Category: Entertainment

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Los Angeles — Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes scholar with a deft writing style and rough charisma who became a country music superstar and A-list Hollywood actor, has died.

Kristofferson died at his home in Maui, Hawaii on Saturday, family spokesperson Ebie McFarland said in an email. He was 88.

McFarland said Kristofferson died peacefully, surrounded by his family. No cause was given. He was 88.

Starting in the late 1960s, the Brownsville, Texas native wrote such classics standards as “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “For the Good Times” and “Me and Bobby McGee.” Kristofferson was a singer himself, but many of his songs were best known as performed by others, whether Ray Price crooning “For the Good Times” or Janis Joplin belting out “Me and Bobby McGee.”

Kristofferson, who could recite William Blake from memory, wove intricate folk music lyrics about loneliness and tender romance into popular country music. With his long hair and bell-bottomed slacks and counterculture songs influenced by Bob Dylan, he represented a new breed of country songwriters along with such peers as Willie Nelson, John Prine and Tom T. Hall.

“There’s no better songwriter alive than Kris Kristofferson,” Nelson said during a November 2009 award ceremony for Kristofferson held by BMI. “Everything he writes is a standard and we’re all just going to have to live with that.”

As an actor, he played the leading man opposite Barbara Streisand and Ellen Burstyn, but also had a fondness for shoot-out Westerns and cowboy dramas.

He was a Golden Gloves boxer and football player in college, received a master’s degree in English from Merton College at the University of Oxford in England and turned down an appointment to teach at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, to pursue songwriting in Nashville. Hoping to break into the industry, he worked as a part-time janitor at Columbia Records’ Music Row studio in 1966 when Dylan recorded tracks for the seminal “Blonde on Blonde” double album.

At times, the legend of Kristofferson was larger than real life. Johnny Cash liked to tell a mostly exaggerated story of how Kristofferson, a former U.S. Army pilot, landed a helicopter on Cash’s lawn to give him a tape of “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down” with a beer in one hand. Over the years in interviews, Kristofferson said with all respect to Cash, while he did land a helicopter at Cash’s house, the ‘man in black’ wasn’t even home at the time, the demo tape was a song that no one ever actually cut, and he certainly couldn’t fly a helicopter holding a beer.

In a 2006 interview with The Associated Press, he said he might not have had a career without Cash.

“Shaking his hand when I was still in the Army backstage at the Grand Ole Opry was the moment I’d decided I’d come back,” Kristofferson said. “It was electric. He kind of took me under his wing before he cut any of my songs. He cut my first record that was record of the year. He put me on stage the first time.”

One of his most recorded songs, “Me and Bobby McGee,” was written based on a recommendation from Monument Records founder Fred Foster. Foster had a song title in his head called “Me and Bobby McKee,” named after a female secretary in his building. Kristofferson said in an interview in the magazine, Performing Songwriter, that he was inspired to write the lyrics about a man and woman on the road together after watching the Frederico Fellini film, “La Strada.”

Joplin, who had a close relationship with Kristofferson, changed the lyrics to make Bobby McGee a man and cut her version just days before she died in 1970 from a drug overdose. The recording became a posthumous No. 1 hit for Joplin.

Hits that Kristofferson recorded include “Why Me,” “Loving Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do),” “Watch Closely Now,” “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” “A Song I’d Like to Sing” and “Jesus Was a Capricorn.”

In 1973, he married fellow songwriter Rita Coolidge and together they had a successful duet career that earned them two Grammy awards. They divorced in 1980.
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New York — Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making, self-financed epic “Megalopolis” flopped with moviegoers, while the acclaimed DreamWorks Animation family film “The Wild Robot” soared to No. 1 at the weekend box office.

“The Wild Robot,” Chris Sanders’ adaptation of Peter Brown’s bestseller, outperformed expectations to launch with $35 million in ticket sales in U.S. and Canada theaters, according to studio estimates Sunday. “Wild Robot” was poised to do well after critics raved about the story of a shipwrecked robot who raises an orphan gosling. Audiences agreed, giving the film an A CinemaScore. “Wild Robot” is likely to set up a long and lucrative run for the Universal Pictures release.

Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore, predicts “The Wild Robot” “may take a page from the ‘Elemental’ playbook by opening to respectable box office and then looking toward long-term playability.” Pixar’s “Elemental,” which like “The Wild Robot” wasn’t a sequel, debuted with a modest $30 million but went on to gross nearly $500 million worldwide.

Family movies, led by the year’s biggest hit “Inside Out 2,” have particularly powered the box office this year. David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter for Franchise Entertainment, said the genre should reach $6 billion worldwide in 2024 — which, he noted, “is back to pre-pandemic levels.”

“Megalopolis,” Coppola’s vision of a Roman epic set in modern-day New York, was never expected to perform close to that level. But the film’s $4 million debut was still sobering for a movie that Coppola bankrolled himself for $120 million. Following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, critics have been mixed on Coppola’s first film in 13 years. Audiences gave it a D+ CinemaScore.

By any financial measure, “Megalopolis” was a mega-flop. But from the start, the 85-year-old Coppola maintained money wasn’t his concern. Coppola fashioned the film, which he first began developing in the late 1970s, as a grand personal statement about human possibility. 

“Everyone’s so worried about money,” Coppola told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of the film’s release. “I say: Give me less money and give me more friends.”

Studios passed on “Megalopolis” after Cannes. Lionsgate ultimately stepped forward to distribute it, for a fee. Coppola also picked up the tab for most of its $15 million in marketing costs. The film, which stars Adam Driver, Nathalie Emmanuel and Aubrey Plaza, also played in about 200 IMAX locations, which accounted for $1.8 million of its ticket sales.

