a statement. “With this bill, California is helping protect children and teenagers from purposely designed features that feed these destructive habits.”
The law bans platforms from sending notifications without permission from parents to minors between midnight and 6 a.m., and between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays from September through May, when children are typically in school. The legislation also makes platforms set children’s accounts to private by default.
Opponents of the legislation say it could inadvertently prevent adults from accessing content if they cannot verify their age. Some argue it would threaten online privacy by making platforms collect more information on users.
The law defines an “addictive feed” as a website or app “in which multiple pieces of media generated or shared by users are, either concurrently or sequentially, recommended, selected, or prioritized for display to a user based, in whole or in part, on information provided by the user, or otherwise associated with the user or the user’s device,” with some exceptions.
The subject garnered renewed attention in June when U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Congress to require warning labels on social media platforms and their impacts on young people. Attorneys general in 42 states endorsed the plan in a letter sent to Congress last week.
State Senator Nancy Skinner, a Democrat representing Berkeley who wrote the California law, said that “social media companies have designed their platforms to addict users, especially our kids.”
“With the passage of SB 976, the California Legislature has sent a clear message: When social media companies won’t act, it’s our responsibility to protect our kids,” she said in a statement.
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‘Souls of Ancestors’ display stirs new interest in Cambodian antiquity
PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA — Nhem Liza made her first visit to the National Museum of Cambodia after learning about the August return from the United States of dozens of looted Cambodian artifacts, including important Hindu and Buddhist masterpieces dating from the ninth to 14th centuries.
“Those artifacts are amazing,” said 15-year-old Nhem, a 10th grade Phnom Penh high school student.
The return of the statues — viewed as divine or containing the souls of ancestors — has given younger Cambodians like Nhem an opportunity to embrace the country’s cultural heritage and history.
“I am excited to see these artifacts our government is trying to get back,” she told VOA on September 16 after viewing some of objects now on display at the museum.
Cambodia has worked for years to identify and secure the return of culturally and historically important relics from private collections and museums overseas, many of which were lost to the country because of war, theft and the illegal artifact trade.
Cambodia faced continuous civil unrest from the mid-1960s until the early 1990s and archeological sites from the ancient Khmer Empire, such as Angkor Wat and Koh Ker, suffered serious damage and widespread looting, Cambodian officials told VOA Khmer.
In August, Cambodia celebrated the return of 70 items from museums and private collections overseas, including 14 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The objects include priceless stone statues such as one depicting a mythical warrior from the Hindu epic Mahabharata. There are also statues of Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati, and one of the Hindu god Ardhanarishvara from the ancient capital of Koh Ker, according to Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts.
Presiding over the return ceremony, Prime Minister Hun Manet said the 70 returned objects symbolically reunited the Cambodian people with their “ancestral souls,” adding that the government will continue working to bring more artifacts home.
From 1996 to July of this year, 1,098 artifacts had been returned to Cambodia — 571 from private collections and 527 from foreign institutions and governments, Hun said.
“It is the soul of our nation,” Doeun Sokun Aly, 18, told VOA at the museum. “The heroes of our country built those artifacts for the younger generation to know about those antiques. … I will visit museums more to see more artifacts.”
National Museum Director Chhay Visoth told VOA the display is meant to stir new interest from Cambodians, especially younger Cambodians.
“Recently, we have seen a surprising increase of Cambodian visitors to the museum, especially youth,” he said by phone this week.
The authorities, he said, are now planning to conduct a “mobile exhibition” to display the artifacts at museums in provinces such as Siem Reap, Battambang and Pursat, in the northwestern part of the country.
Chhay said the museum also hopes the display will send a message to private collectors and museums overseas that “those artifacts are greatly important” and “not for beautifying gardens, kitchens, living rooms, residents or offices of the rich.”
“For Cambodians, they are meaningful indeed. Those artifacts are the souls of Khmer ancestors,” he said.
Chhay added that the museum is already planning to expand its display area to accommodate more returned artifacts.
Over the years, Cambodia has received dozens of statues from the families of wealthy collectors, such as George Lindemann, a U.S. businessman and philanthropist who died in 2018.
In 2021, after three years of negotiations, the family of the late British art collector Douglas Latchford agreed to return more than 100 Cambodian artifacts, according to the government.
Latchford, who co-authored three books on Cambodian art and antiques, died in 2020 facing accusations that he had illegally trafficked the artifacts to his homes in Bangkok and London.
In November 2019, federal prosecutors in New York charged Latchford with falsifying the provenance, invoices and shipping documents to transport valuable Khmer-era relics to private collections, museums and auction houses around the world.
Other cultural objects that have found their way back to Cambodia went through processes including voluntary returns, negotiations, seizures and legal proceedings.
The United States has helped secure the return of well over 150 antiques to Cambodia so far, Wesley Holzer, a U.S. Embassy spokesperson in Phnom Penh said.
“The United States is proud of its longstanding contributions to preserving and restoring Cambodia’s cultural heritage,” he told VOA in an email, adding that Cambodia is the first country in Southeast Asia to establish a bilateral property repatriation memorandum of understanding with the U.S.
