Author: Ohart

A British university student has created a range of watercolor paints made from discarded cosmetics. An example, she says, of how the so-called ‘circular economy’ can help improve the environment. It could also be a way for cosmetics companies and retailers to reduce waste and make more money. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman apologized Thursday to anyone he may have offended after reports he sexually harassed women on movie sets.

“Anyone who knows me or has worked with me knows I am not someone who would intentionally offend or knowingly make anyone feel uneasy,” the 80-year-old actor said in a statement. “I apologize to anyone who felt uncomfortable or disrespected. That was never my intent.”

Eight women told CNN television Freeman had engaged in inappropriate behavior on the sets or promotional tours of various films.

A young woman who was a production assistant on 2015’s Going in Style told CNN Freeman touched her, rubbed her lower back and asked if she was wearing underpants as he tried to lift up her dress.

Others accused Freeman of staring at their breasts and quizzing them about sexual harassment.

One woman told CNN she and others on the set of another Freeman film knew “not to wear any top that would show our breasts, not to wear anything that would show our bottoms,” if Freeman was around.

Freeman has been nominated for five Oscars for acting, winning one for Million Dollar Baby in 2005.

He is the latest major media figure to be accused of sexual harassment. Others include journalists Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw; actor Kevin Spacey; and President Donald Trump, who denied all allegations.

Meanwhile, U.S. news reports said film producer Harvey Weinstein would turn himself in to New York police to face criminal charges of sexual misconduct following a long investigation.

Weinstein, once one of the most powerful figures in show business before being forced to step down as head of his production empire, has denied forcing himself on anyone.
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A new study by Johns Hopkins University says urban foraging, the act of finding naturally growing, edible food in urban settings in the U.S. is on the rise. But before setting out with basket and blade, experts recommend would-be foragers to take classes to determine what’s edible and what might make you sick. Fortunately, foraging classes are cropping up across the country. Faith Lapidus reports on one of them.
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Philip Roth, the prize-winning novelist and fearless narrator of sex, death, assimilation and fate, from the comic madness of “Portnoy’s Complaint” to the elegiac lyricism of “American Pastoral,” died Tuesday night at age 85.

Roth’s literary agent, Andrew Wylie, said that the author died in a New York City hospital of congestive heart failure.

Author of more than 25 books, Roth was a fierce satirist and uncompromising realist, confronting readers in a bold, direct style that scorned false sentiment or hopes for heavenly reward. He was an atheist who swore allegiance to earthly imagination, whether devising pornographic functions for raw liver or indulging romantic fantasies about Anne Frank. In “The Plot Against America,” published in 2004, he placed his own family under the anti-Semitic reign of President Charles Lindbergh. In 2010, in “Nemesis,” he subjected his native New Jersey to a polio epidemic.

He was among the greatest writers never to win the Nobel Prize. But he received virtually every other literary honor, including two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle prizes and, in 1998, the Pulitzer for “American Pastoral.” He was in his 20s when he won his first award and awed critics and fellow writers by producing some of his most acclaimed novels in his 60s and 70s, including “The Human Stain” and “Sabbath’s Theater,” a savage narrative of lust and mortality he considered his finest work.

He identified himself as an American writer, not a Jewish one, but for Roth the American experience and the Jewish experience were often the same. While predecessors such as Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud wrote of the Jews’ painful adjustment from immigrant life, Roth’s characters represented the next generation. Their first language was English, and they spoke without accents. They observed no rituals and belonged to no synagogues. The American dream, or nightmare, was to become “a Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness.” The reality, more often, was to be regarded as a Jew among gentiles and a gentile among Jews.

In the novel “The Ghost Writer” he quoted one of his heroes, Franz Kafka: “We should only read those books that bite and sting us.” For his critics, his books were to be repelled like a swarm of bees.

Feminists, Jews and one ex-wife attacked him in print, and sometimes in person. Women in his books were at times little more than objects of desire and rage and The Village Voice once put his picture on its cover, condemning him as a misogynist. A panel moderator berated him for his comic portrayals of Jews, asking Roth if he would have written the same books in Nazi Germany. The Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem called “Portnoy’s Complaint” the “book for which all anti-Semites have been praying.” When Roth won the Man Booker International Prize, in 2011, a judge resigned, alleging that the author suffered from terminal solipsism and went “on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book.” In “Sabbath’s Theater,” Roth imagines the inscription for his title character’s headstone: “Sodomist, Abuser of Women, Destroyer of Morals.’’

Ex-wife Claire Bloom wrote a best-selling memoir, “Leaving a Doll’s House,” in which the actress remembered reading the manuscript of his novel “Deception.” With horror, she discovered his characters included a boring middle-aged wife named Claire, married to an adulterous writer named Philip. Bloom also described her ex-husband as cold, manipulative and unstable. (Although, alas, she still loved him). The book was published by Virago Press, whose founder, Carmen Callil, was the same judge who quit years later from the Booker committee.

