Category: Новини

“The Outfit,” a film noir by Academy Award winning writer Graham Moore, tells a fictional story of an expert tailor who finds himself caught up in a turf war among dangerous gangsters in 1950s Chicago. Moore, who won an Oscar for the film drama “The Imitation Game,” spoke to VOA’s Penelope Poulou about his interest in the characters in the film and how “The Outfit” resonates with today’s grim realities.
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Musher Brent Sass won the arduous Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race across Alaska on Tuesday as his team of 11 dogs dashed off the Bering Sea ice through a crowd of fans in downtown Nome.

Sass mushed down Front Street and across the finish line just before 6 a.m.

“It’s awesome, it’s a dream come true,” Sass said before he was presented the prize-winning check of $50,000, his beard and mustache partially encased in ice during the post-race interview.

“When I started mushing, my goal was to win the Yukon Quest and win the Iditarod. Checked them both off the list now,” he said.

Sass said he was “super, super, super proud” of his dog team. “It’s all on them. They did an excellent job the whole race. I asked a lot of them, and they preformed perfectly,” he said.

“Every one of these dogs I’ve raised since puppies, and we’ve been working towards this goal the whole time, and we’re here,” he said, his voice cracking. “It’s crazy.”

Fans lined the street welcoming the popular musher, who was escorted by police for the final few blocks to the famous burled arch that marked his victory.

It’s the first Iditarod win for Sass, a wilderness guide and kennel owner who was running in his seventh Iditarod. His previous best finish was third last year.

Sass took command of this year’s race early on and never was challenged, but the final stretch of the race might have been the toughest, with extreme winds blowing on the Bering Sea ice leading into Nome.

“I had to make it very interesting at the end,” Sass said.

At one point during the last few miles of the race, he took a tumble, and the sled went off the trail. He thought he was going to have to hunker down, stopping with his dogs to wait until the weather improved.

“I couldn’t see anything,” he said. “The dogs, the only reason we got out of there is because they trusted me to get them back to the trail. And once we got back to the trail, they just took off a hundred miles an hour again, and we were able to stay on the trail and get in here. It was a lot of work,” he said.

The 42-year-old native of Minnesota who moved north in 1998 to ski for the University of Alaska Fairbanks had about a 90 minute lead over the defending champion, Dallas Seavey, early Tuesday as he left the last checkpoint in Safety, which is 22 miles (35 kilometers) from Nome.

Seavey is tied with musher Rick Swenson for the most Iditarod wins ever at 5. Seavey earlier told The Associated Press that he was planning to take some time off after the race to spend with his daughter whether he won or lost it.

Sass said Seavey is “the best right now and being able to to sort of keep him at bay the whole entire race and and race against the best guy in the business, that just makes this victory even sweeter.”

Seavey toward the end of the race said he was resigned to runner-up status, telling KTUU-TV at the checkpoint in White Mountain that he couldn’t win unless something went wrong for Sass.

Seavey joked: “We’ve got a pretty solid lead over third.”

The third place musher, Jessie Holmes, was about 50 miles (80 kilometers) behind Seavey on Tuesday.

The nearly 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) race across Alaska began March 6 just north of Anchorage. The route took mushers along Alaska’s untamed and unforgiving wilderness, including two mountain ranges, the frozen Yukon River and Bering Sea ice along the state’s western coastline.

This is the 50th running of the race, which started in 1973. This year’s event began with 49 mushers, and five have dropped out along the trail.

Sass was the Iditarod’s rookie of the year in 2012 when he finished 13th. The next year he fell back to 22nd place, before skipping the 2014 race.

In 2015 he was disqualified when race officials found he had an iPod Touch with him on the trail, a violation of race rules banning two-way communication devices because the iPod Touch could connect to the Internet. He said he was clueless, and wanted his fans to know he had no intention of cheating.

Sass placed 16th the following year before taking a three-year break from the Iditarod. In 2020, he placed fourth and was third last year.

