Powered exoskeletons may help people with weak muscles move better. Exoskeletons are often made from metal, which means their joints are rigid. Now researchers at a university in Switzerland are working on flexible, rubber robots that could replace the metal joints in exoskeletons, making them far more flexible. VOA’s Deborah Block has a report.
…
Before leaving her home each day to teach art to children, Mariluce Maria de Souza must factor in extra time to account for the shootings and other eruptions of violence that occur daily in Alemao, Rio de Janeiro’s largest complex of slums, or favelas.
The 35-year-old mother sometimes has to cancel a session teaching painting to children because the journey to class is just too dangerous. Through the project called Favela Art, the self-taught artist requires that her students attend school and study hard in return.
Souza has become an example of empowerment for girls and women in the slum, who often face domestic violence and workplace discrimination.
“Sometimes the mothers, who are mother and father at the same time, don’t have the time to give the kind of attention that five, six or seven children need,” Souza said.
Like many Latin American countries, Brazil has deep problems with gender-specific violence. The Brazilian nonprofit Mapa da Violencia says nearly five in 100,000 women are killed each year, giving the country one of the world’s highest homicide rates for women.
The situation is even worse for black women, many of whom live in slums. Between 2003 and 2013, the annual number homicides of black women jumped 54 percent, according to Mapa da Violencia.
“We use the graffiti to demand the end of violence against women,” said Maiara Viana Rodrigues, a 25-year-old who said that as a teen she was sexually abused by a man in her neighborhood.
To make her point, the member of Afrograffitteiras, a group working to empower black women, on one recent afternoon painted graffiti exhorting: “Viva! You, Woman!” on a wall in a Rio suburb.
Along with rejecting physical violence, the female artists say they also want to shine a light on psychological abuse, unequal access to education and health care, and less pay for women doing the same job as men.
Lya Alves, who recently painted a mural of a black woman on a wall in Rio’s renovated port area, says feminism has lost much of its meaning since the 1970s, when women fought against being considered sexual objects.
“Nowadays the media promotes” the sexual objectification of women, she said. “Is that helping to obtain a better education, a better salary?”
…
Nike will launch a hijab for female Muslim athletes early next year, becoming the first major sports apparel maker to offer a traditional Islamic head scarf designed specifically for competition, the company said on Wednesday.
The head covering, marketed under the “Pro Hijab” brand, is designed to allow athletes to observe the traditional Islamic practice of covering the head without compromising performance.
Made from a lightweight, flexible material, the hijab is expected to hit stores shelves in early 2018, Nike said in a statement.
In recent years, the hijab has become the most visible symbol of Islamic culture in the United States and Europe. Many Muslim women cover their heads in public with the hijab as a sign of modesty, but some critics see it as a sign of female oppression.
With sensitivities over immigration and the perceived threat of Muslim extremism running high, the head scarf has led to attacks against Muslim women. At the same time, the hijab has evolved in a symbol of diversity that Nike has embraced.
The Women’s March on Washington, held the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, used the face of a woman wearing a hijab in an American flag pattern as its promotional image.
Muslim athletes visiting Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, just outside of Portland, have complained about the difficulties of wearing a hijab while competing, according to the company.
The company consulted with Muslim women athletes from around the world, including Middle Eastern runners and cyclists, in the designing the hijab.
Other companies have also set their sights on hijab sales to Muslim athletes.
Last year, Danish sportswear company Hummel unveiled a soccer jersey with an attached hijab for the Afghanistan national women’s soccer team.
Non-professional women Muslim athletes have used athletic hijabs made by smaller companies.
But Nike’s annual net sales in the billions and its reach in popular culture can do more to bring Muslim athletes into the fold, said Amna Al Haddad, a Nike sponsored weightlifter from the United Arab Emirates who consulted on “Pro Hijab.”
“[It will] encourage a whole new generation to pursue sports without feeling there is a limitation because of modesty or dress-code,” Haddad said.
…
Lagos has long been known as Nigeria’s pop culture hub. It’s the home of Nigeria’s film industry, Nollywood, as well as many of the country’s top musicians and artists.
But a group of rappers and fashion designers is creating a scene of their own in Kaduna, in northern Nigeria, some 600 kilometers from Lagos. Kaduna’s is the new center of Nigeria’s growing hip-hop culture.
DJ Jakes Tudu is cranking out jams on his weekly radio show, playing the latest tunes from local rap artists.
Hip-hop music has taken over Nigeria’s pop music scene. Rappers like Morell, DJ AB, Kheengz, and Classiq are part of a new generation of rappers. They hail from Kaduna and they’re trying to put their city on the music map.
On the surface, Kaduna is a quiet conservative city. But there’s another side of it. Here, music artists like Kevin Words are becoming local celebrities. DJ Jakes is a huge fan of Words.
“Stepping into the Kaduna music industry you have to listen to the likes of Kevin Words because a lot of people out there have this stereotype or this mindset that Kaduna artists or the Kaduna industry is full of mediocres, but when you hear people like Kevin Words, trust me, you want to sit up,” DJ Jakes says.
