Category: Новини

Oscar de la Renta, Calvin Klein, Alexandra Alonso Rojas and many others produce their collections with hand-knitted products made by Ukrainian women. It’s been a year since Russia invaded Ukraine, but despite the war, Ukrainian women continue to work. Nina Vishneva has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. VOA footage by Vladimir Badikov, Natalia Latukhina.
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Ukrainian diver Stanislav Oliferchyk proudly bears the name of his late grandfather, who died in brutalized Mariupol. Russia’s troops turned the Ukrainian port city into a killing zone in the process of capturing it. The elder Stanislav could no longer get the cancer treatment he needed in the ruins, his grandson says. He was 74 when he died last October.

Another victim of the months-long Russian siege of Mariupol was its gleaming aquatic center. Oliferchyk had planned to use the refurbished sports complex as his training base for the 2024 Paris Olympics. But it was bombed the same day last March as the city’s drama theater. The theater airstrike was the single deadliest known attack against civilians to date in the year-old Russian invasion. An Associated Press investigation determined that close to 600 people died.

So it takes no leap of the imagination to understand why Mariupol-born Oliferchyk is horrified by the idea that he and other war-traumatized Ukrainian athletes might have to put their anger and consciences aside and compete against counterparts from Russia and ally Belarus at next year’s Olympics.

“I’m angry most of the time. I just can’t stand it anymore when shelling happens,” said the 26-year-old Oliferchyk, a European champion in 3-meter mixed synchronized diving in 2019. “I want Russia to let us live in peace and stay away from us.”

Defying fury from Ukraine and misgivings from other nations, the International Olympic Committee is exploring whether to allow Russians and Belarusians back into international sports and the Paris Games. The IOC says it is mission-bound to promote unity and peace — particularly when war is raging. It also cites United Nations human rights experts who argue, on non-discrimination grounds, that athletes and sports judges from Russia and Belarus shouldn’t be banned simply for the passports they hold.

For Ukrainian athletes setting their sights on Paris, the possibility of sharing Olympic pools, fields and arenas with Russian and Belarusian competitors is so repellent that some say they’d not go if it happens.

Sisters Maryna and Vladyslava Aleksiiva — who won Olympic bronze in artistic swimming’s team competition at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 — are among those who say they’d have to boycott.

“We must,” Maryna said during an Associated Press interview at their training pool in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.

Russia is the giant of their sport, previously called synchronized swimming, having won all the gold medals at the past six Olympics.

Completing each other’s sentences, the Ukrainian twins added: “Our moral feelings don’t allow us to stand near … these people.”

Oliferchyk worries that enmity could spill over if Ukrainians encounter Russians and Belarusians in Paris — a likely scenario given that Olympians will be housed and dine together in accommodation overlooking the River Seine in the city’s northern suburbs.

“Anything can happen, even a fight,” Oliferchyk said. “There simply cannot be any handshakes between us.”

Having to train in the midst of war also puts Ukraine’s Olympic hopefuls at a disadvantage. Russian strikes have destroyed training venues. Air raids disrupt training sessions. Athletes have lost family members and friends, or are consumed by worries that they will. Because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also closed the country’s airspace, traveling to international competitions has become an arduous odyssey — often of long train rides to neighboring Poland, for onward flights from there.

“Our athletes train while cruise missiles are flying, bombs are flying,” Ukrainian Sports Minister Vadym Guttsait said in an AP interview.

He recalled a meeting he took part in between IOC president Thomas Bach and Ukrainian cyclists given refuge in Swizterland.

“Bach asked one of the cyclists how she was doing,” the minister recounted. “She started crying. He asked why. She said that day they (Russian forces) attacked her city, where her parents were, and she was very nervous.”

“This is how every athlete feels about what is happening in Ukraine,” the minister said.

Ukraine’s artistic swim team, including the Aleksiiva sisters, used to train in the Lokomotiv sports center in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city. A Russian strike with powerful S-300 missiles wrecked the complex in September, the region’s governor, Oleh Syniehubov, said at the time. He posted photos showing a giant crater and severe damage to the exterior.