Sass, who lives in the tiny area of Eureka, about a four-hour drive northwest of Fairbanks, had more success in the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race.

He claimed titles in that 1,000-mile (1,609-kilometer) race between Fairbanks and Whitehorse, Yukon, in 2015, 2019 and 2020. This year, the race was shortened to smaller races on both sides of the border, with Sass winning both the 350-mile (563-kilometer) Alaska race and the 300-mile (483-kilometer) Canadian contest.
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Clarissa Ward interrupted her live TV report on Ukrainian refugees to help a distraught older man, then a woman, down a steep and explosion-mangled path, gently urging them on in their language.

A day later, Lynsey Addario, a photographer for The New York Times, captured a grim image of a Russian mortar attack’s immediate outcome: the bodies of a mother and her two children crumpled on a road, amid their suitcase, backpacks and a pet carrier.

The memorable reports illustrate both the skill and gutsiness of female journalists serving as eyewitnesses to Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and the way their presence — hard-won after overcoming ingrained notions of why women shouldn’t cover combat — has changed the nature of war reporting.

They cover the tactics of war but give equal measure to its toll.

“People are so exhausted, they can barely walk,” Ward told viewers in her report. “It’s just an awful, awful scene. And they’re the lucky ones.” 

The author of “You Don’t Belong Here,” a 2021 book that profiles three pioneering women who covered the Vietnam War, said there’s “absolutely no doubt that the reporting is what I would call more humane, looking at the human side of war.”

Elizabeth Becker argues that Frances FitzGerald of the U.S., Kate Webb of Australia and Catherine Leroy of France were foundational to modern war reporting. Arriving in Southeast Asia on their own dime, without a staff job and little or no journalism experience, they broke the male grip on war reporting with daring and innovation.

Traditionally, “the coverage was the battlefield, which is important,” said award-winning journalist Becker, a 1970s Cambodian war correspondent. She said it took newcomer FitzGerald to ask, “‘OK, what does this mean in terms of the Vietnamese and the villages?'”

FitzGerald earned a 1973 Pulitzer and other honors for “Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam,” and her 2017 work, “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America,” was short-listed for the National Book Award.

In major 20th-century conflicts before Vietnam, including World War II and the Korean War, women faced military obstacles and professional bias. Reporter-novelist Martha Gellhorn famously stowed away on a hospital ship to cover the WWII D-Day landing in France after she and other female journalists were denied frontline access.

Newspaper reporter Marguerite Higgins, who had covered WWII, was ordered out of Korea by a U.S. officer when war broke out in 1950, a decision she successfully appealed to Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Higgins earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for her acclaimed reporting, with the jury noting she was “entitled to special consideration by reason of being a woman, since she had to work under unusual dangers.”

Women went on to excel in reporting on the Vietnam War, including Edith M. Lederer of The Associated Press, who was the first woman assigned full-time to its staff there and is now AP’s chief United Nations correspondent. Their numbers increased in subsequent conflicts, including Ukraine — where newspapers, online sites and other media outlets are well-represented by female reporters, known by name if not by their on-camera reporting.

War reporting is “a sense of mission, it’s a sense of purpose, it’s a sense of being able to tell a story,” said Christiane Amanpour, the London-born chief international anchor for CNN. “And women are really very good at it, it seems.”

It’s also a matter of logic, said Holly Williams, the Istanbul-based correspondent for CBS News on assignment in Ukraine.

“I’m acutely aware of the fact that if you don’t tell women’s stories, you’re missing at least half of the picture,” said the Australian-born Williams, who has reported on conflicts in Asia, Europe and the Middle East and worked for BBC News.

Ward, who also has hopscotched across those regions, worked for CBS News prior to joining CNN and, before that, was based in Moscow and Beijing for ABC News.

“Often women do have a different perspective on war, and for a long time that was not really at the forefront of a lot of coverage,” Ward said. She strives to include “the humanity behind the story, the experience of ordinary people who are living in war zones. To me, that is equally as important as the military component.”