Ibrahim Ilyia, 28, is another rapper from the streets of Kaduna. He goes by the stage name IBI. One of his most recent hit songs, Alhamdulillah, fuses the local Hausa slang with American hip-hop style.
“When I was young I used to listen to rap a lot and I fell in love with rap music and right now I do rap music because I love it,” Ilyia says.
Most rappers in Nigeria, Ilyia says, end up going to Lagos to make it but Lagos, in his opinion, is passe.
“I’m not actually against people going to Lagos, but if Kaduna people can just build themselves alone, reach a certain level, I mean Lagos is nothing. We’ll counter them.”
So, he works hard, putting pen to paper to write rhymes and trying out new lyrics with sample beats. He’s good at free-styling, too.
The music is just one part of hip-hop culture. Fashion is also important. Kaduna is fertile ground for young ambitious designers.
Hussena Raji is the CEO of Mummy’s Fashun. Her clothes are an edgy blend of urban and African.
“I decided to blend hip-hop because that’s what’s selling in the market. Almost everybody wants to wear and feel like it. So we try as much as possible to make everything look it,” says Raji.
Patrick Yamai, 24, is another designer combining different looks with his fashion label YKP Clothing.
‘I just felt there was a space in the fashion line that had been neglected. It’s either fully African or it’s fully English, or fully corporate, but I had this dream of fusing the two. Something you can wear to the club and still wear to the office. So I tried to fuse African and urban together to see if it can go and the reception has been wonderful. We’re doing clothes that are African but you can wear it with a sneaker and still look cool, that’s what we’re trying to do,” he said.
Yamai is an accounting graduate while DJ Jakes studied architecture in school. But they each found their calling in this local scene.
…
Major technology firms say they are moving to fix any vulnerabilities in their operating systems, a day after WikiLeaks released documents pertaining to an alleged CIA hacking arsenal capable of spying on people through microphones in mobile phones and other electronic devices, such as smart televisions.
In a statement issued Wednesday, Apple said it already had addressed many of the issues identified in the WikiLeaks documents, but said it would “continue work to rapidly address any identified vulnerabilities.”
“We always urge customers to download the latest iOS to make sure they have the most recent security updates,” Apple said.
Samsung made a similar comment, saying it was aware of the report and “urgently looking into the matter.”
“Protecting consumers’ privacy and the security of our devices is a top priority at Samsung,” the South Korean electronics company said.
According to the WikiLeaks documents, the CIA identified weaknesses within the software used by Apple, Google, Microsoft and other U.S.-based manufacturers; but, instead of informing the companies of the vulnerabilities, the CIA “hoarded” the exploits, leaving people open to potential hacking.
“By hiding these security flaws from manufacturers like Apple and Google the CIA ensures that it can hack everyone; at the expense of leaving everyone hackable,” WikiLeaks said in a statement accompanying the release of the documents.
The CIA would neither confirm nor deny the legitimacy of the documents, although WikiLeaks boasts a nearly perfect record on the authenticity of the documents it publishes.
At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, White House Spokesman Sean Spicer likened the WikiLeaks release to recent information leaks from within the White House, and said it should serve as “a cause for concern” for all Americans.
“I think the idea that we are having these ongoing disclosures of national security and classified information should be something that everybody is outraged about in this country,” he said. “This is the kind of disclosure that undermines our country, our security and our well-being.”
…
The world needs an international treaty to protect people’s privacy from unfettered cybersurveillance, which is being pushed by populist politicians preying on fear of terrorism, according to a U.N. report debated on Wednesday.
The report, submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council by the U.N. independent expert on privacy, Joe Cannataci, said traditional privacy safeguards such as rules on phone tapping were outdated in the digital age.
“It’s time to start reclaiming cyberspace from the menace of over-surveillance,” Cannataci told the Council.
With governments worldwide demanding data from firms such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter, it did not make sense to rely entirely on U.S. legal safeguards, and creating an “international warrant” for data access or surveillance would unify global standards, he said.
“What the world needs is not more state-sponsored shenanigans on the Internet but rational, civilized agreement about appropriate state behavior in cyberspace,” the report said. “This is not utopia. This is cold, stark reality.”
Cannataci was appointed as the first “Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy” in 2015, following the uproar caused by revelations by Edward Snowden, a former U.S. security contractor who once worked at the U.S. mission in Geneva.
His report was submitted last week, before the latest publication by anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks of what it said were thousands of pages of internal CIA discussions of hacking techniques of smartphones and other gadgets.
The United States did not react to Cannataci’s report, but many countries welcomed it and agreed that online privacy standards should be as strong as offline standards.
China’s diplomat at the Council said rapid technological advances and the “drastic increase worldwide in the violation of privacy” made it urgent to enhance protection, while Russia’s representative said Cannataci’s report was “extremely topical”.
Venezuela, Iran and Cuba all welcomed Cannataci’s work and criticized international surveillance.
A draft legal text was being debated by activists and “some of the larger international corporations” and was expected to be published within a year, Cannataci said.