“Through this MOU, the United States and Cambodia have trained heritage professionals, prevented pillaging of antiquities, and facilitated the return of looted artifacts. This agreement also makes it illegal to import certain Cambodian archeological and ethnological material into the United States,” he added.
Bradley Gordon, a lawyer representing Cambodian government, said there were “many more” that his team are searching for.
“To be clear, Cambodia does not want to empty out museums around the world, but wants many important and precious national treasures to come home. Cambodia also is open to long-term loans which they are exploring with a number of museums,” he added.
A member of Gordon’s restitution team, Cambodian researcher Kunthea Chhoun, said getting the artifacts back is not easy.
“We need to investigate and collect testimonies from looters, villagers and brokers. It takes a great amount of patience and many interviews. We have used different approaches to get back our artifacts and it has taken many years,” she told VOA in a September 20 email.
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As traces of Pakistani megacity’s past vanish, flamboyant pink palace endures
KARACHI, Pakistan — Stained glass windows, a sweeping staircase and embellished interiors make Mohatta Palace a gem in Karachi, a Pakistani megacity of 20 million people. Peacocks roam the lawn and the sounds of construction and traffic melt away as visitors enter the grounds.
The pink stone balustrades, domes and parapets look like they’ve been plucked from the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, a relic of a time when Muslims and Hindus lived side by side in the port city.
But magnificence is no guarantee of survival in a city where land is scarce and development is rampant. Demolition, encroachment, neglect, piecemeal conservation laws and vandalism are eroding signs of Karachi’s past.
The building’s trustees have fended off an attempt to turn it into a dental college, but there’s still a decadeslong lawsuit in which heirs of a former owner are trying to take control of the land. It sat empty for almost two decades before formally opening as a museum in 1999.
The palace sits on prime real estate in the desirable neighborhood of Old Clifton, among mansions, businesses and upmarket restaurants.
The land under buildings like the Mohatta Palace is widely coveted, said palace lawyer Faisal Siddiqi. “It shows that greed is more important than heritage.”
Karachi’s population grows by around 2% every year and with dozens of communities and cultures competing for space there’s little effort to protect the city’s historic sites.
For most Pakistanis, the palace is the closest they’ll get to the architectural splendor of India’s Rajasthan, because travel restrictions and hostile bureaucracies largely keep people in either country from crossing the border for leisure, study or work.
Karachi’s multicultural past makes it harder to find champions for preservation than in a city like Lahore, with its strong connection to the Muslim-dominated Mughal Empire, said Heba Hashmi, a heritage manager and maritime archaeologist.
“The scale of organic local community support needed to prioritize government investment in the preservation effort is nearly impossible to garner in a city as socially fragmented as Karachi,” she said.
Mohatta Palace is a symbol of that diversity. Hindu entrepreneur Shivratan Mohatta had it built in the 1920s because he wanted a coastal residence for his ailing wife to benefit from the Arabian Sea breeze. Hundreds of donkey carts carried the distinctively colored pink stone from Jodhpur, now across the border in India.
He left after partition in 1947, when India and Pakistan were carved from the former British Empire as independent nations, and for a time the palace was occupied by the Foreign Ministry.
Next, it passed into the hands of Pakistani political royalty as the home of Fatima Jinnah, the younger sister of Pakistan’s first leader and a powerful politician in her own right.
After her death, the authorities gave the building to her sister Shirin, but Shirin’s passing in 1980 sparked a court fight between people saying they were her relatives, and a court ordered the building sealed.
The darkened and empty palace, with its overgrown gardens and padlocked gates, caught people’s imagination. Rumors spread of spirits and supernatural happenings.
Someone who heard the stories as a young girl was Nasreen Askari, now the museum’s director.
“As a child I used to rush past,” she said. “I was told it was a bhoot (ghost) bungalow and warned, don’t go there.”
Visitor Ahmed Tariq had heard a lot about the palace’s architecture and history. “I’m from Bahawalpur (in Punjab, India) where we have the Noor Mahal palace, so I wanted to look at this one. It’s well-maintained, there’s a lot of detail and effort in the presentations. It’s been a good experience.”
But the money to maintain the palace isn’t coming from admission fees.
General admission is 30 rupees, or 10 U.S. cents, and it’s free for students, children and seniors. On a sweltering afternoon, the palace drew just a trickle of visitors.
It’s open Tuesday to Sunday but closes on public holidays; even the 11 a.m.-6 p.m. hours are not conducive for a late-night city like Karachi.
The palace is rented out for corporate and charitable events. Local media report that residents grumble about traffic and noise levels.
But the palace doesn’t welcome all attention, even if it could help carve out a space for the building in modern Pakistan.
Rumors about ghosts still spread by TikTok, pulling in influencers looking for spooky stories. But the palace bans filming inside, and briefly banned TikTokers.
“It is not the attention the trustees wanted,” said Askari. “That’s what happens when you have anything of consequence or unusual. It catches the eye.”
A sign on the gates also prohibits fashion shoots, weddings and filming for commercials.
“We could make so much money, but the floodgates would open,” said Askari. “There would be non-stop weddings and no space for visitors or events, so much cleaning up as well.”
