Virtual reality, an immersive technology embraced by gamers, has moved into medicine, where it is used for stress relief, physical therapy, pain management and other applications. Mike O’Sullivan has more.
Day: December 23, 2022
The United Nations says high food prices in 2022 led to a crisis of affordability that has pushed millions more people into hunger. VOA U.N. Correspondent Margaret Besheer talks to experts about the situation and what to expect in 2023.
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After being arrested for creating antigovernment propaganda in 2010, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi was banned from making films for 20 years.
Since then, he’s made five widely acclaimed features.
His latest, No Bears, opens soon in U.S. theaters while Panahi is in prison.
In July, Panahi went to the Tehran prosecutor’s office to inquire about the arrest of Mohammad Rasoulof, a filmmaker detained in the government’s crackdown on protests.
Panahi himself was arrested and, on a decade-old charge, sentenced to six years in jail.
Panahi’s films, made in Iran without government approval, are sly feats of artistic resistance. He plays himself in meta self-portraitures that clandestinely capture the mechanics of Iranian society with a humanity both playful and devastating. Panahi made This is Not a Film in his apartment. Taxi was shot almost entirely inside a car, with a smiling Panahi playing the driver and picking up passengers along the way.
In No Bears, Panahi plays a fictionalized version of himself while making a film in a rural town along the Iran-Turkey border. It’s one of the most acclaimed films of the year.
The New York Times and The Associated Press named it one of the top 10 films of the year. Film critic Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times called No Bears 2022’s best movie.
No Bears is landing at a time when the Iranian film community is increasingly ensnarled in a harsh government crackdown. A week after No Bears premiered at the Venice Film Festival, with Panahi already behind bars, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died while being held by Iran’s morality police. Her death sparked three months of women-led protests, still ongoing, that have rocked Iran’s theocracy.
More than 500 protesters have been killed in the crackdown since Sept. 17, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran. More than 18,200 people have been detained.
Saturday, the prominent Iranian actress Taraneh Alidoosti, star of Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning The Salesman, was arrested after posting an Instagram message expressing solidarity with a man recently executed for crimes allegedly committed during the protests.
In the outcry that followed Alidoosti’s arrest, Farhadi — the director of A Separation and A Hero — called for Alidoosti’s release “alongside that of my other fellow cineastes Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof and all the other less-known prisoners whose only crime is the attempt for a better life.”
“If showing such support is a crime, then tens of millions of people of this land are criminals,” Farhadi wrote on Instagram.
Panahi’s absence has been acutely felt on the world’s top movie stages. At Venice, where No Bears was given a special jury prize, a red-carpet walkout was staged at the film’s premiere. Festival director Alberto Barbera and jury president Julianne Moore were among the throngs silently protesting the imprisonment of Panahi and other filmmakers.
No Bears will also again test a long-criticized Academy Awards policy. Submissions for the Oscars’ best international film category are made only by a country’s government. Critics have said that allows authoritative regimes to dictate which films compete for the sought-after prize.
Arthouse distributors Sideshow and Janus Films, which helped lead Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Japanese drama Drive My Car to four Oscar nominations a year ago, acquired No Bears with the hope that its merit and Panahi’s cause would outshine that restriction.
“He puts himself at risk every time he does something like this,” says Jonathan Sehring, Sideshow founder and a veteran independent film executive. “When you have regimes that won’t even let a filmmaker make a movie and in spite of it they do, it’s inspiring.”
“We knew it wasn’t going to be the Iranian submission, obviously,” adds Sehring. “But we wanted to position Jafar as a potential best director, best screenplay, a number of different categories. And we also believe the film can work theatrically.”
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences declined to comment on possible reforms to the international film category. Among the 15 shortlisted films for the award announced Wednesday was the Danish entry Holy Spider, set in Iran. After Iranian authorities declined to authorize it, director Ali Abbasi shot the film, based on real-life serial killings, in Jordan.
No Bears opens in New York on Friday and Los Angeles on Jan. 10 before rolling out nationally.
In it, Panahi rents an apartment from which he, with a fitful internet signal, directs a film with the help of assistants. Their handing off cameras and memory cards gives, perhaps, an illuminating window into how Panahi has worked under government restrictions. In No Bears, he comes under increasing pressure from village authorities who believe he’s accidentally captured a compromising image.
