Category: Новини

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SEOUL, South Korea — Video footage released by an organization that works with North Korean defectors shows North Korean authorities publicly sentencing two teenagers to 12 years’ hard labor for watching K-pop.

The footage, which shows the two 16-year-olds in Pyongyang convicted of watching South Korean movies and music videos, was released by the South and North Development Institute, or SAND.

Reuters was unable to independently verify the footage, which was first reported by the BBC.

North Korea has for years imposed tough sentences on anyone caught enjoying South Korean entertainment or copying the way South Koreans speak in its war on outside influences. A sweeping new “anti-reactionary thought” law was imposed in 2020.

“Judging from the heavy punishment, it seems that this is to be shown to people across North Korea to warn them. If so, it appears this lifestyle of South Korean culture is prevalent in North Korean society,” said Choi Kyong-hui, president of SAND and doctor of political science at Tokyo University, who defected from North Korea in 2001.

“I think this video was edited around 2022. … What is troublesome for [North Korean leader] Kim Jong Un is that Millennials and Gen Z young people have changed their way of thinking. I think he’s working on turning it back to the North Korean way.”

The video, made by North Korean authorities, shows a large public trial in which the two students in grey scrubs are handcuffed while watched by about 1,000 students in an amphitheater. All the students, including the two 16-year-olds, are wearing face masks, suggesting the footage was shot during the COVID pandemic.

The students were sentenced, according to the video, after being convicted of watching and spreading South Korean movies, music and music videos over three months.

“They were seduced by foreign culture … and ended up ruining their lives,” the narrator states, as the video cut away to young girls being handcuffed and Pyongyang women wearing South Korean fashion and hairstyles.

Reclusive North Korea and the rich, democratic South are technically still at war after their 1950-53 conflict ended in a truce, not a peace treaty, and are divided by a heavily fortified demilitarized zone.
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A drawing of a nude Donald Trump. A punching bag sculpture shaped like a woman’s torso. A display of women’s party shoes standing proudly on prayer rugs. All are pieces of contemporary art that have provoked debate and, sometimes, violent reactions. 

These pieces and dozens more that were subjected to some sort of censorship have found a home in Spain at Barcelona’s Museum of Forbidden Art, or “Museu de l’Art Prohibit” in Catalan. The collection of over 200 works, including ones by well-known creators such as American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and Spain’s own Pablo Picasso, is intended to challenge visitors and question the limits imposed on artists in an increasingly polarized world. 

Director Rosa Rodrigo said the museum is the only one in the world dedicated exclusively to art that faced petitions — often successful ones — for their removal from public view on moral, political, religious, sexual or commercial grounds. 

“The museum gives an opportunity to works of art that, for whatever reason, at some point had been banned, attacked, censored, or canceled, because there are so many,” Rodrigo told The Associated Press. 

The museum is the creation of Catalan art collector Tatxo Benet, who owns all but one of the 42 works currently on display — and the 200 more in storage. He was already collecting contemporary art when he began gathering “banned” works. 

Five years later, Benet’s idea became the Museum of Forbidden Art, which opened its doors in October. Since then, over 13,000 people have visited its galleries. 

Museum is “imperative”

As more works come under attack, people like art critic and curator Gabriel Luciani say the exhibit is essential. “I think it’s imperative to have a place like this in Europe and around the world. Especially in these moments of censorship that we’re seeing. Not only in the arts but also in other political contexts,” he said. 

In March, a Hong Kong department store took down a digital artwork that contained hidden references to jailed dissidents. The same month on the other side of the world, a Florida charter school principal was forced to resign after a parent complained about a lesson on Renaissance art that included Michelangelo’s David sculpture. 

Barcelona’s new museum features well-known works of contention, including “Piss Christ” by Andres Serrano, a photo of a crucifix plunged into a vat of the artist’s urine; as well as Mapplethorpe’s “X Portfolio,” photos of sadomasochism that were challenged in court for obscenity. 

“I think the collection could even be more shocking,” Luciani said. 

