Category: Новини

Kim Kardashian has agreed to settle charges of unlawfully touting a crypto security and to pay $1.26 million in penalties, disgorgement and interest, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission said on Monday.

The SEC said in a statement that reality television star and influencer Kardashian failed to disclose that she was paid $250,000 to publish the post about EMAX tokens, the crypto asset security being offered by EthereumMax on her Instagram account.

“This case is a reminder that, when celebrities or influencers endorse investment opportunities, including crypto asset securities, it doesn’t mean that those investment products are right for all investors,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler said.

The U.S. regulator also charged Boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr. and a music producer known as “DJ Khaled” in November 2018 for allegedly not disclosing payments they received for promoting investments in initial coin offerings.

Neither Mayweather nor Khaled Mohamed Khaled admitted or denied the SEC’s charges, but agreed to pay a combined $767,500 in fines and penalties.
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The remains of dozens of Indigenous Maori and Moriori people were officially received at New Zealand’s national museum in Wellington Sunday, completing a repatriation process from Austria, where the bones have resided for more than 130 years.

The repatriation “powhiri,” or welcoming ceremony, in bitterly cold, wet conditions at Te Papa concluded when the remains of about 64 Maori and Moriori — the Indigenous people of mainland New Zealand and the Chatham Islands — were taken to the museum’s Rongomaraeroa Marae, a sacred resting place.

The event completed a six-day journey for the remains, which left from the Natural History Museum in Vienna.

Records show that most of the bones, including skulls, were collected by Austrian taxidermist and grave robber Andreas Reischek, who spent 12 years in New Zealand until 1889.

The remains were housed for decades in Austria’s capital after being “stolen with no regard” from New Zealand’s “iwi” (tribes), officials from the two countries agreed.

Reischek’s diaries outlined how he looted graves without permission from several locations, including the Chatham Islands.

William “Pou” Temara, chairperson of Te Papa’s Repatriation Advisory Panel, said the repatriation — the largest from Austria to New Zealand — was significant.

“It is always a spiritual relief and privilege to welcome back our ancestors who have been victims of such wrongdoing. Culturally we know that they are weeping with joy now that they have returned to Aotearoa (New Zealand) where at last they will rest in peace.”

Te Papa’s acting head of repatriation TeArikirangi Mamaku-Ironside praised the assistance of colleagues in Austria in concluding 77 years of negotiations between the countries.

“The Natural History Museum, Vienna has made a profound commitment to right the wrongs of the past and approached this work with a spirit of openness and reconciliation,” said Temara, before adding that a government-funded repatriation program has numerous ongoing projects to pursue.

“While we’ve seen an increase in conversations about repatriating human remains, there is still a lot of work to do to bring all our ancestors home.”

The remains will reside at Te Papa while iwi are consulted to determine a final resting place.
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The nearly 400-year-old-year Passion play performed by the people of the German alpine village of Oberammergau comes to a close after a nearly five-month run, with viewers saying this year was especially meaningful as the play was delayed by two years by the COVID-19 pandemic. Villagers kept their vow to perform the play every 10 years, made in 1633 to avert the ravages of the plague.

Oberammergau native Christian Stückl has directed the Passion Play for more than 30 years, several times reworking the 100-year-old script, modernizing it, and removing antisemitic references.

“As a spectator you don’t really have to bring anything [in terms of religious understanding], you can just turn up,” Stückl said of the audience that comes from around the world to see the famous production.

“But as a director, if I didn’t have the belief and conviction that there is a certain power behind this story, behind this Jesus, I wouldn’t be able to tell this story,” Stückl said.

Ruth Aspinall traveled from Britain to see the Passion play and said she really liked this year’s production, finding it meaningful in several ways.

“Well, it’s my fifth time of coming and I don’t mean fifth in one year. So, that it explains it all, I would think. Very much so, it’s much simpler. I loved the Resurrection. It’s never been used before. It was just sort of hinted at before. But this time, all the disciples come on and lit candles. Mary was happy. Then everybody sang hallelujah. It ended much more joyful,” said Aspinall.