“It’s not easy to make a movie to begin with, but to make it secretly is very difficult, especially in Iran where a totalitarian government has such tight control over the country and spies everywhere,” says Iranian film scholar and documentarian Jamsheed Akrami.
“It’s really a triumph. I can’t compare him with any other filmmaker.”
In one of the film’s most moving scenes, Panahi stands along the border at night.
Gazing at the lights in the distance, he contemplates crossing it — a life in exile that Panahi in real life steadfastly refused to ever adopt.
Some aspects of the film are incredibly close to reality. Parts of No Bears were shot in Turkey just like the film within the film. In Turkey, an Iranian couple (played by Mina Kavani and Bakhiyar Panjeei) are trying to obtain stolen passports to reach Europe.
Kavani herself has been living in exile for the last seven years. She starred in Sepideh Farsi’s 2014 romance Red Rose. When nudity in the film led to media harassment, Kavani chose to live in Paris. Kavani was struck by the profound irony of Panahi directing her by video chat from over the border.
“This is the genius of his art. The idea that we were both in exile but on a different side was magic,” says Kavani. “He was the first person that talked about that, what’s happening to exiled Iranian people outside of Iran. This is very interesting to me, that he is in exile in his own country, but he’s talking about those who left his country.”
Many of Panahi’s colleagues imagine that even in his jail cell, Panahi is probably thinking through his next film — whether he ever gets to make it or not. When No Bears played at the New York Film Festival, Kavani read a statement from Panahi.
“The history of Iranian cinema witnesses the constant and active presence of independent directors who have struggled to push back censorship and to ensure the survival of this art,” it said. “While on this path, some were banned from making films, others were forced into exile or reduced to isolation. And yet, the hope of creating again is a reason for existence. No matter where, when, or under what circumstances, an independent filmmaker is either creating or thinking.”
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One of the world’s largest marine citizen science projects has surveyed its 500th section of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef since the effort began in 2020. This year’s Great Reef Census, which runs from September to December, has revealed severe damage to the coral, while other parts of the 2,300-kilometer World Heritage site are thriving. The Great Barrier Reef is made up of about 3,000 individual reefs, making it the world’s largest coral system.
The annual reconnaissance of the Great Barrier Reef off northeastern Australia has produced tens of thousands of images.
They have been taken by divers and snorkelers onboard more than 60 dive boats, tourism vessels, sailing boats, super-yachts and tugboats, who are surveying the far reaches of the world’s largest coral system.
They have visited 500 individual reefs during the past three years. The photographs paint a picture of the health of the world’s largest coral system, providing data on the types of coral and their coverage at each reef.
“Reaching 500 reefs through the Great Reef Census is a massive achievement for the community,” said Andy Ridley, chief executive officer of Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, which organizes the survey. “It just goes to prove how a motley flotilla of all sorts of vessels can reach such an enormous amount of area bearing in mind the Great Barrier Reef is the same size of Germany. We have reached about 15% of the reefs, which is amazing.”
Early results from the survey have shown some parts of the Great Barrier Reef are flourishing. Others, though, have been damaged by warmer ocean temperatures and more intense tropical storms caused by climate change as well as coral-eating crown of thorns starfish.
There are other threats, too, including overfishing, pollution and the industrialization of the Queensland coast.
Starting in March, citizen-scientists from across the world will be able to join the project by helping to analyze the images from the expeditions.
The Great Reef Census is a partnership with the University of Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which administers the region, James Cook University, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and several technology companies.
The surveillance project on what is arguably Australia’s greatest natural treasure has become so big that artificial intelligence is being used to scan much of the data, but Ridley has stressed that citizen-scientists, or virtual volunteers, have a critical part to play.
The Great Barrier Reef is so vast that it is the only living thing visible from space.
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Russia’s space agency said it is considering a plan to send an empty spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) to bring home three crew members ahead of schedule, after their Soyuz capsule sprang a coolant leak while docked to the orbiting outpost.
Roscosmos and NASA officials said at a news conference Thursday they continue to investigate how the coolant line of the capsule’s external radiator sustained a tiny puncture last week, just as two cosmonauts were preparing for a routine spacewalk.
No final decision has been made about the precise means of flying the capsule’s three crew members back to Earth, whether by launching another Soyuz to retrieve them or by the seemingly less likely option of sending them home in the leaky capsule without most of its coolant.