Maryna Aleksiiva said they used to think of the sports center as “our second home.” Their substitute pool in Kyiv doesn’t have the same broad depth of water, making it less suitable for practicing their underwater acrobatics, the sisters said. On a recent morning when they spoke to the AP, air raid sirens interrupted their training and they had to get out of the pool and take refuge in a bomb shelter until the all-clear sounded.

The power also flickered briefly off at times. Russia has been systematically bombarding Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure for months. When attacks shut off the pool’s heating, the water gets so cold that the sisters train in full-body wetsuits — far from ideal for their elegant sport.

“It’s hard to move,” Vladyslava said.

The terrors of war also take a mental toll.

“Every day we read the news — explosion, explosion, air alert,” Maryna said. “We feel so nervous about our relatives.”

Oliferchyk said he cannot imagine a handshake between Ukrainian and Russian athletes for “the next 50, 100 years.”

The Neptune arena in Mariupol where he wanted to train for Paris was wrecked by a Russian strike last March 16. As with Mariupol’s drama theater also destroyed that day, civilians were sheltering at the sports complex from bombardments. They included pregnant women who moved there after a Russian strike the previous week devastated a city maternity hospital. Video posted on Facebook by the region’s governor showed the Neptune’s shattered front and a gaping hole in its roof.

The IOC’s possible pathway out of sports exile for Russians and Belarusians would see them compete as “neutral athletes,” without national flags, colors or anthems.

That idea is a non-starter for Ukraine’s sports minister and athletes who resent that would-be Olympians from Russia and Belarus aren’t taking a stand against the invasion.

“They just do nothing and say nothing. And precisely because of their silence and inaction, all this horror is happening,” Oliferchyk said. “A neutral flag is not an option. It is not possible.”
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An international archeological mission has uncovered the remnants of what is believed to be a 5,000-year-old restaurant or tavern in the ancient city of Lagash in southern Iraq.

The discovery of the ancient dining hall — complete with a rudimentary refrigeration system, hundreds of roughly made clay bowls and the fossilized remains of an overcooked fish — announced in late January by a University of Pennsylvania-led team, generated some buzz beyond Iraq’s borders.

It came against the backdrop of a resurgence of archeology in a country often referred to as the “cradle of civilization,” but where archeological exploration has been stunted by decades of conflict before and after the U.S. invasion of 2003. Those events exposed the country’s rich sites and collections to the looting of tens of thousands of artifacts.

“The impacts of looting on the field of archeology were very severe,” Laith Majid Hussein, director of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage of Iraq, told The Associated Press. “Unfortunately, the wars and periods of instability have greatly affected the situation in the country in general.”

With relative calm prevailing over the past few years, the digs have returned. At the same time, thousands of stolen artifacts have been repatriated, offering hope of an archeological renaissance.

“‘Improving’ is a good term to describe it, or ‘healing’ or ‘recovering,'” said Jaafar Jotheri, a professor of archeology at University of Al-Qadisiyah, describing the current state of the field in his country.

Iraq is home to six UNESCO-listed World Heritage Sites, among them the ancient city of Babylon, the site of several ancient empires under rulers like Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar.

In the years before the 2003 U.S. invasion, a limited number of international teams came to dig at sites in Iraq. During Saddam Hussein’s rule, Jotheri said, the foreign archeologists who did come were under strict monitoring by a suspicious government in Baghdad, limiting their contacts with locals. There was little opportunity to transfer skills or technology to local archeologists, he said, meaning that the international presence brought “no benefit for Iraq.”

The country’s ancient sites faced “two waves of destruction,” Jotheri said, the first after harsh international sanctions were imposed following Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and desperate Iraqis “found artifacts and looting as a form of income” and the second in 2003 following the U.S. invasion, when “everything collapsed.”

Amid the ensuing security vacuum and rise of the Islamic State militant group, excavations all but shut down for nearly a decade in southern Iraq, while continuing in the more stable northern Kurdish-controlled area. Ancient sites were looted and artifacts smuggled abroad.

