Month: February 2018

Hailing the Pyeongchang Olympics as “the games of new horizons”, the International Olympics Committee declared the 2018 winter games closed Sunday.

In his speech at the Games’ closing ceremony, IOC president Thomas Bach praised North and South Korea for marching together during the opening ceremony, saying, “You have shown how sport brings people together in our fragile world; you have shown how sport builds bridges,” Bach told the Korean athletes.

Bach handed the Olympic flag to the mayor of Beijing, which will host the next winter Olympics in 2022.  The Chinese capital will be the first city to host both the summer and winter Olympic games, after it hosted the summer edition in 2008.

Following his closing speech, Bach posed for photos with a few standout athletes, including Tongan cross-country skier Pita Taufatofua, who attended both ceremonies bare-chested, despite the cold.

South Korean-Chinese boy band EXO performed for the closing ceremony, which included a drone show, fireworks, and the extinguishing of the Olympic torch.

In Photos: Closing Ceremony of 2018 Winter Olympics

President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump lead the U.S. delegation to the closing ceremonies, sitting in the same box as President Moon Jae-In of South Korea and Kim Yong Chol — vice chairman of North Korea’s ruling Worker’s Party Central Committee.

Yonhap New Agency reported the North Korea delegation said Pyongyang was willing to hold talks with the United States, but the White House denied that anyone in the U.S. delegation spoke with North Korean officials at the ceremony.

“Ivanka Trump and General Brooks watched in President Moon’s box and Ivanka sat next to the first lady of the Republic of Korea … There was no interaction with the North Korean delegation,” a senior administration official said.

Steve Herman contributed to this report.

 
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It began with politics. It ends with … politics.

In between, humanity’s most extraordinary feats of winter athletic prowess unfolded, revealing the expected triumphs but also stars most unlikely — from favorites like Mikaela Shiffrin, Shaun White and Lindsey Vonn to sudden surprise legends like Czech skier-snowboarder Ester Ledecka and the medal-grabbing “Garlic Girls,” South Korea’s hometown curling favorites.

Pyeongchang closes its chapter of the 122-year-old modern Olympic storybook on Sunday night with countless tales to tell — tales of North Korea and Russia, of detente and competitive grit and volunteerism and verve, of everything from an uncomfortable viral outbreak to an athlete’s boozy joyride. 

And above it all: unforgettable experiences for meticulously trained athletes from around the world, all gathered on a mountainous plateau on the eastern Korean Peninsula to test for themselves — and demonstrate to the world — just how excellent they could be.

“We have been through a lot so that we could blaze a trail,” said Kim Eun-jung, skip of the South Korean women’s curling team, which captured global renown as the “Garlic Girls” — all from a garlic-producing Korean hometown. They made a good run for gold before finishing with runner-up silver.

Closing ceremonies

As the sun set on the games’ final day, people began trickling into Olympic Stadium to encounter a far different atmosphere that showed one of the games’ memorable arcs: the weather. Temperatures, so bitterly frigid at the outset that some spectators had to take cover from opening-ceremony winds, were nearly 20 degrees warmer (11 degrees Celsius) as the evening began.

Other trailblazers: Chloe Kim, American snowboarder extraordinaire. The U.S. women’s hockey team and men’s curlers, both of which claimed gold. And the Russian hockey team, with its nail-biting, overtime victory against Germany. 

That these games would be circumscribed by politics was a given from the outset because of regional rivalries. North Korea, South Korea, Japan and China are neighbors with deep, sometimes twisted histories that get along uneasily with each other in this particular geographic cul-de-sac.

But there was something more this time around. Hanging over the entire games was the saga — or opportunity, if you prefer — of a delicate diplomatic dance between the Koreas, North and South, riven by war and discord and an armed border for the better part of a century. 

The games started with a last-minute flurry of agreements to bring North Koreans to South Korea to compete under one combined Koreas banner. Perish the thought, some said, but Moon Jae-in’s government stayed the course. By the opening ceremony, a march of North and South into the Olympic Stadium was watched by the world, and by dozens of North Korean cheerleaders applauding in calibrated synchronicity. 