Last week, Sergei Krikalev, Russia’s chief of crewed space programs, said the leak could have been caused by a micrometeoroid strike. But he and his NASA counterparts have left open the possibility of other culprits, such as a hardware failure or an impact by a tiny piece of space debris.
The Dec. 14 leak prompted mission controllers in Moscow to call off the spacewalk as a live NASA webcast showed what appeared to be a flurry of snowflake-like particles spewing from the rear of the Soyuz spacecraft.
The leak lasted for hours and emptied the radiator of coolant used to regulate temperatures inside the crew compartment of the spacecraft.
NASA has said that none of the ISS crew was ever in any danger from the leak.
Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dimitri Petelin, who were suited up for the spacewalk at the time, flew to the ISS aboard the now-crippled Soyuz MS-22 capsule along with U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio in September.
They were originally scheduled to fly back on the same spacecraft in March, but Krikalev and NASA’s ISS program manager, Joel Montalbano, said Roscosmos would return them to Earth two or three weeks early if Russian space officials decide to launch an empty crew capsule for their retrieval.
Four other ISS crew members — two more from NASA, a third Russian cosmonaut and a Japanese astronaut — rode to the ISS in October via a NASA-contracted SpaceX Crew Dragon and they also remain aboard, with their capsule parked at the station.
The leak has upended Russia’s ISS routines for the weeks ahead, forcing a suspension of all future Roscosmos spacewalks as officials in Moscow shift their focus to the leaky MS-22, a designated lifeboat for its three crew members if something goes wrong aboard the space station.
Two U.S. astronauts, Rubio and Josh Cassada, conducted a seven-hour spacewalk without incident on Thursday to install a new roll-out solar array outside the station, NASA said.
If MS-22 is deemed unsafe to carry crew members back to Earth, another Soyuz capsule in line to ferry Russia’s next crew to the station in March would instead “be sent up unmanned to have (a) healthy vehicle on board the station to be able to rescue crew,” Krikalev, Roscosmos’ executive director for human spaceflight, told reporters.
No mention was made of possibly sending a spare SpaceX Dragon for crew retrieval.
Pinpointing the cause of the leak could factor into decisions about the best way to return crew members.
The recent Geminid meteor shower initially seemed to raise the odds of a micrometeoroid strike as the origin, but the leak was facing the wrong way for that to be the case, Montalbano said, though a space rock could have come from another direction.
Sending the stricken MS-22 back to Earth unfixed with humans aboard appeared an unlikely choice given the vital role the coolant system plays to prevent overheating of the capsule’s crew compartment, which Montalbano and Krikalev said was currently being vented with air flow allowed through an open hatch to the ISS.
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A former judge of the Supreme People’s Court, the highest court in China, is calling for the suspension or revocation of cases against some 80 people found guilty of violating “zero-COVID” policy regulations since the advent of omicron, a less deadly variant that began spreading in December 2021.
China implemented the zero-COVID policy in January 2020, the month after the virus was first detected in humans in Wuhan. Anyone convicted of obstructing the prevention and control of COVID-19 faced a prison sentence of three to seven years, according to regulations set forth by the National Health and Medical Commission of China on January 20, 2020.
Offenses included leaving home during lockdown
The offenses included violations such as leaving home during a lockdown without official authorization and concealing travel plans. Both made it difficult for authorities to trace contacts and contain the virus. Other offenses included avoiding quarantine, concealing close contact history and refusing to perform duties related to COVID containment.
Huang Yingsheng, the former judge, posted on December 10 on the Chinese blogging platform Baidu Baijiahao that because Beijing has relaxed its zero-COVID policy, it is no longer appropriate to prosecute, convict and punish people for violating containment regulations. He posted on the topic again on Monday.
In an interview published Tuesday in the Economic Observer Network, a weekly government-run newspaper, Huang emphasized that since COVID mutated into the less deadly omicron strain in November 2021, “cases where people have been criminally or administratively punished for spreading the virus should also be corrected.”
In cases that originated after the advent of omicron but that are still in progress, Huang said, the trial should be terminated, the accused acquitted, and the case withdrawn without further prosecution. For cases in which a sentence has been imposed, the verdict should be overturned and those who are imprisoned should be freed. And, like those whose sentence was a period of probation, their record should be cleared.