The first international teams to return to southern Iraq came in 2014 but their numbers grew haltingly after that.

The digs at Lagash, which was first excavated in 1968, had shut down after 1990, and the site remained dormant until 2019.

Unlike many others, the site was not plundered in the interim, largely due to the efforts of tribes living in the area, said Zaid Alrawi, an Iraqi archeologist who is the project manager at the site.

Would-be looters who came to the area were run off by “local villagers who consider these sites basically their own property,” he said.

A temple complex and the remains of institutional buildings had been uncovered in earlier digs, so when archeologists returned in 2019, Alrawi said, they focused on areas that would give clues to the lives of ordinary people. They began with what turned out to be a pottery workshop containing several kilns, complete with throwaway figurines apparently made by bored workers and date pits from their on-shift snacking.

Further digging in the area surrounding the workshop found a large room containing a fireplace used for cooking. The area also held seating benches and a refrigeration system made with layers of clay jars thrust into the earth with clay shards in between.

The site is believed to date to around 2,700 BC. Given that beer drinking was widespread among the ancient Sumerians inhabiting Lagash at the time, many envisioned the space as a sort of ancient gastropub.

But Alrawi said he believes it was more likely a cafeteria to feed workers from the pottery workshop next door.

“I think it was a place to serve whoever was working at the big pottery production next door, right next to the place where people work hard, and they had to eat lunch,” he said.

Alrawi, whose father was also an archeologist, grew up visiting sites around the country. Today, he is happy to see “a full throttle of excavations” returning to Iraq.

“It’s very good for the country and for the archeologists, for the international universities and academia,” he said.

As archeological exploration has expanded, international dollars have flowed into restoring damaged heritage sites like the al-Nouri mosque in Mosul, and Iraqi authorities have pushed to repatriate stolen artifacts from countries as near as Lebanon and as far as the United States.

Last month, Iraq’s national museum began opening its doors to the public for free on Fridays — a first in recent history. Families wandered through halls lined with Assyrian tablets and got an up-close look at the crown jewel of Iraq’s repatriated artifacts: a small clay tablet dating back 3,500 years and bearing a portion of the Epic of Gilgamesh that was looted from an Iraqi museum 30 years ago and returned from the U.S. two years ago. The tablet is among 17,000 looted artifacts returned to Iraq from the U.S.

Ebtisam Khalaf, a history teacher who was one of the visitors to the museum on its first free day, said, “This is a beautiful initiative because, we can see the things that we only used to hear about.”

Before, she said, her students could “only see these antiquities in books. But now we can see these beautiful artifacts for real.”
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Archaeologists say they have uncovered a “unique” cache of well-preserved spices, from strands of saffron to peppercorns and ginger, on the wreck of a royal ship that sank off Sweden’s Baltic coast more than 500 years ago.

The wreck of the Gribshund, owned by King Hans of Denmark and Norway, has lain off the coast off Ronneby since 1495, when it is thought to have caught fire and sank as the monarch attended a political meeting ashore in Sweden.

Rediscovered by sports divers in the 1960s, sporadic excavations of the ship have taken place in recent years. Previous dives recovered large items such as figureheads and timber. Now an excavation led by Brendan Foley, an archaeological scientist at Lund University, has found the spices buried in the silt of the boat.

“The Baltic is strange – it’s low oxygen, low temperature, low salinity, so many organic things are well preserved in the Baltic where they wouldn’t be well preserved elsewhere in the world ocean system,” said Foley. “But to find spices like this is quite extraordinary.”

The spices would have been a symbol of high status, as only the wealthy could afford goods such as saffron or cloves that were imported from outside Europe. They would have been travelling with King Hans as he attended the meeting in Sweden.

Lund University researcher Mikael Larsson, who has been studying the finds, said: “This is the only archaeological context where we’ve found saffron. So, it’s very unique and it’s very special.”
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The second half-century for the world’s most famous sled dog race is getting off to a rough start. 