Hashmi, the archaeologist, said there is often a strong sense of territorialism around the sites that have been preserved.
“It counterproductively converts a site of public heritage into an exclusive and often expensive artifact for selective consumption.”
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China-connected spamouflage impersonated Dutch cartoonist
Washington — Based on the posts of an X account that bears the name of Dutch cartoonist Bart van Leeuwen, a profile picture of his face and short professional bio, one would think the Amsterdam-based artist is a staunch supporter of China and fierce critic of the United States.
In one post, the account blasts what it calls Washington’s “fallacies against the Chinese economy,” accompanied by a cartoon from the Global Times — a Beijing-controlled media outlet — showing Uncle Sam aiming but failing to hit a target emblazoned with the words “China’s economy.”
In another, the account reposts a Chinese propaganda video about the country’s rubber-stamp legislature, writing “today’s China is closely connected with the world, blending with each other, and achieving mutual success.”
But Van Leeuwen didn’t make the posts. In fact, this account doesn’t even belong to him.
It belongs to a China-connected network on X of “spamouflage” accounts, which pretend to be the work of real people but are in reality controlled by robots sending out messages designed to shape public opinion.
China has repeatedly rejected reports that it seeks to influence U.S. presidential elections, describing such claims as “fabricated.”
VOA Mandarin and DoubleThink Lab (DTL), a Taiwanese social media analytics firm, uncovered the fake Van Leeuwen account during a joint investigation into a network of spamouflage accounts working on behalf of the Chinese government.
The network, consisting of at least nine accounts, propagated Beijing’s talking points on issues including human rights abuses in China’s western Xinjiang province, territorial disputes with countries in the South China Sea and U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods.
Fake account contradicts real artist
Van Leeuwen confirmed in an interview with VOA Mandarin that he had nothing to do with and was not aware of the fake account.
“It’s ironic that my identity, being a political cartoonist, is being used for political propaganda,” he told VOA in a written statement.
The real Van Leeuwen is an award-winning cartoonist whose works have been published on news outlets around the world, such as the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Korea Times, Sing Tao Daily in Hong Kong and Gulf Today in the United Arab Emirates.
He specializes in editorial cartoons, whose main subjects include global politics, elections in the U.S. and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Several of his past illustrations made fun of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s economic policies and the opaqueness of Beijing’s inner political struggles.
After being contacted by VOA Mandarin, a spokesman from X said the fake account has been suspended.
Other than finding irony in being impersonated by a Chinese propaganda bot, Van Leeuwen said the incident also worries him.
“This example once again highlights the need for far-reaching measures regarding the restriction of social media,” Van Leeuwen wrote in his statement, “especially with irresponsible people like Elon Musk at the helm.”
After purchasing what was then called Twitter in 2022, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO vowed to reduce the prevalence of bots on the platform, but many users complain it has become even worse.
Musk, the world’s richest person, is a so-called “free speech absolutist,” opposing almost all censorship of people voicing their views. Critics say his policy allows racist and false information to flourish on X.
Former President Donald Trump has praised Musk’s business acumen and said he plans to have the man who may become the world’s first trillionaire head a commission on government efficiency if he is reelected in November.
Network of spamouflage accounts
Before its suspension, the X account that impersonated Van Leeuwen had close to 1,000 followers, more than Van Leeuwen’s real X account. It was registered in 2013, but its first post came only last year. The account’s early posts were mostly encouraging and inspiring words in Chinese. It also posted many dance videos.
Gradually, the account started to mix in more and more political narratives, criticizing the U.S. and defending China. It often reposted content from another spamouflage account called “Grey World.”
“Grey World” used a photo of an attractive Asian woman as its profile picture. Most of its posts were supportive of Beijing’s talking points. It regularly posted videos and cartoons from Chinese state media. It also posted several of Van Leeuwen’s cartoons about American politics.
VOA Mandarin and DTL’s investigation identified “Grey World” as the main spamouflage account in a network of nine such accounts. Other accounts in the network, including the fake Van Leeuwen account, amplified “Grey World” by reposting its content.
But posts from “Grey World” had limited reach on X, despite having tens of thousands of followers. For example, between August 18 and September 1, its most popular post, a diatribe against Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy, was viewed a little over 10,000 times but only had 35 reposts and 65 likes.
After the suspension of the fake Van Leeuwen account, X also shut down the “Grey World” account.
The spamouflage network is not the first linked to China.
In April, British researchers released a report saying Chinese nationalist trolls were posing as American supporters of Trump on X to try to exploit domestic divisions ahead of the U.S. election.
U.S. federal prosecutors in 2023 accused China’s Ministry of Public Security of having a covert social media propaganda campaign that also aimed to influence U.S. elections.
Researchers at Facebook’s parent company Meta said it was the largest known covert propaganda operation ever identified on that platform and Instagram, reported Rolling Stone magazine.
Network analysis firm Graphika called the pro-Chinese network “Spamouflage Dragon,” part of a campaign it identified in early 2020 that was at the time posting content that praised Beijing’s policies and attacked those of then-President Trump.
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