Also watching was an equally extraordinary, if motley, crew. Deployed in a VIP box together were Moon, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s envoy sister, Kim Yo Jong. The latter two, at loggerheads over North Korea’s nuclear program, didn’t speak, and the world watched the awkwardness.

What followed was a strong dose of athletic diplomacy: two weeks of global exposure for the Korean team, particularly the women’s hockey squad, which trained for weeks with North and South side by side getting along, taking selfies and learning about each other. 

On Sunday night, the closing ceremony will bookend those politics with U.S. President Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, in attendance as well as Kim Yong Chol, vice chairman of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party Central Committee and a man suspected of masterminding a lethal 2010 military attack on the South.

There’s no reason to believe that the uneasy VIP-box scene will repeat itself. There’s also no reason to believe it will not. But the outcome could provide a coda to an extraordinary two weeks of Olympic political optics — and offer hints of the Trump administration’s approach in coming weeks as it tries to get Pyongyang to give up its nuclear weapons and deals with the North-South thaw.

That wasn’t all when it came to these odd games. Let’s not forget Russia — or, we should say, “Olympic Athletes from Russia,” the shame-laced moniker they inherited after a doping brouhaha from the 2014 Sochi Games doomed them to a non-flag-carrying Pyeongchang Games. 

But two more Russian athletes tested positive in Pyeongchang in the past two weeks. So on Sunday morning, the IOC refused to reinstate the team in time for the closing but left the door open for near-term redemption from what one exasperated committee member called “this entire Russia drama.” 

What’s next for the games? Tokyo in Summer 2022, then Beijing — Summer host in 2008 — staging an encore, this time for a Winter Games. With the completion of the 2018 Pyeongchang Games, that Olympic trinity marks one-third of a noteworthy Olympic run by Asia.

For those keeping score at home: That means four of eight Olympic Games between 2008 and 2022 will have taken place on the Asian continent. Not bad for a region that hosted only four games in the 112 years of modern Olympic history before that — Tokyo in 1964, Sapporo in 1972, Seoul in 1988 and Nagano in 1998. Japan and China will, it’s likely, be highly motivated to outdo South Korea (and each other). 

Meantime, the Olympians departing Monday leave behind a Korean Peninsula full of possibility for peace, or at least less hostility. 

The steps taken by North and South toward each other this month are formidable but fluid. People are cautiously optimistic: the governor of Gangwon, the border province where Pyeongchang is located, suggested Sunday that the 2021 Asian Games could be co-hosted by both Koreas. 

It might not happen. But it could. That could be said about pretty much anything at an Olympic Games, inside the rings and out. Corporate and political and regimented though it may be, that’s what makes it still the best game in town for an athletic thrill every other year — and sometimes a political one, too.
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Men and women swayed to music at Saudi Arabia’s first jazz festival on Friday, the second of a three-day outdoor event that showcases the Kingdom’s recent efforts of shedding its conservative image.

Locals and foreigners flocked to the festival to watch bands from Riyadh, Beirut and New Orleans. The crowd sang along when Lebanon’s Chady Nashef performed the Eagles’ “Hotel California” — an unusual moment in the Islamic country after the religious police last year condemned concerts that feature singing as harmful and corrupting.

On Thursday, the General Entertainment Authority announced it will stage more than 5,000 shows, festivals and concerts in 2018, double the number of last year.

The entertainment plans are largely motivated by economics, part of a reform program to diversify the economy away from oil and create jobs for young Saudis.

They also mark a change in social Saudi life and the gradual relaxing of gender segregation, although restrictions persist.

At the festival, the area in front of the stage was divided into two sections — one for men and one for women — but people mixed in family seating areas on the side and in the back.

“I am so so happy I got up from bed this morning and went to a jazz festival and performed in front of a crowd like me, my countrymen,” said Saleh Zaid, a Saudi musician from the local band Min Riyadh. “It’s a feeling I just cannot explain to you.”