The play’s deputy director, Abdullah Kenan Karaca, also plays the priest, Nicodemas. Karaca is the son of Turkish immigrants and grew up in Oberammergau, a predominately Catholic village. But the village, too, is becoming reflective of Germany’s increased diversity, taking in refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Ukraine. This is the first time the play has included a leading Muslim actor, Cengiz Gorur. Karaca, a professional theater director, says his first theater experience was performing in the Passion play as a child.

“The motivation why people are in the play is totally different. Some people, because of their faith, they want to fulfill the vow, other ones they just fascinated by the big production we have. Everyone is trying their best and do it really with their heart. This is really beautiful that the Passion play, the story of Jesus, can bring a lot of people together,” he said.

For Oberammergau native Frederik Mayet, one of two actors who plays Jesus, conveying Jesus’ message of love and hope to the audience is important.

“You always have to find the words that reach the people of today. We notice now in this Passion play year, the people are really touched. The power, joy, and enthusiasm we have on stage reaches the people in the auditorium automatically and that’s something special. When the choir is singing, when there are hundreds of persons on stage, sometimes it’s a magical moment,” he said.

Mayet portrayed Jesus for a second time and comes from a family with a long history of participating in the Passion play, starting in 1890. His children, 3 and 8, have also been on stage this year.
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While European Union nations are still mulling a cap on gas prices, some businesses are more in a hurry for solutions to the continent’s energy crisis.

In Brussels, the epicenter of the EU, restaurant owners have imagined how a future without gas and electricity would look like for gourmets.

The guests at the dinner served at the Brasserie Surrealiste and cooked by Racines employees this week were the first to experience it: No ovens, no stoves, no hot plates, no coffee machines and no light bulbs.

Still, great food.

Just cold entrees, or slightly grilled over the flaming charcoal grill of a Japanese barbecue, served at candle-lit tables.

“The idea is to go back to the cave age,” said Francesco Cury, the Racines owner. “We prepared a whole series of dishes that just need to be grilled for a few seconds … But the search for taste, for the amazing, for the stunning, is still part of our business.”

On the menu: brioche with anchovies, porchetta and focaccia cooked on a wood fire, raw white tuna, grilled pork with beans, and ricotta cream with pumpkin jam and pistachios as desert.

But what sounds like a romantic atmosphere and a one-time experience is actually what customers could face more permanently if energy bills keep increasing.

“People see price increases of 30% to 40% in the supermarket. And we, restaurant owners, buy the same raw material, the same products. So what do we do? We increase the prices. But then on top comes the price of gas and electricity. Can we do our job without energy sources? The answer is no,” Cury said. “So we have to think a little bit more, and society has to realize how critical the situation is.”

The dramatic rise of inflation in Belgium could have been a deterrent, but 50 guests took part in the dinner Thursday organized as part of the “Brussels in the Dark” initiative involving a dozen of restaurants.

“We are at a point when one needs to choose between being warm at home or eating out,” said Stephane Lepla, on a night out with his girlfriend. “Finding the balance is complicated. So yes, of course, there is a reflection on a daily basis. There are habits that need to change, that we try to change anyway, even if it is not always easy.”
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This year’s Nobel Prize season approaches as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shattered decades of almost uninterrupted peace in Europe and raised the risks of a nuclear disaster.

The secretive Nobel committees never hint who will win the prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, economics or peace. It’s anyone’s guess who might win the awards being announced starting Monday.

Yet there’s no lack of urgent causes deserving the attention that comes with winning the world’s most prestigious prize: wars in Ukraine and Ethiopia, disruptions to supplies of energy and food, rising inequality, the climate crisis, the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The science prizes reward complex achievements beyond the understanding of most. But the recipients of the prizes in peace and literature are often known by a global audience, and the choices — or perceived omissions — have sometimes stirred emotional reactions.

Members of the European Parliament have called for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the people of Ukraine to be recognized this year by the Nobel Peace Prize committee for their resistance to the Russian invasion.

While that desire is understandable, that choice is unlikely because the Nobel committee has a history of honoring figures who end conflicts, not wartime leaders, said Dan Smith, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

Smith believes more likely peace prize candidates would be those fighting climate change or the International Atomic Energy Agency, a past recipient. Honoring the IAEA again would recognize its efforts to prevent a radioactive catastrophe at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant amid fighting in Ukraine, and its work in fighting nuclear proliferation, Smith said.

