Category: Новини

The International Olympic Committee, or IOC, on Thursday banned the Russian Olympic Committee after the ROC recognized regional organizations from four annexed Ukrainian territories. The ban takes effect immediately.

On Oct. 5, the ROC recognized the regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which are under the authority of the National Olympic Committee of Ukraine. This move constituted a breach in the Olympic Charter, according to the IOC.

Ukraine and the West denounced Russia’s referendums in the four regions in 2022 as a sham and decried the annexation as illegal.

The ROC will be suspended until further notice, meaning that they will not receive any funding as “they will no longer be able to operate as an Olympic Committee,” according to an IOC statement.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the IOC banned from international competition athletes from Russia as well as Belarus.

However, as of March 2023, the IOC has held the position that Russian and Belarusian athletes would be allowed to compete in international events — with no flag, emblem or anthem — stating that athletes should not be punished for the actions of their governments.

The IOC’s decision on Thursday to suspend the ROC does not change their position on Russian or Belarusian athletes.

“The suspension of the ROC does not affect the participation of independent athletes,” IOC spokesperson Mark Adams said at a news conference.

Ukraine supported today’s IOC ruling. The head of Ukraine’s Presidential Office, Andriy Yermak, called the move “an important decision,” via the Telegram messaging app.

“We communicate with our partners that sports cannot be out of politics when a terrorist country commits genocide of Ukraine and uses athletes as propaganda,” Yermak said.

The Russian Olympic Committee condemned the action taken by the IOC, claiming the suspension to be politically charged.

“Today the IOC made another counterproductive decision with obvious political motivations,” the ROC said in a statement.

Some information in this report came from Reuters.
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It has been 25 years since the body of Matthew Shepard was discovered in Laramie, Wyoming. The gay college student had been tied to a fence post, tortured, and left to die. 

The murder drew national attention to violence against gay people, and attracted the interest of theater director Moises Kaufman, who turned the horror into art with “The Laramie Project.” 

This 25th anniversary has triggered deep sadness for Kaufman, founder and artistic director of the New York-based Tectonic Theater Project. He wonders about all the things Shepard could have become. 

“Every year around this time, it’s painful to remember, but this one has hit particularly hard,” Kaufman told Theh Associated Press.

After Shepard’s 1998 killing, Kaufman and members of Tectonic traveled to Laramie and wrote the play based on more than 200 interviews. “The Laramie Project” is a poignant mix of real news reports and actors portraying friends, family, police officers, killers and other Laramie residents. 

This week, Tectonic is marking the anniversary by gathering the original cast and creators, and some of the people represented in the piece for a staged reading and conversation as part of the 2023 Shepard Symposium at the University of Wyoming. 

“The Laramie Project,” one of the most frequently performed plays in high schools, has been performed in more than 20 countries and translated into more than 13 languages. It is among the top 10 most licensed plays in America. 

“Precisely because it wasn’t about Matthew Shepard, precisely because it was about the town of Laramie is why it continues to resonate,” said Kaufman. 

“We were hoping that it wouldn’t be relevant anymore. But it is every day more relevant. Hate crimes all over our nation are at much higher rates than they were when Matthew Shepard was killed.” 

He pointed to an increase in anti-Asian incidents since the pandemic began, and assaults on transgender and gender-nonconforming people. 

In 2009, Kaufman was on hand as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was signed by then-President Barack Obama. The act expanded the 1969 federal hate-crime law to include crimes based on a victim’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. 

“The Laramie Project” has consistently been the subject of pushback by some conservative school districts, and this year faces banishment from Florida stages due to what critics call the “Don’t Say Gay” law. 

Elsewhere, theater creators across the nation say school censorship is getting worse, particularly around material with LGBTQ+ themes. Cardinal High School in Middlefield, Ohio, canceled a production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” due to content issues. 

Kaufman is also alarmed that the Lansing Board of Education in Kansas voted to remove the script of “The Laramie Project” from the school curriculum. 

“There has always been — since the inception — a couple of theaters every year where the board of the school says no. All right. But this last year was the first time that the book itself was banned from a classroom.” 

Kaufman has always been cheered by the students who find a way to perform the play despite barriers, becoming what he calls artist-activists. “My belief is that the best art occurs at the intersection of the personal and the political,” he said.
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Three books that explore and celebrate the diversity of American culture were awarded Kirkus Prizes on Wednesday night, with each winner receiving $50,000.

James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, a novel set in an eclectic Pennsylvania town in the 1930s, won in the fiction category. Héctor Tobar’s Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’ received the nonfiction award, and Ariel Aberg-Riger’s America Redux: Visual Stories From Our Dynamic History won for young reader’s literature.

The awards were presented by the trade publication Kirkus Reviews.

“History and community emerged as central themes in the most outstanding works of literature published this year. We see these ideas come to life in wildly different ways in all three of this year’s winners, each one compelling from beginning to end, begging to be celebrated, discussed, and shared,” Meg Kuehn, publisher of Kirkus Reviews, said in a statement.

Previous winners of the Kirkus Prize, established in 2014, include Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Jason Reynolds’ As Brave as You and Susan Faludi’s In the Darkroom. 
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