While some showed up out of a love for jazz, many came to enjoy the chance to hear music at an outdoor event, with food trucks, a vintage car display and a relaxed atmosphere.

While reforms have taken place in the Kingdom, with a 35-year cinema ban lifted and women set to drive later this year, the majority of the country is conservative, which is reflected in government decisions.

Earlier this month, authorities detained a man after a video of him dancing with a woman in the street went viral.

But on Friday, women in abayas, loose-fitting robes, moved with the music, unconcerned with the possible backlash.

“This festival shows that the leadership here wants to let the people open up, to see more things, more cultures,” said Salem al-Ahmed, who with his stylish young friends jumped at the opportunity to attend his city’s first-of-a-kind festival.
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A North Korean women’s ice hockey player who defected in 1997 was flooded with memories of her tough sports training as she watched a team from North and South Korea skate through their Olympic matches earlier this month.

Speaking with VOA Korea after the team’s fifth and final loss earlier this week, Hwangbo Young lauded the effort it took the blended team to come together to play as a single force, given that they began practicing together less than a month before the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

“I sensed that the team wasn’t able to fully demonstrate what the players prepared,” Hwangbo said. “I heard that during practice, the North Korean players were visibly very zealous and wanted to learn from the South Korean players.” 

Neither the North Korean nor the South Korean team was a serious medal contender, but Hwangbo said the combined team did better than expected in matches, which ended Tuesday.

“I thought they would lose all games by double digits,” Hwangbo told VOA during an interview in Seoul after the team’s final loss on Tuesday. “But they did better than I first expected, although they lost all matches.”

Overcoming differences

For the first time in Olympic history, the two divided Koreas fielded a joint women’s ice hockey team with 23 players from the South and 12 from the North. The move was seen as a peace initiative led by South Korean President Moon Jae-in.

North Korea and South Korea split after Japan, which occupied Korea, surrendered to end World War II. 

Although Hwangbo hopes to see her relatives and friends who remain in North Korea, she doubts if unification will occur in her lifetime and doesn’t expect that to change because of the united hockey team.

She pointed out that despite a similar, earlier effort — the united table tennis team of South Korean Hyun Jung-hwa and North Korean Li Pun Hui that played in the 1991 World Championship in Chiba, Japan — there are still two Koreas.

At the rink, melding the teams meant overcoming differences in training and approaches to diet, and building team spirit. Off the rink, there was criticism that sports was being used as a political tool.

“With everything that happened to them, prior to the Olympics, for them to come together like this and compete like this in the Olympics, it’s remarkable,” Sarah Murray, the Canadian who coached the South Koreans, and then the joint team. 

Now coaching in South Korea, Hwangbo watched the games, which evoked memories of her training in North Korea. After her family’s defection two decades ago, she also competed against the North Korean team in the 2003 Aomori Asian Winter Games as a South Korean player. 

Her training in North Korea was tough, Hwangho recalled, very tough. There were long runs with weights, there were runs in the mountains — but there were no ice rinks.

“Unless water was poured over frozen ground to freeze into ice in the wintertime, we had to do all our tactical training on bare ground with soccer balls, volleyballs and basketballs,” she said.

​Start in hockey

Hwangbo, the daughter of two government workers, started playing hockey as a 12-year-old and was recruited by a coach from the North Korean national team. 

“At the time, I didn’t know what ice hockey was,” she said. “I just began because I liked sports. During gym class in school, a coach asked if I wanted to play in an ice hockey team. I said ‘yes’ without knowing what it was, because I liked playing sports. Later, I found out I said yes to ice hockey.” 

In 1997, Hwangbo and her family boarded a small boat and crossed the Tuman River, North Korea’s northern border, into China before settling in South Korea. 

Three years after her defection, she began playing for South Korea’s national ice hockey team and became a member of the team that played against the North Korean team in the 2003 Aomori Asian Winter Games in Japan. North Korea finished fourth and South Korea fifth.

Hwangbo has said that facing the North Korean team in Aomori was one of the most painful experiences of her life.