Only 33 mushers will participate in the ceremonial start of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on Saturday, the smallest field ever to take their dog teams nearly 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) over Alaska’s unforgiving wilderness. This year’s lineup is smaller even than that of the 34 mushers who lined up for the very first race in 1973. 

The small pool of mushers is raising concerns about the future of an iconic race that has taken hits from the pandemic, climate change, inflation and the loss of deep-pocketed sponsors, just as multiple big-name mushing champions are retiring with few to take their place. 

The largest field ever was 96 mushers in 2008; the average number of mushers starting the race over the last 50 years was 63. 

“It’s a little scary when you look at it that way,” said four-time winner Martin Buser, 64, who retired after completing his 39th race last year. “Hopefully it’s not a state of the event and … it’s just a temporary lull.” 

The Iditarod is the most prestigious sled dog race in the world, taking competitors over two mountain ranges, the frozen Yukon River and treacherous Bering Sea ice in frigid temperatures before ending in the old Gold Rush town of Nome. The roughly 10-day event begins with a “ceremonial start” in Anchorage on Saturday, followed by the competitive start in Willow, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) to the north, on Sunday. 

And while the world-renowned race has the highest winner’s purse of any sled dog competition, the winner only pockets about $50,000 before taxes — a payout that is less appealing amid inflation and the continued reverberations of the pandemic. 

Many mushers supplement their income by offering uniquely Alaska experiences to cruise ship passengers, but for several years the pandemic has meant fewer summer visitors to shell out money for a sled dog ride on a glacier. 

“There’s a lot of kennels and a lot of mushers that rely on that to keep going,” said Aaron Burmeister, a Nome native who is sitting out this year’s race to spend more time with family. Burmeister, who works construction, has had eight top 10 finishes in the last decade. 

“Being able to race the Iditarod and the expense of putting together a race team became more than they could bear to maintain themselves,” he said of mushers. 

Inflation has also taken a toll, and several mushers said they’d like to see a higher prize purse to attract younger competitors. 

Defending champion Brent Sass, who supplements his income as a wilderness guide, isn’t surprised some mushers are taking a break to build up bank accounts. 

Sass, who has 58 dogs, orders 500 bags of high-quality dog food a year. Each bag cost $55 a few years ago, but that has swelled to $85 per bag — or about $42,500 total a year. That’s about how much money Sass pocketed from his Iditarod win last year. 

“You got to be totally prepared to run Iditarod, and have enough money in the bank to do it,” said Sass, who lives in Eureka, about a four-hour drive north of Fairbanks. 

With other race costs, Buser said running the Iditarod now can mean spending $250,000 to win a $40,000 championship. 

The race itself has suffered under the increased inflation, Iditarod CEO Rob Urbach said. Supply costs have gone up about 30%, he said, and last year it cost nearly $30,000 to transport specially certified straw from the lower 48 for dogs to sleep on at race checkpoints. 

The Iditarod also continues to be dogged by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which has targeted the race’s biggest sponsors. Over the past decade, Alaska Airlines, ExxonMobil, Coca-Cola and Wells Fargo have ended race sponsorships after being targeted by PETA. 

PETA took out full-page newspaper ads in Anchorage and Fairbanks in February with a husky — the predominate sled dog breed — prominently featured with the headline, “We don’t want to go to the Iditarod. We just want the Iditarod to go.” 

But Urbach said the race’s financial health is good, and payouts should be a little higher this year. The top 20 finishers receive payouts on a sliding scale, and every other finisher gets $1,049, reflecting the stated mileage of the race, though the actual mileage is lower. 

Urbach noted they are paying “the healthiest prize money” among competitive sled dog races and called the PETA campaign “pretty offensive, I think, to most Alaskans.” 

There’s also worry about the future of the race because of climate change. 

The warming climate forced organizers to move the starting line 290 miles (467 kilometers) north from Willow to Fairbanks in 2003, 2015 and 2017 because of a lack of snow in the Alaska Range. Poor winter conditions and urban growth likewise led the Iditarod to officially move the start from Wasilla about 30 miles (48 kilometers) north to Willow in 2008, even though Wasilla last hosted the start in 2002. 

