Day: May 8, 2022

US Senate to Vote on Abortions Rights Bill

Democrats are moving forward this week on a Senate vote on a bill that would codify abortion rights into federal law, in the wake of a leaked draft from the Supreme Court that signals a possible end to the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. As Arash Arabasadi reports, the legislation is expected to be blocked by Senate Republicans.

more

Leaked US Court Opinion Mobilizes Abortion Rights Supporters, Opponents

The U.S. Supreme Court may overturn federal protections for abortions, according to a leaked draft of an opinion expected in the next few months. That would leave the legal status of abortions up to individual states. For VOA, Deana Mitchell reports from Texas, where women are not permitted to have abortions beyond six weeks of pregnancy.

more

U2’s Bono Gives ‘Freedom’ Concert in Kyiv Metro 

Irish rock group U2’s frontman Bono and his bandmate The Edge performed a 40-minute concert in a metro station in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Sunday and praised Ukrainians fighting for their freedom from Russia.

“Your president leads the world in the cause of freedom right now … The people of Ukraine are not just fighting for your own freedom, you’re fighting for all of us who love freedom,” Bono told a crowd of up to 100 gathered inside the Khreshchatyk metro station. He was referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Russia, which calls its action in Ukraine a “special military operation,” continues to carry out missile strikes across Ukraine. However, some life has returned to Kyiv even though air raid sirens sound regularly.

Bono rallied the crowd between songs during his performance.

“This evening, 8th of May, shots will ring out in the Ukraine sky, but you’ll be free at last. They can take your lives, but they can never take your pride,” he said.

more

Centuries-old Passion Play Returns after Pandemic Break

Almost 400 years ago, the Catholic residents of a small Bavarian village vowed to perform a play of “the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ” every 10 years, if only God would spare them any further losses from the plague known as the Black Death.

Legend has it that ever since 1634, when the villagers of Oberammergau first performed their passion play, no more residents died of that pestilence or any other plagues — until 2020, when the world was hit by a new plague, the coronavirus pandemic.
Oberammergau, like so many places worldwide, suffered some COVID-19 deaths, though residents who confirmed that were unsure how many.

Another consequence: The villagers could not fulfill their vow to stage the play after a 10-year interval. It was set to open in the spring of 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic.

Now, after a two-year delay, the famous Oberammergau Passion Play is finally opening on May 14 — the 42nd staging since its long-ago debut. Almost half of the village’s residents — more than 1,800 people, including 400 children — will participate in the play about the last five days before Christ’s crucifixion.

It’s a production modernized to fit the times, stripped of antisemitic allusions and featuring a diverse cast that include refugee children and non-Christian actors.

The play will be one of the first major cultural events in Germany since the outbreak of the pandemic, with almost half a million visitors expected from Germany and all over the world, notably from the United States.

“Just a few weeks ago, many could not believe that the Passion Play would premiere,” said director Christian Stueckl, who was born in Oberammergau and has been in charge of the play for more than 30 years.

“We don’t know what COVID-19 will do, if there will be another wave,” he said. “But we have an endless desire to bring our passion play back to the stage and we are highly motivated.”

All the actors tested themselves for the virus before every rehearsal and will continue to do so for all 103 performances which run through Oct. 2, Stueckl said. They have all been letting their hair grow — and the men letting beards grow — for over a year, as tradition dictates.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine still underway, themes such as war, hunger, persecution and displacement play prominent roles in this year’s production — showing the timelessness of human suffering from 2,000 years ago and from today.

The play — which for hundreds of years reflected a conservative, Catholic outlook — has received a careful makeover to become reflective of Germany’s more diverse society. It includes a leading Muslim actor for the first time and has been purged of the many notorious antisemitic plot lines which drew widespread criticism.

“The history of the Oberammergau Passion Play as being one which manifests these antisemitic tropes — Jews as villainous, Jews as deceptive, Jews as bloodthirsty, Jews as manipulative, Jews as Christ killers — was always part of the story,” Rabbi Noam Marans told The Associated Press in a recent interview in Oberammergau.

Marans, the director for interreligious and intergroup relations for the American Jewish Committee in New York, has been advising Stueckl together with a team of Christian and Jewish American experts for several years on how to rid the play of antisemitic content.

It’s been a success story. The play no longer depicts the Jews as Christ’s killers and shows clearly that Jesus was a Jew himself. It places the story of Jesus’ last days in historical context, with all its intra-Jewish tensions and the Jews’ oppression by the Romans.

The male performers wear yarmulkes, making them clearly recognizable as Jews. Of course, there are many Christian elements as well, such as the famous choir and orchestra whose musical compositions go back to the early 19th century.

