Category: Новини

More than two decades ago, Natalia Paruz was hit by a car in New York. While recovering from the accident, she went to Austria, where she saw bells on necks of cows. And that simple vision prompted a huge change in her life. Anna Nelson has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
Camera: Natalia Latukhina and Vladimir Badikov
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In Egypt, Christmas celebrations are officially sanctioned by Islamic clerics for people of all faiths, despite objections from some conservative Muslims. On Friday, January 7, the holiday season concluded with Coptic Christmas, observed by the vast majority of Christians in Egypt. For VOA, Hamada Elrasam has this photo essay, with words by Elle Kurancid. 
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Sidney Poitier, who broke through racial barriers as the first Black winner of the best actor Oscar for his role in Lilies of the Field, and inspired a generation during the civil rights movement, has died at age 94, an official from the Bahamian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Friday. 

Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, confirmed Poitier’s death. 

Poitier created a distinguished film legacy in a single year with three 1967 films at a time when segregation prevailed in parts of the United States. 

In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner he played a Black man with a white fiancee, and In the Heat of the Night he was Virgil Tibbs, a Black police officer confronting racism during a murder investigation. He also played a teacher in a tough London school that year in To Sir, With Love. 

Poitier had won his history-making best actor Oscar for Lilies of the Field in 1963, playing a handyman who helps German nuns build a chapel in the desert. Five years before that Poitier had been the first Black man nominated for a lead actor Oscar for his role in The Defiant Ones.

His Tibbs character from In the Heat of the Night was immortalized in two sequels — They Call Me Mister Tibbs! in 1970 and The Organization in 1971 — and became the basis of the television series In the Heat of the Night starring Carroll O’Connor and Howard Rollins. 

His other classic films of that era included A Patch of Blue in 1965 in which his character is befriended by a blind white girl, The Blackboard Jungle and A Raisin in the Sun, which Poitier also performed on Broadway. 

Poitier was born in Miami on February 20, 1927, and raised on a tomato farm in the Bahamas, and had just one year of formal schooling. He struggled against poverty, illiteracy and prejudice to become one of the first Black actors to be known and accepted in major roles by mainstream audiences. 

Poitier picked his roles with care, burying the old Hollywood idea that Black actors could appear only in demeaning contexts as shoeshine boys, train conductors and maids. 

“I love you, I respect you, I imitate you,” Denzel Washington, another Oscar winner, once told Poitier at a public ceremony. 

As a director, Poitier worked with his friend Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby in Uptown Saturday Night in 1974, and Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in 1980’s Stir Crazy.

Started on stage

Poitier grew up in the small Bahamian village of Cat Island and in Nassau before he moved to New York at 16, lying about his age to sign up for a short stint in the Army and then working at odd jobs, including dishwasher, while taking acting lessons. 

The young actor got his first break when he met the casting director of the American Negro Theater. He was an understudy in Days of Our Youth and took over when the star, Belafonte, who also would become a pioneering Black actor, fell ill. 

Poitier went on to success on Broadway in Anna Lucasta in 1948 and, two years later, got his first movie role in No Way Out with Richard Widmark. 

In all, he acted in more than 50 films and directed nine, starting in 1972 with Buck and the Preacher in which he co-starred with Belafonte. 

In 1992, Poitier was given the Life Achievement Award by the American Film Institute, the most prestigious honor after the Oscar, joining recipients such as Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Astaire, James Cagney and Orson Welles. 

“I must also pay thanks to an elderly Jewish waiter who took time to help a young Black dishwasher learn to read,” Poitier told the audience. “I cannot tell you his name. I never knew it. But I read pretty good now.” 

In 2002, an honorary Oscar recognized “his remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being.” 

Poitier married actress Joanna Shimkus, his second wife, in the mid-1970s. He had six daughters with his two wives and wrote three books — This Life (1980), The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (2000) and Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter (2008). 

“If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you’re not going to get very far,” he told the Washington Post. “The journey has been incredible from its beginning. So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.” 

Poitier wrote three autobiographical books and in 2013 published Montaro Caine, a novel that was described as part mystery, part science fiction. 

Poitier was knighted by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in 1974 and served as the Bahamian ambassador to Japan and to UNESCO, the U.N. cultural agency. He also sat on Walt Disney Co’s board of directors from 1994 to 2003. 

In 2009, Poitier was awarded the highest U.S. civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by President Barack Obama. 

The 2014 Academy Awards ceremony marked the 50th anniversary of Poitier’s historic Oscar and he was there to present the award for best director. 