Roth’s wars also originated from within. He survived a burst appendix in the late 1960s and near-suicidal depression in 1987. After the disappointing reaction to his 1993 novel, “Operation Shylock,” he fell again into severe depression and for years rarely communicated with the media. For all the humor in his work – and, friends would say, in private life – jacket photos usually highlighted the author’s tense, dark-eyed glare. In 2012, he announced that he had stopped writing fiction and would instead dedicate himself to helping biographer Blake Bailey complete his life story, one he openly wished would not come out while he was alive. By 2015, he had retired from public life altogether.

He never promised to be his readers’ friend; writing was its own reward, the narration of “life, in all its shameless impurity.” Until his abrupt retirement, Roth was a dedicated, prolific author who often published a book a year and was generous to writers from other countries.

 Roth began his career in rebellion against the conformity of the 1950s and ended it in defense of the security of the 1940s; he was never warmer than when writing about his childhood, or more sorrowful, and enraged, than when narrating the shock of innocence lost.

Roth was born in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey, a time and place he remembered lovingly in “The Facts,” “American Pastoral” and other works. The scolding, cartoonish parents of his novels were pure fiction. He adored his parents, especially his father, an insurance salesman to whom he paid tribute in the memoir “Patrimony.” Roth would describe his childhood as “intensely secure and protected,” at least at home. He was outgoing and brilliant and, tall and dark-haired, especially attractive to girls. In his teens he presumed he would become a lawyer, a most respectable profession in his family’s world.

But after a year at Newark College of Rutgers University, Roth emulated an early literary hero, James Joyce, and fled his hometown. He transferred to Bucknell College in Pennsylvania and only returned to Newark on paper. By his early 20s, Roth was writing fiction.

After receiving a master’s degree in English from the University of Chicago, he began publishing stories in The Paris Review and elsewhere. Bellow was an early influence, as were Thomas Wolfe, Flaubert, Henry James and Kafka, whose picture Roth hung in his writing room.

Roth insisted writing should express, not sanitize. After two relatively tame novels, “Letting Go” and “When She was Good,” he abandoned his good manners with “Portnoy’s Complaint,” his ode to blasphemy against the “unholy trinity of “father, mother and Jewish son.” Published in 1969, a great year for rebellion, it was an event, a birth, a summation, Roth’s triumph over “the awesome graduate school authority of Henry James,” as if history’s lid had blown open and out erupted a generation of Jewish guilt and desire.
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Richard N. Goodwin, an aide, speechwriter and liberal force for the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson who helped craft such historic addresses as Robert Kennedy’s “ripples of hope” and LBJ’s speeches on civil rights and “The Great Society,” died Sunday evening. He was 86.

Goodwin, the husband of Pulitzer Prize winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, died at his home in Concord, Massachusetts. According to his wife, he died after a brief bout with cancer.

“It was the adventure of a lifetime to be married for 42 years to this incredible force of nature – the smartest, most interesting, most loving person I have ever known. How lucky I have been to have had him by my side as we built our family and our careers together surrounded by close friends in a community we love,” said Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Richard Goodwin was among the youngest members of John F. Kennedy’s inner circle and among the last survivors. Brilliant and contentious, with thick eyebrows and a mess of wavy-curly hair, the cigar-smoking Goodwin rose from a working class background to the Kennedy White House before he had turned 30. He was a Boston native and Harvard Law graduate who specialized in broad, inspirational rhetoric – top JFK speechwriter Theodore Sorensen was a mentor – that “would move men to action or alliance.”

Thriving during an era when few feared to be called “liberal,” Goodwin also worked on some of Lyndon Johnson’s most memorable domestic policy initiatives, including his celebrated “We Shall Overcome” speech. But he differed with the president about Vietnam, left the administration after 1965 and would later contend – to much debate – that Johnson may have been clinically paranoid. Increasingly impassioned through the latter half of the ’60s, he co-wrote what many regard as then- Sen. Robert Kennedy’s greatest speech, his address in South Africa in 1966. Kennedy bluntly attacked the racist apartheid system, praised protest movements worldwide and said those who speak and act against injustice send “forth a tiny ripple of hope.”

Goodwin’s opposition to the Vietnam conflict led him to write speeches in 1968 for Kennedy and to manage the presidential campaign for anti-war candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy. But McCarthy faded, Kennedy (”My best and last friend in politics,” Goodwin wrote) was assassinated and Republican Richard Nixon was elected president. Goodwin never worked for another administration, although he and his wife were fixtures in the Democratic Party and he continued to comment on current affairs for Rolling Stone, The New Yorker and other publications. In 2000, he was called upon for one of the least glamorous jobs in speechwriting history: Al Gore’s concession to George W. Bush after a deadlocked race that ended with a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in Bush’s favor.

