In Malawi, 35,000 backstreet abortions were carried out in 2022 and 2023, according to its Ministry of Health. These unsafe procedures are just one reason support for abortion rights has increased in recent years. Chimwemwe Padatha has more from Lilongwe.
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Day: March 10, 2024
Zambia has received the first shipment of a new medicine to prevent HIV infection. The delivery makes Zambia only the second country in the world after the United States to offer the injectable preventative outside of a research setting. Kathy Short reports from Lusaka, Zambia. Camera and video editing by Richard Kille.
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Beijing, China — China has intensified efforts to block software that enables internet users to access banned websites during a top political meeting this week, a leading provider of firewall-leaping software told AFP.
Beijing operates some of the world’s most extensive censorship over the internet, with web users in mainland China unable to access everything from Google to news websites without using a virtual private network (VPN).
And as thousands of delegates gather in Beijing this week for the annual “Two Sessions” meeting, VPN software has increasingly struggled to circumvent the censorship while outages have become much more frequent, even when compared to previous sensitive political events.
“Currently, there is increased censorship due to political meetings in China,” a representative of the Liechtenstein-based service Astrill — one of the most popular VPN services for foreigners in China — confirmed to AFP.
“Unfortunately, not all VPN protocols are functioning at this time,” they said. “We are working intensively on bringing all services back to normal, but currently have no ETA.”
The use of a VPN without government authorization is illegal in China, as is using the software to access blocked websites.
State media workers and diplomats, however, are allowed to access prohibited websites such as X, formerly Twitter.
Security has tightened across Beijing throughout the Two Sessions, with security officers patrolling streets with sniffer dogs and elderly volunteers in red armbands monitoring pedestrians for suspicious behavior.
Chinese social media giant Weibo has also been quick to block sensitive topics.
All hashtags discussing Beijing’s decision to call off a traditional news conference by the country’s premier were quickly removed from search results.
And another, a reference to China’s economic woes declaring “middle class children have no future” was also removed.
China’s domestic media is state-controlled and widespread censorship of social media is often used to suppress negative stories or critical coverage.
Regulators have previously urged investors to avoid reading foreign news reports about China.
In a speech last year, President Xi Jinping said the ruling Communist Party’s control of the internet had been “strengthened,” and that it was crucial that the state “govern cyberspace.”
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Los Angeles — Hollywood’s glitterati gather on Sunday to celebrate the best performances in film at the annual Academy Awards, a ceremony expected to turn into a toast to blockbuster atomic bomb drama “Oppenheimer.”
Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel returns for the fourth time to emcee the film industry’s highest honors from the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.
“Oppenheimer,” the three-hour drama directed by Christopher Nolan, leads the field with 13 nominations. The movie is the frontrunner to win the prestigious best picture prize, capping its sweep of other major awards this year.
“If the best picture isn’t ‘Oppenheimer,’ it will be one of the biggest upsets, if not the biggest upset, in the history of the Oscars,” said Scott Feinberg, executive editor for awards at The Hollywood Reporter.
After 2023 was marred by actors and writers strikes, the Oscars give Hollywood a chance to celebrate two global hits. “Oppenheimer” and feminist doll adventure “Barbie,” another best picture nominee, brought in a combined $2.4 billion in a summer box office battle dubbed “Barbenheimer.”
Oscar producers said they have planned unannounced cameos and other surprises to entertain audiences at home.
“My biggest hope is that they go through a range of emotions with us, that they feel happiness and joy, that we maybe make them shed a tear,” Executive Producer Raj Kapoor said. “And then they somehow feel connected and inspired to also live their dreams.”
Supporting actor nominee Ryan Gosling will sing the ’80s-style rock anthem “I’m Just Ken” from “Barbie.” Members of the Osage Nation will perform the nominated “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” from “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
Cillian Murphy, the Irish actor who played physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer as he led the race to build the first atomic bomb, is considered the favorite for best actor. Murphy’s main competition, according to awards pundits, is “The Holdovers” star Paul Giamatti.
Best actress may go to Lily Gladstone of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the real-life story about a murder plot to take over lucrative Osage oil rights in 1920s Oklahoma. If she prevails, Gladstone would be the first Native American actress to win an acting Oscar.
Gladstone’s rivals include previous Oscar winner Emma Stone, nominated this year for playing a woman revived from the dead in the dark and wacky comedy “Poor Things.”
The supporting actor race features “Oppenheimer” star Robert Downey Jr., who played the scientist’s professional nemesis, and Sterling K. Brown from “American Fiction.”
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, praised for her role as a grieving mother in “The Holdovers,” vies for best supporting actress against Danielle Brooks from “The Color Purple” and others.
“Barbie,” last year’s No. 1 film with $1.4 billion in global ticket sales, may be shut out of the top awards. Billie Eilish’s “Barbie” ballad “What Was I Made For?” is likely to win the original song prize, Feinberg said, and could snag the awards for costumes and production design.
For Nolan, the night could bring his first directing Oscar, as well as the award for adapted screenplay. The director of “The Dark Knight” trilogy, “Inception” and other acclaimed films has never had a movie win best picture.
The ceremony may end with “the industry-wide coronation for Christopher Nolan,” Feinberg said. With “Oppenheimer,” “he has he has made his best possible argument yet for why he is worthy of this recognition.”
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New York — Six years ago, Nachiket Chanchani visited Angkor Wat for the first time. Inspired, the architectural historian began thinking about the relationship between the complexities of modern post-genocide Cambodia and the ancient temple complex.
Chanchani, an associate art history professor at the University of Michigan, kept reflecting on Angkor Wat, juxtaposing the temple complex against art created since the Khmer Rouge killed nearly 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979.