 
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Midday queues snake out to the street in an upmarket Shanghai neighborhood, but it’s not lunch at the city’s hottest restaurant that people are lining up for — it’s cosmetic “micro-procedures”, which are surging in popularity in China.    

The “lunchtime facelift” and other “medical aesthetics” procedures are booming as a new generation of Chinese consumers grapple with the pressure to look good on social media as well as in person.   

Kayla Zhang has never actually gone under the knife for cosmetic reasons, but she’s had laser treatments, injections and a thread lift — a barbed string inserted under the skin and pulled up to “lift” the face.  

“I’m not changing my nose or my eyes, which would be an extreme change in my looks,” the 27-year-old told AFP, adding that she’s seeking a “better version” of herself rather than “a totally new face.”    

Already popular in the West because they are less invasive and more affordable than traditional cosmetic surgery, micro-procedures — from laser facials and fillers to thread lifts — are fast becoming the norm in China’s cities where disposable incomes have jumped in the past decade.    

The Chinese Association of Plastics and Aesthetics estimates, overall, the cosmetic industry will grow to $46 billion this year compared to around $6.5 billion in 2013. 

Micro-procedures are now an expanding segment of that market, while traditional surgery’s growth rates slow, according to data from consulting firm Frost and Sullivan.   

Changing values 

But a government crackdown looms over the boom.   

The ruling Communist Party is pushing a broad campaign to “purify” social values, which includes taking aim at mounting youth pressure to go under the knife. 

The government has banned industry advertising practices that contribute to “appearance anxiety” such as before-and-after images, and has levied tens of millions of dollars in fines this year over various infractions.  

Model Li Li already gets monthly laser treatments to correct skin blemishes but admits she feels social pressure to continually fix her appearance.    

After friends said her face was out of proportion she opted for a “chin filler,” which makes the chin more prominent.  

“I went to get it immediately,” the 27-year-old confessed.

But Li and Zhang insist that micro-procedures — which can cost on average a third of the price of cosmetic surgery, according to research by Deloitte — are a less-invasive alternative to traditional surgery and are being unfairly stigmatized.   

“Everyone had the same standard of beauty before, but now it feels like this norm is being tipped over,” added Zhang, who likens micro-procedures to skincare, but faster.   

A decade ago, cosmetic doctor Yang Kaiyuan said customers often came to him with a picture of a celebrity, telling him: “I want to look like this.” 

“Nowadays, people just hope to make slight improvements on what they already have,” Yang explained.   

Unrestrained growth

But the government is concerned by the rise in unlicensed, unregulated providers.   

In 2019, 15 percent of the 13,000 licensed beauty clinics in China were operating outside of their business scope and only 28 percent of doctors in the industry were certified, according to iResearch.   

Its report added that for every up-to-standard needle used, two unapproved ones were in circulation.  

Earlier this year, a Chinese actress shared cautionary photos online of a botched operation that left her nose badly infected. 

But Ken Huang, CEO at beauty clinic PhiSkin, says the societal factors pushing young Chinese to seek cosmetic adjustments to advance their careers or to boost social media popularity remain strong.   

“Good-looking people will have more opportunities than others,” Huang said.    

“If you don’t look good on the outside, even if you have an interesting personality, people might not get the chance to see it.” 

Still in her twenties, Zhang already opts for monthly micro-procedures and will keep this routine until she feels her appearance leaves her “no choice but to go under the knife.”   

She explained: “Then I may need stronger methods to be able to return to a younger state.” 
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Peter Bogdanovich, the ascot-wearing cinephile and director of 1970s black-and-white classics like The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon, has died. He was 82.

Bogdanovich died early Thursday morning at his home in Los Angeles, said his daughter, Antonia Bogdanovich. She said he died of natural causes. 

Considered part of a generation of young “New Hollywood” directors, Bogdanovich was heralded as an auteur from the start, with the chilling lone shooter film Targets and soon after The Last Picture Show, from 1971, his evocative portrait of a small, dying town that earned eight Oscar nominations, won two (for Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman) and catapulted him to stardom at age 32. He followed The Last Picture Show with the screwball comedy What’s Up, Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal, and then the Depression-era road trip film Paper Moon, which won 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal an Oscar as well. 

His turbulent personal life was also often in the spotlight, from his well-known affair with Cybill Shepherd that began during the making of The Last Picture Show while he was married to his close collaborator, Polly Platt, to the murder of his Playmate girlfriend Dorothy Stratten and his subsequent marriage to her younger sister, Louise, who was 29 years his junior.

Reactions came in swiftly at the news of his death. 

