Abortion is restricted in Kenya, but in Kilifi County on the southern coast many women and girls with unplanned pregnancies say they have no choice but to undergo dangerous abortions without the intervention of a nurse or doctor. Local activists say the practice is contributing to high maternal mortality in the region. Halima Gongo reports.
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Day: August 4, 2024
A community of breastfeeding women in Uganda is helping mothers who are struggling not to just feed their newborn babies, but to keep them alive. Halima Athumani and Mukasa Francis report from Uganda’s capital Kampala.
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New York — After 10 days in theaters, “Deadpool & Wolverine” is already the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever, not accounting for inflation.
In its second weekend, the Marvel Studios blockbuster starring Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman continued to steamroll through movie theaters, collecting $97 million according to studio estimates Sunday. That raised its two-week total to $395.6 million, pushing it past the long-reigning top R-rated feature, “The Passion of the Christ,” which held that mark for 20 years with $370 million domestic.
Worldwide, the Shawn Levy-directed “Deadpool & Wolverine” has quickly amassed $824.1 million in ticket sales, a total that already surpasses the global hauls of the first two “Deadpool” films. The 2016 original grossed $782.6 million worldwide; the 2018 sequel collected $734.5 million.
The weekend’s primary challengers both struggled.
M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller, “Trap,” managed a modest opening of $15.6 million at 3,181 theaters for Warner Bros. The film, starring Josh Hartnett as a serial killer hunted by police at a pop concert, didn’t screen for critics before opening day and scored lower in reviews (48% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) than Shyamalan’s films typically do. Audiences gave it a C+ CinemaScore.
With a budget of about $35 million that Shyamalan largely finances himself, “Trap” didn’t need a huge opening. But it may struggle to break even.
“This is a soft opening for an M. Night Shyamalan suspense crime thriller,” wrote David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter for Franchise Entertainment. “The writer/director’s movies out-earn other original thrillers by a wide margin, and that’s true here, but this start is not on the level of recent Shyamalan films.”
The live action “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” adapted from the classic kids’ book, also didn’t make much of a mark in theaters. The Sony Pictures release debuted with $6 million. It, too, got dinged by critics (28% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), though audiences (an A- CinemaScore) liked it more. “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” which stars Zachary Levi, cost about $40 million to make.
“Twisters,” the Universal Pictures disaster film, continues to kick up a storm at the box office. It held in second place with $22.7 million in its third weekend. Lee Isaac Chung’s sequel to the 1996 original, starring Glen Powell, Daisy Edgar-Jones and Anthony Ramos, has racked up $195.6 million domestically. While it has made less of an impression overseas, “Twisters” is holding particularly well in North American theaters, down just 35% from the week prior.
Hollywood closed July with its best month in a year and its first $1 billion month since July 2023. While comparisons to last year aren’t favorable — July was when “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” launched — a pair of Walt Disney Co. releases in “Inside Out 2” and “Deadpool & Wolverine” (the two top films of the year) powered a banner month for the movie industry.
There will still be reminders, though, of harder times in cinemas earlier in the spring and early summer, when a sparse release calendar and a few notable flops put the box office at a deficit. On Friday, AMC Theatres, the largest North American chain, posted a $32.8 million loss for the second quarter of 2024.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
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“Deadpool & Wolverine,” $97 million.
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“Twisters,” $22.7 million.
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“Trap,” $15.6 million.
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“Despicable Me 2,” $11.3 million.
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“Inside Out 2,” $6.7 million.
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“Harold and the Purple Crayon,” $6 million.
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“Longlegs,” $4.1 million.
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“A Quiet Place: Day One,” $1.4 million.
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“Daaru Na Peenda Hove,” $615,782.
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“Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” $600,000.
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Olympic and faith leaders seek reset after opening ceremony outcry, while chaplains welcome athletes
PARIS — Faith leaders gathered with Olympic officials Sunday morning in front of Notre Dame Cathedral to celebrate how “faith and sport can complement each other,” in the words of International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach.
The 2024 Paris Games got off to a rocky start with many religious groups around the world, including the Vatican. They criticized a scene in the opening ceremony seen as mocking Christianity by evoking “The Last Supper” and featuring drag queens, though the performers and the ceremony’s artistic director denied being inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s painting.
“We wanted to show that the most important thing is peace,” Catholic Bishop Emmanuel Gobilliard said at the gathering. It was modeled after the first such interfaith meeting, organized by modern Olympics founder Pierre de Coubertin in the 1924 Paris Games.
Far from the controversy, in an inconspicuous tent-like structure tucked away at the end of the athletes’ village in Paris, ordained and lay representatives from the five major global religions have taken up that mantle, providing spiritual comfort to Olympians.
Representatives of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism worked for months to set up a shared hall where the more than 10,500 athletes and their staff can find information about worship and speak with a chaplain.
For the first half of the Games, many seem to have found their way there to have a quiet moment away from the overwhelming pressure of competition.