During the pandemic, his thoughts crystallized amid worldwide suffering, anxiety and fear. “I thought that this art, both from the deep past and from more recent times in Cambodia, can teach us lessons of how to kind of stay stable, find some way forward,” he told VOA Khmer Service via Zoom.
The University of Michigan Museum of Art, or UMMA, one of the largest university museums in the United States, is now exhibiting 80 pieces of Cambodian art in a show guest curated by Chanchani in Ann Arbor. Titled “Angkor Complex: Cultural Heritage and Post-Genocide Memory in Cambodia,” it opened February 3 and runs through July 28. Featured artists Vann Nath, Sopheap Pich, Svay Sareth, Amy Lee Sanford and Leang Seckon, who live in Cambodia and the U.S., have pieces in the exhibit.
The Angkor Archaeological Park, a UNESCO World Heritage site, covers more than 400 square kilometers (155 square miles). Once a city of nearly a million people, the site contains some of Cambodia’s most famous structures, including those recognized worldwide after being seen in movies such as “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and In the Mood for Love.”
Playing with the dictionary meanings of “complex” such as “a whole made up of complicated or interrelated parts,” “a building or group of buildings housing related units” or “a group of repressed desires and memories that exerts a dominating influence upon the personality,” Chanchani saw how the exhibit could “allow us to think about these different layers, these different kinds of ideas of complexness.”
Today, “Cambodians regard Angkor Wat as a sacred center, a national symbol, and a site of memory,” according to the exhibition guide.
“Like Angkor Wat’s bullet-ridden walls, contemporary artworks from Cambodia and its diaspora bear the scars of a genocide and of related upheavals,” said Chanchani, adding that as a non-Cambodian outsider, he was aware of the exhibition’s sensitive nature. “It’s not as if this is something that happened a thousand years ago that you can just say, it happened,” he said. “The survivors are still there.”
Chanchani hoped bringing Cambodian art to the U.S. would console viewers.
But what could the U.S., one of the biggest economic and military powers learn from Cambodia, a small southeast Asian country, other than how to move on from painful memories and what the exhibition catalog describes as the current interwoven global crises of “public health, economic instability, authoritarian regimes, racial injustice and climate change?”
And how does one nation heal from an event like the Khmer Rouge killing nearly a quarter of the population in its quest to create an agrarian utopia for worker-peasants?
For some Cambodians, it can seem as if, 40 years later, the nation can barely move on or show off a new face when it is still being referred to in the context of the past suffering, especially on the international stage.
Reaksmey Yean, a Cambodian art writer, curator and researcher in Phnom Penh, applauded the Michigan show, but added it is a “cliche” because Angkor Wat and the Khmer Rouge have been overused to identify Cambodia.
“An exhibition about Cambodia, its history and culture is rare in the U.S., so I think it is important to have the exhibition to put Cambodia on the map,” Reaksmey Yean told VOA Khmer Service. “However, it is a cliche for me because it’s been more than 20 years when our civil war completely ended and there are so much in our cultures that can be shown.”
Museum Director Christina Olsen said the audience will have a chance to learn about the “distinct cultural and political [significance] of Cambodia” through the historical and contemporary arts by Cambodian and diasporic artists.
“At the same time, the exhibition invites consideration of today’s broader cultural, social and political happenings and fosters dialogue about the lessons that can be taken from the pain and resilience of the Cambodian people,” she added in the press release.
Svay Sareth is a Cambodian artist whose works in sculpture, installation and durational performance “are made using materials and processes intentionally associated with war — metals, uniforms, camouflage and actions requiring great endurance,” according to the Richard Koh Gallery in Singapore. Sareth’s interest in how Cambodia was affected by war and how its people are moving on has informed his art.
“I want the audience in the U.S. [to] see how the post genocide in Cambodia affect the intergeneration,” Sareth said.
Another work, “Full Circle,” by Khmer American artist Amy Lee Sanford, is comprised of 40 broken clay pots, repaired and installed in a circle. She is known for her “Break Pot” performance pieces where she would drop the clay pot from a height, then glue all the pieces back together, an effort to show how situations can change in seconds and even when repaired, can never be the same again.
Sanford said she hopes the Michigan exhibition will show that Cambodians “have a memory of some of the important architectural and religious structures … and that also that there are contemporary artists now doing things related to history and related to looking forward as well.”
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MUMBAI, India — Krystyna Pyszková of the Czech Republic was crowned Miss World at a glittering contest held in India on Saturday night.
Yasmina Zaytoun of Lebanon was the first runner-up among 112 contestants in the competition held in Mumbai, India’s financial and entertainment capital.
“Being crowned Miss World is a dream come true. I am deeply honored to represent my country and the values of ‘beauty with a purpose’ on a global platform,” Pyszkova said.
After the reigning Miss World, Karoline Bielawska of Poland, passed the crown to her, Pyszková waved to the large crowd at the Jio World Convention Center and hugged some of the other contestants.
The event showcased the rich tapestry of India’s culture, traditions, heritage, arts and crafts, and textiles to a massive global audience. The participants wore heavily embroidered skirts and blouses and danced to popular Bollywood songs.
The beauty competition returned to India for the first time in 28 years.
India’s Sini Shetty exited after making it to the final eight. Six Indian women have won the title, including Reita Faria (1966), Aishwarya Rai (1994), Diana Hayden (1997), Yukta Mookhey (1999), Priyanka Chopra (2000) and Manushi Chillar (2017).
The 71st Miss World beauty pageant was hosted by Bollywood filmmaker Karan Johar and Miss World 2013 Megan Young from the Philippines.
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