Goodwin was admired for his rare blend of poetry and political savvy, and criticized for being all too aware of his talents. Even one of his supporters, historian and fellow Kennedy insider Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., would say that he “probably lacked tact and finesse.” But Schlesinger also regarded Goodwin as the “archetypal New Frontiersman” of JFK’s brief presidency.

“Goodwin was the supreme generalist,” Schlesinger wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Thousand Days,” published in 1965, “who could turn from Latin America to saving the Nile Monuments, from civil rights to planning a White House dinner for the Nobel Prize winners, from composing a parody of Norman Mailer to drafting a piece of legislation, from lunching with a Supreme Court Justice to dining with Jean Seberg – and at the same time retain an unquenchable spirit of sardonic liberalism and unceasing drive to get things done.”

Richard Naradof Goodwin was born in Boston on Dec. 7, 1931, but spent part of his childhood in suburban Maryland, where he would recall being harassed and beaten because he was Jewish. His enemies only inspired him. He graduated summa cum laude from Tufts University, at the top his class from Harvard Law School, then clerked for Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, the first of a series of powerful men Goodwin worked under.

His road to Kennedy’s “Camelot” began not with an election, but with the corruption of TV game shows. He was an investigator in the late `50s for the Legislative Oversight Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, which helped reveal that the popular “Twenty One” program was rigged. Goodwin’s recollections were adapted into the 1994 film “Quiz Show,” directed by Robert Redford and featuring Rob Morrow as Goodwin, who was one of the producers. The film received four Academy Award nominations, including for best picture, but was criticized for inflating Goodwin’s role in uncovering the scandal.

His efforts were noticed by Kennedy, then a U.S. senator from Massachusetts and aspiring presidential candidate. Goodwin was hired to write speeches for the 1960 race, advised Kennedy for his landmark television debates with Nixon and held a number of positions in the administration, from assistant special counsel in the White House to an adviser on Latin America. After Kennedy’s assassination, in 1963, Goodwin was urged – implored – to stay on by the new president: “You’re going to be my voice, my alter ego,” Goodwin remembered Lyndon Johnson saying.

​There was constant tension between Johnson, a Texan, and the “Harvards” around Kennedy, but Goodwin initially had strong influence. He was assigned key policy speeches, including the 1964 address at the University of Michigan, when Johnson outlined his domestic vision of a “Great Society.” Johnson’s 1965 civil rights speech to a joint session of Congress, written by Goodwin on less than a day’s notice and in the wake of the bloody marches in Selma, Alabama, ended with an exhortation that drew upon the language of the protest movement and reportedly left the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in tears.

“Their cause must be our cause too,” Johnson said. “Because it is not just Negroes, but all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
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Barack and Michelle Obama are getting into the television business with Monday’s announcement that they had signed a multiyear deal with Netflix.

The former president and first lady have formed their own production company, Higher Ground Productions, for the material. In announcing a deal that had been rumored since March, Netflix offered no specifics on what shows they would make.

Netflix said the Obamas would make “a diverse mix of content,” potentially including scripted and unscripted series, documentaries or features.

“We hope to cultivate and curate the talented, inspiring, creative voices who are able to promote greater empathy and understanding between peoples, and help them share their stories with the wider world,” Barack Obama said in Netflix’s announcement.

The Obamas can be expected to participate in some of the programming onscreen, said a person familiar with the deal, not authorized to talk publicly about it, on condition of anonymity. The programming itself is not expected to be partisan in nature; a president who often derided the way things were covered on cable news won’t be joining in.

The type of people that Obama — like other presidents — brought forward as guests at his State of the Union addresses would likely provide fodder for the kinds of stories they want to tell.

“Barack and I have always believed in the power of storytelling to inspire us, to make us think differently about the world around us, and to help us open our minds and hearts to others,” Michelle Obama said.

No content from the deal is expected to be available until at least 2019, said the person familiar with the deal.

The former president appeared in January on David Letterman’s Netflix talk show, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.” Obama is said to be friendly with Ted Sarandos, Netflix chief content officer, and discussions for other programming were already under way.

“We are incredibly proud they have chosen to make Netflix the home for their formidable storytelling abilities,” Sarandos said.

Netflix has 125 million subscribers worldwide. The company has always been reluctant to discuss how many people watch its programming, but it clearly dominates the growing market for streaming services. Roughly 10 percent of television viewing now is through these services, the Nielsen company said.