Moving the start of the race north will likely become more common as global warming advances, said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Ice on Alaska’s western coast could also get thinner and more dangerous, he said. 

“It doesn’t have to be that there’s waves crashing on the beach,” Thoman said of the impacts of ice melt. “It just has to be at the point where the ice is not stable.” 

As challenges stack up, several veteran mushers with multiple championships have stepped away this year after decades of braving the frigid and windy conditions to train in the dead of the Alaska winter for the Iditarod. They are finding that few are willing to take their place, at least this year. 

“I just got back from Cancun to see the Grateful Dead play on the beaches of Mexico,” said four-time champion Jeff King, who is now 67. “I first said I was going to retire at 40, and I ran the race at 66, so I don’t feel like I’m bailing on anybody.” 

Five-time champion Dallas Seavey said last year’s race would be his last, at least for a while, to spend time with his daughter. Other past champions not racing include Dallas’ father, three-time champion Mitch Seavey, and Joar Leifseth Ulsom and Thomas Waerner, who have one title each. 

Waerner said sponsors are holding back, and it’s too expensive to pay $60,000 to get his team from Norway to Alaska. 

Lance Mackey, another four-time champion, died last year from cancer. He is the honorary musher for this year’s race, and his children, Atigun and Lozen, will ride in the first sled to leave the ceremonial start line in Anchorage and during the competitive start Sunday. 

That leaves two former winners in this year’s field, Sass and Pete Kaiser.

Sass said he is confident the Iditarod will survive this downturn. 

“If we can just keep the train rolling forward, I think it’s going to come back, and hopefully our world can get things under control and things maybe get a little less expensive,” Sass said. “I think that’s going to help get our numbers back up.” 
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Tom Sizemore, the “Saving Private Ryan” actor whose bright 1990s star burned out under the weight of his own domestic violence and drug convictions, died Friday at age 61.

The actor had suffered a brain aneurysm on Feb. 18 at his home in Los Angeles. He died in his sleep Friday at a hospital in Burbank, California, his manager Charles Lago said.

Sizemore became a star with acclaimed appearances in Natural Born Killers and the cult-classic crime thriller Heat. But serious substance dependency, abuse allegations and multiple run-ins with the law devastated his career, left him homeless and sent him to jail.

As the global #MeToo movement wave crested in late 2017, Sizemore was also accused of groping an 11-year-old Utah girl on set in 2003. He called the allegations “highly disturbing,” saying he would never inappropriately touch a child. Charges were not filed.

Despite the raft of legal trouble, Sizemore had scores of steady film and television credits — though his career never regained its onetime momentum. Aside from Black Hawk Down and Pearl Harbor, most of his 21st century roles came in low-budget, little-seen productions where he continued to play the gruff, tough guys he became famous for portraying.

“I was a guy who’d come from very little and risen to the top. I’d had the multimillion-dollar house, the Porsche, the restaurant I partially owned with Robert De Niro,” the Detroit-born Sizemore wrote in his 2013 memoir, By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There. “And now I had absolutely nothing.”

The book’s title was taken from a line uttered by his character in Saving Private Ryan, a role for which he garnered Oscar buzz. But he wrote that success turned him into a “spoiled movie star,” an “arrogant fool” and eventually “a hope-to-die addict.”

He racked up a string of domestic violence arrests. Sizemore was married once, to actor Maeve Quinlan, and was arrested on suspicion of beating her in 1997. While the charges were dropped, the couple divorced in 1999.

Sizemore was convicted of abusing ex-girlfriend Heidi Fleiss in 2003 — the same year he pleaded no contest and avoided trial in a separate abuse case — and sentenced to jail. The former Hollywood madam testified that he had punched her in the jaw at a Beverly Hills hotel, and beaten her in New York to the point where they couldn’t attend the Black Hawk Down premiere.