In his report, he criticized populist laws that intruded on privacy in the name of fighting terrorism.
He said such sweeping but unproven powers were based on fear alone, and compared them to U.S. President Donald Trump’s order restricting travel from six Muslim-majority countries: Iran, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
“The level of the fear prevents the electorate from objectively assessing the effectiveness of the privacy-intrusive measures proposed,” he wrote.
“Trying to appear tough on security by legitimizing largely useless, hugely expensive and totally disproportionate measures which are intrusive on so many people’s privacy – and other rights – is patently not the way governments should go.”
…
Today, woman around the world are celebrating International Women’s Day. U.N. agencies are calling for greater efforts to ensure gender equality and end hunger and poverty.
…
You may not particularly recall Nov. 16, but Broadway actor Michael Luwoye will never forget it.
It was a Wednesday and he certainly earned his salary that day. Luwoye played the title role in the mega-hit musical “Hamilton” at the matinee and then suited up a few hours later to play Aaron Burr that evening.
“I knew that this would happen, at some point. I was prepped and a little excited to do that. So it was one of those moments of just, ‘Let’s just go!'” he said. “It was much more exhilarating than I’d imagined it would be.”
Luwoye is the first person to play both pivotal roles on the same day, and audiences across the country will soon be getting a chance to see why he was entrusted with the responsibilities.
The 26-year-old Alabama native stars as Alexander Hamilton in the “Hamilton” national tour, which kicks off this month with a 21-week stand in San Francisco, followed by a 21-week engagement in Los Angeles.
“It’s incredible how much people love this show and they haven’t seen it. So it warms my heart to know that more people will be able to see it with this tour,” Luwoye said.
Luwoye is the fifth actor to play Hamilton and promises a strong take on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s striving Founding Father. “My Hamilton is pretty gritty. I feel like that fire that Hamilton has, I feel like I capture that very well,” he said.
Thomas Kail, the Tony Award-winning director of “Hamilton,” said he watched and listened to Luwoye audition for Hamilton with a memorable take on the striving song “My Shot.”
“It was one of those moments when you sit up straight in your chair and you know that you are witnessing something,” said Kail. “We throw a lot of material at people when we’re auditioning and there are certain people who rise to meet that. And he just rose to meet it.”
Miranda’s multiple award-winning take on the nation’s first U.S. treasury secretary has a varied score, ranging from pop ballads to rap battles to sexy R&B. It has been cheered for reclaiming the nation’s founding story with a multicultural cast.
Luwoye, born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, went to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and decided to make performing a career as a junior in college. His credits include playing a Ugandan dreamer in off-Broadway’s “Invisible Thread” and Peter Tosh in a bio-musical of Bob Marley in Maryland.
When “Hamilton” was first being created downtown, he initially auditioned for the dual roles of Hercules Mulligan/James Madison. He didn’t get it – the roles went to Okieriete Onaodowan – but Luwoye kept auditioning, learning new characters and eventually impressing with his Hamilton and Burr.
Luwoye got the call that he’d won the part of the Hamilton alternate on Broadway when he was working as a caterer. “I was in the middle of putting on my tuxedo,” he said. “Once I hung up the phone, I was like, ‘I have a lot of words to learn.'”
Then came that pivotal winter day when on the same day he played both the chatty, workaholic Hamilton and his political nemesis, the sly and careful Burr, which he considers a harder part. Luwoye said doing both made the show more clear.
“Hamilton and Burr onstage mirror each other,” he said. “Hamilton gets to express a lot more and is very, very fast – that fire is lit under him and he just goes. Burr has the same drive but has to do it a lot slower. The story is not about him. He’s telling the story and so his moments are not the priority in the storytelling.”
Luwoye has packed up his Brooklyn apartment and flown to San Francisco where company members include Joshua Henry as Burr and Rory O’Malley as King George III. “I don’t really have words for this, to be very honest,” he said.
One thing is certain: His catering days are done.
“I think so,” he said with a smile. “I think so.”
…
A lawyer for Scarlett Johansson’s husband Romain Dauriac says he’s “shocked” that the star filed for divorce.
Johansson’s filing in a New York City court on Tuesday states that her marriage to Dauriac is “irretrievably broken.” The move follows a January announcement that the couple split last summer after less than two years of marriage.
Johansson asks for joint custody of the couple’s toddler daughter in the filing, but also wants the child to live with her. Dauriac’s lawyer, Hal Mayerson, says he’s taken aback by the request because he has been the “primary parent” for Rose while Johansson has been involved with her career.
Johansson’s representatives and attorneys didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Johansson was previously wed to actor Ryan Reynolds from 2008 to 2011.
When the Trump administration issued its executive order in Janurary restricting travelers from certain countries, many tech companies and their employees were quick to express their objections.
But now, with the new executive order out limiting travel to the U.S. for people from six countries, the response from Silicon Valley has been largely muted.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, Facebook and Microsoft has so far remained quiet.
In reaction to the first travel executive order, the three companies were among 100 U.S. tech firms that filed a legal brief in opposition. At the time, Google said 76 of its employees were affected by the executive order.