Forty-nine percent of streaming being viewed now comes through Netflix, and no other service comes close, Nielsen said.
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Over the centuries, Tibetan monks have created mandalas, fanciful images of the universe with complex iconography. Losang Samten is one of those monks. The American scholar and artist is best known for creating mandalas in colored sand for the public and sharing messages of healing and peace. VOA’s June Soh caught up with him in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Molly McKitterick narrates.
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The day after the mass shooting at a Texas high school in the small town of Santa Fe, the students who survived are living through the painful aftermath. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee spoke to a couple of them who decided that working is the best way to cope.
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Wild animal sounds were heard recently in the halls of the U.S. Capitol. But these were not the calls of escaped animals. They were the sounds of endangered animals serving as the animal world’s ambassadors to commemorate “Endangered Species Day.” Their presence in the Capitol was intended to encourage legislators to support efforts to protect endangered and rare animals. But as Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports, conservation and animal welfare appears to be a touchy subject on Capitol Hill.
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As part of a wave of women’s empowerment programs, the government of Pakistan’s Punjab province is running a campaign called “Women on Wheels”, a 2-year-old program that trains women to ride motorcycles as a way to raise awareness of gender-based violence and street harassment. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports on the excitement and independence the campaign has brought to participants.
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Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda won the Palme d’Or at Cannes on Saturday for Shoplifters, a critically acclaimed family drama with

unguessable plot twists.

The award, to a director who has won prizes at the festival before, defied speculation that the Palme might go to a female director, with three strong contenders in a year when the Hollywood sex scandal was the talk of the town.

Italian actress Asia Argento, who has accused movie mogul Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault, said there were abusers in the audience who had yet to be outed.

Argento said Weinstein raped her during the Cannes festival in 1997 when she was 21. “This festival was his hunting ground,” Argento said in a speech ahead of the prize announcements.

Weinstein has denied allegations of non-consensual sex. A spokesman for Weinstein had no immediate comment. Argento’s London-based agent, Steve Kenis, was not immediately available to provide further details.

“Even tonight, sitting among you, there are those who still have to be held accountable for their conduct against women,” Argento told the black-tie ceremony. “You know who you are, but, most importantly, we know who

you are, and we are not going to allow you to get away with it any longer.”

After the ceremony, Cate Blanchett, who headed the jury of five women and four men, said: “Women and men alike on the jury would love to see more female directorial voices represented,” adding that it had been “bloody hard” to select a winner.

‘Bowled over’

“But in the end I think we were completely bowled over by how intermeshed the performances were with the directorial vision,” she said of Shoplifters.

The runner-up prize, the Grand Prix, went to Spike Lee’s satire BlacKkKlansman, based on the true story of a black police officer who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s.

Blanchett said the film’s ending, with footage of the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last August and President Donald Trump blaming “both sides” for the deadly violence, “blew us out of the cinema.”

A female director, Nadine Labaki from Lebanon, won the Jury Prize — effectively, the bronze medal — for Capharnaum, a realist drama about childhood neglect in the slums of Beirut.

Fifty years after he helped get the Cannes festival canceled in 1968 in solidarity with worker-student protests, 87-year-old Jean-Luc Godard received a Special Palme d’Or for his collage of sounds and images, The Image Book.

Poland’s Pawel Pawlikowski won Best Director for Cold War, a romance that moves from the peasant farms of Poland to Paris jazz clubs and back from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Girl, a Belgian drama about a transgender teenage girl’s quest to become a ballerina, won the Camera d’Or for the best directorial debut for director Lukas Dhont.

Jafar Panahi, the Iranian director who is prevented from leaving Iran and is in theory banned from making films, won Best Screenplay for 3 Faces along with co-writer Nader Saeivar.

The award was given jointly to another film, Happy as Lazzaro, written and directed by Italian Alice Rohrwacher.
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The big day finally arrived for Britain’s Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, as the couple married Saturday in the town of Windsor, outside London.

Prince Charles, Prince Harry’s father, walked the bride down the aisle.

The American former actress confirmed earlier that her father would not attend the ceremony, owing to ill health, after days of speculation over whether he would make the journey across the Atlantic.

Throngs of people descended on the historic town as well-wishers tried to catch a glimpse of the royal couple. Thousands of police officers mounted one of the biggest security operations in recent years, paid for by the public — a bill resented by some opposed to the monarchy.

Supporters argued the wedding was likely to attract big spending by visitors and those watching in bars and big screens across the country.

The ceremony began at midday in the stunning 14th century Saint George’s Chapel on the grounds of Windsor Castle, where Prince Harry was baptized in 1984.

In Photos: The Royal Wedding

Some 600 guests were invited, mainly those who have a direct relationship with the couple.

In addition, more than 2,500 members of the public were invited onto the castle grounds — the prime spot to watch the guests come and go.

“To me, that was surprising, and it was very touching. Because for as much as they don’t like the media intrusion, the royals, they’ve invited media in, they’ve invited the public in, and they’re wanting to share their special day,” said Thomas Mace-Archer-Mills of the British Monarchist Society and Foundation.