The initial excitement of seeing some of her former teammates after seven years dissipated as they taunted her as a traitor throughout the game, even hurling insults when she approached them for a handshake after the game.

But she said she understood their antagonism, because any signs of warmth toward her could have resulted in severe punishment when the team returned to North Korea. 
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Garrison Keillor described several sexually suggestive emails he exchanged with a former researcher who accused him of sexual misconduct as “romantic writing” that never resulted in a physical relationship, and the radio host rejected the idea that because he was her boss — and the driving force of a hugely popular radio program — it could be sexual harassment.

The woman responded, via her attorney, that Keillor’s power over her job made her afraid to say no to him.

In one of his first extended interviews since Minnesota Public Radio cut ties over the allegations against the former A Prairie Home Companion host in November, Keillor said he never had a sexual relationship with the woman, a freelance contributor to the show at the time.

“No button was unbuttoned and no zipper was unzipped,” Keillor told The Associated Press. “I never kissed her. … This was a flirtation between two writers that took place in writing.”

Keillor also downplayed his power over the woman by portraying himself as uninvolved in the mundane operations of the radio show he created nearly a half-century ago and built into a powerhouse that attracted millions of listeners nationwide each Saturday evening, spun off assorted businesses and tours, and inspired a movie.

“I was not really the boss around Prairie Home Companion,” Keillor said. “I was a writer sitting in a dim office at a typewriter, back in the old days.” He also said: “I had no control over her whatsoever. She worked at home.”

Power imbalance

The woman said in an emailed response through her attorney that Keillor “had the power to provide or take away job assignments and opportunities. He also acknowledged several times that power imbalance between us, recognizing how his conduct could be offensive when it was coming from the person for whom I work.”

She also said she wasn’t interested in anything but a “collegial” relationship with Keillor.

“He was my mentor and employer,” she said. “As such, he had power over me. Every time I said ‘no’ or tried to avoid him I feared I was saying ‘no’ to my future.”

The Associated Press does not typically name alleged victims of sexual harassment unless they have chosen to go public.

MPR spokeswoman Angie Andresen said the station stood by its handling of the claims against Keillor. In January, the company said the woman had accused Keillor of dozens of sexually inappropriate incidents over several years, including requests for sexual contact and explicit sexual communications and touching.

“Our decision was not based on flirtations or fantasies, but based on facts confirming unacceptable behavior in the workplace by a person in a position of power over someone who worked for him,” Andresen said by email.

Kelly Marinelli, founder of Solve HR Inc., a human resources consulting company in Colorado, said even when a relationship seems reciprocal, there could be problems when one person is the boss. 

“In a situation where someone has power over another person and whether or not they continue to receive work … it’s very difficult for that to be a real mutual, consensual relationship,” she said.

​AP views emails

Before the interview, Keillor’s attorneys allowed the AP to view hundreds of emails between Keillor and the woman dating from 2004 to 2017, on condition that they could be described but not quoted directly.

Some were work-related, including details from her research and Keillor’s critiques. But many were personal, sharing details about their families and emotional struggles from their home email accounts, and some were overtly sexual.

The tone began changing in 2013, as the pair began sharing more about their lives and signing off by saying they loved and missed each other. By 2014 and 2015, the emails became more amorous. They both shared wishes or fantasies of being intimate, sometimes in detail. In one July 20, 2015, email, Keillor wrote of his desire to reach into the woman’s blouse and hold her breast in his hand. Keillor was married at the time and still is.

“I agree that there are adolescent passages in there, but there were some by her and some by me,” Keillor told the AP.

“We were two writers and we wrote back and forth and sometimes we slipped into what one could call romantic writing,” he said. “But this was between two people who hardly ever laid eyes on each other.  She was never required to be in the office.”

Keillor also wrote several times about wanting to touch the woman, kiss her or be naked with her. She replied in kind. The emails also included some explicit acknowledgements by Keillor of their work relationship, with him apologizing for some of the emails and noting that he was the person she worked for — but that he didn’t feel like her boss.