But the works by women, which have drawn ire from conservative religious groups or been repressed for their feminist content, are among the most powerful of the collection. 

“Silence,” an installation by French Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah that displays 30 pairs of stiletto heels on the same number of Islamic prayer rugs, dominates the center of a room. Bouabdellah agreed to have her work removed from a museum in Clichy, France, after the 2015 attacks in Paris against the staff of the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper, which had published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. 

Modern and classic

The physical abuse of women is captured by Kazakh artist Zoya Falkova in Evermust, a leather sculpture of a woman’s torso as a boxer’s punching bag. It was one of six works removed from a museum in Kyrgyzstan when an exhibition of feminist art came under fire from officials who said it went against traditional values. 

While most of the works are from the 21st century, Goya, Picasso and Klimt all have their place in the halls of the elegant modernist mansion that houses the museum. Goya had to sell his late-1790s “Los Caprichos” prints to the Spanish crown when he feared they could come under the scrutiny of the Inquisition, while Picasso saw his “Suite 347” of erotic drawings displayed in a private room in 1960s Paris. 

Although censorship has taken many forms, the museum shows that the drive to silence artists who make challenging works is alive and kicking. 

“Censorship in art has always existed because artists are always forerunners and touch on different themes,” Rodrigo said. “[But] it is true that most of the works on display are from the years 2010 to 2020. In those 10 years, in many different areas of the world, I think that societies themselves have undergone a regression of values, because it has not necessarily been governments which have acted [against artworks], but rather it has been society itself.” 

In 2016, the Australian artist Illma Gore posted her full-monty drawing of Trump on Facebook and had her account shut down for obscenity and nudity. Gore believes the piece led to her being assaulted on a Los Angeles street. 

Following a series of canceled shows after he was accused of making inappropriate sexual comments to potential models, the late American painter Chuck Close, a master of photorealism, has a self-portrait on display at the Museum of Forbidden Art. 

Hoping for no attacks

Commercial interests have also played a role in muzzling free expression. 

Yoshua Okón’s video of an obese woman lying nude on a table in McDonald’s, called “Freedom Fries,” was removed from a gallery in London after, according to the Barcelona museum, members of gallery’s board were worried about damaging the fast-food chain’s reputation. 

The museum also houses several works that have come under physical attack, including “Piss Christ.” 

Spanish artist Charo Corrales’ “With Flowers for Mary,” which depicts a Virgin Mary masturbating, was slashed while exhibited in southern Spain after Catholic legal groups filed a lawsuit against the work for offending religious sensibilities. It is now on display in Barcelona with an open gash in the canvas. 

Rodrigo said her museum hopes it won’t see any attacks because visitors should come prepared to be shocked. She also believes that by grouping these works, they produce a more balanced impact. Plus, she has faith that the spectator will show respect and restraint when granted the freedom to come in contact with provocative artwork. 

“We want our visitors to feel comfortable, not that they are in a fortress,” Rodrigo said, “because if we did that, we would be sending the wrong message.”
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A 23-year-old Taylor Swift fan died at the singer’s Eras Tour concert in Rio de Janeiro Friday night, according to a statement from the show’s organizers in Brazil. Both fans and politicians reacted to the news with outrage.

While a cause of death for Ana Clara Benevides Machado has not been announced, fans complained they were not allowed to take water into Nilton Santos Olympic Stadium despite soaring temperatures.

A group launched an online petition Saturday morning calling for a “Benevides Law” to “make water in events mandatory.”

The petition garnered more than 150,000 signatures in just a few hours. Federal authorities announced that free water would be made available at all future concerts.

In a handwritten note shared on her social media, Swift said she had a “shattered heart.”

“There’s very little information I have other than the fact that she was so incredibly beautiful and far too young,” the singer wrote of the young woman.

The show’s organizer, Time4Fun, said on Instagram that paramedics attended to Benevides after she reported feeling unwell. She was taken to a first-aid center and then to a hospital, where she died an hour later, the statement from the Brazilian live entertainment company said.

