Author: Ohart

Life is good at NICE TV.

Staff enjoy generous benefits at the new Chinese network and their flashy building, directly inside Cambodia’s Ministry of Interior, boasts an elegant restaurant on the fifth floor with 360 degree views of the city’s political heartland.

News manager Seang Sophorn is busy directing from the control room as reporter Khoun Leakana, formerly of The Phnom Penh Post, beams in live from the scene of a reeking chicken processing factory that has residents up in arms.

“We are journalists so we are like the bridge to make the government aware of people’s needs or also to bring what government needs from people,” said Sophorn, who cut her teeth as a reporter at Radio Free Asia before a stint at the PNN network of ruling party Senator Ly Yong Phat.

Ministry of Interior

The news menu includes stories about preparations for the upcoming water festival and the types of stories NICE TV producers say are their standard fare: residential complaints about floods and traffic.

The key to NICE TV’s “bridge to the people” is an app the company has developed called Tutu Live, which allows viewers to beam themselves into the program, the television equivalent of talk-back radio.

Through it they are pushing user-generated content from their currently small audience, including NICE TV’s partners at the Ministry of Interior.

“The ministry has a police network all around Cambodia so we want to create social news and we can use this resource to create the best social news in Cambodia,” Nice TV Chief Operations Officer Jason Liu told VOA, speaking through an interpreter.

Limit the scope of media?

Others are less optimistic about the partnership.

This type of partnership between a foreign firm and a ministry responsible for Cambodian state security looked “not good” said Nop Vy, acting head of the media conservator the Cambodian Center for Independent Media.

“The image of the location in the ministry itself and the work of the private company interferes into the work of the ministry and [the] Ministry of Interior’s role is very important,” he said.

“So we just thought that so through this support it will limit the scope of the media team working at their station because they will [be] working under the internal policy of the TV station and the policy I know that it maybe say something for example not doing something against China,” he added.

Certain topics avoided

Despite their close relationship with the ministry, which holds an unspecified but apparently small share in the venture, Sophorn and Lui insist they are free to report whatever they want.

For Lui, the fact that the station tends to avoid sensitive political stories or opposition perspectives is more indicative of viewer appetites than any state enforced restriction.

“The role of TV is to make people’s living better, it is not to make conflict,” he said.

But a casual chat with some of the producers at the network suggests it is well understood that anything that could provoke the ruling Cambodian People’s Party is not to be touched.

Traditional journalism gone

Meanwhile their opportunities to do traditional journalism are evaporating as government critical news organizations fall one after another under increasing government pressure on the free press.

Gone are The Cambodian Daily, an obstinate dissenter for more than two decades, the broadcasts of Radio Free Asia and more than 30 radio frequencies that relayed their own shows as well as those of others, including Voice of America. Rumors that The Phnom Penh Post will soon be shuttered are swirling, but persistently denied by the bilingual paper.

In this void, outfits more in line with the Chinese model of media-state relations are on the verge of taking over the press entirely in Cambodia.

In an interview with VOA, Huy Vannak, an under-secretary of state at the Ministry of Interior, suggested that though the content at NICE TV will predominantly focus on entertainment, the station will also work “to inform the people about how to enforce the better public service.”

“That’s the purpose to have the TV because the ministry is run and has a big task to the people basically at the grass-roots level because we have the police department on the security side and we have the public service on the administration side,” he said.

VOA has sought to clarify the ministry’s relationship with NICE TV, but after months of efforts no comment has been forthcoming.

Liu conceded it was unusual for a foreign company to hold such a partnership with a government ministry. But he stressed NICE TV was an entirely private operation that has simply been the beneficiary of blossoming relations between Cambodia and China.

“Because we come from private enterprise so the Cambodian government allow us to come and invest on the media sector, but if we come from Chinese government the Cambodian government I think they will not allow us to come and invest in the media sector,” he said.

He refused to comment on the record about whether the Chinese government held any influence over the station.

Reporter Sun Narin in Washington contributed to this report.
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Advocates of free speech recently honored about a dozen U.S. journalists who uncovered widespread sexual misconduct in politics, sports and movies, as well as a pair of Olympians who used their fame in a controversial bid to bring injustices to light half a century ago. In 1968, U.S. Olympians John Carlos and Tommie Smith bowed their heads and raised their fists on the medal stand at the Summer Olympics to protest injustices toward African Americans. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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Saudi Arabia has ended a 35-year ban on movie theaters with a private screening of the Hollywood blockbuster Black Panther.

The invitation-only screening, held Wednesday at a concert hall converted into a cinema complex in the capital, Riyadh, was attended by both women and men. 

“This is a landmark moment in the transformation of Saudi Arabia into a more vibrant economy and society,” Saudi Minister of Culture and Information Awwad Alawwad said in statement ahead of the screening.

It’s a stark reversal for a country where public movie screenings were banned in the 1980s during a wave of ultraconservatism that swept Saudi Arabia. Many Saudi clerics view Western movies and even Arabic films made in Egypt and Lebanon as sinful.

The opening marked another milestone for reforms spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to open the country culturally and diversify the economy.

The prince, 32, has already eased restrictions in the last two years, on such matters as permitting public concerts and allowing women to drive and attend sports events. 

The Saudi government projects there will be 300 movie theaters with around 2,000 screens built across the kingdom by 2030.

Movies screened in Saudi cinemas will be subject to approval by government censors, as is the case in other Arab countries. Scenes of violence are not cut, but scenes involving nudity, sex or even kissing often get axed. 

It was not clear whether Black Panther underwent similar censorship for Wednesday’s screening. 
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Sweden’s king wants to change the statutes of the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Literature Prize each year, to allow its life-appointed board members to resign.

Academy head Sara Danius stepped down last week amid turmoil at the academy over the alleged sexual misconduct of a man married to an academy board member, Swedish poet Katarina Frostenson.

The latter left the academy when Danius withdrew. A week earlier, three male members had resigned over the academy’s vote not to remove Frostenson.

King Carl XVI Gustav — the body’s patron who must approve any of its secret votes — said Wednesday “that anyone who no longer wishes to be a member of an association should be able to withdraw.”

Members of the 18-seat board now are not technically permitted to leave.
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British theater critics are praising a new stage musical about the life of Tina Turner – and it also has the approval of the star herself.