Wang Quanzhang, a Chinese human rights lawyer, said that the Law on the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases fails to specify exactly what is illegal.
“The law is defined by specific law enforcement officers and judiciary,” Wang told VOA Mandarin. “The scope of attack is very large. Even if someone’s travel code has an error, or he fails to report his travel history truthfully, he may be arrested and charged for this crime.”
Cases still under investigation
Cai Fan, a retired associate professor of law at Wenzhou City University in Zhejiang, suggested that it would be difficult for authorities to adopt Huang’s recommendations, saying, “After three years of COVID prevention, some people have been detained and sentenced. If you delete all the cases of these people, then the country will have to pay compensation. How can that be possible?”
Zero-COVID criminal cases in Sichuan, Hunan and Shanxi provinces and elsewhere are still under investigation. At least three infected people in Hunan were being investigated for not reporting their infections to the community, not wearing masks when they entered and exited multiple public places, or for infecting other people, according to a local news network run by the government.
Wang, the human rights lawyer, believes it may be difficult to change the course of prosecution.
“Excessive reliance on the law makes it difficult to correct unjust, false and wrongly decided cases even if new situations arise,” he said. “But [the] mechanism is top-down. New regulations need to be issued and a systematic correction needs to be adopted. By then, some innocent people may have been locked up for a long time.”
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Hundreds of high-profile figures from the global cinema industry called Wednesday for Iran to release actor Taraneh Alidoosti, who was jailed over her support for the country’s three-month-old protest movement.
Actors Emma Thompson, Penelope Cruz, Kate Winslet and Ian McKellen and directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh were among a host of luminaries to sign an open letter demanding the star of “The Salesman” be freed.
“We demand the immediate release” of Alidoosti, “who was arrested on 17 December 2022 and has been taken into custody at Evin prison, Iran, where many other political prisoners also remain,” the letter says.
Alidoosti, 38, was arrested last Saturday, official media said, after issuing a string of social media posts supporting the protest movement, including removing her headscarf and condemning the execution of protesters.
The actor is one of the most prominent figures arrested in a crackdown by Iran’s hard-line regime that has seen the detention of lawyers, cultural figures, journalists and campaigners.
“The Iranian authorities have strategically chosen to arrest Taraneh before Christmas to ensure her international peers would be distracted,” the letter continues.
“But we are not distracted. We are outraged. Taraneh Alidoosti, like all citizens of Iran, has a right to freedom of expression, freedom of association, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention.
“We hereby stand in solidarity with her and demand her immediate release and safe return to her family.”
The Islamic Republic has been shaken by protests since the September 16 death of Mahsa Amini in custody after her arrest by the morality police for allegedly violating Iran’s strict dress rules for women.
At least 14,000 people have been arrested since the nationwide unrest began, the United Nations said last month.
The United States on Tuesday condemned Alidoosti’s arrest as “part of the regime’s effort to sow fear and suppress these peaceful protests.”
The open letter came after “The Salesman” director Asghar Farhadi took to Instagram to demand Alidoosti’s freedom.
Alidoosti appeared in two of Farhadi’s earliest films before he won international renown, “Beautiful City” (2004) and “Fireworks Wednesday” (2006).
She then appeared in the 2009 film “About Elly,” which earned Farhadi the Silver Bear for best director at the Berlin film festival, before reuniting for “The Salesman” in 2016.
“The Salesman” won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2017.
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Nearly a week after Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk said that the accounts of suspended journalists would be reinstated, at least six remain blocked.
Voice of America’s chief national correspondent, Steve Herman, is among them. Twitter suspended the accounts Dec. 15 over posts about another removed account — @Elonjet — which uses public data to track Musk’s private jet and other aircraft.
On Thursday, the Government Accountability Project (GAP), a Washington-based whistleblower protection and advocacy organization, filed a complaint to Congress over the suspension of Herman and other journalists.
“All of this is disturbing,” GAP’s Senior Counsel David Seide wrote in a letter addressed to the House and Senate commerce committees. “For no rational reason, Twitter and Mr. Musk wrongly muzzled and continue to muzzle Voice of America’s reporter and at least five other journalists. We ask you to continue to review this mistreatment and, if you believe warranted, investigate further.”
The letter, shared with VOA, said that Musk “abused his authority by acting arbitrarily and capriciously” in suspending and continuing to block several prominent journalists from the social media platform.