The prominence of TV correspondents and the reach of their outlets adds to their impact. Oprah Winfrey offered online praise of network reporters “risking their lives to show the world the truth,” singling out Ward as a “fierce, unshakable and outstanding journalist.”

Many of their male colleagues also contribute nuanced reporting, as ABC News veteran Martha Raddatz and others noted. But Raddatz recalls a not-so-distant time when men tended to “love the equipment, love the airplanes.”

Ward and other female journalists tip their cap to their predecessors, including FitzGerald and the late Martha Gellhorn, whose reporting stretched from WWII to the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989-90. They also praise recent trailblazers, including Amanpour.

Her decades of conflict reporting include the 1991 Gulf War, subsequent clashes in the Middle East region and, in southeastern Europe, the deadly 1992-96 siege of Sarajevo during the war between Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I think my generation and myself, we were perhaps the last line of the rare woman foreign correspondent,” Amanpour said. In every form of media it’s “exploded into a very female friendly profession.”

But parity has yet to be achieved in pay, Amanpour said. Or in all journalism jobs, according to Ward.

The growing number of female TV correspondents belies “a fairly male-dominated profession in general,” Ward said. “Don’t forget, the person in front of the camera is one person. Then you have, for TV, four people holding the camera, behind the camera, and most of them are still men.”

In journalism overall, men retain a numerical advantage over women even in a changing media industry. according to “The Missing Perspectives of Women in News,” a 2020 report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Despite progress, “the majority of journalists in newsrooms globally are men,” the report said, citing several multi-country studies.

Female reporters face additional challenges in non-democratic countries and some regions, Amanpour said.

“They come under a huge amount of societal pressure in many parts of the developing world, and certainly in the Islamic world and other areas of what I call the patriarchy,” she said. “It’s very difficult, but they’re doing it and coming out into this profession more and more, and I really applaud them.”

The presence of women reporting in Ukraine is set against a backdrop of traditional roles and expectations, with women and children allowed to flee war’s violence while men are required to stay behind and defend their country.

Yonat Friling, a Jerusalem-based senior producer for Fox News Channel who worked in Ukraine with correspondent Trey Yingst, is aware of how attitudes can vary. In 2004, she was on the international desk for an Israeli TV channel when she asked her boss to switch her to field producer.

“He told me, ‘This is a job for men. Only men can do that,'” recalled the Israeli native. “Then I left, I joined Fox (in 2005). And on several occasions, including this time, I keep texting him, ‘A job for men? Yeah, right.'”

The Ukraine assignment proved deeply emotional for Friling. When she recently joined the stream of refugees leaving Kyiv, it was a reminder of grandparents who fled Nazism and Soviet occupiers in Europe in the 1940s.

“I saw children and women, and I (saw) my grandparents in their faces. … I know how much this is going to influence their whole life and the next generations,” she said.

Raddatz, who covered early refugee evacuations and returned to Ukraine on Friday, realizes how much has changed for her and her female colleagues over the years. The chief global affairs correspondent for ABC News covered the Bosnian crisis in the late 1990s and has focused on Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I remember in Iraq, I always thought that if something happened to me, it (the reaction) would be, ‘How could she do that, go over there when she has two children?’ whereas they would never say that with a guy,” she said. “Now, I don’t think they would do that.” 

Family needs and concerns add to the burden of war reporting.

NBC News correspondent Erin McLaughlin said that before Russia struck at Ukraine, the threat of what might happen made her parents worry more than they had over her previous assignments, including in Iraq.

“My brother went to stay with them for the weekend because they were so nervous,” McLaughlin said. “It was really tough, but at the same time they understand that this is my calling. It’s an important job, and someone needs to do it.”

Ward, married and with two children, said her work takes an inevitable toll.