Still, some firms, such as Uber, Lyft, Mozilla and Airbnb, were quick to express their objections to Monday’s executive order.
Lyft, the ride-hailing firm, plans to meet with the American Civil Liberties Group this week to discuss how “we can further support their efforts,” Logan Green, Lyft’s CEO, said in a statement. The company gave the civil liberties organization $1 million in January.
“Our sentiment has not changed: President (Donald) Trump’s immigration ban is unjust and wrong,” an Uber spokesperson said. “We will continue to stand up for those in the Uber community affected.”
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted a tribute to his grandfather, “Thinking of great grandfather Issac Benioff who came to US from Kiev as Refugee. W/O him no @Salesforce (2M jobs/200B GDP) or@GameOfThrones!” (Benioff’s cousin, David, is the co-creator of the hit TV series.)
Tech lobbying group and trade organizations have largely stayed mum about the limited travel ban.
One exception is TechNet, which represents tech firms such as Facebook and Apple. It put out a statement this week saying that “unfortunately, just like the first order, this new policy singles out individuals based on their country of origin and will adversely impact technology workers who live and work in our nation.”
The industry has been anxiously waiting for the Trump administration’s revamp of the H-1B visa program, which Silicon Valley uses to hire skilled workers. Late last week, the administration jettisoned an aspect of the H-1B visa application process called “premium processing,” which allowed companies to pay extra for their visa applications to be expedited.
That change underscored the uncertainty in the industry over how the Trump administration will ultimately handle both work visas and travel restrictions.
“What’s next?” said Evan Engstrom, executive director of Engine, an advocacy and research group focused on tech startups.
“What everyone is concerned about is what anti-immigration policies are going to be more expansive,” Engstrom said.
It’s a point echoed by a Yahoo executive.
“American businesses like Yahoo need certainty, particularly around the ability to hire and retain top talent. A piecemeal approach leaves question marks for companies and employees,” April Boyd, a Yahoo vice president and head of global public policy, said in a statement. “We encourage the administration to work with Congress on a thoughtful, lasting approach to bring positive change to the current immigration system.”
Each April 1, the U.S. holds a lottery for 65,000 H-1B visas and 20,000 additional visas for foreign students with master’s degrees. Last year, there were requests for more than 200,000, a record figure.
But critics say skilled-worker visa programs have hurt American workers. Companies have used them, they say, to hire foreign workers who are not highly skilled and who are paid lower than market rate wages.
The biggest users of the H-1B program have been outsourcing firms that provide IT consulting.
…
Staying up late into the night, Lilia Lobato Martinez watched endless YouTube videos to teach herself the computer code she used to help build her prize-winning Ool app for volunteers in Guadalajara, Mexico.
In her country, she is usually the only woman in tech competitions, which often hand out men’s T-shirts to the winners.
Now the 18-year-old electrical engineering student is using the $10,000 she won for her app in last year’s international girls-only Technovation competition to further develop Ool, which has so far linked over 1,000 volunteers with 20 non-profit groups in Mexico’s second-biggest city.
“A lot of people were constantly complaining everything’s wrong, but I found that no one was going out to the street to volunteer,” said Lobato. “So I decided to develop an app that’s a compendium of all the non-profit organizations, so we can learn what Mexico is building.”
A male-dominated field
With plans to eventually set up a center to teach children to code, she said many of her female friends shied away from IT development because it was male-dominated. Only four out of 40 students on her degree course are women, she pointed out.
Across Latin America, the participation of girls and women in technology and science has lagged far behind men, experts say.
And while awareness of the need to correct the imbalance is growing, social and economic pressures mean many are still pushed into other areas or expected to start work straight after school rather than going into higher education.
“Boys think it’s easy for them and they expect to be smart in technology … it’s not expected for girls, and that’s reinforced by the education system quite often,” said Gloria Bonder, Buenos Aires-based UNESCO chair on women, science and technology in Latin America.
The portrayal of women in the media, and a lack of role models also contribute to making it a system-wide problem, added Bonder, who is working on a Central American pilot project to incorporate gender equality into science and technology education.
While 44 percent of all science research positions — including social sciences — in the region are held by women, they are under-represented in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), according to UNESCO.
For example, in Peru and Colombia, around a third of natural science researchers are women, but they account for just a quarter of engineering and technology researchers.
Now a number of projects are striving to improve access for girls and give them the skills and confidence to compete in those jobs.
Developers’ boot camp
One of these is the Laboratoria coding academy in Lima, which spots talent “where no one else is looking,” said its chief executive, Mariana Costa Checa.
More than 1,000 women applied for 70 places at its intensive boot camp where candidates from low-income backgrounds train as front-end web developers.
The application process involves a series of rigorous tests, alongside interviews with candidates’ families to reduce the drop-out rate for the course, which also runs in Santiago, Mexico City and the Peruvian city of Arequipa, and helps participants land jobs with companies such as IBM.