Concertgoers said they were not allowed to bring water bottles into the stadium even though Rio and most of Brazil have had record-breaking temperatures this week amid a dangerous and lasting heat wave. The daytime high in Rio on Friday was 39.1 degrees Celsius (102.4 degrees Fahrenheit), but it felt much hotter.

Elizabeth Morin, 26, who recently moved to Rio from Los Angeles, described “sauna-like” conditions inside the stadium.

“It was extremely hot. My hair got so wet from sweat as soon as I came in,” she said. “There was a point at which I had to check my breathing to make sure I wasn’t going to pass out.”

Morin said she drank plenty of water but saw “a good amount of people looking distressed” and others “yelling for water.” She said that she was able to get water from the sidelines of the area she was standing in, but that water was a lot harder to access from other parts of the stadium, “especially if you were concerned about losing your specific position.”

During the show, Swift paused her performance and asked from the stage for water to be brought to a group of people who had successfully caught the singer’s attention, according to Morin.

“They were holding up their phones saying ‘We need water,’” she recalled.

Justice Minister Flávio Dino said on X that the ministry would implement “emergency rules” in response to the situation. He later announced that “water bottles for personal use, in suitable material, will be allowed” at concerts and other events and that show producers must provide free and easily accessible drinking water.

Before the show, Benevides posted a video of herself on Instagram wearing a Taylor Swift T-shirt and waiting in line to enter the stadium while seeking shade under an umbrella. Like her, thousands of fans waited hours in the sun before being allowed inside.

She told her followers while fanning her face that she’d arrived at 11 a.m. — the show began around 7:30 p.m. — and was “still in the mess.”

Benevides’ friend, Daniele Menin, who attended the concert with her, told online news site G1 that her friend passed out at the beginning of the concert as Swift performed her second song, “Cruel Summer.”

“We always said that when [Taylor Swift] came to Brazil we would find a way to go. The ticket was very expensive, but we still found a way,” Menin told G1.

Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes said on X the “loss of a young woman’s life … is unacceptable.”

While authorities are investigating the circumstances of the death, Paes wrote, the municipality will demand Saturday that the show’s production company provide new water distribution points, more brigades and ambulances, and advance entrance to the show by one hour.

Swift has two more shows scheduled in Rio, one Saturday and one Sunday.

“I’m not going to be able to speak about this from stage because I feel overwhelmed by grief when I even try to talk about it,” she wrote. “I want to say now I feel this loss deeply and my broken heart goes out to her family and friends.” 
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India captain Rohit Sharma said Saturday his players understand the pressure of being Indian cricketers and remain “calm and composed” for the World Cup final against five-time champion Australia.

The hosts are undefeated in 10 matches and will eye their first global trophy in over a decade in front of around 130,000 fans at the world’s biggest cricket stadium in Ahmedabad on Sunday.

“Leading up to every game we have been quite composed, quite calm about what we want to do, because we know how it is outside the environment we have,” Rohit told reporters. “The expectations and the pressure, criticism and everything, so it’s important we stick to our strength and what we want to do as a team.

“Inside, what they [players] feel I can’t tell you, but when they are around the group, everybody seems to be quite relaxed and calm. Being an Indian cricketer you have [to] deal with pressure, that’s a given, it’s there,” Rohit said.

Australia team captain Pat Cummins said the immense size of the stadium will be a challenge.

“The crowd’s obviously going to be very one-sided, but in sport, there’s nothing more satisfying than hearing a big crowd go silent, and that’s the aim for us tomorrow,” he told reporters Saturday. “You’ve just got to embrace every part of a final. … You know in the lead-up there’s going to be noise and more people and interest, and you just can’t get overwhelmed.”

India last won the World Cup in 2011 at home under M.S. Dhoni with the cricket-crazy country erupting in joy as thousands took to the streets to celebrate.

Two years later, Dhoni led India to the 2013 Champions Trophy, but the cricketing powerhouse faltered at the World Cup semifinal stage in 2015 and 2019.

This time around, Rohit’s team has lived up to its billing as pre-tournament favorites with a perfect showing in the league stage and then a 70-run win over New Zealand in the semifinal.