“It’s my son’s 4th birthday today, which has been really hard to miss,” Ward said at the end of another draining day in Ukraine, her voice emotional. “There’s the entire juggling act — you’re FaceTiming with your kids and there’s air raid sirens and bombs going off in the distance.”

“I’m not going to pretend this isn’t hard. But I also wouldn’t be anywhere else right now,” she said. 
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Leon Schwarzbaum, a survivor of the Nazis’ death camp at Auschwitz and a lifelong fighter for justice for the victims of the Holocaust, has died. He was 101.

Schwarzbaum died early Monday in Potsdam near Berlin, the International Auschwitz Committee reported on its website. No cause of death was given.

“It is with great sadness, respect and gratitude that Holocaust survivors around the world bid farewell to their friend, fellow sufferer and companion Leon Schwarzbaum, who in the last decades of his life became one of the most important contemporary witnesses of the Shoah,” the committee said.

Schwarzbaum was the only one of his family to survive the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Buchenwald and a subcamp Sachsenhausen, the Auschwitz committee said.

He became known to a wider audience when film director Hans Erich Viet made a movie in 2018 about his life. “The Last of the Jolly Boys” was shot with Schwarzbaum himself at original locations.

Schwarzbaum was born in 1921 to a Polish-Jewish family in Hamburg in northern Germany. He grew up in Bedzin, Poland, from where the family was deported to Auschwitz in 1943 after the ghetto there was dissolved.

After the war, he lived in Berlin for many years where he worked as an art and antiques dealer. He was married twice, but had no children, daily newspaper Bild reported.

Well into his 90s, Schwarzbaum still appeared on German television to speak about the unbearable sufferings he lived through at Auschwitz and the other concentration camps he was deported to. He also visited schools in Germany regularly to tell the children about his life.

“Especially in his last years, Leon Schwarzbaum was driven again and again by the urge to remember his parents who were murdered in Auschwitz and all the other victims of the Holocaust. He spoke on their behalf,” said Christoph Heubner, the Executive Vice President of the International Auschwitz Committee.

“But he was also driven by his anger at the fact that so few SS perpetrators ever saw the inside of a German courtroom,” Heubner added, referring to the Nazis’ brutal paramilitary organization.

In 2016, he gave testimony at the trial against former Auschwitz death guard Reinhold Hanning in Germany.

In an 2019 interview with the Associated Press at his Berlin apartment, which was covered with paintings and old back-and-white pictures of his 35 relatives who perished in the Holocaust, Schwarzbaum expressed deep worry about the reemergence of antisemitism across Europe.

“If things get worse, I would not want to live through such times again,” he said. “I would immigrate to Israel right away.”

In a letter of condolence to Schwarzbaum’s widow, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said that “we are losing a wonderful human being and an important eyewitness to history.”

“Leon Schwarzbaum experienced himself what it means when a criminal regime suspends human rights and human dignity,” Steinmeier said, praising him for testifying about “Germany’s darkest period” after the war and warning about the dangers of far-right extremism and xenophobia. 
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American actor William Hurt, known for much-loved films such as “The Big Chill” and “A History of Violence,” has died at age 71, US media reported Sunday.

Multiple outlets cited Hurt’s son, Will, who said in a statement: “It is with great sadness that the Hurt family mourns the passing of William Hurt, beloved father and Oscar winning actor, on March 13, 2022, one week before his 72nd birthday. He died peacefully, among family, of natural causes.”

The actor had been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer in May 2018, but his son’s statement did not specify whether the disease contributed to Hurt’s passing.

Hurt built his reputation on his willingness to play quirky and unusual characters such as a Russian police officer in “Gorky Park” (1983), a wealthy and aloof husband in Woody Allen’s “Alice” (1990) and a man seeking to build a machine that would benefit blind people in “Until the End of the World” (1991).