Along with computer programs like JavaScript, it teaches workplace skills that are crucial for women who have little experience of formal-sector employment, said Costa.
She expects some Laboratoria graduates will go on to develop technical solutions for problems in their communities.
“The first thing we look for is a job, because it gives them economic stability, and for our average student, it triples their income,” said Costa.
It also gives them “a new perspective in life,” she added. “It starts changing the way they look at the world — and I think there’s enormous value in then bringing that change to their own communities.”
Many girls are on their own
With many girls from poor families under pressure to start earning as soon as they finish school, Rebeca Vargas, president of the U.S.-Mexico Foundation, said most of those who signed up for the international STEM mentoring program she helped set up in Mexico’s Puebla state did so without telling their parents.
Nearly all are now studying STEM subjects at college or university.
“Some of the girls we worked with last year had to sell bread and food on the street to be able to earn money to eat,” said Vargas, whose foundation developed the program with Mexico’s public education secretariat and the New York Academy of Sciences.
Girls take a different route
Families often expect girls to pay their way at home but not to seek senior positions at corporations or well-paid jobs.
“They’re supposed to work but they’re not supposed to be educated,” Vargas said.
Wendy Arellano Martinez, who won a scholarship to study biotechnology engineering at the prestigious Monterrey Technology Institute after the mentoring program, is now part of a team developing a project to make spectacle frames from recycled plastic bottles for older people on low incomes.
“We’re going to be looking for funds from organizations or foundations to help us distribute our products to people who need them but don’t have the resources,” said the 18-year-old student from Puebla. “I want to give the same support that I received.”
…
Jackie Chan says letting more Hollywood movies into the Chinese market would pressure Chinese filmmakers to make better films.
China sets a quota on the number of foreign movies allowed to be shown in the country, trying to fend off a cinematic wave that could swamp local filmmakers and loosen the ruling Communist Party’s grip on culture.
However, competition can be good, Chan said.
“It is this pressure that makes our filmmakers work harder and shoot better films,” Chan told reporters at a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday. “If we had shot our own films behind closed doors without any competition, we wouldn’t have had the growth in box office we have today.”
The Hong Kong action star is a member of the official advisory body to the national legislature, which is meeting this week in the Chinese capital.
Negotiators from China and the U.S. are expected to reach a new agreement this year on how many foreign films to allow into China, now the world’s the second-biggest movie market after North America. An expanded quota would mean more competition for domestic films, which last year accounted for 58 percent of the total box office, or 26.7 billion yuan ($3.8 billion).
In 2012, then-Vice President Xi Jinping and then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden negotiated a five-year deal to allow 34 foreign films to be shown in Chinese cinemas each year on a revenue-sharing basis. State media reports have suggested that a new deal could see the quota increased by 10 films or more.
In addition to the quota, a handful of extra Hollywood movies were let in last year to try to boost a disappointing slowdown in box office receipts.
Apart from expanding the quota, Hollywood executives hope to increase their share of ticket sales in China from the current 25 percent. They receive 40 percent of ticket revenues in other markets.
It’s unclear how much effort President Donald Trump’s administration will put into promoting Hollywood’s interests in China. Trump has been criticized by various Hollywood stars and fired off his own insults at others.
…
Two of the most celebrated actors of their generation, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, will star together for the first time in new Steven Spielberg political drama “The Post,” according to Hollywood trade magazine Variety.
The film will focus on the Washington Post’s publication of the 1971 Pentagon Papers, which made headlines around the world when the newspaper’s editor and publisher challenged the U.S. federal government over their right to publish them.
Twice Oscar winner Hanks will play the editor, Ben Bradlee, while triple Oscar winner Streep will take on the role of the publisher, Kay Graham, according to Variety.
No dates for filming were revealed in the report, with award-laden director Spielberg currently in post-production on science-fiction action movie, “Ready Player One,” which is due to hit theaters in March 2018.
Streep was branded an “overrated actress” by U.S. President Donald Trump after she criticized him for belittling a disabled journalist at the Golden Globes in January.
…
Africa’s largest film festival, Fespaco, recently celebrated its 25th edition. The main venue, as always, was the old and respectable Cine Burkina, in the heart of the capital Ouagadougou. The city used to have at least nine dedicated cinemas — now only two remain.
It is a picture that is repeated across the continent.
In Senegal, don’t go looking for the Cinema de Paris, the old film temple at the Place de l’Independence in downtown Dakar. It’s gone. It was knocked down in 2011, and the hole it left behind was filled with hotels and office blocks.
And in the Cameroonian capital Yaounde, the number of cinemas is …
“Zero. In Yaounde, we’re three million [people] but we don’t have a single functioning cinema,” said Cameroonian culture journalist Parfait Tabapsi.
The arrival of DVDs and the failure of the big cinemas to go digital are two of the reasons for the demise in West Africa.
People can watch the latest Hollywood flicks — often pirated, of course — for a pittance on TVs at little neighborhood viewing spots, but try to find any African films, besides perhaps a bit of Nollywood, and you will be disappointed.