The sentencing judge said drug abuse was likely a catalyst but that testimony had revealed a man who had deep problems dealing with women. Fleiss called Sizemore “a zero” in a conversation with The Associated Press after his conviction.

Sizemore apologized in a letter, saying he was “chastened” and that “personal demons” had taken over his life, though he later denied abusing her and accused her of faking a picture showing her bruises.

Fleiss also sued Sizemore, saying she suffered emotional distress after he threatened to get her own probation revoked. Fleiss had been convicted in 1994 of running a high-priced call-girl ring. That lawsuit was settled on undisclosed terms.

Sizemore was the subject of two workplace sexual harassment lawsuits related to the 2002 CBS show Robbery Homicide Division, in which he played a police detective. He was arrested as recently as 2016 in another domestic violence case.

Sizemore ended up jailed from August 2007 to January 2009 for failing numerous drug tests while on probation and after Bakersfield, California, authorities found methamphetamine in his car.

“God’s trying to tell me he doesn’t want me using drugs because every time I use them I get caught,” Sizemore told The Bakersfield Californian in a jailhouse interview.

Sizemore told the AP in 2013 that he believed his dependency was related to the trappings of success. He struggled to maintain his emotional composure as he described a low point looking in the mirror: “I looked like I was 100 years old. I had no relationship with my kids; I had no work to speak off. I was living in squat.”

He appeared on the reality TV show Celebrity Rehab and its spinoff Sober House, telling the AP that he did the shows to receive help, but also partly to pay off accumulated debts that ran into the millions.

Many of Sizemore’s later-career films had a sci-fi, horror or action bent: In 2022 alone, he starred in movies with such titles as Impuratus, Night of the Tommyknockers and Vampfather. But Sizemore still nabbed a few meaty roles — including in the Twin Peaks revival — and guest spots on popular shows like Entourage and Hawaii Five-O.

A stuntman sued Sizemore and Paramount Pictures in 2016, saying he was injured when the allegedly intoxicated actor ran him over while filming USA’s Shooter. State records obtained by the AP showed that Sizemore was only supposed to be sitting in the unmoving car and that he “improvised at the end of the scene and drove away in his car.” Sizemore was fired from Shooter, and the stuntman’s lawsuit was settled on undisclosed terms.

In addition to his film and TV credits, he was part of the voice cast for 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City video game. He also taught classes at the LA West Acting Studio, according to recent advertisements.

He is survived by his 17-year-old twin sons, Jayden and Jagger, and his brother Paul, all of whom were by his side when he died.

“I’ve led an interesting life, but I can’t tell you what I’d give to be the guy you didn’t know anything about,” Sizemore wrote in his memoir.
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“The Red Suitcase,” a short film by Iranian-born filmmaker Cyrus Neshvad, will compete for an Oscar at the Academy Awards on March 12. The director and his star tell VOA’s Mike O’Sullivan that the film looks at a young woman’s struggle to determine her own future. Camera: Mike O’Sullivan.
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Nobel Peace Prize winner Ales Bialiatski was sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison by a Belarus court.

Bialiatski is the founder of Viasna, a prominent human rights group in Belarus that has provided legal and financial support to protesters, following a wave of unrest in 2020, following disputed election results that returned Belarus strongman President Alexander Lukashenko back into office, a position he has held  for over 30 years.

Lukashenko, a frequent ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is often called Europe’s “last dictator.”   

Bialiatski has said he is being persecuted for political reasons.  

Bialiatski was among the three co-recipients of last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, alongside a Russian and Ukrainian human rights group.
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Scientists in Egypt have discovered a 9-meter hidden corridor near the main entrance of one of the Great Pyramids of Giza.

The discovery was made as part of the Scan Project that uses noninvasive technology to look into Egypt’s ancient and mysterious structures without causing any harm.

The discovery was found within the Great Pyramid of Khufu, which was built as a tomb for Pharoh Khufu who reigned from 2509-2483 B.C.

The antiquities authorities do not know how the chamber was used. In 2017, another chamber was discovered in the same pyramid.

The Great Pyramids at Giza are the only one of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World that remains standing.
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