His first film role was as an obsessed scientist in Ken Russell’s 1980 film “Altered States.” Appearing opposite Kathleen Turner in “Body Heat” in 1981 turned him into a sex symbol, and he won the best actor Oscar in 1985 for playing a gay prisoner in “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

Hurt was also nominated for Oscars as a teacher of deaf students in “Children of a Lesser God” (1986) and as a slow-witted television anchorman in “Broadcast News” (1987).

For his second Academy Award, Hurt played a Philadelphia mobster in David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence.” He appears in the film for only about 10 minutes, but he made a huge impact with critics, who praised his “creepy” and “funny” character.

In recent years, Hurt made himself known to younger moviegoers through his turn in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Thaddeus Ross, a blustering general who was present on the day Bruce Banner became the Hulk.

In addition to “The Incredible Hulk,” Hurt’s character appeared in four Marvel films including “Captain America: Civil War,” “Avengers: Infinity War,” “Avengers: Endgame” and “Black Widow.”

Hurt was born March 20, 1950 in Washington, DC, but as his father was a U.S. diplomat, he traveled widely as a child.

After his parents divorced, his mother married Henry Luce III, the heir to the Time-Life empire, and moved to New York.

Hurt stayed close by, studying theology at Tufts University before enrolling at the renowned Juilliard School of performing arts in New York.

Despite his spreading fame, Hurt did not settle in Hollywood but set up his home in Oregon. In interviews, he had shown he was uneasy with stardom.

“I’m not comfortable with all this. I’m not comfortable with walking the red carpet in a tuxedo and seeing all the women with their boobs pushed up and all the men dressed as penguins,” he told one interviewer.

His private life, however, read like something straight out of Hollywood.

Hurt married aspiring actress Mary Beth Supinger after finishing his studies at Tufts and followed her to London to study drama. They divorced on their return to New York.

In the late 1980s, he was sued by a former live-in love, ballet dancer Sandra Jennings, who is the mother of one of his sons.

He had two other sons from another marriage and a daughter, Jeanne, from a relationship with French actress Sandrine Bonnaire.

Hurt spoke fluent French and was also an avid private pilot.
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Sci-fi epic “Dune” took four early prizes from a field-leading 11 nominations as the British Academy Film Awards returned Sunday with a live, black-tie ceremony after a pandemic-curtailed event in 2021.

Acting nominees Benedict Cumberbatch and Lady Gaga were among the stars walking the red carpet at London’s Royal Albert Hall before a ceremony hosted by Australian actor-comedian Rebel Wilson.

Last year’s event was largely conducted online, with only the hosts and presenters appearing in person. This year, stars were gathering in the shadow of Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine.

Krishnendu Majumdar, chairman of the British Film Academy, known as BAFTA, opened the show with a message of support for Ukraine.

“We stand in solidarity with those who are bravely fighting for their country and we share their hope for a return to peace,” he said.

After that came the glitz, with 85-year-old diva Shirley Bassey and a live orchestra performing “Diamonds Are Forever” to mark the 60th anniversary of the James Bond films.

“Bond is turning 60, and his girlfriends are turning 25,” joked host Wilson, who toned down her usual bawdy material for the ceremony’s early-evening TV broadcast on the BBC.

Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune,” starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya, has 11 nominations including best film, cinematography and original score.

The space saga set on a desert planet took awards early in the ceremony for visual effects, sound, Greig Fraser’s cinematography and Hans Zimmer’s score.

Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog,” set in 1920s Montana and starring Cumberbatch as a ranch owner, has eight including best director and best film.

If Campion takes the directing trophy she will be only the third female winner in that category, but the second in two years after Chloe Zhao for “Nomadland” in 2021.

Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical “Belfast,” the story of a childhood overshadowed by Northern Ireland’s violent “Troubles,” has six nominations including best film. Daniel Craig’s final 007 thriller, “No Time to Die,” Steven Spielberg’s musical “West Side Story” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s coming-of-age drama “Licorice Pizza” has five nominations apiece.

Best-picture nominees are “Dune,” “The Power of the Dog,” “Belfast,” “Licorice Pizza” and disaster comedy “Don’t Look Up.”