After three weeks atop the box office, Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” slid to second place with $16 million in its fourth weekend of release. The Warner Bros. sequel to the 1988 “Beetlejuice,” starring Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, has amassed $250 million domestically in a month of release.

Third place went to “Transformers One,” the Transformers prequel starring Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry. After its lower-than expected debut last weekend, the Paramount release collected $9.3 million on its second weekend.

“Megalopolis” was even bested by the Indian Telugu-language action film “Devara: Part 1.” It grossed $5.1 million in its opening weekend, good enough for fourth place.

Also debuting in theaters was Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night,” an affectionate dramatization of the sketch-comedy institution on the night it first aired in 1975. On the same weekend the NBC series began its 50th season, Reitman’s movie launched in five New York and Los Angeles theaters and collected $265,000, good for a strong $53,000 per-theater average. “Saturday Night” goes nationwide in two weeks. 

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday. 

1. “The Wild Robot,” $35 million. 

2. “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” $16 million. 

3. “Transformers One,” $9.3 million. 

4. “Devara: Part 1,” $5.1 million. 

5. “Speak No Evil,” $4.3 million. 

6. “Megalopolis,” $4 million. 

7. “Deadpool & Wolverine,” $2.7 million. 

8. “My Old Ass,” $2.2 million. 

9. “Never Let Go,” $2.2 million. 

10. “The Substance,” $1.8 million. 
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MUNICH — The head brewmaster for Weihenstephan, the world’s oldest brewery, has a secret: He really likes alcohol-free beer.

Even though he’s quick to say he obviously enjoys real beer more, Tobias Zollo says he savors alcohol-free beer when he’s working or eating lunch. It has the same taste but fewer calories than a soft drink, he said, thanks to the brewery’s process of evaporating the alcohol.

“You can’t drink beer every day — unfortunately,” he joked last week at the Bavarian state brewery in the German town of Freising, about 30 kilometers north of Munich.

Zollo isn’t alone in his appreciation for the sober beverage. Alcohol-free beer has been gaining popularity in recent years as beer consumption shrinks.

At Weihenstephan, which was founded as a brewery in 1040 by Benedictine monks, non-alcoholic wheat beer and lager now make up 10% of the volume. The increase over the last few years, since they started making alcohol-free drinks in the 1990s, mirrors the statistics for the rest of Germany’s beer industry.

“The people are unfortunately — I have to say that as a brewer — unfortunately drinking less beer,” Zollo said Friday, the day before Oktoberfest officially started. “If there’s an alternative to have the crisp and fresh taste from a typical Weihenstephan beer, but just as a non-alcoholic version, we want to do that.”

Even at Oktoberfest — arguably the world’s most famous ode to alcohol — alcohol-free beer is on the menu.

All but two of the 18 large tents at the festival offer the drink through the celebration’s 16 days. The sober beverage will cost drinkers the same as an alcoholic beer — between 13.60 and 15.30 euros ($15.12 and $17.01) for a 1-liter mug — but save them from a hangover.

“For people who don’t like to drink alcohol and want to enjoy the Oktoberfest as well, I think it’s a good option,” Mikael Caselitz, 24, of Munich said Saturday inside one of the tents. “Sometimes people feel like they have more fun with alcohol, which is not a good thing because you can also have fun without alcohol.”

He added: “If you want to come and drink alcohol-free beer, nobody will judge you.”

This year marked the first time an alcohol-free beer garden opened in Munich. “Die Null,” which means “the zero” in German, served non-alcoholic beer, mocktails and other alcohol-free drinks near the city’s main train station this summer but was scheduled to close a few day before Oktoberfest opened.

Walter König, managing director of the Society of Hop Research north of Munich, said researchers have had to breed special hops varieties for alcohol-free beer. If brewers use the typical hops for alcohol-free beer, the distinct aroma gets lost when the alcohol is reduced during the brewing process.

But customers don’t care about that, König said Friday as he prepared for Oktoberfest.

“They only want to know that what they are tasting is as good as traditional beers with alcohol,” he said.
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After Russia invaded Ukraine, Yuliia Lebedynska moved to Brussels with her daughter and granddaughter. She was an entrepreneur in Ukraine but in Belgium, she found herself in a Ukrainian women’s choir.  Valentina Vasileva has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: David Gogokhia  
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Washington — Johnny Cash now stands among the most famous politicians, trailblazers and activists of American history as he became the first professional musician to be honored with a statue in the U.S. Capitol.

Congressional leaders from both parties and members of the Cash family were among the several hundred guests who gathered Tuesday for the unveiling of the statue. They shared their memories of a man who grew up on an Arkansas cotton farm and turned a love of music into a decades-long career that gave voice to the struggles and triumphs of everyday Americans.

“Some may ask: Why should a musician have a statue here in the halls of the great American republic?” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at the unveiling ceremony. “The answer is pretty simple. It’s because America is about more than laws and politics.”

Each state selects two statues to place within the Capitol. The Cash statue is the second new figure Arkansas has sent to replace two existing images that had represented the state at the U.S. Capitol for more than 100 years. Another statue depicting civil rights leader Daisy Bates was unveiled at the Capitol earlier this year. Bates mentored the nine Black children who desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957.

The state’s legislature in 2019 voted to replace Arkansas’ two prior statues, which depicted little-known figures from the 18th and 19th centuries, with Bates and Cash.