Changing that is at the heart of Tabapsi’s work in Cameroon with an organization called Mobile Digital Cinema.
“Our aim is to bring movies to the places where they cannot go,” he said. “Because there’s no communication means, there’s no electricity, the roads are bad. … But people need to see artists and directors that tell the story of Africa. So we buy the film rights and screen the films for free.”
And now, belatedly, the old-fashioned cinema is catching up.
Fespaco joined the digital age two editions ago, when it announced that directors were no longer required to deliver their films in the expensive and cumbersome 33-mm format.
It’s a shift that can also be seen elsewhere in the industry.
Young Ivorian film director and actress Kadhy Toure has proven that home-grown movies can be made, and can make money.
Her film, L’Interprete, is the biggest box office hit in Ivorian history.
“In Ivory Coast, we only have one big company that has three cinemas,” Toure said. “They were blown away. They kept asking me: How did you do it? This is the first time that they see a line of people just wanting to see an African film.”
The film is about the many twists and turns in the love life of an Abidjan woman who works as an interpreter. It’s a story, Toure says, about us — and that’s why people queue around the block to see it.
Toure says a sequel is on the way. Elsewhere, her fellow African directors are working equally hard to have their films shown — in their countries.
The award-winning Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun single-handedly revived Le Normandie, in the capital N’Djamena. And in Burkina Faso, another mythical cinema, Guimbi, in the country’s second-largest city of Bobo Dioulasso, is under reconstruction, according to the project’s spokeswoman Rosalie Zida.
Reconstruction of the cinema — the only one in the city — started in mid-2015 and is the initiative of local filmmakers, along with the help of friends in Belgium and France. One hall will open later this year, Zida says, and the full complex will be finished in 2018.
And, in Ouagadougou, this year’s Fespaco coincided with the opening of a new screening venue, the Canal Olympia. It is part of a series of multifunctional cultural venues owned by the French chain Canal+ and already present in Conakry, Guinea.
So what is the takeaway, as Fespaco goes into its habitual two-year slumber? That mostly private initiatives are helping to resurrect African cinema, and that this applies to the buildings and to what is shown on the big screens. Produce it — and they will come.
…
A German court rejected a temporary injunction against Facebook on Tuesday in a case brought by a Syrian refugee who sued the social networking site for failing to remove faked posts linking him to crimes and militant attacks.
The Wuerzburg district court said in a preliminary ruling that Facebook is neither a “perpetrator nor a participant” in what it said was “undisputable defamation” by Facebook users, but simply acting as a hosting provider that is not responsible for preemptively blocking offensive content under European law.
The posts in dispute featured a picture showing Anas Modamani, a 19-year-old from Damascus, taking a selfie with Chancellor Angela Merkel in September 2015 at a refugee shelter in the Berlin district of Spandau.
Modamani’s image was subsequently shared on Facebook on anonymous accounts, alongside posts falsely claiming he was responsible for the Brussels airport bombing of March 2016 and setting on fire a homeless man in December last year by six migrants at an underground station in Berlin.
The court rejected the need for a temporary injunction sought by Modamani to require Facebook to go beyond measures the company had taken to block defamatory images of him for Facebook users in Germany using geo-blocking technology.
In a statement following the decision, Facebook expressed concern for Modamani’s predicament but said the court’s ruling showed the company acted quickly to block access to defamatory postings, once they had been reported by Modamani’s lawyer.
The case has been closely watched as Germany, a frequent critic of Facebook, is preparing legislation to force the social networking website to remove “hate speech” from its web pages within 24 hours or face fines.
After the ruling, Modamani’s lawyer in the case, Chan-jo Jun, told a news conference he was disappointed such imagery continued to circulate online and more must be done to force Facebook to delete hate-filled content on its own accord.
“We have to decide whether we want to accept that Facebook can basically do whatever it wants or whether German law, and above all the removal of illegal contents in Germany, will be enforced. If we want that we need new laws,” Jun said.
Modamani’s complaint maintained that defamatory images based on the selfie posted to Facebook were still viewable online outside of Germany, or by users within Germany using a sophisticated Tor browser.
But the court found that the risk of average German users seeing the illegal content was not sufficiently credible and therefore a temporary injunction was unnecessary at this stage.
The ruling said there remained a legitimate issue over whether it was technically feasible for Facebook to do more to block such images, but this would require testimony by experts.
Tuesday’s decision is subject to appeal within one month of the yet-to-be-published written judgment, a court statement said. Jun declined to say whether an appeal was planned, saying the decision remained up to his client.
…
IOC member Frank Fredericks has stepped down from his role overseeing the 2024 Olympic bidding process after a $300,000 payment from a banned track official was revealed.
Fredericks says “Paris and Los Angeles are presenting two fantastic candidatures and I do not wish to become a distraction.”
The Namibian sprinter, a four-time Olympic silver medalist, says stepping aside as IOC evaluation chairman is “in the best interests” of the bidding process.
Fredericks would have led an April 23-25 visit to Los Angeles.
He also will skip the September hosting vote.