The mix of Christian and Jewish influences on the current performance is vividly illustrated during the depiction of the Last Supper, when a huge Menorah is lit on the table and the disciples of Jesus recite both Hebrew prayers and the Christian Lord’s Prayer.

“Let there be no doubt: in Oberammergau, in the play, antisemitism has no place, and it has no place in the lives of the performers either,” Stueckl said.

Along with tackling the play’s antisemitism, Stueckl made it a more inclusive performance overall.

Until the 1990s, when Stueckl took over as director, performers had to belong to one of the two major German churches, Roman Catholic or Lutheran. These days, people who have left the church, atheists, Muslims, and members of any other religious affiliation are welcome to participate as long as they are residents of Oberammergau.

Judas is played by Muslim actor Cengiz Gorur. The deputy director, Abdullah Karaca, is the son of Turkish immigrants. And several children of refugees from Africa and elsewhere, who only recently arrived in Oberammergau after fleeing their home countries, were invited to perform.

When it comes to women, there’s still some work to be done. Stueckl called the play “very male-dominated” — all leading roles are male, with the exception only of Jesus’ mother, Mary, and Mary Magdalene.

Asked whether he could imagine a future performance in which women played leading male roles, Stueckl shook his head.

“I don’t think I will live to see Jesus being played by a woman — or Mary by a man,” he said. Then he paused for a moment, smiled, and added: “Even though the world would not come to an end because of that.”

more

Motherhood Deferred: US Median Age for Giving Birth Hits 30

For Allyson Jacobs, life in her 20s and 30s was about focusing on her career in health care and enjoying the social scene in New York City. It wasn’t until she turned 40 that she and her husband started trying to have children. They had a son when she was 42.

Over the past three decades, that has become increasingly common in the U.S., as birthrates have declined for women in their 20s and jumped for women in their late 30s and early 40s, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. The trend has pushed the median age of U.S. women giving birth from 27 to 30, the highest on record.

As an older parent celebrating Mother’s Day on Sunday, Jacobs feels she has more resources for her son, 9, than she would have had in her 20s.

“There’s definitely more wisdom, definitely more patience,” said Jacobs, 52, who is a patients’ services administrator at a hospital. “Because we are older, we had the money to hire a nanny. We might not have been able to afford that if we were younger.”

While fertility rates dropped from 1990 to 2019 overall, the decline was regarded as rather stable compared to previous eras. But the age at which women had babies shifted. Fertility rates declined by almost 43% for women between ages 20 and 24 and by more than 22% for women between 25 and 29. At the same time, they increased by more than 67% for women between 35 and 39, and by more than 132% for women between 40 and 44, according to the Census Bureau analysis based on National Center for Health Statistics data.

Decisions by college-educated women to invest in their education and careers so they could be better off financially when they had children, as well as the desire by working-class women to wait until they were more financially secure, have contributed to the shift toward older motherhood, said Philip Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist.

In the past, parents often relied on their children for income — putting them to work in the fields, for example, when the economy was more farm-based. But over the last century or more in the U.S., parents have become more invested in their children’s futures, providing more support while they go to school and enter young adulthood, he said.

“Having children later mostly puts women in a better position,” Cohen said. “They have more resources, more education. The things we demand of people to be good parents are easier to supply when you are older.”

Lani Trezzi, 48, and her husband had their first child, a son, when she was 38, and a daughter followed three years later. Even though she had been with her husband since she was 23, she felt no urgency to have children. That changed in her late 30s, once she’d reached a comfortable spot in her career as an executive for a retail company.

“It was just an age when I felt confident all around in the many areas of my life,” said Trezzi, who lives in New Jersey, outside New York City. “I didn’t have the confidence then that I have now.”

Over the last three decades, the largest increases in the median age at which U.S. women give birth have been among foreign-born women, going from ages 27 to 32, and Black women, going from ages 24 to 28, according to the Census Bureau.

With foreign-born women, Cohen said he wasn’t quite sure why the median age increased over time, but it likely was a “complicated story” having to do with their circumstances or reasons for coming to the U.S.

For Black women, pursuing an education and career played roles.

“Black women have been pursuing higher education at higher rates,” said Raegan McDonald-Mosley, an obstetrician and gynecologist, who is CEO of Power to Decide, which works to reduce teen pregnancies and unwanted births. “Black women are becoming really engaged in their education and that is an incentive to delay childbearing.”