“Oh, dear, a shock. I am devastated. He was a wonderful and great artist,” said Francis Ford Coppola in an email. “I’ll never forgot attending a premiere for The Last Picture Show. I remember at its end, the audience leaped up all around me bursting into applause lasting easily 15 minutes. I’ll never forget, although I felt I had never myself experienced a reaction like that, that Peter and his film deserved it. May he sleep in bliss for eternity, enjoying the thrill of our applause forever.” 

Tatum O’Neal posted a photo of herself with him on Instagram, writing “Peter was my heaven & earth. A father figure. A friend. From Paper Moon to Nickelodeon he always made me feel safe. I love you, Peter.” 

Guillermo del Toro tweeted: “He was a dear friend and a champion of cinema. He birthed masterpieces as a director and was a most genial human. He single-handedly interviewed and enshrined the lives and work of more classic filmmakers than almost anyone else in his generation.” 

Born in Kingston, New York, in 1939, Bogdanovich started out as a film journalist and critic, working as a film programmer at the Museum of Modern Art, where through a series of retrospectives he endeared himself to a host of old guard filmmakers including Orson Welles, Howard Hawks and John Ford.

Clues 

“I’ve gotten some very important one-sentence clues, like when Howard Hawks turned to me and said, ‘Always cut on the movement and no one will notice the cut,’ ” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It was a very simple sentence but it profoundly affected everything I’ve done.” 

But his Hollywood education started earlier than that: His father took him at age 5 to see Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton movies at the Museum of Modern Art. He’d later make his own Keaton documentary, The Great Buster, which was released in 2018. 

Bogdanovich and Platt moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, where they attended Hollywood parties and struck up friendships with director Roger Corman and Frank Marshall, then just an aspiring producer, who helped get the film Targets off the ground. And the professional ascent only continued for the next few films and years. But after Paper Moon, which Platt collaborated on after they had separated, he would never again capture the accolades of those first five years in Hollywood. 

Bogdanovich’s relationship with Shepherd led to the end of his marriage to Platt, with whom he shared daughters Antonia and Sashy, and a fruitful creative partnership. The 1984 film Irreconcilable Differences was loosely based on the scandal. He later disputed the idea that Platt, who died in 2011, was an integral part of the success of his early films.

He would go on to make two other films with Shepherd, an adaptation of Henry James’s Daisy Miller and the musical At Long Last Love, neither of which were particularly well-received by critics or audiences.

And he also passed on major opportunities at the height of his successes. He told entertainment news site Vulture that he turned down The Godfather, Chinatown and The Exorcist. 

“Paramount called and said, ‘We just bought a new Mario Puzo book called The Godfather. We’d like you to consider directing it.’ I said, ‘I’m not interested in the Mafia,’ ” he said in the interview. 

Headlines would continue to follow Bogdanovich for things other than his movies. He began an affair with Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten while directing her in They All Laughed, a romantic comedy with Audrey Hepburn and Ben Gazzara, in the spring and summer of 1980. Her husband, Paul Snider, murdered her that August. Bogdanovich, in a 1984 book titled The Killing of the Unicorn: Dorothy Stratten, 1960-1980, criticized Hugh Hefner’s Playboy empire for its alleged role in events he said ended in Stratten’s death. Then, nine years later, at 49, he married her younger sister Louise Stratten, who was just 20 at the time. They divorced in 2001, but continued living together, with her mother in Los Angeles. 

Relationships’ effects

In an interview with the AP in 2020, Bogdanovich acknowledged that his relationships had an impact on his career. 

“The whole thing about my personal life got in the way of people’s understanding of the movies,” Bogdanovich said. “That’s something that has plagued me since the first couple of pictures.” 

Despite some flops along the way, Bogdanovich’s output remained prolific in the 1980s and 1990s, including a sequel to The Last Picture Show called Texasville; the country music romantic drama The Thing Called Love, which was one of River Phoenix’s last films; and, in 2001, The Cat’s Meow, about a party on William Randolph Hearst’s yacht starring Kirsten Dunst as Marion Davies. His last narrative film, She’s Funny That Way, a screwball comedy starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston that he co-wrote with Louise Stratten, debuted to mixed reviews in 2014. 

Over the years he authored several books about movies, including Peter Bogdanovich’s Movie of the Week, Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors and Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors. 

He acted semi-frequently, too, sometimes playing himself (in Moonlighting and How I Met Your Mother) and sometimes other people, like Dr. Elliot Kupferberg on The Sopranos, and also inspired a new generation of filmmakers, from Wes Anderson to Noah Baumbach. 

“They call me ‘Pop,’ and I allow it,” he told Vulture.

At the time of the AP interview in 2020, coinciding with a podcast about his career with Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz, he was hard at work on a television show inspired by Dorothy Stratten, and wasn’t optimistic about the future of cinema. 