Known as the “The Man in Black,” Cash was a vivid storyteller who sang with a deep voice songs like “I Walk The Line,” “Ring of Fire,” “Jackson” and “A Boy Named Sue.” The statue depicts the singer with a guitar slung across his back and a Bible in his hand. Little Rock sculptor Kevin Kresse created the statue.

Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said artistic creativity is an important part of the country’s growth, and Cash’s “substance” and “swagger” inspired generations of artists from every genre imaginable. He quoted singers such as Bob Dylan and Snoop Dogg about Cash’s impact.

“He called Johnny Cash a real American gangster. That a compliment from Snoop Doggy Dogg,” Jeffries said as the audience laughed. “What a life, what a legend, what a legacy.”

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders led a group of Arkansas lawmakers at the ceremony. She said she grew up in a musical family where “after God and country, came Johnny Cash.” She noted how Cash struggled with addiction but went on to perform for prisoners and held a deep religious faith. She described him as a “hymn-singing Christian” who also experienced difficult times.

“When so much in today’s world is fake, Johnny Cash was very real,” Sanders said.

Cash’s daughter, Rosanne Cash, said her father would have viewed the statue “as the ultimate” honor in his life. She said her father’s hard upbringing instilled in him a strong work ethic and that he loved the idea of America as a place of dreams and refuge.

“This man was a living redemption story,” Rosanne Cash said. “He encountered darkness and met it with love.”

Cash was born in Kingsland, a tiny town about 100 kilometers south of Little Rock. He died in 2003 at age 71. His achievements include 90 million records sold worldwide spanning country, rock, blues, folk and gospel. He is among the few artists inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Cash’s statue will be the newest added to the Capitol since one from North Carolina depicting the Rev. Billy Graham was unveiled in May.
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ZHENGZHOU, China — On a film set that resembles the medieval castle of a Chinese lord, Zhu Jian is busy disrupting the world’s second-largest movie industry.

The 69-year-old actor is playing the patriarch of a wealthy family celebrating his birthday with a lavish banquet. But unbeknownst to either of them, the servant in the scene is his biological granddaughter.

A second twist: Zhu is not filming for cinema screens.

“Grandma’s Moon” is a micro drama, composed of vertically shot, minute-long episodes featuring frequent plot turns designed to keep millions of viewers hooked to their cellphone screens — and paying for more.

“They don’t go to the cinema anymore,” said Zhu of his audience, which he described as largely composed of middle-aged workers and pensioners. “It’s so convenient to hold a mobile phone and watch something anytime you want.”

China’s $5 billion a year micro drama industry is booming, according to Reuters’ interviews with 10 people in the sector and four scholars and media analysts.

The short-format videos are an increasingly potent competitor to China’s film industry, some experts say, which is second in size only to Hollywood and dominated by state-owned China Film Group. And the trend is already spreading to the United States, in a rare instance of Chinese cultural exports finding traction in the West.

Three major China-backed, micro-drama apps were downloaded 30 million times across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play in the first quarter of 2024, grossing $71 million internationally, according to analytics company Appfigures.

“The audience only has that much attention. So obviously, the more time they spend in short videos, the less time they have for TV or other longer-format shows,” said Ashley Dudarenok, founder of a Hong Kong-based marketing consultancy.

The leader in the space is Kuaishou, an app that accounted for 60% of the top 50 Chinese micro dramas last year, according to media analytics consultancy Endata.

Kuaishou vice president Chen Yiyi said at a media conference in January that the app featured 68 titles that notched more than 300 million views last year, with four of them watched over a billion times.

Some 94 million people — more than the population of Germany — watched more than 10 episodes a day on Kuaishou, she said. Reuters was not able to independently verify the data.

Initial episodes on such apps are often free, but to complete a micro drama like “Grandma’s Moon,” which has 64 clips, audiences may pay tens of yuan.

Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok that is owned by internet technology firm Bytedance, is also popular with micro drama fans.

Alongside other major Chinese social media apps like Instagram-like Xiaohongshu and YouTube competitor Bilibili, it has announced plans to make more.

In the United States, micro drama platform ReelShort, whose parent company is backed by Chinese tech giants Tencent and Baidu, has recently outranked Netflix in terms of downloads on Apple’s U.S. app store, according to market researcher Sensor Tower.

“China discovered this audience first,” said Layla Cao, a Chinese producer based in Los Angeles. “Hollywood hasn’t realized that yet, but all the China-based companies are already feeding the content.”

‘Low-brow and vulgar’

Many popular micro dramas, including “Grandma’s Moon,” have narratives that revolve around revenge or Cinderella-like rags-to-riches journeys.

Tales of how circumstances at birth are deterministic and can only be changed by near-miracles have struck a chord with viewers at a time when upward mobility in China is low and youth unemployment high.

The micro dramas often “show people who one day are lower class and the next day become upper class — you get so rich that you get to humiliate those who used to humiliate you,” said a 26-year-old screenwriter known by her pen name of Camille Rao.

Rao recently left her poorly paid job as a junior producer in the traditional film industry for what she described as the more dynamic and less hierarchical world of micro dramas. She now writes and adapts scripts for the U.S. market.

“Social mobility is actually very difficult now. Many people perceive this as a social reality,” said Xu Ting, associate professor of Chinese language and literature at Jiangnan University.

This has fueled interest in stories about billionaires and wealthy families, she added: “Everyone desires power and wealth, so it is normal for these type of stories to be popular.”

In the U.S. market, by contrast, fantasy stories about werewolves and vampires are particularly popular, several creators told Reuters.