Last Friday, Fredericks said he contacted the IOC Ethics Commission ahead of French daily Le Monde reporting that a company linked to him was paid $299,300 on Oct. 2, 2009, the day Rio de Janeiro won 2016 Olympic hosting rights.
Fredericks denies wrongdoing.
…
The Oklahoma City bombing nearly 22 years ago was an act of domestic terror by U.S. military veteran Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols. The bombing destroyed one third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people and injuring 680 others. In his documentary, Oklahoma City, filmmaker Barak Goodman revisits the bombing as the first major domestic terrorist attack in the United States on April 19, 1995.
It was the number of civilians killed – especially the 15 children, four of them infants, crushed inside the building’s day care center – that made this terrorist attack by a massive fertilizer bomb so heinous for many Americans. Many films have recounted the story, but Goodman’s documentary treats the Oklahoma City bombing as a springboard to examine the roots of America’s ultra-right militia and to analyze the makeup of homegrown American terrorism.
History of suspicion
“It goes all the way back to the founding of the Republic,” the filmmaker told VOA. “The Republic was founded on the suspicion of government.” Goodman says many of these extreme separatists believe in white supremacy and in unregulated freedom to keep and bear arms so that they can protect themselves from outsiders and the government.
In the documentary, former militia member Kerry Noble explains the ideology. “The government is an enemy of the people, and in this war it’s an all or nothing. We’re either gonna win as the white race or we’re gonna lose.”
Oklahoma City points to two events in the late 20th century that bolstered separatist ideologies: The Ruby Ridge incident on August 21, 1992, and the Waco siege in Waco, Texas, between February 28 and April 19, 1993. In both cases, federal and local government agents clashed with American separatists. The deadly incidents were fueled by the authorities’ demand to search the premises for illegal firearms.
The Waco siege was particularly deadly. The compound belonged to a group known as the Branch Davidians, led by David Koresh. When federal authorities sent in armed agents and armored vehicles to end the standoff, a fire engulfed the compound, killing 82 people, including David Koresh. Sixty-two of the victims were women and children.
Birth of an extremist
Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran disillusioned by the government during his tour in Iraq, was among those who went to witness the siege. According to the documentary, McVeigh was radicalized by those events and by an extremist publication called The Turner Diaries.
“It’s a Talisman for the far right, even to this day, but especially back in the ’90s and ’80s it was the ‘Bible’ of this movement,” says Goodman. “It’s a novel about a small group of ‘patriots,’ ‘white patriots’ who retake the government from the Jews and blacks who have infiltrated it, essentially. It’s a racist creed and as I said, it is very poorly done. Intriguingly though, it describes the bombing of the FBI, the culmination of the novel, and it really lays out a recipe on how to build a bomb like this.”
That bomb is very similar to the one McVeigh used in Oklahoma City.
“McVeigh was deeply, deeply influenced by this book,” Goodman adds. “He sold it in gun shows, he quoted it, when he was arrested he had several pages of it in a folder beside him in a car. And it wasn’t just McVeigh, it was all through this movement. People were really exorcised, impassioned, inflamed by this novel.”
The documentary shows McVeigh obsessed with his guns and with the idea that the government was going to take them away. The film also points out that his exposure to the war in Iraq accelerated his feeling of mistrust of the U.S. government.
“The way he put it made it sound he was emphatic towards the dead Iraqi soldiers that he killed. I really don’t think that’s the case,” says Barak Goodman. Instead, says the filmmaker, it was McVeigh’s mistrust of the U.S. government, how it had blundered into Iraq and his idea of the U.S. government as a bully, and McVeigh, says Goodman, hated bullies. The Ruby Ridge and Waco stand-offs reinforced that idea in his mind.
Homegrown extremism
According to the documentary, there are 500 militia organizations in the U.S. today. Goodman believes they are as radicalized as ever. “Some of them have gotten rid of their camouflage outfits and put on suits and ties, but really the rhetoric has been virtually the same for 100 years or more. ‘It’s a whites-only country, it should be a whites-only country, the federal government is in the hands of Jews, blacks, it’s a conspiracy.’”
Goodman says it is a misconception to believe that this is a movement of white poor disenfranchised people. Certainly, he says, many are, but there also many professionals feeling a loss of entitlement, a loss of privilege and power. The filmmaker stresses that these people operate outside political parties and share a deep mistrust of the Washington political establishment.
But Goodman cautions these extremists are not de facto terrorists. He says it takes a confluence of opportunity and a warped personality, often a lone individual, to commit a terrorist act of a scale such as the Oklahoma City bombing.
“McVeigh was a shock to most people in the FBI. It would be less of a shock today. But it’s very hard to prevent these things. One of the takeaways from our film and audiences who have seen it have been amazed at how really easy it was to do this. It cost about $6000, it was one guy, reading some literature,” says the filmmaker.
Goodman says in a politically polarized America, the possibility for future domestic terrorist attacks is high.
“If you talk to people from the Southern Law Poverty Center, which tracks these groups, they are pounding on the wall, they are ringing the bell, they are saying, ‘This is an ongoing threat, it’s threat level midnight, it’s rising, it’s whatever the highest color is on the chart,’” he says.