“Some of the athletes who come to pray, I think they came to give up their pressure, to take some time to get out of their own heads,” said the Rev. Jason Nioka, a former judo champion who’s in charge of the largest contingent of Olympic chaplains, about 40 Catholic priests, nuns and lay faithful.
Each religion got 50 square meters (538 square feet) of the structure provided by the Paris Games organizing committee, with instructions to comply with France’s secularism laws that strictly prescribe the role of religion in public spaces.
What the faith leaders have done with the space is itself a wordless message of dialogue, tolerance and welcome — beginning with redistributing the size of the different rooms based on the expected number of faithful.
The door between the small Jewish room and the Muslim space, about twice its size but equally sparingly adorned, is often kept open.
“Here it’s very symbolic,” said Rabbi Moshe Lewin, vice president of the Conference of European Rabbis and one of the Jewish chaplains. “The conviviality, that’s the image that we should transmit.”
“People smile when they see an imam and a rabbi together,” added Najat Benali, president of the Coordination of Muslim Associations of Paris, who leads the Muslim chaplaincy. “We do ‘geo-fraternity,’ not geopolitics.”
The Hindu space also welcomes visitors with blessings by a small water fountain as chanting resounds from a volunteer’s cellphone. It’s the most exuberantly decorated space, with statues from India and a recreated temple structure in painted polyester foam.
In the middle is the Christian area, where Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox share an altar with a large Bible flanked by a cross and icons. Next to it hangs a poster with a quote about faith by U.S. star gymnast Simone Biles.
Last week, three athletics competitors from Australia, Finland and Jamaica walked in to pray, and faith leaders asked if they could join them.
“It was like a little Pentecost,” said Anne Schweitzer, who’s coordinating about three dozen Protestant chaplains.
She discovered one of the three athletes, a silver medalist, is also quoted in the Gospel edition called “More Precious than Gold,” created for the Games and available to visitors there and at churches across Olympic host cities.
Some Catholics, as well as volunteers in the village, have gone next door to meditate in the Buddhist space, said Luc Charles, a Zen monk with the Buddhist Union of France.
“It’s the occasion to get to know each other better,” he added.
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BANGUI, Central African Republic — African health officials said mpox cases have spiked by 160% so far this year, warning the risk of further spread is high given the lack of effective treatments or vaccines on the continent.
The Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report released Wednesday that mpox, also known as monkeypox, has now been detected in 10 African countries this year including Congo, which has more than 96% of all cases and deaths.
Officials said nearly 70% of cases in Congo are in children younger than 15, who also accounted for 85% of deaths.
There have been an estimated 14,250 cases so far this year, nearly as many as all of last year. Compared to the first seven months of 2023, the Africa CDC said cases are up 160% and deaths are up 19%, to 456.
Burundi and Rwanda both reported the virus for the first time this week.
New outbreaks were also declared this week in Kenya and Central African Republic, with cases extending to its densely populated capital, Bangui.
“We are very concerned about the cases of monkeypox, which is ravaging (the capital region),” the Central African Republic’s public health minister, Pierre Somsé, said Monday.
On Wednesday, Kenya’s Health Ministry said it found mpox in a passenger traveling from Uganda to Rwanda at a border crossing in southern Kenya. In a statement, the ministry said that a single mpox case was enough to warrant an outbreak declaration.
The Africa CDC said the mpox death rate this year, at about 3%, “has been much higher on the African continent compared to the rest of the world.” During the global mpox emergency in 2022, fewer than 1% of people infected with the virus died.
Earlier this year, scientists reported the emergence of a new form of the deadlier version of mpox, which can kill up 10% of people, in a Congolese mining town that they feared might spread more easily among people. Mpox spreads via close contact with infected people, including via sex.
An analysis of patients hospitalized from October to January in eastern Congo suggested that recent genetic mutations in the virus were the result of the ongoing spread in people.
Unlike in previous mpox outbreaks, where lesions were mostly seen on the chest, hands and feet, the new form of mpox causes milder symptoms and lesions mostly on the genitals, making it harder to spot.
The medical charity Doctors Without Borders called the expanding mpox outbreak “worrying,” noting the disease had also been seen in camps for displaced people in Congo’s North Kivu region, which shares a border with Rwanda.
“There is a real risk of explosion, given the huge population movements in and out,” said Dr. Louis Massing, the group’s medical director for Congo.
Mpox outbreaks in the West have mostly been shut down with the help of vaccines and treatments, but barely any have been available in African countries including Congo.
“We can only plead … for vaccines to arrive in the country and as quickly as possible so that we can protect the populations in the areas most affected,” Massing said in a statement.
In May, WHO said that despite the ongoing outbreak in Africa and the potential for the disease to spread internationally, not a single donor dollar had been invested in containing mpox.
Earlier this week, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations announced it was starting a study in Congo and other African countries next month to see if giving people an mpox shot after they had been exposed to the disease could help prevent severe illness and death.
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