The boom in micro dramas in China has brought scrutiny from the Communist Party.

Between late 2022 and early 2023, the National Radio and Television Administration regulator said it organized a “special rectification campaign” during which it removed 25,300 micro dramas, totaling close to 1.4 million episodes, due to their “pornographic, bloody, violent, low-brow and vulgar content.”

As Chinese leader Xi Jinping promotes values such as loyalty to the Communist Party and heteronormative marriages, the state-owned China Women’s News outlet in April complained that some micro dramas “portray unequal and twisted marriage and family relationships as a common phenomenon” and “deviate from mainstream social values.”

In June, the government began requiring some creators to register micro dramas with NRTA. The regulator didn’t respond to Reuters’ questions for this story.

Key to the commercial success of these films are plot twists that keep people paying as they scroll while commuting or in line at a grocery store. Episodes often end with a hook — such as a boyfriend walking in on his partner with another man — and viewers have to pay for the next episode to find out what happened.

“The plot of these micro dramas is exaggerated,” said Zhu, the actor. “It has plot reversals, it’s nonsensical, so it catches people’s attention and a large audience wants to see them.”

Zhu is a lover of cinema and an avid fan of Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.” Like many of his colleagues in micro dramas, he thinks the genre has limited artistic value. “I see it as fast food: a longer drama is a kind of sumptuous meal, and a micro drama is fast food.”

But its dedicated viewers disagree. Huang Siyi, a 28-year-old customer service agent, said she enjoyed watching romantic micro dramas because “the acting is good and the male and female leads are good-looking.”

“It’s easy to be obsessed with micro dramas,” she said.

Explosive growth

Vertical filming and distribution through social media apps mean micro dramas can be made with small overhead costs. Budgets for such films range from between $28,000 and $280,000, according to market researcher iResearch.

In the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, “Grandma’s Moon” is being made with a compressed budget and timeline. When Reuters visited the set in July, the filming day stretched until 2 a.m. The crew then moved to a new location and began shooting again at 7 a.m.

The show was shot in just six days, and Zhu, a muscular man with a wide smile and boundless energy, says he plays table tennis after hours to keep up with the young crew on set.

“We’d need to take two to three years to distribute one traditional TV series of film, but we only need three months to distribute a micro drama, saving us a lot of time,” said Zhou Yi, a showrunner at Chinese gaming giant NetEase, which also makes micro dramas.

As micro dramas gain in popularity, actors’ salaries have also grown. Leading roles used to pay $280 a day, said Zhu, adding that main actors in big productions can now make more than double the rate, though extras earn as little as $17 daily.

A retired railway employee who started acting in the 1970s in a theater troupe attached to the unit where he worked, Zhu now lives off his pension and occasional acting gigs.

Many Chinese micro drama producers have their eye on Western markets, where cultural exports from China have often struggled. NetEase last year started making productions for the U.S. that it distributes via an app called LoveShots; the made-for-export films aren’t typically available in China.

Micro dramas designed for the West are often made by production and acting crews in Los Angeles and shot on location. The scripts, which are in English, may also revolve around themes of wealth, cheating partners and miracles.

One of the latest micro dramas on LoveShots is about a woman who, after years of being paralyzed, miraculously regains her ability to move — and walks in on her husband cheating on her.
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Los Angeles — It’s a three-peat for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”

The Tim Burton legacy sequel to his 1988 horror comedy topped the North American box office charts for the third straight weekend with $26 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.

It edged out the animated new release “Transformers: One,” which brought in $25 million. The Optimus Prime origin story from Paramount Pictures features the voices of Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry and Scarlett Johansson.

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” a Warner Bros. release with Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder returning as stars, has earned more than $226 million domestically in its three weeks after a monster opening of $110 million — the third best of the year — and a second weekend of $51.6 million.

Third place went to the James McAvoy horror “Speak No Evil,” which came in at $5.9 million in its second week for a total of $21.5 million.

On the whole, the box office was in a quiet phase that is expected to break when ” Joker: Folie à Deux ” dances its way onto the big screen on Oct. 4.

The year’s second-highest grosser ” Deadpool & Wolverine ” remained in the top 5 in its ninth weekend with another $3.9 million and a domestic total of $627 million. Only Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” has earned more.

The Demi Moore-starring, Coralie Fargeat-directed body horror “The Substance,” which made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival, brought in $3.1 million on limited screens in its first weekend for the sixth spot.

The Daily Wire movie “Am I Racist?” — in which conservative columnist Matt Walsh goes undercover as a “DEI trainee” — stayed in the top 10 after a fourth place finish last week, earning $2.9 million for seventh place and a two-week total of $9 million.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” $26 million.

2. “Transformers One,” $25 million.

3. “Speak No Evil,” $5.9 million.

4. “Never Let Go,” $4.5 million.

5. “Deadpool & Wolverine,” $3.9 million.

6. “The Substance,” $3.1 million.

7. “Am I Racist?” $2.5 million.

8. “Reagan,” $1.7 million.

9. “JUNG KOOK: I AM STILL,” $1.4 million.

10. “Alien Romulus,” $1.3 million.
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SANBAGAWA, Japan — Benmou Suzuki’s dilapidated 420-year-old temple, located deep in the forest near a tiny Japanese mountain village, hardly looks like prized real estate.

Yet the monk was recently approached by two men, who said they were real estate brokers and wanted to know if he was interested in selling.

He suspects they weren’t really interested in the ornate building at the trailhead of a sacred mountain, but the special tax status that comes with running a religious property.