“Emotionally it’s a big thing, a big occasion,” said 36-year-old Rohit. “So along with me, all the other 10 players who will play on the ground tomorrow, their focus will be more on their work for the team, rather than thinking about, ‘This is the biggest moment of my life.’”

Fellow cricket superpower Australia is now into its eighth World Cup final.

They have won eight matches on the bounce after two opening losses, including a six-wicket defeat to India after they were bowled out for just 199.

Australia fast bowler Mitchell Starc said after his team’s semifinal win over South Africa, “India has been the best in the tournament so far, and we both find ourselves in the final. We played them in the first game of the tournament, now we get to take them on in the last. What a place to be at the end of a World Cup.”

“They’ve won eight out of eight, and they played it really well. So, it’s going to be a good contest,” said Rohit. “Both teams deserve to be at this stage playing the finals, and we understand the importance of what Australia can do. They are a very complete side, and for us, again, what is important is to focus on what we want to do as a team.”

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Many of Malaysia’s urban communities are adding a rural touch. Community gardens are popping up as residents look for ways to bring the great outdoors closer to home. Dave Grunebaum has the story.
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British author A.S. Byatt, who wove history, myth and a sharp eye for human foibles into books that included the Booker Prize-winning novel Possession, has died at the age of 87.

Byatt’s publisher, Chatto & Windus, said Friday that the author, whose full name was Antonia Byatt, died “peacefully at home surrounded by close family” on Thursday.

Byatt wrote two dozen books, starting with her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun, in 1964. Her work was translated into 38 languages.

Possession, published in 1990, follows two young academics investigating the lives of a pair of imaginary Victorian poets. The novel, a double romance which skillfully layers a modern story with mock-Victorian letters and poems, was a huge bestseller and won the prestigious Booker Prize.

Accepting the prize, Byatt said Possession was about the joy of reading.

“My book was written on a kind of high about the pleasures of reading,” she said.

“Possession” was adapted into a 2002 film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Aaron Eckhart. It was one of several Byatt books to get the film treatment. Morpho Eugenia, a gothic Victorian novella included in the 1992 book Angels and Insects, became a 1995 movie of the same name, starring Mark Rylance and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Her short story The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, which won the 1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, inspired the 2022 fantasy film Three Thousand Years of Longing. Directed by Mad Max filmmaker George Miller, it starred Idris Elba as a genie who spins tales for an academic played by Tilda Swinton.

Byatt’s other books include four novels set in 1950s and ’60s Britain that together are known as the Frederica Quartet: The Virgin in the Garden, published in 1978, followed by Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. She also wrote the 2009 Booker Prize finalist The Children’s Book, a sweeping story of Edwardian England centered on a writer of fairy tales.

Her most recent book was Medusa’s Ankles, a volume of short stories published in 2021.

Byatt’s literary agent, Zoe Waldie, said the author “held readers spellbound” with writing that was “multilayered, endlessly varied and deeply intellectual, threaded through with myths and metaphysics.”

Clara Farmer, Byatt’s publisher at Chatto & Windus — part of Penguin Random House — said the author’s books were “the most wonderful jewel-boxes of stories and ideas.”

“We mourn her loss, but it’s a comfort to know that her penetrating works will dazzle, shine and refract in the minds of readers for generations to come,” Farmer said.

Born Antonia Susan Drabble in Sheffield, northern England, in 1936 – her sister is novelist Margaret Drabble – Byatt grew up in a Quaker family, attended Cambridge University and worked for a time as a university lecturer.

She married economist Ian Byatt in 1959 and they had a daughter and a son before divorcing. In 1972, her 11-year-old son, Charles, was struck and killed by a car while walking home from school.

Charles died shortly after Byatt had taken a teaching post at University College London to pay for his private school fees. After his death, she told The Guardian in 2009, she stayed in the job “as long as he had lived, which was 11 years.” In 1983, she quit to become a full-time writer.

Byatt lived in London with her second husband, Peter Duffy, with whom she had two daughters.