Four members of the Mumbai city-based charity the Myna Mahila Foundation were invited. The non-governmental organization provides sanitary products in the slums of the Indian capital and was visited by Meghan Markle last year. It’s one of seven charities that the couple have asked guests to make donations to instead of providing wedding gifts. The charity’s founder, Myne Mahila, says the invitation came as a huge shock.

“We are representing not just ‘Myna,’ but also the women across the urban slums in the city and India as well. I think there is a lot on the plate and a lot of pressure,” she said.

More than 100,000 people were expected to line the streets of Windsor. Many arrived early to bag the best spots for a look. Donna Werner is a self-confessed royal “superfan” who flew over from her home in the U.S. state of Connecticut and camped out for four nights on a Windsor sidewalk.

In Photos: Crowds, Stars Gather for Royal Wedding

“Every little girl has read fairy tales from her childhood on by her mother and she always dreams of becoming a princess and living in a castle. And I mean, this is it. This is a real-life fairy tale,” she said.

In a break with U.S. tradition, Meghan Markle did not have a maid of honor. All of the six bridesmaids and four page boys were children of friends of the couple. Harry’s nephew, Prince George, was a pageboy, and niece, Princess Charlotte, a bridesmaid.  

In the kitchens of Windsor Castle, 30 chefs prepared a banquet for the reception guests.

“The couple … tasted everything, they’ve been involved in every detail,” says royal head chef Mark Flanagan.

That could mean some stateside surprises among the British fare.

“Are we going to see hot dogs and these sorts of American things? I’m sure there will be a nod to the American culture where food is concerned,” said Mace-Archer-Mills.

As well as the home crowds, millions were expected to watch on television around the globe, with the promise of British pomp mixed with plenty of Hollywood glamour.

Fern Robinson contributed to this report.
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Millions around the world watch the union of British royalty and Hollywood glamour at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle in Windsor, near London, England.
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“Panda Beer,” “Little General,” “Flying Fist IPA,” and “Mandarin Wheat” are among the offerings on tap at a craft beer exhibition this week in Shanghai dedicated to expanding the palette of Chinese consumers and promoting sales of high-end brews.

The 2018 Craft Beer of China Exhibition features breweries like Rasenburg Beer, Myth Monkey Brewing, Lazy Taps, Goose Island and Boxing Cat Brewery that are sharing tips on the latest technology and sales trends as Chinese shift from legacy brews to more experimental, refined and expensive flavors.

From taps at the expo flowed creative mixes of flavors and traditions, a swirling cocktail of Chinese ingredients, barley, hops and spices from around the world.

“After drinking it [craft beer], it feels much better than the domestic industry beer, and then you just can’t leave it,” said Yu Shiqi, a 40-year old craft beer consumer at the expo who dreams of brewing his own.

There’s money to be made in China, which drinks a quarter of all beer worldwide, and small-batch brewers and giant multinationals are cashing in. Though craft beer is far from upstaging local beer behemoths like Tsingtao that dominate the $28 billion national beer market, it is rising in popularity as small breweries open up in China’s major metropolitan areas like Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.

Craft beers are typically more expensive than mass-market, low-alcohol content brews like Budweiser and China’s Yanjing. But as China’s middle class grows, so too does its tastes for finer products.

A couple of years ago, craft beer made up only 0.3 percent of total beer consumption. It has since risen to about 5 percent, said Darren Guo, one of the exhibition’s organizers, who expect to see 30 percent growth in the craft beer market every year until 2020. “Beer culture is pretty much on the beginning or starting level.”

Laurel Liu, sales director of Beijing-based Jing-A brewery, says she gets calls from small towns asking how to start up a craft brewery.

“You don’t even expect them to have craft beer there but now they do,” Liu said. “I’m really surprised and happy to see now that craft beer in China is a thing and it’s really easier to access these products now.”

More money was spent on beer in China than the U.S. in 2017, according to beer industry research firm Drink Sector. Craft breweries were “rapidly increasing,” although foreign imports continue to dominate the high-end beer sector.

The Belgian-Brazilian firm Anheuser-Busch InBev, the makers of Budweiser, has invested heavily in China, building breweries and acquiring craft breweries like Shanghai’s Boxing Cat. Anheuser Busch also owns Goose Island, which is based in Chicago.

Michael Jordan, brew-master at Boxing Cat, and his staff experiment with flavors like egg tart, green tea, peppercorn, chai, kiwi, hibiscus and sweet potato.

Jordan chalks up some of the success of craft brewing in China to President Xi Jinping sharing a pint of IPA, or Indian Pale Ale, in 2015 in the UK with then-prime minister David Cameron.