“There are people out there who want a temple, even a mountain temple like this. In fact, considering the value of the religious corporation status, this temple could fetch quite a lot of money,” said 52-year-old Suzuki.

As Japan’s population falls and interest in religion declines, there are fewer people to contribute to the upkeep of the country’s numerous temples and shrines. Suzuki’s Mikaboyama temple, for example, is located in Sanbagawa — an area a three-hour drive from Tokyo with only 500 residents and which also has three other Buddhist temples, one Shinto shrine and a church.

A surge in religious properties coming up for sale has Japanese authorities worried that prospective buyers are not interested in them for heavenly purposes. Rather they fear many are out to dodge taxes or possibly even launder money.

“It’s already a sense of crisis for us and the religious community,” said an official at Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, which oversees religious sites.

Cases of temple or shrine properties being extensively repurposed have triggered public outrage. In Osaka, a temple sold in 2020 was later razed and dozens of graves were relocated to make way for a property development. In Kyoto, a case about a temple that was demolished and turned into a parking lot made headlines this year.

Owning a temple, shrine or church recognized as a religious corporation in Japan can confer sizeable tax benefits. Businesses under such corporations that offer religious services such as funerals do not have to pay taxes while other non-religious businesses also enjoy preferential tax rates. A wide range of undertakings are allowed from restaurants to hair salons to hotels.

Japan had about 180,000 religious sites with corporation status as end-2023, according to the agency’s data. The number of so-called inactive corporations — such as those with no religious events for more than a year — jumped by a third to more than 4,400.

When monks or priests die without a successor, the overseeing religious group will usually appoint someone to take over or voluntarily relinquish the site’s corporation status.

However, there are around 7,000 religious sites that operate independently of these groups and are considered easy to acquire, according to the agency and specialist brokers.

The cultural affairs agency said it has stepped up efforts to dissolve the corporation status of inactive religious sites to stop them from being targeted by dubious buyers.

And when big earthquakes hit, often damaging temples and shrines, agency officials visit religious groups in those areas, warning them about falling prey to such buyers.

Last year, 17 religious corporations were voluntarily dissolved and six were ordered to dissolve. The agency said the number would increase this year and next year as it ratchets up scrutiny.

It might seem easier for Japan to change its laws to more strictly control the criteria for purchasing religious sites. But the agency said the government is wary about amending laws related to religion as that could be seen as impinging on religious freedom which is guaranteed by Japan’s constitution.

Reuters checks of six websites specializing in brokering the sale of religious properties showed hundreds on the market. Most are only obliquely described online with brokers saying sellers prefer to conduct sales as privately as possible.

Osaka-based broker Takao Yamamoto told Reuters interest is surging. A religious corporation license alone can fetch 30 million yen ($210,000), he adds. Some religious sites, especially those with profitable graveyards, are advertised for millions of dollars.

“Anyone can buy independent sites as long as you have money…even foreigners can buy them. Recently, a lot of Chinese people are trying to buy them,” Yamamoto said.

For his part, Suzuki says he has no intention to sell Mikaboyama temple and is working on ideas to raise funds to maintain it. “Temples are places for local people to gather and forge connections. We just can’t get rid of them,” he said. 
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KAWARAMACHI, Japan — Time seems to stop here. 

Women sit in a small circle, quietly, painstakingly stitching patterns on balls the size of an orange, a stitch at a time. 

At the center of the circle is Eiko Araki, a master of the Sanuki Kagari Temari, a Japanese traditional craft passed down for more than 1,000 years on the southwestern island of Shikoku. 

Each ball — known as a “temari” ball — is a work of art, with colorful geometric patterns carrying poetic names like “firefly flowers” and “layered stars.” A temari ball takes weeks or months to finish. Some cost hundreds of dollars (tens of thousands of yen), although others are much cheaper. 

These kaleidoscopic balls aren’t for throwing or kicking around. They’re destined to be heirlooms, carrying prayers for health and goodness. They might be treasured like a painting or piece of sculpture in a Western home. 

The concept behind temari is an elegant otherworldliness, an impractical beauty that is also very labor-intensive to create. 

“Out of nothing, something this beautiful is born, bringing joy,” said Araki. “I want it to be remembered there are beautiful things in this world that can only be made by hand.” 

Natural materials 

The region where temari originated was good for growing cotton, warm with little rainfall, and the spherical creations continue to be made out of the humble material. 

At Araki’s studio, which also serves as head office for temari’s preservation society, there are 140 hues of cotton thread, including delicate pinks and blues, as well as more vivid colors and all the subtle gradations in between. 

The women dye them by hand, using plants, flowers and other natural ingredients, including cochineal, which is a bug living in cacti that produces a red dye. The deeper shade of indigo is dyed again and again to turn just about black. Yellow and blue are combined to form gorgeous greens. Soy juice is added to deepen the tints, a dash of organic protein. 

Outside the studio, loops of cotton thread, in various tones of yellow today, hang outside in the shade to dry. 

Creating and embroidering the balls 

The arduous process starts with making the basic ball mold on which the stitching is done. Rice husks that are cooked then dried are placed in a piece of cotton, then wound with thread, over and over, until, almost magically, a ball appears in your hands. 

Then the stitching begins. 

The balls are surprisingly hard, so each stitch requires a concentrated, almost painful, push. The motifs must be precise and even. 

Each ball has lines to guide the stitching — one that goes around it like the equator, and others that zigzag to the top and bottom. 