“This is a really difficult period in world history, and there is not a lot of peace being made,” he said.

Promoting peace isn’t always rewarded with a Nobel. India’s Mohandas Gandhi, a prominent symbol of nonviolence, was never so honored.

In some cases, the winners have not lived out the values enshrined in the peace prize. 

Just this week the Vatican acknowledged imposing disciplinary sanctions on Nobel Peace Prize-winning Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo following allegations he sexually abused boys in East Timor in the 1990s.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won in 2019 for making peace with neighboring Eritrea. A year later, a largely ethnic conflict erupted in the country’s Tigray region. Some accuse Abiy of stoking the tensions, which have resulted in widespread atrocities. Critics have called for his Nobel to be revoked, and the Nobel committee has issued a rare admonition to him.

The Myanmar activist Aung San Suu Kyi won in 1991 for her opposition to military rule but decades later has been viewed as failing to oppose atrocities committed against the mostly Muslim Rohingya minority.

In some years, no peace prize has been awarded. The Norwegian Nobel Committee paused them during World War I, except to honor the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1917. It didn’t hand out any from 1939 to 1943 because of World War II. In 1948, the year Gandhi died, the committee made no award, citing a lack of a suitable living candidate.

The peace prize also does not always confer protection.

Last year journalists Maria Ressa of the Philippines and Dmitry Muratov of Russia were awarded “for their courageous fight for freedom of expression” in the face of authoritarian governments.

Following the invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has cracked down even harder on independent media, including Muratov’s Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s most renowned independent newspaper. Muratov himself was attacked on a Russian train by an assailant who poured red paint over him, injuring his eyes.

The Philippines government this year ordered the shutdown of Ressa’s news organization, Rappler.

The literature prize, meanwhile, has been anything but predictable.

Few had bet on last year’s winner, Zanzibar-born, U.K.-based writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose books explore the personal and societal impacts of colonialism and migration.

Gurnah was only the sixth Nobel literature laureate born in Africa, and the prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers. It is also male dominated, with just 16 women among its 118 laureates.

A clear contender is Salman Rushdie, the India-born writer and free-speech advocate who spent years in hiding after Iran’s clerical rulers called for his death over his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie, 75, was stabbed and seriously injured in August at a festival in New York state.

The list of possible winners includes literary giants from around the world: Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Japan’s Haruki Murakami, Norway’s Jon Fosse, Antigua-born Jamaica Kincaid and France’s Annie Ernaux.

The prizes to Gurnah in 2021 and U.S. poet Louise Gluck in 2020 have helped the literature prize move on from years of controversy and scandal.

In 2018, the award was postponed after sex abuse allegations rocked the Swedish Academy, which names the Nobel literature committee, and sparked an exodus of members. The academy revamped itself but faced more criticism for giving the 2019 literature award to Austria’s Peter Handke, who has been called an apologist for Serbian war crimes.

Some scientists hope the award for physiology or medicine honors colleagues instrumental in the development of the mRNA technology that went into COVID-19 vaccines, which saved millions of lives around the world.

“When we think of Nobel prizes, we think of things that are paradigm shifting, and in a way I see mRNA vaccines and their success with COVID-19 as a turning point for us,” said Deborah Fuller, a microbiology professor at the University of Washington.

Physics at times can seem arcane and difficult for the public to understand. But the last three years, the physics Nobel has honored more accessible topics: climate change computer models, black holes and planets outside our solar system.

Some harder-to-understand topics in physics — like stopping light, quantum physics and carbon nanotubes — could capture a Nobel award this year.

The Nobel announcements kick off Monday with the prize in physiology or medicine, followed by physics on Tuesday, chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The 2022 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on October 7 and the economics award on October 10.

The prizes carry a cash award of 10 million Swedish kronor (nearly $900,000) and will be handed out on December 10.
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Irpin, a city in the Kyiv region, was under Russian occupation in March. Officials say over 70% of its infrastructure was damaged. When the Russians retreated, several residents started returning from abroad to help rebuild their city. Anna Kosstutschenko has the story.
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