The separate category of best British film comprises “After Love,” “Ali & Ava,” “Belfast,” “Boiling Point,” “Cyrano,” “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” “House of Gucci,” “Last Night in Soho,” “No Time to Die” and “Passing.”

The contenders for best actor are Cumberbatch, Adeel Akhtar for “Ali & Ava,” Mahershala Ali for “Swan Song,” Stephen Graham for “Boiling Point,” Leonardo DiCaprio for “Don’t Look Up” and Will Smith for “King Richard.”

Leading actress nominees are Lady Gaga for “House of Gucci,” Alana Haim for “Licorice Pizza,” Emilia Jones for “Coda,” Renate Reinsve for “The Worst Person in The World,” Joanna Scanlan for “After Love” and Tessa Thompson for “Passing.” The category is the most unpredictable of the night, with acclaimed performances by Kristen Stewart in the Princess Diana biopic “Spencer” and Olivia Colman in “The Lost Daughter” overlooked for nomination.

The British awards are usually held a week or two before the Academy Awards and have become an important awards-season staging post. This year’s Oscars take place March 27.

The British film academy has expanded its voting membership and shaken up its rules in recent years in an attempt to address a glaring lack of diversity in the nominations. In 2020, no women were nominated as best director for a seventh consecutive year, and all 20 nominees in the lead and supporting performer categories were white.

Awards organizers say they are committed to supporting new talent, and this year all the performers in the supporting actor category are first-time nominees. They include Woody Norman for “C’mon C’mon” — at 11 years old the youngest nominee of the year — and Ariana DeBose, who plays Anita in “West Side Story.”

The celebration of cinema was subdued, with many attendees reflecting on the war raging on the other side of Europe.

Cumberbatch wore a lapel badge in the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. He said it was to oppose the “megalomaniac” Russian President Vladimir Putin “raining down terror” on Ukraine.

“It’s a very scary and sad time,” he said on the red carpet. “Although this is a gesture, and people can say it’s hollow, it’s just something I can do tonight” — along with pressuring British politicians to take in more refugees from the war.

Jonas Poher Rasmussen, director of the animated feature “Flee,” the story of an Afghan refugee, said it was “surreal” to be at an awards show when “the world is burning.”

But he said images of the millions driven from their homes in Ukraine underscored the message that “these stories need to be told.”
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Brent Sass continued to lead the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on Sunday, but he must hold off the defending champion as mushers have reached the Bering Sea coast and its treacherous ice.

Sass breezed through the checkpoint in the village of Shaktoolik on Sunday morning, staying only eight minutes. The village is 1,213 kilometers (754 miles) into the nearly 1,609-kilometer (1,000-mile) race, and the winner is expected to cross the finish line in Nome on Tuesday or Wednesday.

According to GPS trackers each musher carries, Sass had a lead of just over 16 kilometers (10 miles) on Dallas Seavey, who tied Rick Swenson for the most Iditarod victories at five with his 2021 Iditarod win.

But the GPS data on the race’s Iditarod Insider website also showed Seavey running at a faster clip even though he is mushing with two fewer dogs than the 12 Sass has in harness.

Aaron Burmeister was in third place, but about 64 kilometers (40 miles) behind Seavey.

Sass picked up another award late Saturday when he was the first musher to reach the Gold Coast. Among the prizes presented to him in the community of Unalakleet was 28.35 grams (one ounce) of gold nuggets, worth about $2,000.

He’s previously been awarded several cash prizes, artwork and a gourmet meal for being the first musher to reach checkpoints dotting the trail from the Anchorage area to the Gold Rush town of Nome.

Sass turned down the gourmet meal, however, because he didn’t have time to eat it.

The world’s most famous sled dog race began with 49 mushers on March 6 in Willow, about 121 kilometers (75 miles) north of Anchorage. Since then, four have withdrawn from the race.
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