Appealing to a new generation 

These days, temari is getting some new recognition, among Japanese and foreigners as well. Caroline Kennedy took lessons in the ball-making when she was United States ambassador to Japan a decade ago. 

Yoshie Nakamura, who promotes Japanese handcrafted art in her duty-free shop at Tokyo’s Haneda airport, says she features temari there because of its intricate and delicate designs. 

“Temari that might have been everyday in a faraway era is now being used for interior decoration,” she said. 

“I really feel each Sanuki Kagari Temari speaks of a special, one-and-only existence in the world.” 

Araki has come up with newer designs that feel both modern and historical. She is trying to make the balls more accessible to everyday life — for instance, as Christmas tree ornaments. A strap with a dangling miniature ball, though quite hard to make because of its size, is affordable at about 1,500 yen ($10) each. 

Another of Araki’s inventions is a cluster of pastel balls that opens and closes with tiny magnets. Fill it with sweet-smelling herbs for a kind of aromatic diffuser. 

A tradition passed down through generations 

Araki, a graceful woman who talks very slowly, her head cocked to one side as though always in thought, often travels to Tokyo to teach. But mostly she works and gives lessons in her studio, an abandoned kindergarten with faded blue paint and big windows with tired wooden frames. 

She started out as a metalwork artist. Her husband’s parents were temari masters who worked hard to resurrect the artform when it was declining in the modern age, at risk of dying out. 

They were stoic people, rarely bestowing praise and instead always scolding her, she remembers. It’s a tough-love approach that’s common in the handing down of many Japanese traditional arts, from Kabuki acting to hogaku music, that demand lifetimes of selfless devotion. 

Today, only several dozen people, all women, can make the temari balls to traditional standards. 

“The most challenging aspect is nurturing successors. It typically takes over 10 years to train them, so you need people who are willing to continue the craft for a very long time,” Araki said. 

“When people start to feel joy along with the hardship that comes with making temari, they tend to keep going.” 
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KARACHI, Pakistan — Stained glass windows, a sweeping staircase and embellished interiors make Mohatta Palace a gem in Karachi, a Pakistani megacity of 20 million people. Peacocks roam the lawn and the sounds of construction and traffic melt away as visitors enter the grounds.

The pink stone balustrades, domes and parapets look like they’ve been plucked from the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, a relic of a time when Muslims and Hindus lived side by side in the port city.

But magnificence is no guarantee of survival in a city where land is scarce and development is rampant. Demolition, encroachment, neglect, piecemeal conservation laws and vandalism are eroding signs of Karachi’s past.

The building’s trustees have fended off an attempt to turn it into a dental college, but there’s still a decadeslong lawsuit in which heirs of a former owner are trying to take control of the land. It sat empty for almost two decades before formally opening as a museum in 1999.

The palace sits on prime real estate in the desirable neighborhood of Old Clifton, among mansions, businesses and upmarket restaurants.

The land under buildings like the Mohatta Palace is widely coveted, said palace lawyer Faisal Siddiqi. “It shows that greed is more important than heritage.”

Karachi’s population grows by around 2% every year and with dozens of communities and cultures competing for space there’s little effort to protect the city’s historic sites.

For most Pakistanis, the palace is the closest they’ll get to the architectural splendor of India’s Rajasthan, because travel restrictions and hostile bureaucracies largely keep people in either country from crossing the border for leisure, study or work.

Karachi’s multicultural past makes it harder to find champions for preservation than in a city like Lahore, with its strong connection to the Muslim-dominated Mughal Empire, said Heba Hashmi, a heritage manager and maritime archaeologist.

“The scale of organic local community support needed to prioritize government investment in the preservation effort is nearly impossible to garner in a city as socially fragmented as Karachi,” she said. 

Mohatta Palace is a symbol of that diversity. Hindu entrepreneur Shivratan Mohatta had it built in the 1920s because he wanted a coastal residence for his ailing wife to benefit from the Arabian Sea breeze. Hundreds of donkey carts carried the distinctively colored pink stone from Jodhpur, now across the border in India.

He left after partition in 1947, when India and Pakistan were carved from the former British Empire as independent nations, and for a time the palace was occupied by the Foreign Ministry.

Next, it passed into the hands of Pakistani political royalty as the home of Fatima Jinnah, the younger sister of Pakistan’s first leader and a powerful politician in her own right.

After her death, the authorities gave the building to her sister Shirin, but Shirin’s passing in 1980 sparked a court fight between people saying they were her relatives, and a court ordered the building sealed.

The darkened and empty palace, with its overgrown gardens and padlocked gates, caught people’s imagination. Rumors spread of spirits and supernatural happenings.

Someone who heard the stories as a young girl was Nasreen Askari, now the museum’s director.

“As a child I used to rush past,” she said. “I was told it was a bhoot (ghost) bungalow and warned, don’t go there.”

Visitor Ahmed Tariq had heard a lot about the palace’s architecture and history. “I’m from Bahawalpur (in Punjab, India) where we have the Noor Mahal palace, so I wanted to look at this one. It’s well-maintained, there’s a lot of detail and effort in the presentations. It’s been a good experience.”

But the money to maintain the palace isn’t coming from admission fees.

General admission is 30 rupees, or 10 U.S. cents, and it’s free for students, children and seniors. On a sweltering afternoon, the palace drew just a trickle of visitors.

It’s open Tuesday to Sunday but closes on public holidays; even the 11 a.m.-6 p.m. hours are not conducive for a late-night city like Karachi.

The palace is rented out for corporate and charitable events. Local media report that residents grumble about traffic and noise levels.