“The ‘Xi phenomenon’ really kind of opened people’s eyes to IPA,” he said.
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The big day is nearly here for Britain’s Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as the couple are to wed Saturday in the town of Windsor, just outside London. The former American actress confirmed this week that her father will not attend the ceremony because of ill health. Huge crowds are expected as well-wishers try to catch a glimpse of the royal couple and, as Henry Ridgwell reports, from the security operation, to the catering, to the flowers, the day marks the culmination of months of preparation.
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Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Apple founder Steve Jobs are some of America’s best known inventors. But there are other, less recognizable individuals whose innovative products have greatly impacted our world. More than a dozen of them were recently honored for their unique contributions in a special ceremony at the National Inventors Hall of Fame Museum in Alexandria, Virginia. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Ishea Brown and more than a dozen of her black friends will gather around the TV set in her Seattle home on Saturday to watch the biracial actress Meghan Markle marry Britain’s Prince Harry and to toast a union the hostess never imagined possible.

Brown is not a longtime devotee of all things royal, and she was not particularly interested in the House of Windsor before November. All that changed with the announcement of the wedding of the queen’s grandson to Markle, whose mother is black.

“These are things that growing up I never would have thought that we would see,” Brown, 33, said, referring to a woman with African-American heritage becoming a royal in the United Kingdom.

“I hope that women, but particularly black women, are able to see themselves in her and her mother, and know that there are no spaces that are not meant for us,” she said.

Brown has dubbed her party “Black A.F. Royal Wedding Brunch” and is using the hashtag of #WakandaWeddingWeekend, a reference to the fictional African country Wakanda featured in the blockbuster movie “Black Panther.”

Hundreds of thousands of royal watchers around the world will tune into the royal nuptials on May 19, and interest is particularly intense in the United States, with its historical, cultural and linguistic ties to Great Britain.

There has been a surge of interest and excitement among some black Americans, especially black women, who are inspired by Meghan Markle’s new-found status, said Sarah Gaither, a Duke University psychology professor who has focused on diversity issues and race relations.

“Most communities of color really aspire to have representation or role models, said Gaither, who is also a biracial woman.” That’s what I think is really unique of Meghan Markle – because she’s biracial.”

That said, Gaither pointed out some people within the black community do not fully identify with Markle because she is a biracial woman.

Kim Love, a black American with a large Twitter and YouTube following who frequently comments on social mobility issues, raised that point in an online post on Tuesday.

“Meghan Markle’s marriage does not represent a win for black women,” Love said in a tweet. “Besides, she doesn’t even self-identify as a ‘black woman,’ so please stop forcing it.”

In New York City, Claire Osborne, a 34-year-old stage manager and a fan of “Suits,” the USA Network television series that starred Markle, is one of those black women fascinated by the wedding. In fact, her interest runs so deep, she says she now spends much of her free time on Twitter to learn more about the festivities.

“A lot of my friends, we all weren’t that interested in the royal family but now she’s in there, as a person of color, we want to follow now,” Osborne said, who also plans on waking up early to watch the wedding on television. “We’re kind of rooting for her because you see someone in that world who looks like you and representation matters.”

The wedding service starts at 1200 GMT (5 a.m. PDT), and to get in the spirit, Brown and her friends will wear tiaras or fascinators, a style of headwear favored by women at British weddings. But in a nod to the bride’s heritage, the Seattle women will lace their hats with African prints.

In Seattle, Brown initially scheduled her get-together to start before dawn, but too many of her friends had schedule conflicts, so she changed the party time for noon, when guests will watch the festivities on delay.

Brown and her friends will sip glasses of English rose champagne and Hennessy refresh tea, a mix of the cognac and English Earl Grey black tea, which she said “is the best of both worlds.”

“We’re going to do cucumber sandwiches to be traditional, but we’ll also have fried chicken sandwiches,” Brown said. “We know that his favorite stuff is bacon and pizza, so we may have a breakfast pizza.”

While the party is mostly about having fun, Brown says her identification with Markle runs deep. Like the royal bride, she also went through a divorce and is currently in an interracial relationship.

Brown says Markle represents the kind of woman whose life was not limited by preconceptions and arbitrary social boundaries.

“I find it inspiring,” she said.
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The late King of Pop is getting his own street name in Motown, which first launched him into superstardom.

A section of Randolph in downtown Detroit will be renamed Michael Jackson Avenue during a June 15 ceremony. The announcement came Tuesday, ahead of next month’s Detroit Music Weekend.

Four of Jackson’s brothers — Jackie, Tito, Jermaine and Marlon — are scheduled to perform during the festival. They also will receive a key to the city.

The Gary, Indiana, brothers signed in 1968 with Detroit’s Motown and had hits that included “I Want You Back” and “ABC.”

Michael later would leave Motown and in 1984 recorded “Thriller,” which became the best-selling album of all time. He was 50 when he died in 2009 in Los Angeles from a prescription drug overdose.
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The Miss America Organization is putting women in its three top leadership positions following an email scandal in which male officials were caught making vulgar and insulting comments about past winners of the beauty pageant. 