Twitter did not immediately respond to VOA’s request for comment, sent in a direct message via the platform.
Twitter appeals
Early Saturday morning, Musk announced on Twitter that the “accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now.”
To other Twitter users, Herman’s account looked as if it were back to normal.
But when Herman opened the app later that day, he was met with a notification saying he could regain access only if he deleted three tweets that referenced the @Elonjet account — or he could file an appeal.
Herman chose the latter option, he told VOA, “not realizing that put me in an even deeper level of purgatory.”
Making it seem as if his account was reactivated was “disingenuous at best,” Herman said.
Other journalists had similar experiences, including Matt Binder of Mashable, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN and freelance reporters Aaron Rupar and Tony Webster.
VOA spoke with several of these reporters, who all said they were not surprised at being suspended.
Rupar and Webster told VOA they opted to delete the tweets in question to regain full access to their accounts, but the other six refused, so remain locked out.
Twitter told them they will be barred until specified posts are deleted.
“I will not delete the tweets because I feel there was nothing wrong with those tweets, and deleting them would be an admission that I did something wrong,” Herman said. “The only way I will tweet again is if my account is reinstated unconditionally.”
Mashable’s Binder was briefly unsuspended Saturday, but he says he was locked out again after asking a Twitter official which company policy he had broken.
He appealed the ruling instead of deleting the offending tweet but said that Twitter denied the request.
Now journalists are “going to have to be cautious about how they disseminate their reporting on Twitter because Elon Musk can just choose on a whim to change policy,” Binder told VOA in an interview. “We’ve seen it already.”
GAP’s Seide said suspensions over @Elonjet tweets do not bode well for press freedom on Twitter.
“It’s especially concerning because it’s so arbitrary and innocuous,” he told VOA. “If they can force journalists to censor themselves on innocuous issues, they plainly do that on other issues, too.”
Webster, a freelance reporter based in Minneapolis, said Twitter has played a big role in building an audience for his work. Because of that, he deleted the requested tweets to regain access.
Still, getting suspended has changed how he engages with the platform, he told VOA.
“It’s really chilling to have to be so careful about what to say,” he said. “You just worry about what might happen in the future if you say something that might be upsetting to Elon Musk.”
Even though Webster is back on Twitter, he said he no longer trusts the platform and plans to use the social media platform Mastodon more.
The Intercept’s Lee told VOA he will not delete the tweet that got him suspended.
That journalists now risk facing arbitrary censorship “basically just proves that Twitter is no longer a viable platform,” he said, adding that he believes it is important to “diversify what social media you use.”
VOA’s public relations team on Thursday confirmed Herman’s account had not been reinstated.
In an emailed statement when Herman was first suspended, VOA spokesperson Nigel Gibbs said, “As Chief National Correspondent, Mr. Herman covers international and national news stories, and this suspension impedes his ability to perform his duties as a journalist.”
Musk had said on Twitter that the @Elonjet account and any accounts that linked to it were suspended because they violated Twitter’s anti-doxxing policy.
Doxxing is when someone maliciously publishes private or identifying information about someone — like their phone number or address — on the internet, according to Clayton Weimers, executive director of the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) U.S. office.
The @Elonjet Twitter account, however, used publicly available data. Additionally, none of the journalists who had tweeted about Musk and his shutdown of the account had tweeted location information for his plane.
Doxxing is an increasingly common intimidation tactic to target journalists over their coverage, Weimers said.
“The risk here is that [Musk is] really lowering the barrier for what we’re considering doxxing and weaponizing it against journalists in a way that doesn’t make journalists or other public officials any safer on the platform,” Weimers said.
Twitter has historically been slow to respond to genuine doxxing attacks, Weimers said.
Musk also dissolved Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, of which RSF was a longtime member. Made up of human and civil rights groups, the 100-member advisory group advised on policies to respond to hate speech and other issues on Twitter.
Since Twitter is Musk’s private company, “there’s an argument to be made that it’s his $44 billion plaything, and he can make the rules as he sees fit,” Herman acknowledged. “And if he wants to turn it into the online equivalent of a private country club, then he probably legally can.”
Herman said he has not spoken with any of the other journalists in the suspended-from-Twitter club.
“I’ve been pretty busy,” he said. “But I think some of us are following each other on Mastodon now.”
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