Turner was in the audience for the opening night of “Tina” at London’s Aldwych Theatre. After the show Tuesday, she joked that “I’ve found a replacement” in Adrienne Warren, who plays the brassy singer in the musical.

The show charts Turner’s roots in small-town Tennessee, her musical apprenticeship alongside abusive husband Ike Turner and her solo breakthrough in the 1980s with hits such as “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”

It’s a gritty tale with powerhouse tunes and a performance by Warren that the Guardian newspaper called “simply astonishing.”

Turner said the message of the show is that “it’s possible to turn poison into medicine.”
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When you think of Florida, the colored stone walls of the Grand Canyon don’t come to mind. Neither do cowboys, wolves or Native American silver-and-turquoise jewelry.

In downtown St. Petersburg, all of those icons of the American West are on display in a new museum.

It’s called the James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art, and it opened this month. The 80,000-square-foot (7,400-square-meter) space is two blocks from the glittering blue waters of Tampa Bay. But at the museum’s front door, visitors are transported west. For vacationers in the Gulf Coast city, it will be a fascinating cultural respite from sun, sand and palm trees.

The building

The entrance is through a sandstone sculptural exterior evoking mesas of the American Southwest. That aesthetic of cliffs and cave dwellings and vertical forms runs throughout the museum. A two-story black granite waterfall is the centerpiece of the entrance.

A high ceiling and cubist angles frame a bank of windows at the entrance, allowing Florida’s sun to shine through. Through the gift shop, a massive wooden bar that looks like something out of a Nevada saloon is the centerpiece for the cafe. It’s a 19th century antique in itself, from a hotel in San Francisco.

​The art

There are 400 pieces on display, from large sculptures of Native Americans on horseback to pop-art conceptual paintings of the pioneer spirit. It’s unusually earthy and rustic fare, especially for a state that’s known for beaches, alligators and sanitized theme parks. Even the gallery walls are painted in earthy, Southwestern colors.

All of the art was collected over decades by billionaire Thomas James, chairman emeritus of the Raymond James financial services company, and his wife, Mary. Much of the art once decorated the corporate offices of the company, which is based in St. Petersburg.

“The collection is inspired by Tom’s fascination with cowboy lore,” museum director Bernice Chu said.

Many Western-themed collections in other parts of the country showcase works from the 19th and early 20th centuries, like Frederic Remington’s famous depictions of the Old West. What’s different about this collection is that nearly all the artists featured are still alive.

The collection is organized in six themes. Native American life includes artwork that tells the story of the complicated and often brutal history of how Native Americans were treated. A room called “The Jewel Box” in the Native American artists area displays contemporary Native American jewelry owned by Mary James, who has “free rein” to dip into the collection and take out “anything she wants” to wear, Chu said.

A wildlife exhibition is the only one that’s not dedicated to the West. That display includes paintings and sculptures of animals from around the globe, which will delight younger visitors.

St. Pete, arts hub

The Museum of Western & Wildlife Art is the latest museum in a city that’s increasingly becoming known as an arts hub.

One of the museum’s architects, Jann Weymouth, created another unique local institution: the nearby Dali museum, which is devoted to works of Spanish artist Salvador Dali.

In 2019, the Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement is expected to open, housing businessman Rudy Ciccarello’s collection of furniture, pottery, tile, metalwork, lighting, photography and other decorative arts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Asia Argento said he raped her during the Cannes Film Festival. Mira Sorvino said he chased her around a hotel room at the Toronto International Film Festival. Rose McGowan’s encounter happened at the Sundance Film Festival. 

Just as Harvey Weinstein did at the Oscars, the disgraced movie mogul lorded over the festival world, which provided the glitzy, champagne-flowing setting for many of his alleged crimes. And in the aftermath of Hollywood’s sexual harassment scandals, film festivals have done some soul searching.

Codes of conduct have been rewritten, selection processes have been re-examined and, in many cases, gender equality efforts have been redoubled.

When the curtain goes up on the 17th annual Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday, the festival will boast more female filmmakers than ever before. After last year accounting for a third of the slate, films directed by women make up 46 percent at this year’s festival.

Jane Rosenthal, co-founder of the festival and chief executive of Tribeca Enterprises, particularly wanted to launch this year’s festival with the premiere of a film directed by a woman, about a woman. Lisa Dapolito’s Love, Gilda, about the comedienne Gilda Radner, will kick things off Wednesday at New York’s Beacon Theatre. The first episode of Liz Garbus’ Showtime documentary series The Fourth Estate, about The New York Times covering the first year of the Trump administration, will close the festival. On April 28, the festival will hold a day’s worth of conversations with Time’s Up, including Ashley Judd and Julianne Moore, to benefit the legal defense fund and gender equality initiative.

‘Fairly easy’ results

“For us it was, on one hand, business as usual,” said Rosenthal, pointing to previous efforts Tribeca has made to promote female filmmakers, like its Nora Ephron Award. “But we tasked ourselves early on with: Can you get to 50-50? Can we have 50 percent women filmmakers at the festival? We got to 46. I would say that it was fairly easy for us. Those pictures would probably have been in the festival without that kind of mandate.”

Efforts to improve the movie business’ record on gender equality have been ongoing at many, though not all, major film festivals in recent years. Pursuing parity has seemed at times like an arms race, with various festivals touting their male-to-female ratios. The festival world is far ahead of the industry (only eight of last year’s top 100 films at the box office were directed by women) and the Academy Awards (where Greta Gerwig became just the fifth woman ever nominated for best director this year).

Thirty-seven percent of the 122 features at this year’s Sundance were directed by women, including Seeing Allred, about women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred. For the first time, all four of the festival’s directing prizes went to female filmmakers. The festival’s top prize, the Grand Jury Prize, went to Desiree Akhavan’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post.

At SXSW in March, eight of the 10 films in the narrative competition were directed by women. At last fall’s Toronto film festival, one third of entries were made by female filmmakers and a five-year, $3 million campaign dubbed “Share Her Journey” was launched to support female filmmakers.

Hot Docs

The Hot Docs Festival, a well-regarded documentary festival held annually in Toronto, reached gender parity for the first time this year. A year after a program in which 48 percent of the projects were directed by females, this year’s 246 films and 16 interdisciplinary projects are 50/50 on gender. The festival on Tuesday also added the premiere of Barry Avrich’s Weinstein documentary The Reckoning: Hollywood’s Worst Kept Secret.