The organization told The Associated Press on Thursday it is appointing Regina Hopper as president and CEO of the Miss America Organization, and Marjorie Vincent-Tripp as chairwoman of the board of the Miss America Foundation.

Coupled with Gretchen Carlson leading the Miss America Organization’s board of trustees, the group is moving on from the email scandal with women firmly in charge.

“By putting female leadership in place, we hope to send a strong signal,” Hopper told the AP. “We want young women to see Miss America as a place where they can come and benefit and be empowered.”

Hopper, a former Miss Arkansas, attorney and TV journalist, replaces Sam Haskell, whose emails about the intellect, appearance and sex lives of former Miss Americas led to his departure and a revamping of the group’s top leadership in December. She is a former correspondent for CBS News, where she won an Emmy for her work on the show 48 Hours.

The scandal began when the Huffington Post published leaked emails showing pageant officials ridiculing past Miss Americas, including crass and sometimes vulgar comments about them. The emails included one that used a vulgar term for female genitalia to refer to past Miss America winners, one that wished that a particular former Miss America had died and others that speculated about how many sex partners one former Miss America has had.

Haskell declined to comment on the new leadership.

Vincent-Tripp, who was Miss America 1991, formerly served on the Miss America Board of Trustees. She is an assistant attorney general in Florida, and formerly worked as a TV journalist. As chair of the Miss America Foundation, she is responsible for educating the public about the foundation’s values and building public support.

Vincent-Tripp replaces Lanny Griffith, who along with MAO chair Lynn Weidner stepped down during the transition.

Carlson, Miss America 1989, was named chairwoman of the Miss America board in January after the email scandal rocked the organization. Her sexual harassment lawsuit against Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes led to his departure.

Hopper said she hopes young women will realize that Miss America is now being led by women who have been through the program and have been helped by it, and that they will seek the same benefits from it.

Larry Hoffer, a volunteer at local and state pageants, said he is eager to see what the new leaders’ vision will be and expects the women will leave the organization stronger.

“I think it’s an excellent, excellent move,” Hoffer said. “For a pageant that is strictly about empowering women to have not had female leadership for all of these years just never seemed to work. You basically had men deciding how women should be treated and featured on the telecast and how Miss America should be portrayed in the media. Having these women lead such a major scholarship organization shows that women are being taken seriously.”

Jill Cook, a local pageant volunteer, said she saw the new appointments as “a step forward” for Miss America. She applauded the women’s pedigrees and their success both in the pageant world and beyond.
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With its characters herding cattle through an austere, dusty landscape, “The Harvesters” bears a passing resemblance to a Western. But the setting of the movie, which won critical acclaim for its first-time director in Cannes, is not the Wild West but South Africa, and its cowboys are Afrikaners, a community that thrived in the apartheid era but now faces an uncertain future.

The story follows teenage boy Janno, the oldest child and only son in a God-fearing family whose life and sense of self are thrown into chaos by his parents’ decision to foster an orphan, Pieter, a 13-year-old child recovering from drug addiction and life as a rent boy.

Writer-director Etienne Kallos, a South African, but not an Afrikaner, was drawn to the story of a community in a “post-post-colonial” world that finds itself increasingly isolated.

“They are overlooked, I would say, in many ways,” Kallos told Reuters in Cannes.

“They are under-represented, especially because the only thing people think about is apartheid. But there’s so much more going on.

“The new generation of Afrikaners was born completely outside the apartheid regime and they’re moving towards some sort of a new Africa and don’t know what that is yet.”

There is a sense of identity under threat, both for the community and for Janno himself, played by newcomer Brent Vermeulen, whose deep feelings for his best friend do not fit with the macho rugby-playing culture.

Screen Daily said: “This assured feature debut effectively hints at a churning savagery beneath the surface, which is every bit as unforgiving as the stark landscape.” That landscape, in Eastern Free State and KwaZulu-Natal, with its mesas, striking flat-topped mountains, was the starting point for Kallos.

“I set out to make a film about place,” he said. “We worked hard to somehow capture … a grandeur that the landscape is bigger than the people. “I wanted to feel the landscape was more important than the characters or more powerful than the characters.”

“The Harvesters” (“Die Stropers”) is in competition in the “Un Certain Regard” section at the Cannes Film Festival that runs to May 19.
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Gold-medal Olympic gymnast Aly Raisman and dozens of other women who spoke out about sexual abuse by Larry Nassar will receive the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at this year’s ESPYS.

 

The July 18 show in Los Angeles honors the past year’s best athletes and moments in sports. Alison Overholt, a vice president at ESPN, says the women have shown “what it truly means to speak truth to power.”

 

More than 250 gave statements in court when Nassar was sentenced for sexual assault in January and February. They said the sports doctor molested them while they sought treatment for injuries.