One incident recalled

When MPR cut ties with Keillor in November, his public statement at the time acknowledged one incident — placing his hand on a woman’s bare back in what he portrayed as an accident. He said then it was the only incident he could remember.

A timeline provided along with the emails said it was in July 2015 when Keillor’s hand went inside her shirt and he touched her back as they embraced while at lunch. That was the same month in which he sent the email about holding her breast. In a July 2016 email, as he neared retirement, Keillor apologized to the woman; she replied that she forgave him.

Keillor was accompanied in the interview by his attorney, Eric Nilsson, who highlighted the woman’s status as a freelancer.

“There’s an important distinction between an employee and an independent contractor. This woman was an independent contractor,” he said.

Until his retirement in 2016, Keillor, 75, entertained millions weekly on A Prairie Home Companion, the show he created in 1974.

MPR faced a backlash from some listeners when it ended its relationship with him, in part because it provided scant details of the allegations against him. It later gave more details based on what the company said was a 12-page letter from the woman.

MPR has removed archived Keillor shows from its website and no longer rebroadcasts shows he hosted. It also ended broadcasts of The Writer’s Almanac, his daily reading of literary events and a poem. Talks between Keillor and MPR over transitioning their business relationship have gone nowhere since early January.
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Touch Me Not, a film about intimacy and sex that shocked some viewers with explicit scenes, won the Golden Bear prize for best film at the 68th Berlin

International Film Festival on Saturday.

Romanian director Adina Pintilie said she had not expected to win the award for her film, which blurs reality and fiction as it follows characters who seek intimacy yet also fear it.

Speaking at a news conference after collecting her Golden Bear trophy, Pintilie said the film invited viewers to feel empathy, embrace otherness and reconsider their ideas about everything. It holds a mirror up to the audience, she said.

“This is why I think for many people this film might not be comfortable but at the same time we challenge you, the viewer, to dialogue and to look at yourself,” Pintilie said.

The Silver Bear award for best director was given to U.S. director Wes Anderson for Isle of Dogs — an animated movie about a Japanese city that deports its dogs to a garbage dump island during an outbreak of canine flu.

Bill Murray, who was the voice of one of the dogs, collected the award at the gala ceremony on Anderson’s behalf.

“I never thought that I would go to work as a dog and come home with a bear,” he joked as he held the Silver Bear trophy.

Anthony Bajon received the award for best actor for his role as a drug addict who tries to kick his habit with the help of religion in Cedric Kahn’s La priere (The Prayer).

“I prayed a lot to receive a bear,” Bajon told reporters after the awards ceremony, adding: “It’s very important to show drug addicts that there is a way out of their addiction — in this movie it is the monastery, it is religion

that helps this person.”

Brun takes best actress prize

Ana Brun received the best actress award for her role as a reclusive woman who ends up taxiing older ladies around when her partner gets sent to prison in Marcelo Martinessi’s Las herederas (The Heiresses). That film also won the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer prize for a feature that opens new perspectives.

The best screenplay award was given to Manuel Alcala and Alonso Ruizpalacios for Museo (Museum), about students stealing artifacts from Mexico City’s National Museum of Anthropology in a 1985 heist that shocked the nation.

Polish director Malgorzata Szumowska’s Twarz (Mug) — about a man who has a face transplant after an accident — took the Silver Bear grand jury prize.

Elena Okopnaya won an award for outstanding artistic contribution for costume and production design in Russian director Alexey German Jr.’s biopic Dovlatov about the 20th-century writer Sergei Dovlatov.

The awards were decided by a six-person jury headed by German director Tom Tykwer. At the 11-day festival, which runs through Sunday, about 400 films are being screened. Of those, 19 were competing for the top Golden Bear prize.

The “Berlinale” is one of the oldest and most prestigious film festivals in the world. While there was no overarching theme this year, there were many films about migration and portraits of artists.
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They were little girls with dreams of Olympic gold when they started in gymnastics. Now they’re women with lifelong injuries, suffocating anxiety and debilitating eating disorders. 

They are the other victims of USA Gymnastics. 