But the palace doesn’t welcome all attention, even if it could help carve out a space for the building in modern Pakistan.

Rumors about ghosts still spread by TikTok, pulling in influencers looking for spooky stories. But the palace bans filming inside, and briefly banned TikTokers.

“It is not the attention the trustees wanted,” said Askari. “That’s what happens when you have anything of consequence or unusual. It catches the eye.”

A sign on the gates also prohibits fashion shoots, weddings and filming for commercials.

“We could make so much money, but the floodgates would open,” said Askari. “There would be non-stop weddings and no space for visitors or events, so much cleaning up as well.”

Hashmi, the archaeologist, said there is often a strong sense of territorialism around the sites that have been preserved.

“It counterproductively converts a site of public heritage into an exclusive and often expensive artifact for selective consumption.” 
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PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA — Nhem Liza made her first visit to the National Museum of Cambodia after learning about the August return from the United States of dozens of looted Cambodian artifacts, including important Hindu and Buddhist masterpieces dating from the ninth to 14th centuries.

“Those artifacts are amazing,” said 15-year-old Nhem, a 10th grade Phnom Penh high school student.

The return of the statues — viewed as divine or containing the souls of ancestors — has given younger Cambodians like Nhem an opportunity to embrace the country’s cultural heritage and history.

“I am excited to see these artifacts our government is trying to get back,” she told VOA on September 16 after viewing some of objects now on display at the museum.

Cambodia has worked for years to identify and secure the return of culturally and historically important relics from private collections and museums overseas, many of which were lost to the country because of war, theft and the illegal artifact trade.

Cambodia faced continuous civil unrest from the mid-1960s until the early 1990s and archeological sites from the ancient Khmer Empire, such as Angkor Wat and Koh Ker, suffered serious damage and widespread looting, Cambodian officials told VOA Khmer.

In August, Cambodia celebrated the return of 70 items from museums and private collections overseas, including 14 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The objects include priceless stone statues such as one depicting a mythical warrior from the Hindu epic Mahabharata. There are also statues of Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati, and one of the Hindu god Ardhanarishvara from the ancient capital of Koh Ker, according to Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts.

Presiding over the return ceremony, Prime Minister Hun Manet said the 70 returned objects symbolically reunited the Cambodian people with their “ancestral souls,” adding that the government will continue working to bring more artifacts home.

From 1996 to July of this year, 1,098 artifacts had been returned to Cambodia — 571 from private collections and 527 from foreign institutions and governments, Hun said.

“It is the soul of our nation,” Doeun Sokun Aly, 18, told VOA at the museum. “The heroes of our country built those artifacts for the younger generation to know about those antiques. … I will visit museums more to see more artifacts.”

National Museum Director Chhay Visoth told VOA the display is meant to stir new interest from Cambodians, especially younger Cambodians.

“Recently, we have seen a surprising increase of Cambodian visitors to the museum, especially youth,” he said by phone this week.

The authorities, he said, are now planning to conduct a “mobile exhibition” to display the artifacts at museums in provinces such as Siem Reap, Battambang and Pursat, in the northwestern part of the country.

Chhay said the museum also hopes the display will send a message to private collectors and museums overseas that “those artifacts are greatly important” and “not for beautifying gardens, kitchens, living rooms, residents or offices of the rich.”

“For Cambodians, they are meaningful indeed. Those artifacts are the souls of Khmer ancestors,” he said.

Chhay added that the museum is already planning to expand its display area to accommodate more returned artifacts.

Over the years, Cambodia has received dozens of statues from the families of wealthy collectors, such as George Lindemann, a U.S. businessman and philanthropist who died in 2018.

In 2021, after three years of negotiations, the family of the late British art collector Douglas Latchford agreed to return more than 100 Cambodian artifacts, according to the government.

Latchford, who co-authored three books on Cambodian art and antiques, died in 2020 facing accusations that he had illegally trafficked the artifacts to his homes in Bangkok and London.

In November 2019, federal prosecutors in New York charged Latchford with falsifying the provenance, invoices and shipping documents to transport valuable Khmer-era relics to private collections, museums and auction houses around the world.

Other cultural objects that have found their way back to Cambodia went through processes including voluntary returns, negotiations, seizures and legal proceedings.

The United States has helped secure the return of well over 150 antiques to Cambodia so far, Wesley Holzer, a U.S. Embassy spokesperson in Phnom Penh said.

“The United States is proud of its longstanding contributions to preserving and restoring Cambodia’s cultural heritage,” he told VOA in an email, adding that Cambodia is the first country in Southeast Asia to establish a bilateral property repatriation memorandum of understanding with the U.S.

“Through this MOU, the United States and Cambodia have trained heritage professionals, prevented pillaging of antiquities, and facilitated the return of looted artifacts. This agreement also makes it illegal to import certain Cambodian archeological and ethnological material into the United States,” he added.

Bradley Gordon, a lawyer representing Cambodian government, said there were “many more” that his team are searching for.

“To be clear, Cambodia does not want to empty out museums around the world, but wants many important and precious national treasures to come home.   Cambodia also is open to long-term loans which they are exploring with a number of museums,” he added.

A member of Gordon’s restitution team, Cambodian researcher Kunthea Chhoun, said getting the artifacts back is not easy.

“We need to investigate and collect testimonies from looters, villagers and brokers.  It takes a great amount of patience and many interviews.   We have used different approaches to get back our artifacts and it has taken many years,” she told VOA in a September 20 email. 
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NEW YORK — Music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs has been hit with three federal charges of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution, according to an indictment unsealed on Tuesday.  