Shane Smith, director of programming at Hot Docs, which begins April 26, said reflecting the diversity and the demands of the audience is imperative for “cultural gatekeepers” like film festivals.

“We were hoping we could get to gender parity,” said Smith. “Once we started screening the work that was coming in, and the quality of the films and the stories that were being told by female filmmakers, we saw that it was a goal that was achievable this year,” Smith said. “We weren’t going to force this to happen if the work wasn’t there. But given the strides that have happened in the last few years, it was easy, actually.”

The Cannes Film Festival, which opens May 8, has applied a different strategy. Its artistic director, Thierry Fremaux, has regularly responded to complaints about the number of female filmmakers selected for its prestigious Palme d’Or competition by saying it’s not a festival’s place to consider anything but a submission’s merit — that progress can only come further up the pipeline at studios and production companies.

Critics say Cannes’ track record (only one female filmmaker, Jane Campion, has ever won the Palme) speaks for itself. Fremaux last week announced Cannes’ main slate with three female filmmakers — Nadine Labaki, Alice Rohrwacher and Eva Husson — disappointing some who thought Cannes might adapt in the age of #MeToo.

“The question of a quota in no case concerns the artistic selection of a festival. Films are chosen for their quality,” Fremaux said at a news conference last week. “There will never be a selection made by positive discrimination.”

Weinstein, who has denied allegations of sexual assault, was for years a dominant wheeler-and-dealer at Cannes. His fall was felt acutely there. “The Cannes Film Festival will never be the same again,” said Fremaux, who vowed to re-examine the festival’s own gender parity in salaries and jury selections.

Backlash at Austin

Other festivals have had even tougher questions to answer. Last September’s Fantastic Fest, the Austin-based genre film festival, caused a backlash after it was revealed that the festival’s host, Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, had rehired blogger Devin Faraci a year after he stepped down following an accusation of sexual assault. Fox Searchlight pulled Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri from the festival.

Weinstein had less of a connection with the Tribeca festival, but the scandal still hit close to home. The Weinstein Co. is based in the same Tribeca building as the Tribeca Enterprises headquarters. “It was: ‘Who’s the stranger next door?’ ” said Rosenthal, Robert De Niro’s longtime producing partner.

But as a Time’s Up member herself, Rosenthal is hopeful that the industry is waking up to overdue change. Festivals don’t have direct sway over what gets made and what sells, but they can play a vital role in showcasing filmmaking talent and sparking conversation.

“I’ve had a women’s lunch for 15 years at the festival,” said Rosenthal. “Now, it’s going to be very crowded.”
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Senegal has a small but ambitious circus. It began as a local association offering arts and acrobatics workshops to disadvantaged kids from poor neighborhoods around the capital. The circus troupe has grown from there and now performs abroad, though some of the acrobats continue to face resistance from their families. Chika Oduah reports for VOA from Dakar.
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FIFA charged World Cup host Russia with fan racism Tuesday, less than two months before the tournament begins.

Monkey chants were aimed at black French players, including Paul Pogba, during France’s 3-1 friendly win over Russia in St. Petersburg last month.

“Disciplinary proceedings have been opened against the Russian Football Union for this incident,” FIFA said.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, who is overseeing World Cup preparations, told state news agencies Tuesday that Russia was cracking down on racist fans.

“We’ll do anything so there are no discrimination cases,” he said. “But if that happens … there should be zero tolerance for these people.”

The RFU said it is cooperating with the FIFA investigation.

“A request has been made to the Interior Ministry to identify several persons who were involved in these incidents,” RFU anti-discrimination officer Alexei Smertin was quoted as saying Monday by the Tass news agency. “If these people’s guilt is proven, then there’s a high likelihood they won’t be allowed to attend World Cup and Russian league games.”

Russia was previously charged with racist behavior by its fans at the last two European Championships. On both occasions, the RFU paid a fine.

It’s the third racism case this season at St. Petersburg Stadium, which will host a World Cup semifinal match. Zenit St. Petersburg has twice faced UEFA charges for racism by its fans in Europa League games.

Zenit fans flew a banner praising convicted war criminal Ratko Mladic when playing a Macedonian club in November and are accused of using a racially charged term to mock an injured black player in a game against Leipzig. The second case is due to be heard by UEFA on May 31, two weeks before the World Cup begins.
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California rapper Kendrick Lamar on Monday became the first rapper to win the Pulitzer Prize for music, one of the most prestigious arts awards in the United States.

Lamar, 30, won the Pulitzer for his 2017 album “DAMN.” and was also the first music winner in the 100-year history of the Pulitzers to come from outside of the world of classical or jazz.

Rap officially surpassed rock in 2017 as the biggest music genre in the United States.

Lamar’s fusion of jazz, poetry and blues with social themes and love songs has made him one of the most innovative rappers of his generation.

The Pulitzer board on Monday hailed “DAMN.,” which was released in April 2017, as “a virtuosic song collection unified by its vernacular authenticity and rhythmic dynamism that offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life.”

Previous Pulitzer music winners include jazz musicians Wynton Marsalis and Ornette Coleman.

“DAMN.,” Lamar’s fourth album deals with religion, love, personal struggles and racial politics. It topped the Billboard 200 album charts for three weeks on its release last year and powered Lamar to five wins at the Grammy Awards in New York in January.

But the album failed to win the top Grammy prize – album of the year – in what was seen as a snub by music industry voters for the rap genre despite its rising popularity.

Only two hip-hop albums have ever won the Grammy for album of the year: Lauryn Hill’s “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” in 1999 and Outkast’s “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below” in 2004.

Lamar was born and raised in the Los Angeles suburb of Compton, the home of hip-hop pioneers NWA, and started making music as a 16-year-old.

He also produced the soundtrack for the 2018 superhero box-office hit film “Black Panther,” and performed the lead single “Pray For Me” with The Weeknd.
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The New York Times and The New Yorker won the Pulitzer Prize for public service Monday for breaking the Harvey Weinstein scandal with reporting that galvanized the #MeToo movement and set off a worldwide reckoning over sexual misconduct in the workplace.

 

The Times and The Washington Post took the national reporting award for their coverage of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and contacts between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian officials.

The Press Democrat of Santa Rosa, California, received the breaking news reporting award for coverage of the wildfires that swept through California wine country last fall, killing 44 people and destroying thousands of homes.