Since unintended pregnancies are highest among teens and women in their 20s, and more of their pregnancies end in abortion compared to older women, ending Roe v. Wade would likely shift the start of childbearing earlier on average, in a reverse of the trend of the past three decades, “although the magnitude is unknown,” said Laura Lindberg, principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

“The burden will fall disproportionately on women of color, Black women, people without documentation, people living in rural areas, people in the South — where there are a lot of Black women — and in the Midwest,” said McDonald-Mosley, who also has served previously as chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Motherhood also has been coming later in developed countries in Europe and Asia. In the U.S., it could contribute to the nation’s population slowdown since the ability to have children tends to decrease with age, said Kate Choi, a family demographer at Western University in London, Ontario.

In areas of the U.S. where the population isn’t replacing itself with births, and where immigration is low, population decline can create labor shortages, higher labor costs and a labor force that is supporting retirees, she said.

“Such changes will put significant pressure on programs aimed at supporting seniors like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare,” Choi said. “Workers may have to pay higher taxes to support the growing numbers of the retired population.”

Although the data in the Census Bureau report stops in 2019, the pandemic over the past two years has put off motherhood even further for many women, with U.S. birth rates in 2020 dropping 4% in the largest single-year decrease in nearly 50 years. Choi said there appears to have been a bit of a rebound in the second half of 2021 to levels similar to 2019, but more data is needed to determine if this is a return to a “normal” decline.

During the pandemic, some women at the end of their reproductive years may have given up on becoming parents or having more children because of economic uncertainties and greater health risks for pregnant women who get the virus, she said.

“These women may have missed their window to have children,” Choi said. “Some parents of young children may have decided to forego the second … birth because they were overwhelmed with the additional child-caring demands that emerged during the pandemic, such as the need to homeschool their children.”

more

As Beijing COVID Outbreak Proves Stubborn, Mass Tests Becoming Routine

Millions of Beijing residents queued up for another round of COVID-19 tests Sunday as China’s capital seeks to trace and isolate every infection to contain a small but stubborn outbreak — and avoid a Shanghai-type prolonged lockdown.

Strict COVID curbs in Beijing, Shanghai and dozens of other major cities across China are taking a psychological toll on its people, weighing on the world’s second-largest economy and disrupting global supply chains and international trade.

But Chinese authorities are unwavering in their commitment to stamp out the coronavirus, rather than live with COVID like many countries that are easing or ditching virus measures. Last week the authorities threatened action against critics of the zero-COVID policy.

Most of the 25 million people in the commercial hub of Shanghai, China’s most populous city, had been confined to their housing compounds for more than a month. Many complain of not being able to get food or to access emergency health care or other basic services.

Parts of Shanghai have seen their risk levels officially downgraded to the point where government rules would in theory allow them to leave their residences.

But while some were allowed out for brief walks or grocery trips, most were still stuck behind the locked gates of their compounds, causing widespread frustration and occasionally leading to rare altercations with hazmat-suited authorities.

Beijing was desperate to avoid such drama, relentlessly working to track and isolate infections.

On Sunday, residents lined up for another round of tests in the Chaoyang, Fangshan and Fengtai districts and small parts of others where infections had been detected over the past two weeks.

It has become an almost daily routine in the capital. Even if they are not subject to the mass tests, many still need to show a recent negative result to get to work or enter various venues.

Health app ‘abnormalities’

Beijing has closed gyms and entertainment venues, banned dine-in services at restaurants and shut scores of bus routes and almost 15% of its sprawling subway system.

The streets were less hectic than usual, with many not wanting to risk any activity that could classify them as close contacts of COVID patients, forcing them into quarantine.

Businesses that remained open were suffering.

A barber who asked to be identified only by his surname, Song, said his salon at a high-end shopping mall in Chaoyang has seen far fewer clients since the outbreak.

“They’re afraid of getting abnormalities in their health apps,” Song said, referring to the mobile monitoring software all residents must use. “North of us are malls and offices that have been sealed, and their apps might mark them as close contacts if they came.”

Song said his salon will try to stay open for as long as possible, but he was not sure for how long.

Beijing’s daily COVID cases are in the dozens, much lower than Shanghai’s at this point in its own outbreak, when infections were in the triple digits and rising.

Shanghai’s cases fell for a ninth day, Sunday data showed, but remained in the thousands.

Like other cities in China, Shanghai is building thousands of permanent PCR testing stations. With most residents still indoors, this seems to anticipate a gradual return to normal life when people are back out on the streets.

But authorities have warned that remains far off.

Top Chinese leaders meeting last week said the nation would fight any comment or action that distorted, doubted or repudiated its COVID policy. Shanghai party and city officials have also warned against complacency.

more

Mickey Gilley, Who Helped Inspire ‘Urban Cowboy,’ Dies at 86

Country star Mickey Gilley, whose namesake Texas honky-tonk inspired the 1980 film Urban Cowboy and a nationwide wave of Western-themed nightspots, has died. He was 86.