The SPLC reports, “the number of hate groups in the United States rose for a second year in a row in 2016 as the radical right was energized by the candidacy of Donald Trump.” “The most dramatic growth,” it states, “was the near-tripling of anti-Muslim hate groups – from 34 in 2015 to 101 last year.” Also, a wave of bomb threats and vandalism has rattled Jewish institutions around the country, but especially in the South. “Right now, minorities feel particularly threatened,” says the Oklahoma City filmmaker.
“There is a very big difference between even hard gun rights activists and terrorists. I want to make that clear,” says Goodman. “I would take issue with the idea that they have infiltrated the administration. But it is a little galling to see the really mono focus on terrorists from abroad, terrorists influenced by ideas from abroad, whatever those ideas might be, and not on any real discussion about home-grown terrorism which has always been with us and which is not going away and which is actually — if you look at the numbers of the incidents — rivaling or exceeding those by that other group,” he adds.
Goodman hopes his film, Oklahoma City, will call attention to this rising threat and contribute to the conversation on the inherent dangers of domestic terrorism.
…
Actor Alec Baldwin said that his impersonation of U.S. President Donald Trump on NBC’s sketch show “Saturday Night Live” has revived his “dead” comedy career after he wrapped up sitcom “30 Rock” in 2012.
“I didn’t realize in the comedy terms that I was dead,” Baldwin told Reuters on Monday when asked if he felt he was entering a new era with his comedy.
“Maybe I was in a coma … now I’m waking up from a coma and now I’m ready to do some comedy.”
The actor was promoting his latest film, DreamWorks’ animated comedy “The Boss Baby,” out in theaters on March 31, in which he voices a suit-wearing baby manager of a corporation for babies who is adopted by a family to undertake a covert mission.
It has been nearly five years since Baldwin, 58, concluded his six-year tenure as the charming corporate boss Jack Donaghy in NBC’s quirky comedy series “30 Rock.”
Since then, he has appeared in a handful of movies in supporting roles, but the actor saw a new surge in popularity when he took over as Trump on “Saturday Night Live” (SNL) last October, ahead of November’s U.S. presidential elections.
Baldwin quipped that his comedy career “did die” but that “I’m being reincarnated. As Trump! Oh God!”
Viewer ratings have soared for “Saturday Night Live” since Baldwin started portraying Trump in a series of skits mocking the billionaire reality TV star-turned-politician as a dim-witted commander-in-chief with a short attention span, an oversized-ego and a Twitter addiction.
Trump criticized the NBC show in December, calling it “totally unwatchable” and a “hit-job.”
Asked whether he felt playing the president took a toll on him, Baldwin said the challenge of the role was that it would “delight some people and offend other people.”
“A large plurality of the country voted for Trump as president, and I think many of them are people that are not fond of the way Trump is treated, not just by ‘Saturday Night Live’ but the comedy cosmos in general,” he said.
“I think for me playing Trump has been, it’s been a fun experience because it’s like going home when I do SNL.”
Pop star George Michael died from natural causes, according to a British coroner.
Specifically, the singer died of “dilated cardiomyopathy with myocarditis and fatty liver,” according to Darren Salter senior coroner for Oxfordshire, where Michael died last Christmas at the age of 53.
The heart conditions named interfere with the heart’s ability to pump blood and cause inflammation of the heart muscle.
Since Michael died of natural causes, there will be no investigation.
Michael had a long history of drug and alcohol abuse.
Born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, he once played music on the London underground train system before forming Wham! with Andrew Ridgeley in 1981.
Michael enjoyed immense popularity early in his career as a member of Wham! with hits such as “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and “Careless Whisper.”
As a solo artist, he developed into a more serious singer and songwriter, lauded by critics for his tremendous vocal range. Some of his solo hits included “Father Figure” and “Freedom.”
In 2011, Michael postponed a series of concerts after being hospitalized with pneumonia. He later said it had been “touch and go” as to whether he lived.
Michael disclosed he was gay in 1998 after being arrested in a public toilet in Beverly Hills, California for engaging in a lewd act.
…
Facebook has launched a tool it says will help flag so-called fake news.
The tool adds a “disputed news” flag on stories that have been deemed fake by what Facebook says are third parties, including Snopes, Politifact and Factcheck.org.
Facebook announced the disputed news flag in December, but it appears it only has gone live in the past day or so, according to news reports.
If a story is flagged by some of Facebook’s 1.86 billion users, the company will determine which to send to the third parties. If the story is fake, it will still be on Facebook, but will carry a notice that it was disputed along with an explanation about why.
Disputed stories can still be shared, but users will be warned they are sharing fake news.
According to USA Today, one fake news story about how President Trump’s Android phone was the source of White House leaks came from a fake news site called “The Seattle Tribune.” The story now appears with a disputed flag as well as links to third party explanations as to why.
A May 2016 survey from the Nieman Lab said 44 percent of Americans get their news from Facebook.