The Washington Post also won the investigative reporting prize for revealing decades-old allegations of sexual misconduct against Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama. The Republican former judge denied the accusations, but they figured heavily in Doug Jones’ victory as the first Democrat elected to the Senate from the state in decades.

One of the biggest surprises of the day came in the non-journalism categories when rap star Kendrick Lamar was awarded the Pulitzer for music, becoming the first non-classical or non-jazz artist to win the prize.

The Pulitzers, American journalism’s most prestigious awards, reflected a year of unrelenting news and unprecedented challenges for U.S. media, as Trump repeatedly branded reporting “fake news” and called journalists “the enemy of the people.”

 

In announcing the journalism prizes, Pulitzer administrator Dana Canedy said the winners “uphold the highest purpose of a free and independent press, even in the most trying of times.”

 

“Their work is real news of the highest order, executed nobly, as journalism was always intended, without fear or favor,” she said.

 

A string of stories in The Times and The Washington Post shined a light on Russian interference in the presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign and transition — ties now under investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. The president has branded the investigation a “witch hunt.”

The Pulitzer judges commended the two newspapers for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest.”

 

In stories that appeared within days of each other in October, The Times and The New Yorker reported that movie mogul Weinstein faced allegations of sexual harassment and assault from a multitude of women in Hollywood going back decades and had secretly paid settlements to keep the claims from becoming public.

 

The Pulitzer judges said The Times’ Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey and The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow produced “explosive, impactful journalism that exposed powerful and wealthy sexual predators, including allegations against one of Hollywood’s most influential producers, bringing them to account for long-suppressed allegations of coercion, brutality and victim silencing, thus spurring a worldwide reckoning about sexual abuse of women.”

The stories led to Weinstein’s ouster from the studio he co-founded, and he now faces criminal investigations in New York and Los Angeles. He has apologized for “the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past” but denied any non-consensual sexual contact.

The stories’ impact soon spread beyond Weinstein to allegations against other prominent men in entertainment, politics and elsewhere, toppling such figures as “Today” show host Matt Lauer, actor Kevin Spacey, newsman Charlie Rose and Sen. Al Franken.

 

Men and women, famous or not, have spoken about their own experiences of sexual harassment and assault in what has become known as the #MeToo movement.

 

Weinstein spokeswoman Holly Baird declined to comment on the Pulitzer award except to suggest similar recognition should be afforded to Tarana Burke, an activist who founded the #MeToo movement on Twitter about a decade ago to raise awareness of sexual violence.

 

In other categories, the Arizona Republic and USA Today Network won the explanatory reporting prize for a multi-format look at the challenges and consequences of building the Mexican border wall that was a centerpiece of Trump’s campaign. The project included footage from a helicopter flight along the entire, 2,000-mile border, a podcast and a virtual reality component.

 

The local reporting award went to The Cincinnati Enquirer for what judges called “a riveting and insightful” narrative and video about the heroin epidemic in the area. The paper deployed more than four dozen reporters and photographers for an intense dive into the drug’s toll over one week.

 

Work like that and the Press Democrat’s wildfire coverage show “you don’t have to have a huge budget to have a big impact,” Canedy said.

Clare Baldwin, Andrew R.C. Marshall and Manuel Mogato of Reuters won the international reporting award for their coverage of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly crackdown on drugs, and the news agency’s photographers received the feature photography prize for their images of the plight of Rohingya refugees who have fled Myanmar.

 

The breaking news photography award went to Ryan Kelly of The Daily Progress of Charlottesville, Virginia, who captured the moment that a car plowed into counter-protesters demonstrating against a white nationalist rally in the Virginia college town. The car killed one of the counter-demonstrators, Heather Heyer.

Kelly made the photo on his last day at the newspaper before moving on to a job at a brewery. In a text Monday, Kelly described the prize as an “incredible honor” but added: “Mostly I’m still heartbroken for Heather Heyer’s family and everybody else who was affected by that tragic violence.”

 

Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, a freelance writer for GQ magazine, took the feature writing award for a profile of Dylann Roof, the avowed white supremacist convicted of killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina.

 

The commentary award went to John Archibald of Alabama Media Group in Birmingham, Alabama, for pieces on politics, women’s rights and other topics. Art critic Jerry Saltz of New York magazine won the criticism award for what the judges called his “canny and often daring perspective.”

 

Andie Dominick of The Des Moines Register received the editorial writing prize for pieces about the consequences of privatizing Iowa’s administration of Medicaid.

 

Freelance writer Jake Halpern and freelance cartoonist Michael Sloan were awarded the editorial cartooning prize for a graphic narrative in The New York Times about a family of refugees fearing deportation.

 

The Pulitzers were announced at Columbia University, which administers the prizes. This is the 102nd year of the contest, established by newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer.

 

Winners of the public service award receive a gold medal; the other awards carry a prize of $15,000 each.
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The latest cinematic installment of the smash hit “Millennium series” will reveal more details about mysterious hacker heroine Lisbeth Salander, and delve into her past, director Fede Alvarez said.

Filming for the The Girl in the Spider’s Web is under way in Sweden with British actress Claire Foy cast as the young tattooed Salander, an introvert who endures a complex relationship with journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason).

“What I really wanted to do was to send her into a place of her life and, in this case, to her past to confront things that will hopefully reveal a bit more about who she truly is,” said the Uruguayan director behind Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe.

“When you think you know, when you think you have figured her out, she does something that changes everything you thought you knew. That’s what’s fun about her.”

The film, set for a November release, is based on the book by new author David Lagercrantz who took the series on after the death of Stieg Larsson, the author of the original best-selling trilogy.

Lagercrantz’s sequel, released in 2016, features spies from the U.S. National Security Agency and Salander’s long-missing twin sister Camilla, who has taken over their father’s criminal network.

The role of Salander was previously portrayed by American Rooney Mara in the 2011 The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Foy, who won critical acclaim for her role as Britain’s Queen Elizabeth in the Netflix series The Crown, said she was excited to play the dark character alongside Gudnason, who replaces James Bond actor Daniel Craig.

“I think inside she knows who she is, but the outside have always seen her as a victim,” said Golden Globe winner Foy, showing off her new short haircut for the role in Stockholm.