Combs, 54, was arrested in Manhattan by federal agents on Monday night, following a year in which his career was derailed by several lawsuits accusing him of physical and sexual abuse. 

Marc Agnifilo, Combs’ lawyer, said he was disappointed with the decision to pursue an “unjust prosecution” of the rapper and producer. 

“Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs is a music icon, self-made entrepreneur, loving family man, and proven philanthropist who has spent the last 30 years building an empire, adoring his children, and working to uplift the Black community,” Agnifilo said on Monday night. “He is an imperfect person, but he is not a criminal.” 

Agnifilo added that Combs voluntarily relocated to New York in anticipation of the charges. 

Combs, who has also been known as P. Diddy and Puff Daddy, was a major figure in hip-hop in the 1990s and 2000s. He founded the label Bad Boy records, and is credited with helping turn rappers and R&B singers such as Mary J. Blige, Faith Evans, Notorious B.I.G. and Usher into stars. 

His reputation came under fire last November when former girlfriend Casandra Ventura, an R&B singer known as Cassie, accused him in a lawsuit of serial physical abuse, sexual slavery and rape during their decade-long relationship. She agreed to an undisclosed settlement one day after suing, even as Combs denied her allegations. 

His legal pressures mounted, and he has faced several civil lawsuits by women and men who accused him of sexual assault and other misconduct. His lawyers have been fighting those cases in court. Federal agents raided his homes in Los Angeles and Miami Beach, Florida six months ago. 

Singer Dawn Richard, formerly of Danity Kane, last week accused Combs in a lawsuit of sexual assault, battery, sex trafficking, gender discrimination and fraud. 

A Michigan judge this month ordered Combs to pay $100 million to Derrick Lee Smith, who said Combs drugged and sexually assaulted him at a party almost 30 years ago, after Combs failed to show up to defend himself in court. A lawyer for Combs said he would seek to dismiss that judgment. 

Combs has also rejected claims in a February sex trafficking lawsuit by Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones, who Combs employed as a producer on his 2023 release “The Love Album: Off the Grid.” 

The indictment is not Combs’ first brush with the law. He was acquitted in March 2001 of bribery and weapons charges in a criminal trial stemming from a nightclub shooting that left three people wounded.
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Osaka, Japan — Japan celebrated on Monday the record-breaking Emmy Awards triumph of “Shogun”, although many confessed not having watched the series about the country’s warring dynasties in the feudal era.

“Shogun” smashed all-time records at the television awards in Los Angeles on Sunday, taking home an astounding 18 statuettes and becoming the first non-English-language winner of the highly coveted award for best drama series.

Lead Hiroyuki Sanada, who played Lord Toranaga, became the first Japanese actor to win an Emmy, while Anna Sawai achieved the same for her performance as Lady Mariko.

“As a Japanese, I’m happy Sanada won,” Kiyoko Kanda, a 70-year-old pensioner, told AFP in Tokyo.

“He worked so hard since he moved to Los Angeles,” she said.

“In ‘Last Samurai’, Tom Cruise was the lead, but it’s exciting Sanada is the main character in ‘Shogun’,” Kanda added.

But she admitted that she only watched the trailer.

The series is available only on Disney’s streaming platform, which is relatively new in Japan.

“I want to watch it. I’m curious to know how Japan is portrayed,” Kanda said.

Otsuka, who declined to give her first name, said she, too, has not watched the show.

“But I saw the news and I’m happy he won.” Sanada, now 63, began his acting career at the age of five in Tokyo and moved to LA after appearing in “Last Samurai” in 2003.

The words “historic achievements” and “Hiroyuki Sanada” were trending on X in Japanese, while Sanada’s speech at the awards racked up tens of thousands of views.

Yusuke Takizawa, 41, also only watched a trailer but he said he was amazed by the quality of the show.

“I was impressed by the high-spirited acting, the attention to detail and the film technology,” Takizawa told AFP outside Osaka Castle, a major historical location for the series.

“I think many young people will want to try their hand in Hollywood after watching Sanada,” he said.

Tourists at the castle also welcomed the record Emmy win.

“I think was the best TV show that I’ve seen this year,” said Zara Ferjani, a visitor from London.

“I thought it was amazing… The direction was beautiful, and I really enjoyed watching something that wasn’t in English as well,” the 33-year-old said.

She said she had planned to watch “Shogun” after returning home from Japan.

“But one of my friends strongly advised me to watch it beforehand, just to appreciate the culture more and definitely Osaka Castle more,” she added.

Breaking from cliches

Many in the Japanese film industry were also jubilant.

“He won after many years of trying hard in Hollywood. It’s too cool,” wrote Shinichiro Ueda, director of the hit low-budget film “One Cut of the Dead”, on X.

Video game creator and movie fan Hideo Kojima, who has described the show as “Game of Thrones in 17th-century Japan”, reposted a news story on the win.

The drama, adapted from a popular novel by James Clavell and filmed in Canada, tells the tale of Lord Toranaga, who fights for his life against his enemies alongside Mariko and British sailor John Blackthorne.

A previous TV adaptation made in 1980 was centered on Blackthorne’s perspective.

But the new “Shogun” breaks away from decades of cliched and often bungled depictions of Japan in Western cinema, with Japanese spoken throughout most of the show.

Sanada, who also co-produced the drama, is credited with bringing a new level of cultural and historical authenticity to “Shogun.”

An army of experts, including several wig technicians from Japan, worked behind the scenes to make the series realistic, poring over sets, costumes and the actors’ movements.
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