“I just keep going, you know. Television is not dead yet,” he said with a laugh. “But movies may have a problem.” 

Yet even with his Hollywood-sized ego, Bogdanovich remained deferential to those who came before. 

“I don’t judge myself on the basis of my contemporaries,” he told The New York Times in 1971. “I judge myself against the directors I admire — Hawks, [Ernst] Lubitsch, Buster Keaton, Welles, Ford, [Jean] Renoir, [Alfred] Hitchcock. I certainly don’t think I’m anywhere near as good as they are, but I think I’m pretty good.” 
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Vaccinated, masked and ready-to-revel New Orleans residents will usher in Carnival season Thursday with a rolling party on the city’s historic streetcar line, an annual march honoring Joan of Arc in the French Quarter and a collective, wary eye on coronavirus statistics.

Carnival officially begins each year on Jan. 6 — the 12th day after Christmas — and, usually, comes to a raucous climax on Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, which falls on March 1 this year. Thursday’s planned festivities come two years after a successful Mardi Gras became what officials later realized was an early Southern superspreader of COVID-19; and nearly a year after city officials, fearing more death and more stress on local hospitals, canceled parades and restricted access to the usually raucous Bourbon Street.

This year, the party is slated to go on despite rapidly rising COVID-19 cases driven by the omicron variant.

In what has become a traditional kickoff to the season, the Phunny Phorty Phellows will gather at a cavernous streetcar barn and board one of the historic St. Charles line cars along with a small brass band. Vaccinations were required in keeping with city regulations and seating on the streetcar was to be limited and spaced. And, in addition to the traditional over-the-eye costume masks, riders were equipped with face coverings to prevent viral spread.

Larger, more opulent parades will follow in February as Mardi Gras nears and the city attempts to leaven the season’s joy with caution.

 

“It was certainly the right thing to do to cancel last year,” said Dr. Susan Hassig, a Tulane University epidemiologist who also is a member of the Krewe of Muses, and who rides each year on a huge float in the Muses parade. “We didn’t have vaccines. There was raging and very serious illness all over the place.”

Now, she notes, the vaccination rate is high in New Orleans. While only about 65% of the total city population is fully vaccinated, according the city’s statistics, 81% of all adults are fully vaccinated. And the overall percentage is expected to increase now that eligibility is open to younger children.

And, while people from outside the city are a big part of Mardi Gras crowds, Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s anti-virus measures include proof of vaccination or a negative test for most venues. “The mayor has instituted a vaccine requirement and/or negative test to get into all the fun things to do in New Orleans — the food, the music,” said Hassig. She adds, however, that she’d like to see a federal requirement that air travelers be vaccinated.

Sharing Hassig’s cautious optimism is Elroy James, president of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, a predominantly Black organization whose Mardi Gras morning parade is a focal point of Carnival. Early in the pandemic, COVID-19 was blamed for the death of at least 17 of Zulu’s members. Compounding the tragedy: Restrictions on public gatherings meant no traditional jazz funeral sendoff for the dead.

“I think most krewes, particularly, I know, for Zulu, we’ve been very proactive, leaning in, with respect to all of the safety protocols that have been in place since the onset of this thing,” James said Wednesday. “Our float captains are confirming our riders are vaccinated. And part of the look for the 2022 Mardi Gras season is face masks.”

Statistics still show reason for concern in a state where the pandemic has claimed more than 15,000 lives over the past two years. Louisiana health officials reported more than 1,287 hospitalizations as of Tuesday — a sharp increase from fewer than 200 in mid-December. Still, reports nationwide indicate the omicron-driven illnesses are milder than previous cases. Hassig notes that a lower percentage of patients require ventilators, a sign of less-severe illness.

And dedicated parade participants aren’t stopping precautions at masks and shots. Muses founder Staci Rosenberg said the krewe had planned to gather at a bar a couple of blocks off the streetcar route to await the passing of the Phunny Phorty Phellows’ procession. Now, they’ve moved that party to an outside parking lot.

Hassig, meanwhile, says she doesn’t plan to attend any indoor gatherings. She, is, however, determined to ride in the Feb. 24 parade — vaccinated, face covered with an N95 mask and knowing that outdoor activities are generally less likely to spread disease.

It’s important to Hassig. She rode in her first parade in 2006 as the city fought to recover from catastrophic flooding following Hurricane Katrina. And she wants to participate in the tourist-dependent, tradition-loving city’s recovery from the economic ravages of the virus.

 

“It’s incredibly important, financially, for the city that this go well,” she said.
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