“People have been taking advantage of that and I think she’s just a survivor and non-judgmental and just … I love her. I love her.”
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Evictions have been called a silent threat to America’s cities. Every week, thousands of Americans are forced from their homes, for non-payment. An exhibit on U.S. housing evictions opens in Washington D.C. this weekend, based on a book by Princeton University professor Matthew Desmond, which explores the problem by following the lives of several families in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as they struggle to pay the rent. From Washington, VOA’s Jill Craig takes a look at the exhibit.
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Betty Rosenbaum was only 2 years old when her mother and brother were sent to a concentration camp in eastern Poland in 1943. She never saw them again. Today, a new digital exhibition at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Museum, features a treasured letter her mother wrote to her more than 75 years ago. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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Bon Jovi, the Cars and four first-time nominees, including Nina Simone, will be inducted Saturday night as the 2018 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame class.

Dire Straits, The Moody Blues and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who died in 1973, will also earn the prestigious honor at the organization’s 33rd annual ceremony at Public Auditorium in Cleveland, where the Rock Hall is based.

Bon Jovi, who have sold more than 120 million albums and launched multiple No. 1 hits, was first nominated in 2011. Jon Bon Jovi will be inducted alongside current bandmates David Bryan and Tico Torres, as well as former members Richie Sambora and Alec John Such. Sambora left in 2013; Such left in 1994.

The frontman said though he and the other current members haven’t spoken to Sambora since he left the group, he invites the performer, along with Such, to be part of the Rock Hall festivities. The band will be inducted by Howard Stern.

Brothers Mark and David Knopfler, of English rockers Dire Straits, won’t attend the event, according to bassist John Illsley.

“He just didn’t feel like coming, it’s as simple as that,” Illsley, in an interview with Billboard, said of Mark Knopfler. “It just didn’t appeal to him, and I appealed to him on several occasions.”

Tharpe will be inducted with the “Award for Early Influence,” while the other five acts will be inducted as performers. She was a pioneering guitarist who performed gospel music and was known to some as “the godmother of rock ‘n’ roll.” She will be inducted by Brittany Howard, of blues rock band Alabama Shakes.

The jazzy and soulful Simone, who died in 2003, was a leader in pushing for civil rights and influenced the likes of Alicia Keys and Aretha Franklin. Mary J. Blige will induct Simone, while Andra Day will sing in her honor.

​Rock Hall voters have recently opened their hearts to progressive rockers, which benefited “Nights in White Satin” singers The Moody Blues, to be inducted by Ann Wilson of Heart. The Cars, founded in Boston in 1976, combined New Wave and classic rock sounds. This year marked the band’s third nomination; Brandon Flowers, of The Killers, will induct the band.

The 2018 class were chosen from a group of 19 nominees, including Radiohead, who were expected to enter in the Rock Hall in their first year of eligibility, but didn’t make it.

Each year, between five and seven acts usually make it into the Rock Hall following a vote by 1,000 people, including performers, music historians and industry experts. Fans also were able to vote on the Rock Hall’s website. All of the inductees had to have released their first recording no later than 1992 to be eligible.

The event will air May 5 on HBO and will also be heard on SiriusXM Radio.
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When she was 11, Bonna Neang woke daily at first light to a Khmer Rouge tune broadcast over a public speaker in a hamlet in Cambodia’s rural Banteay Meanchey province.

“The bright, fresh red blood was spilled all over the towns and over the plains of Cambodia, our motherland. … ”

The child of a Phnom Penh family well-versed in classical Khmer music and appreciative of youngsters’ at-home dance performances, Bonna Neang Weinstein, now 53, still recalls the lyrics to “Build a Revolution.”

Today, the mother of three sons and stepmother of three daughters, owns a Philadelphia gallery, Khmer Art, which is dedicated to the revival of Cambodian work. She describes it as a portal to a culture the Khmer Rouge, who captured Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975, attempted to eradicate over the next four years.

Among the 1.7 million people who died in a population of 6 million were 90 percent of the nation’s artists, felled by revolutionaries with the motto “To keep you is no gain; to lose you is no loss.”

“The Khmer Rouge is a dark episode” in Cambodia’s history, Weinstein said. The regime also wiped out the educated, the skilled, the city dwellers and the intellectuals. She said she believes the revival of the arts allows Cambodians to reclaim their heritage because “the Khmer Rouge is not us … that’s not who we are.”

For the world

Ethnomusicologist Sam Sam-Ang, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” said “[Khmer] arts do not only belong to Cambodia, they belong to all human beings in the world.”

Today, there is evidence such as Prumsodun Ok’s Ted Talk on Khmer classical dance that Cambodia’s traditional cultural life is undergoing a robust renaissance after the Khmer Rouge suppression.

“Beauty is the most resistant thing,” Ok said in the October talk, which also discusses the intergenerational transfer of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, among Cambodians from Khmer Rouge survivors to their offspring. “Beauty is what connects people to time and place.”

As those connections strengthen, Khmer artists are taking the traditional into new areas.

“Cambodian art is rebuilding and that means both the traditional art, so people who do the classic paintings of Angkor Wat and carving and Buddhist images,” said anthropologist Judy Ledgerwood, adding there is “a growing body of art that combines traditional themes with modern ideas, and more recently, some very modern work, but still with a Cambodian theme and idea.”

Weinstein is one of the many Cambodians determined to use traditional arts, such as dance, music, carving and painting, to revive a rich culture. It is a point of pride.

From the ninth to the 14th century, Khmer culture flourished. Its lasting legacy, the Angkor Wat complex, at its full glory was about the size of Los Angeles. “Nonskilled, noneducated people cannot make that,” Weinstein said.

Well into the mid-20th century, the Angkor complex anchored a cultural life that was one of the most vibrant southeast Asia, attracting such people as the late Jacqueline Kennedy and inspiring creatives such as the late architect Vann Molyvann.

There was even a vibrant local rock ’n’ roll scene featuring the likes of Sinn Sisamouth and Ros Serey Sothea recalled today by the Cambodian Space Project.​

​Human expression

That Cambodia’s cosmopolitan heritage could not be eradicated by the Khmer Rouge dream of creating an agrarian utopia speaks not only to Cambodians’ resilience but to something that makes us all human.

“There is no culture without artistic expression,” said anthropologist Ledgerwood, who has been conducting research on Khmer culture since 1989.

Think of the cave paintings by early homo sapiens in France, Indonesia and Spain, and recent findings that even Neanderthals may have expressed themselves artistically.