Thirteen former U.S. gymnasts and three coaches interviewed by The Associated Press described a win-at-all-cost culture rife with verbal and emotional abuse in which girls were forced to train on broken bones and other injuries. That culture was tacitly endorsed by the sport’s governing body and institutionalized by Bela and Martha Karolyi, the husband-and-wife duo who coached America’s top female gymnasts for three decades.

The gymnasts agreed to speak to AP, some for the first time, after the recent courtroom revelations about USA Gymnastics’ former team doctor, Larry Nassar, who recently was sentenced to decades in prison for sexually assaulting young athletes for years under the guise of medical treatment.

The Karolyis’ oppressive style created a toxic environment in which a predator like Nassar was able to thrive, according to witness statements in Nassar’s criminal case and a lawsuit against USA Gymnastics, the Karolyis and others. Girls were afraid to challenge authority, Nassar was able to prey on vulnerable girls and, at the same time, he didn’t challenge the couple’s harsh training methods.

“He was their little puppet,” Jeanette Antolin, a former member of the U.S. national team who trained with the Karolyis, said. “He let us train on injuries. They got what they wanted. He got what he wanted.”

Young girls were virtually starved, constantly body shamed and forced to train with broken bones or other injuries, according to interviews and the lawsuit. Their meager diets and extreme training often delayed puberty, which some coaches believed was such a detriment that they ridiculed girls who started their menstrual cycles.

USA Gymnastics declined to answer questions for this story, and the Karolyis didn’t reply to requests for comment. The Karolyis’ Houston attorney, Gary Jewell, said the Karolyis didn’t abuse anyone.

Some female gymnasts in the U.S. were subjected to abusive training methods before the Karolyis defected from their native Romania in 1981. But other coaches and former gymnasts say the Karolyis’ early successes — starting with Romania’s Nadia Comaneci becoming the first woman gymnast awarded a perfect score in competition — validated the cutthroat attitudes that fostered widespread mistreatment of American athletes at the highest levels of women’s gymnastics.

The Karolyis, who helped USA Gymnastics win 41 Olympic medals, including 13 gold over three decades, trained hundreds of gymnasts at their complex in rural Huntsville, Texas, known as “the ranch.” They selected gymnasts for the national team and earned millions from USA Gymnastics. 

A congressional committee investigating the gymnastics scandal said in Feb. 8 letters to the Karolyis, USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic Committee that they were all “at the center of many of these failures” that allowed Nassar’s sexual abuse to persist for more than two decades.

It’s unclear what the Karolyis knew about Nassar’s sexual abuse and whether they took any action to stop it.

Martha Karolyi, in a deposition given last year as part of the lawsuit against the Karolyis and numerous others, acknowledged that “in or around June 2015” she received a phone call from the then-head of the national gymnastics organization, Steve Penny, informing her that the organization had received a complaint that Nassar had “molested a national team gymnast at the ranch.”

The deposition was included in a Feb. 14 letter to two U.S. senators from John Manly, an attorney representing Nassar victims in a lawsuit that seeks monetary damages and court oversight of USA Gymnastics.

Manly cited the deposition in accusing the sport’s governing body of lying to Congress. 

In a timeline submitted to a congressional committee investigating the scandal, the organization said it was told in mid-June of an athlete “uncomfortable” with Nassar’s treatment, but that it was not until late July 2015 that it decided to notify law enforcement “with concerns of potential sexual misconduct.”

Penny, the former USA Gymnastics chief, said in a statement that Martha Karolyi was mistaken about the timing of his call.

Texas has one of the strongest child abuse reporting laws in the nation, requiring anyone who has reason to believe abuse has occurred to immediately alert authorities. Failure to do so is a misdemeanor punishable by jail time and a fine.

In the deposition, Martha Karolyi said she did not discuss what she learned about Nassar with anyone but her husband, her lawyers and the USA Gymnastics official who called her. 

Jewell, the Karolyis’ attorney, said the couple didn’t know about any sexual assault complaints involving Nassar until Martha Karolyi was contacted by a USA Gymnastics official in the summer of 2015.
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