Queen Elizabeth II made Byatt a dame, the female equivalent of a knight, in 1999 for services to literature, and in 2003 she was made a chevalier (knight) of France’s Order of Arts and Letters.

In 2014, a species of iridescent beetle was named for her — Euhylaeogena byattae Hespenheide — in honor of her depiction of naturalists in Morpho Eugenia.
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Tahir Hamut Izgil witnessed firsthand, China’s repressive treatment of the Uyghur ethnic minority group and experienced how society changed over time in Xinjiang, an autonomous region in northwest China. His memoir, published this year has gained attention by readers and recognition by two prominent U.S.  publications this week, while China describes accusations of repression as a false narrative.

Izgil’s memoir, Waiting to be Arrested at Night: A Uyghur Poet’s Memoir of China’s Genocide, has been listed as one of the “50 notable works of nonfiction,” by The Washington Post and as the “100 Must-Read Books of 2023,” by Time magazine.   

Now living in the U.S., Izgil, a Uyghur, was born in Kashgar in 1969 and lived through some of the most drastic changes in Xinjiang in the region’s modern history. While preparing to leave for Turkey to study in 1996, the Chinese government accused him of “trying to take illegal and confidential materials out of the country” and he was imprisoned for three years. He was able to establish a career in filmmaking after his confinement.   

In his book, Izgil wrote about people he knew disappearing and described what he did — fearing he would be next.   

“As the situation worsened, like many others, I spent hours ‘cleaning out’ my phone, just as I had cleaned out my computer three years earlier,” Izgil wrote in his book. “I deleted pictures, videos, audio records, and even chat records on QQ and WeChat one after another.”   In 2017, as the Chinese government intensified its crackdown on Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Izgil and his family managed to flee the region and seek asylum in the United States.   

China’s response

Beijing has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in Xinjiang and dismissed genocide and crimes against humanity allegations as “lies and fabrications,” asserting that Xinjiang has achieved remarkable economic growth and social development in recent years.    

“People of all ethnic backgrounds in Xinjiang are entitled to the rights and interests under China’s Constitution and other laws,” wrote Liu Pengyu the spokesperson from the Chinese Embassy in Washington, in an email response to VOA’s inquiry.

“In recent years, China’s Foreign Ministry and the government of Xinjiang have held multiple press briefings for domestic and international media to learn more about real life in Xinjiang. Regrettably, however, a few people in some Western countries, including in the U.S., would rather buy into false narratives than acknowledge the truth and the real progress in Xinjiang,” wrote Liu.

Concerns of Chinese repression  

President Joe Biden “raised concerns regarding PRC (People’s Republic of China) human rights abuses, including in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong,” during his meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in San Francisco this week.  The U.S. has accused China of “genocide and human rights abuses” and called on China “to address forced labor in Xinjiang.”  

Last year, the U.N. Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner released a report which documented credible evidence of torture or other ill-treatment and sexual and gender-based violence against the Uyghurs. The report stated the violations may constitute crimes against humanity. 

The European Parliament also adopted a resolution in 2022 condemning “in the strongest possible terms the fact that the Uyghur community in the People’s Republic of China has been systematically oppressed by brutal measures, including mass deportation, political indoctrination, family separation…”    

Personal testimony and beyond    

“As the world takes notice of my storytelling, my memoir stands as a testament to the resilience of the Uyghur people amid the challenges posed by China’s genocide,” Izgil told VOA. 

He said he is preparing to write another book on his firsthand experience in a Chinese prison. 

“I am now writing the book because nowadays, when I attend book interviews and other gatherings on my book, a lot of readers mention that my years in a Chinese prison in the second half of the 1990s were largely absent in my book. Now I want to fill that gap and inform the world about Chinese prison life in the 1990s.”   

Izgil said his memoir is contracted to be translated into 15 languages.
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Leaders of the union representing Hollywood actors announced a tentative deal recently with film and television studios to end a strike that started in July. It includes pay raises, streaming bonuses for actors, and the industry’s first protections against the use of artificial intelligence. From Los Angeles, Genia Dulot has our story.
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