“Human beings always look for ways to express themselves through textiles, painting, sculpture, music, dance, even in language itself in the way that we structure our speech,” Ledgerwood said.

Which is why authoritarian regimes like the Khmer Rouge target artists.

Joseph Melillo, who brought Bangsokol: A Requiem for Cambodia to New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in December, says art “allows individual people to think freely and to feel emotionally. … If you remove artists and intellectuals from your society, that means political power could dictate the style of life and the thinking of the people, because there is no ( group) in other parts of the society that are able to offer an alternative to what artists and intellectuals are articulating.”

Creating a role model

Cambodian composer Him Sophy, a Khmer Rouge survivor, built Bangsokol, which is named after a ceremony performed at Cambodian funerals, on Khmer traditional music enhanced by a Western orchestra and a Taiwanese chorus.

“Because of my pain during the Khmer Rouge that I cannot forget, I try to express my feelings, emotion and thoughts through the music I compose,” said Him Sophy, who lost two older brothers to the regime.

Sam Sam-Ang told VOA that “Bangsokol” represents “Cambodian pride. We created an international art production, and it is a role model for our next generations to show them that we are capable to do it like any other nations in the world.”

Cambodian Living Arts (CLA), a nonprofit group that works to support the revival of traditional art forms, commissioned Bangkosol.

Prim Phloeun, CLA’s executive director, told VOA that of the Khmer traditional musical instruments played in the performance, the ancient Khmer harp called a “pin,” attracts the most attention from audiences, in part because it “disappeared” nearly 900 years ago.

Khmer musician Keo Sonan Kavei, and French ethnomusicologist Patrick Kersalé joined Him Sophy to build a pin in 2014, using inscriptions and sculptures on Angkor Wat and Sambo Prey Kok temples as their blueprints.

Sngoun Kavei Sereyroth, one of the two harpists who performed in Bangsokol, is also Him Sophy’s first harp student.

“I play harp because five or six generations of my family are artists. I have art in my blood,” said Sngoun Kavei Sereyroth, who started to play the pin when she was 14 years old.

“We contribute to the rebirth of Khmer musical instruments and prevent them from disappearing because we have shown those instruments to the young generations,” Him Sophy added.

Masters of the arts

Not all artists and artisans use the bas reliefs of Angkor Wat for instructions.

Weinstein, who left Cambodia in 1979 when she was 14, has been able to use family connections to find masters who survived the Khmer Rouge.

“During four years under the Khmer Rouge, people say Khmer arts were dying, but that’s not true,” Weinstein said. “For me, I think our Khmer arts were only dormant.”

The late Kikuo Morimoto, a Kyoto kimono painter and self-described silk fanatic, traveled throughout Cambodia in 1995, “asking from village to village if silk weaving still occurred,” according to the Institute of Khmer Traditional Textiles (IKTT).

Morimoto found a “very few old grandmothers left with the knowledge and skill to produce fine silk” and persuaded them to forgo chemical dyes for the plant-based dyes they no longer used. Today, the IKTT trains apprentices who spend a decade learning the spinning, dying and weaving techniques to become master artisans.

“My father was a government officer and an artist and culture lover,” said Weinstein, who returned to Cambodia for the first time in the early 1990s. “His circle was interconnected. I knew how to ask, and how to keep in touch with that group. One friend leads to another friend.”

Weinstein found a wood-carving master who was released from a Khmer Rouge labor camp when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia in 1979. He salvaged “as much wood as possible, from temples, big houses, pagodas that the Khmer Rouge had ordered demolished … to save the past, use it in the present and present it to the future.”

The wood carving master took on apprentices and, using a book of old drawings, taught them how to carve “using the old ways … and by practice,” Weinstein said, adding that she saw the same process repeated with coppersmiths, painters and other craftspeople.

“The copper pieces we commissioned in Cambodia are hand-chiseled, hand-hammered” in a foundry with an open fire. “There’s no modern technology at all.”

Tapping into these traditions, connects Cambodians, Weinstein said. 

“The arts, the performing arts, I don’t know how we could show our identity without the performing arts, the visual arts,” she added.

Ethnomusicologist Sam Sam-Ang suggests the revival of Cambodian arts has an importance that transcends the country, saying if these arts are lost, “the world also loses something, and we lose more because we are the owners of our arts.”
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Two recent Western films on Russia, one a Hollywood spy thriller, the other an independent historical satire, depict the country’s dark political underbelly. How much of that portrayal is an exaggeration for entertainment’s sake and how much is a take from reality? Experts and filmmakers say it’s a little bit of both. VOA’s Penelope Poulou set out to find out.
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Milos Forman, the Czech-born movie director who found fame in Hollywood with the Oscar-winning classics One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus has died at the age of 86, Czech news agency CTK reported Saturday.

Forman died Friday in the United States after a short illness, his wife, Martina, told CTK.

“His departure was calm and he was surrounded the whole time by his family and his closest friends,” she said.

Forman was born in the Czech town of Caslav on Feb. 18, 1932, but moved to the United States after the Communist crackdown on the “Prague Spring” uprising in 1968. He became a U.S. citizen in the 1970s.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in which a psychiatric institution becomes a microcosm of the contemporary world, and Amadeus, the life of 18th-century composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart through the eyes of his rival Antonio Salieri, earned 13 Oscars between them, including those for best director to Forman.

His other notable work included the rock musical Hair in 1979, Ragtime in 1981 and The People vs Larry Flint in 1996, which was nominated for an Academy Award that year.
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We’re airborne with the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending April 14, 2018.

If you liked last week’s lineup, you’ll like our new one … we do get a bit of shuffling just for variety’s sake.

Number 5: Ed Sheeran “Perfect”

Ed Sheeran drops two slots to fifth place with his four-times-platinum ex-champ “Perfect.” Ed’s security guard Kev has a new Instagram feed, and has racked up 185,000 followers in his first two days. He posts funny and embarrassing photos of Ed, in his words, “to keep him in line.”

He also likes to mock Ed’s photographer, Zakary Walters, for having more followers. If you’d like to see some samples, go to our Facebook page, VOA1TheHits.

Number 4: Post Malone Featuring Ty Dolla $ign “Psycho”

Rebounding a slot to fourth place are Post Malone and Ty Dolla $ign with “Psycho.”  For months, we’ve been anticipating Post’s sophomore album “Beerbongs & Bentleys.” Now, we have a release date: April 27.