Gilley died Saturday in Branson, Missouri, where he helped run the Mickey Gilley Grand Shanghai Theatre. He had been performing as recently as last month but was in failing health over the past week.

“He passed peacefully with his family and close friends by his side,” according to a statement from Mickey Gilley Associates.

Gilley — cousin of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis — opened Gilley’s, “the world’s largest honky tonk,” in Pasadena, Texas, in the early 1970s. By mid-decade, he was a successful club owner and had enjoyed his first commercial success with Room Full of Roses. He began turning out country hits regularly, including Window Up Above, She’s Pulling Me Back Again and the honky-tonk anthem Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time.

Overall, he had 39 Top 10 country hits and 17 No. 1 songs. He received six Academy of Country Music Awards, and also worked on occasion as an actor, with appearances on Murder She Wrote, The Fall Guy, Fantasy Island and The Dukes of Hazzard.

“If I had one wish in life, I would wish for more time,” Gilley told The Associated Press in March 2001 as he celebrated his 65th birthday. Not that he’d do anything differently, the singer said.

“I am doing exactly what I want to do. I play golf, fly my airplane and perform at my theater in Branson, Missouri,” he said. “I love doing my show for the people.”

‘Urban Cowboy’

Meanwhile, the giant nightspot’s attractions, including its famed mechanical bull, led to the 1980 film Urban Cowboy, starring John Travolta and Debra Winger and regarded by many as a countrified version of Travolta’s 1977 disco smash, Saturday Night Fever. The film inspired by Gilley’s club was based on an Esquire article by Aaron Latham about the relationship between two regulars at the club.

“I thank John Travolta every night before bed for keeping my career alive,” Gilley told the AP in 2002. “It’s impossible to tell you how grateful I am for my involvement with Urban Cowboy. That film had a huge impact on my career, and still does.”

The soundtrack included such hits as Johnny Lee’s Lookin’ for Love, Boz Scaggs’ Look What You’ve Done for Me and Gilley’s Stand by Me. The movie turned the Pasadena club into an overnight tourist draw and popularized pearl snap shirts, longneck beers, the steel guitar and mechanical bulls across the country.

But the club shut down in 1989 after Gilley and his business partner Sherwood Cryer feuded over how to run the place. A fire destroyed it soon after.

An upscale version of the old Gilley’s nightclub opened in Dallas in 2003. In recent years, Gilley moved to Branson.

He was married three times, most recently to Cindy Loeb Gilley. He had four children, three with his first wife, Geraldine Garrett, and one with his second, Vivian McDonald.

A Natchez, Mississippi, native, Gilley grew up poor, learning boogie-woogie piano in Ferriday, Louisiana, alongside Lewis and fellow cousin Jimmy Swaggart, the future evangelist. Like Lewis, he would sneak into the Louisiana clubs to listen to R&B music. He moved to Houston to work construction but played the local club scene at night and recorded and toured for years before catching on in the ’70s.

Gilley had suffered health problems in recent years. He underwent brain surgery in August 2008 after specialists diagnosed hydrocephalus, a condition characterized by an increase in fluid in the cranium. Gilley had been suffering from short-term memory loss and credited the surgery with halting the onset of dementia.

He underwent more surgery in 2009 after he fell off a step, forcing him to cancel scheduled performances in Branson. In 2018, he sustained a fractured ankle and fractured right shoulder in an automobile accident.

more

Long Shot Rich Strike Stuns with Win at 148th Kentucky Derby

Rich Strike came off a blistering pace at odds of more than 80-1 to beat 19 blue-blooded opponents and produce one of the biggest upsets in history while capturing the 148th running of the Kentucky Derby on Saturday afternoon at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.

Rich Strike, who was only entered into the field on Friday when Ethereal Road was scratched, is trained by Eric Reed, and owned by RED TR-Racing. Sonny Leon, a journeyman jockey based in Ohio, rode Rich Strike and won his first Kentucky Derby in his first attempt.

Race-favorite Epicenter was second by a length, with Zandon third by another half-length.

Rich Strike had raced just seven times before the Derby, winning once and finishing third three times.

He found his way through the field after starting in the 21st and far outside post position and under the fastest opening quarter mile in race history.

Rich Strike was still far back under a very fast pace as the horses turned for home down the long Churchill Downs stretch but went to the rail to save ground. Leon moved out to get past a fading Messier and then returned to the rail to run down Epicenter and Zandon, who were eye to eye with the finish line in sight but could not hold off the winner.

The winner is the second longest shot to win the Derby after Donerail took the post at 91-1 odds to win the Run for the Roses in 1913. 

more