 

Michigan State University announced a $500 million settlement with Nassar’s victims Wednesday. He assaulted females at his campus clinic, Lansing-area home, area gyms and major gymnastics events.

 

The ESPYS will be broadcast live on ABC at 8 p.m. ET from the Microsoft Theater.
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In his home in Marrakech, artist Lahcen Iwi brings out a cutter and gets to work, slicing up squares of used tires to craft his sculptures.

From dragons to unicorns, Iwi creates his artwork out of tires he collects from landfill sites and scrapyards.

The Moroccan artist believes that there is something noble in recycling tires, “injecting art” into an object that would otherwise be harmful to the environment.

“It is a good message for humanity,” he said.

A single sculpture can take Iwi anything from a week to two months to make.

He sells his art and previous works have gone on display in exhibitions in France.

 
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Here’s a little known fact to sink your teeth into — Did you know that George Washington’s second inaugural speech contained only 135 words? It’s not because America’s first president had nothing to say. Tooth historians say it’s because the president was wearing new dentures, making it difficult for him to speak. Searching for other toothy morsels from history, our reporter Maxim Moskalkov went to the National Dentistry Museum in Baltimore to learn more.
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Young boys who were forced to beg on the streets for Islamic teachers have turned their suffering into art, as they join more than 1,000 artists showing their work at Africa’s biggest and oldest biennale art exhibition in Senegal this month.

Some 50,000 child beggars known as talibe live in religious schools called daaras in the West African nation, according to rights groups, who say some were trafficked from neighboring countries and many are beaten and abused.

“Being in the daara was like being in prison,” read one caption for an image of a sorrowful eye peering through a row of fingers. “My friend’s hands represent the feeling of being locked up.”

All of the photographs in the “Look at me” exhibition – which is part of the Dakar Biennale, known as Dak’Art, founded in the 1990s – were taken by and of street children living in a nearby shelter run by Samusocial, a charity.

Most children who come through the shelter are former talibe, while others escaped forced labor or family disputes, said Samusocial, which provides medical care and shelter while attempting to reunite them with their families.

“For me, the color red is like pain,” said another caption, describing a photograph of a boy, known as D.D., wrapped in a colored cloth. “I put it in the background because it’s in the past.”

In plastic sandals and bright T-shirts, the boys walked down the street together to visit the exhibition. They gazed wide-eyed at the photos printed larger than they are.

“I am happy,” said D.D., 16, who worked in a sewing shop for several years where he was regularly beaten. “I didn’t expect to see this,” he said of his photograph.

Samusocial often uses art and music to help the children build confidence and open up, said director of operations Isabelle Diouf.

“These children need beautiful things. It takes them out of the realities of the street a little and makes them want to move forward,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Spanish photographer Javier Acebal, who worked with the children on the exhibit, said he hopes it will change viewers’ perceptions of beggars.

“When you’re walking down the street you think you know about these children, but in fact you know nothing,” he said. “They say they want to be like normal kids. I hope people start to think about that.”
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DJ Khaled has reason to be grateful – he’s been nominated for a leading six trophies for the BET Awards.

The nominations for next month’s ceremony were announced Tuesday night. Among the awards Khaled was nominated for include album of the year for “Grateful” and video of the year for “Wild Thoughts” which featured Rihanna and Bryson Tiller.

Other top nominees include Migos and SZA, both of whom were nominated for four awards.

Bruno Mars, Drake, Beyonce, Jay-Z, Cardi B, and Chris Brown are also up for key awards.

Recent Pulitzer Prize-winner Kendrick Lamar is among the nominees for best album, and he’s got competition from himself, for his “Black Panther” soundtrack.

The blockbuster is also nominated for best movie along with “Girls Trip” and “Wrinkle in Time,” among other films. Tiffany Haddish is nominated for best actress along with the likes of Issa Rae and Lupita Nyong’o, while Michael B. Jordan faces off against Chadwick Boseman and more for best actor.

Venus and Serena Williams are among the nominees for sportswoman of the year while LeBron James and Steph Curry are among the sportsman of the year nominees.

The BET Awards will air live on BET on June 24 from Los Angeles.
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Bill Cosby will be sentenced September 24 — five months after he was convicted of sexual assault.

Judge Steven O’Neill set the date on Tuesday. Cosby’s lawyers had asked to delay sentencing until December.

Cosby turns 81 in July and is likely to face a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.

Cosby has been a prisoner in his suburban Philadelphia mansion since the April 26 conviction. That’s the home where jurors concluded he drugged and molested a former Temple University athletics administrator in January 2004.

O’Neill ordered Cosby outfitted with a GPS monitoring bracelet and said he needs permission to leave, and only to meet with lawyers or go to the doctor.

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, as Constand has done.
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