Post dropped the news April 5, while also giving fans a video of his new song “Stay.” Post performed the acoustic ballad on the Nashville stop of his Bud Light Dive Bar Tour.

Number 3: Bruno Mars & Cardi B “Finesse”

Bruno Mars and Cardi B are back in third place with “Finesse,” but that’s not the big news this week. On April 7, Cardi performed on Saturday Night Live — and officially announced her pregnancy. While we don’t yet know the due date, U.S. media outlets are speculating it will happen sometime this North American summer.

While Cardi has already canceled two European festival appearances, she says her other shows — including a September tour with Bruno Mars — are still on her schedule.

Number 2: Bebe Rexha & Florida Georgia Line “Meant To Be”

If Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line are “Meant To Be” champions, it won’t happen this week: They hold in the runner-up slot.

Beyond the charts, Bebe has announced the release date for her first full-length album. Titled “Expectations,” it’s available for pre-order this week, ahead of a June 22 release.

Number 1:  Drake “God’s Plan”

Drake enters the land of double digits, as “God’s Plan” racks up a 10th week atop the Hot 100. He now has two 10-week chart champs, following “One Dance” in 2016.

This week, Drake dropped the video for a new song, “Nice For What.” The clip features several female stars from Hollywood, and you can see it on our Facebook page, VOA1TheHits.

That’s it for now, but the chart never sleeps! Join us next week for a new lineup.
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A German Jewish leader is criticizing a music awards show for giving a prize to two rappers whose reference to the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp in a song she says harms efforts to fight anti-Semitism.

German rappers Kollegah and Farid Bang won an Echo award Thursday night for their new album, including a track that contains the line “my body more defined than Auschwitz inmates’.”

Charlotte Knobloch, former head of the Central Council of Jews, said Friday giving them an award in the hip-hop/urban national category was a “devastating sign” amid growing signs of “anti-Semitism in our society, especially in schools.”

She says “the two rappers reach millions of mostly young people with their inhuman message.”

The rappers have defended the line as artistic freedom and not political opinion.
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In the springtime, the Tidal Basin in Washington is known for having a spectacular display of cherry blossoms. But in a quiet neighborhood in Maryland, just outside Washington, more than 1,000 cherry trees also put on quite a show. VOA’s Deborah Block takes us to Chevy Chase, Maryland, where the breathtaking canopy of flowers attracts visitors from around the world.
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Organizers of the Cannes Film Festival say new films by Spike Lee and Jean-Luc Godard will be among the competitors for the Palme d’Or next month.

Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” will open in theaters on Aug. 10, the one-year anniversary of the violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white nationalists marched and a protester was killed.

 

The film is about the real-life story of Ron Stallworth, a black police officer in Colorado who went undercover in 1978 to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan. John David Washington plays Stallworth in the film and Adam Driver plays his partner.

 

Godard’s movie “Le Livre d’Image” – The Image Book – is described as a “revolutionary song in five chapters.”

 

Organizers announced Thursday the lineup for the May 8-19 festival, now in its 71th year.

 
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An Iranian state TV network’s unusual decision to censor the crest of Italian football club AS Roma has helped the club attract a big following of Iranian fans to its new Persian Twitter account. 

AS Roma’s head of digital media, Paul Rogers, posted a tweet Wednesday, saying the club’s Persian Twitter account had “really good local fan feedback” in the first 24 hours since it launched a day earlier.

The @ASRoma_Persian account’s following had risen further to 22,000 by late Wednesday, U.S. time. 

In a Tuesday statement posted on its website, AS Roma said the launch of the Persian Twitter account was a first for a major European football club. It said the move will allow it to communicate directly on the social media platform with Iranian fans and other Persian speakers around the world. 

The launch coincided with AS Roma beating Spanish club Barcelona 3-0 in Rome on Tuesday in a European Champions League quarterfinal second leg match. It was a surprising result that enabled the Italian team to reach the Champions League semifinals after having suffered a 4-1 defeat at Barcelona in the quarterfinal first leg on April 4. AS Roma tied Barcelona 4-4 on aggregate and advanced on away goals scored. 

AS Roma said it had been inundated with supportive tweets from Iranian fans after Iranian state TV’s third channel partially censored the club’s crest during an April 4 broadcast of the quarterfinal first leg.

The AS Roma crest contains an image of Rome’s mythical twin founders Romulus and Remus sucking the teats of the Capitoline Wolf. Viewers noticed that the Iranian TV channel blurred the female wolf’s nipples when displaying the crest in a box next to the program’s anchor. A screen grab of the blurred logo posted by Denmark-based Iranian sports journalist Mehdi Rostampour on his Telegram channel went viral, with football fans making fun of it.

Rostampour joined the mockery, writing: “In 3,000 years, Remus and Romulus were only deprived of their mother’s milk, but Iran’s state broadcaster deprived them of even a wolf’s milk.” There were no reports of any response from the Iranian broadcaster to the backlash.

Iranian state media regularly censor images deemed sexual in nature by the nation’s Islamist clerical rulers. That practice was the focus of VOA Persian’s Straight Talk call-in show on Wednesday, with some callers in Iran telling the program that they think such censorship is good because it protects children from seeing inappropriate images. 

Other callers criticized the Iranian government’s censorship policies. One woman, who gave her name as Afsaneh and said she was calling from the northeastern city of Mashhad, said censorship has a harmful psychological and financial impact on Iranian society, particularly by pressuring women to dress conservatively and keep a low profile in public arenas. 

VOA Persian’s Behrooz Samadbeygi, Afshar Sigarchi and Mohammad Naficy contributed to this report.
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The first accuser to testify at Bill Cosby’s retrial described the comedian as “a serial rapist” Wednesday, stunning the courtroom as she parried with his lawyers.

 

In her second day on the witness stand, Heidi Thomas, a Colorado music teacher, told jurors she came forward with her allegations in early 2015 to support other women who have accused Cosby, not for the attention his lawyers say it brought her.

 

Thomas had testified that Cosby knocked her out with wine and forced her to perform oral sex in 1984 in Reno, Nevada.

 

She rejected a defense lawyer’s insinuation that she would do anything to help the comedian’s chief accuser, Andrea Constand.

“You’ve made it very clear that you want to help Andrea Constand, haven’t you?” Kathleen Bliss asked.

 

“I want to see a serial rapist convicted,” Thomas replied.

 

Thomas is one of five additional accusers who say the comedian drugged and attacked them long before he met Constand, a former Temple University women’s basketball administrator who alleges Cosby gave her pills and then violated her in 2004. He says the encounter with Constand was consensual.

 

Prosecutors are lining up the additional accusers to make the case that Cosby, once revered as “America’s Dad,” was a Hollywood predator who is only now facing a reckoning after allegedly assaulting Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home.

 

The women also could help prosecutors insulate Constand from the defense’s contention that she is a “con artist” who preyed on Cosby’s vulnerability after the 1997 killing of his son, Ennis, and then framed him to score a big payday via a $3.4 million civil settlement.

 

Thomas was a 24-year-old aspiring actress when her agent arranged for Cosby to give her acting tips. She testified that Cosby gave her the wine as they rehearsed a scene in which she portrayed a drunken woman.

 

She said she remembered feeling sick and wondering, “How did I get here?”

 

Thomas rebuffed a defense suggestion that she was seeking a share of the spotlight and trying to profit off her experiences. Under cross examination, she told jurors that many of the more than a dozen interviews she gave after going public stemmed from her work to extend the statute of limitations for sex crimes. Thomas has teamed with other Cosby accusers to lobby for longer statutes of limitations, including a successful effort to double Colorado’s to 20 years.

 

Court opened Wednesday with the defense successfully arguing that jurors should hear about another accuser’s criminal past so they can fully assess her credibility.

 

Cosby lawyer Jaya Gupta told the judge that Chelan Lasha’s 2007 guilty plea for making a false report to Arizona law enforcement “bears on her veracity.”

 

State law bars talk of witness convictions more than a decade old, but Gupta argued that Lasha’s conviction should be an exception since her allegations against Cosby date to 1986.

 

The judge ruled that Cosby’s lawyers can bring it up.

 

The former model and aspiring actress said she was immobilized and unable to speak as Cosby assaulted her after giving her a pill he described as an antihistamine. Her lawyer, Gloria Allred, said the defense is trying to smear Lasha.

 

The defense has urged jurors to ignore the other accusers, calling their allegations irrelevant to the charges involving Constand, who turned 45 on Wednesday.

 

Thomas once sent a Facebook message to Constand.

 

“I just wanted her to know that everything that was being said about her and about us, that there was somebody out there who knew she was telling the truth,” Thomas testified.

 

Cosby, 80, is charged with three counts of aggravated indecent assault, each punishable by up to 10 years in prison. His first trial last year ended in a hung jury.

 

As they began building their case against Cosby, prosecutors chose Thomas as their first substantive witness.

 

On Tuesday, Thomas testified that she blamed herself for what happened, thinking she must have said or done something that led Cosby to believe she would be open to his advances. She never told her agent or her parents about the alleged assault.

 

“I was pretty sure whatever I did was my fault,” Thomas testified, adding: “I was just going to move on. And I did.”

 

Under cross examination, Thomas testified that she chronicled her trip to Reno in a scrapbook and recorded a cassette tape at the home where she had the encounter with Cosby. She said she wanted to recount the trip for her mother and agent but destroyed it years later after seeing a psychiatrist.

 

It made no mention of the alleged assault, Thomas said, because she had planned to give it to her mom.

 

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand and Thomas have done.

 

 

 
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Isaac Asimov’s influential “Foundation” science fiction novels about the collapse and resurgence of a galactic empire are heading to Apple as a television drama series, a company spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

The series is the latest step the iPhone maker has taken to acquire original programming as it seeks to rival more established outlets such as Netflix Inc, Time Warner’s HBO and Amazon.com’s Amazon Studios.

It is unclear when Apple’s shows will be released, and where viewers will be able to see them. The company has not said if it will distribute them through its own iTunes Store, where it sells shows and films by other companies, or on another platform.

David S. Goyer, screenwriter of blockbusters “The Dark Night” and “Batman Begins,” and Josh Friedman, the writer of Steven Spielberg’s 2005 sci-fi adaptation “War of the Worlds,” have been charged to bring Asimov’s work to the TV screen.

Hollywood’s attempts over the past two decades to bring the Russian-American author and scientist’s saga of humans living on planets scattered throughout the Milky Way galaxy to either television or the big screen have so far never come to fruition.

The “Foundation” series began as several short stories published between 1942 and 1950, and was later developed into a trilogy of novels published from 1951 to 1953. It won a Hugo Award, the top awards for science fiction and fantasy writing, in 1966 as best all-time series, the only time the award has been handed out.

Apple has already ordered two seasons of a drama about a morning TV program starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston, as well as a remake of Spielberg’s 1980 sci-fi anthology series “Amazing Stories.”
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Comedic actor Tracy Morgan, who rose to prominence on sketch comedy series “Saturday Night Live” after growing up in one of New York City’s toughest housing projects, said he felt right at home receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Tuesday.

With his trademark wide, mischievous grin, Morgan, 49, bent over and kissed the emblematic terrazzo and brass star along Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, now one of the city’s most-visited sites but for decades was a home to L.A.’s underbelly.

“When I was a poor kid growing up in the projects in Brooklyn, I would never dream of having a star on the Walk of Fame,” the comic known for his cringe-inducing style said.

“But now that I’m here, I have to tell you I feel pretty comfortable,” the “30 Rock” star added. “I’ll tell you why! Because of the smell of weed and stale urine – it’s just like being in the projects. What would really make me feel at home, if somebody spray painted graffiti on my star.”

Morgan, who stars in the new Time Warner-owned TBS comedy “The Last O.G.” with Tiffany Haddish, was introduced by Oscar winner Jordan Peele and comedian Martin Lawrence, who gave Morgan his first break in 1994 on his TV comedy series “Martin.”

“The Last O.G.” is Morgan’s first big step back into Hollywood after he was seriously injured in 2014 when a Wal-Mart truck crashed into his limousine on the New Jersey Turnpike killing his friend, the comedian James McNair.

“He’s been through so many things and he’s come out with an outlook on life that is absolutely beautiful,” Peele told the assembled crowd.

“He’ll take you all over the map in a conversation with him,” Peele added. “You’ll be laughing one second, you’ll be crying the next second. He’ll have you thinking one second and then he’ll say something so stupid it’s just funny the next second.”

The Hollywood Walk of Fame is administered by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.
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