Category: Новини

Ken Kragen, a top entertainment producer, manager and philanthropist who turned to such clients as Lionel Richie and Kenny Rogers in helping to organize the 1985 all-star charity single We Are the World, has died. He was 85.

Kragen died Tuesday of natural causes at his home in Los Angeles, according to a statement released by his family.

“Ken worked tirelessly on behalf of the artists he represented, but what I loved most about him, other than the essence of his spirit, was that he had a 360-degree understanding that the combination of art & commerce could be used to make the world a better place,” Quincy Jones, who produced We Are the World, tweeted this week.

“As one of the original organizing partners on We Are the World, w/o Ken’s expertise & specific skill set, we may never have made the enormous global impact that we did,” Jones tweeted.

Kragen was a Harvard Business School graduate whose other credits included producing The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and The Gambler television movies that starred Rogers. His most famous project began late in 1984 with a phone call from Harry Belafonte, who was anxious to raise money for starving people in Africa, notably in Ethiopia, where a famine had killed millions. The British recording Do They Know It’s Christmas? that featured George Michael, Bono and many others, had been a major success, and Belafonte wanted to organize a U.S. effort.

He first contacted Kragen, whom he didn’t even know.

“I needed a younger generation of artists, the ones at the top of the charts right now: Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers, and Cyndi Lauper. When I looked at the management of most of these artists, I kept seeing the same name: Ken Kragen,” Belafonte wrote in his memoir My Song, published in 2011.

Kragen was hesitant at first, Belafonte wrote, but called Richie, who said yes. Rogers said the same, as did Jones and dozens of others, including Jackson, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder. We Are the World, co-written by Jackson and Richie, went on to sell tens of millions of copies and win Grammys for record and song of the year. Kragen later received a United Nations Peace Medal.

Kragen also managed Trisha Yearwood, the Bee Gees and Olivia Newton-John among others. His other charitable works included the Hands Across America fundraiser from 1985, when a cross-country human chain featured everyone from President Ronald Reagan to Yoko Ono to Robin Williams.

Kragen’s survivors include his wife, actor Cathy Worthington; their daughter, cinematographer Emma Kragen; and her husband, director/producer Zach Marion. 
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An Australian-led study warns that 1,500 of the world’s 7,000 recognized languages might no longer be spoken by the end of this century.

The research, published Friday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, details a wide range of factors putting endangered languages under pressure.

Australian researchers have found that as roads increasingly connect cities to more remote areas around the world, Indigenous languages can be overwhelmed by their more dominant counterparts, such as English.

The study also asserts that bilingual education has been neglected. Again, dominant languages have been found to smother those spoken by smaller groups.

Experts have said Australia’s record is poor, and the country has one of world’s highest rates of language loss worldwide.

Before European colonization, more than 250 First Nations languages were spoken in Australia. Today, there are just 40, and only a dozen are being taught to children.

“This has been an on-going process through colonization and globalization,” said the University of Queensland’s professor Felicity Meakins, one of the study’s co-authors. “So, we do not want to forget, of course, in all of this that individual speech communities have their own histories and experiences, and in many places, including Australia, languages have been silenced as the result of brutal colonial policies, which have been designed to suppress languages. So, for instance, in Australia people were punished for speaking their language and these experiences were really traumatic and have had lasting consequences for the ability of language communities to pass on their languages.”

Researchers have said that as the world prepares for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, Decade of Indigenous Language in 2022, their findings were a “vital reminder” that more action is needed to save at-risk languages.

They have said that every language is “brilliant in its own way” and a critical part of “our human cultural diversity.” 

 

 
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Multiple Grammy winner Bruce Springsteen has sold his masters and music publishing rights to Sony Music in a deal worth about $500 million, entertainment publication Billboard said Wednesday, citing sources. 

The sale will give Sony ownership of the rock music legend’s entire catalog, including 15-times platinum album “Born in the U.S.A” and five-times platinum “The River,” Billboard reported. 

It is the latest in a string of catalog deals over the past year or so that includes the music of David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Stevie Nicks, Neil Young and Carole Bayer Sager. 

Warner Music bought worldwide rights to Bowie’s catalog in September, and Dylan sold his back catalog of more than 600 songs in December last year to Universal Music Group at a purchase price widely reported as $300 million. 

Sony’s Columbia Records, where Springsteen recorded his music, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Representatives for Springsteen could not be reached. 

 
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Chinese authorities are pledging unrestricted internet access for foreign athletes at February’s Beijing Winter Olympics, but rights advocates say athletes will likely be cautious about exploiting the rare crack in China’s “Great Firewall.”

China has been strengthening that firewall for more than a decade, blocking access to internationally popular foreign messaging apps, social media platforms, search engines and websites deemed threatening to national security.

In a statement emailed to VOA, the International Olympic Committee confirmed that China, as host of the 2022 Beijing Games, will honor a promise to allow athletes and accredited foreign media to have open internet service in the Olympic Village, competition and noncompetition venues, and contracted media hotels.

“Accredited participants will be able to access open internet service with their own devices via wired or Wi-Fi OTN (optical transport network) connection … when purchasing Games SIM cards via the Beijing 2022 Rate Card program,” the IOC said.

China has unblocked its Great Firewall for certain foreign visitors in certain venues on several occasions in the past decade.

While working for another network, a VOA Mandarin Service journalist who was reporting from Hangzhou, China, for the 2016 Group of 20 summit and from Beijing for the 2017 Belt and Road summit observed that Chinese authorities provided unrestricted Wi-Fi access at both venues to accredited foreign journalists.  

Angeli Datt, senior China researcher at Washington-based human rights group Freedom House, told VOA that the Great Firewall was also unblocked for visitors participating in the 2015 World Athletics Championships, held at the same Beijing stadium that had hosted the 2008 Summer Olympics.

During the 2008 Games, China’s Great Firewall was much smaller, blocking foreign websites containing political content that Beijing deemed sensitive while allowing access to U.S. web portals Google and Yahoo, video-sharing site YouTube, and social media platforms Facebook and Twitter. In subsequent years, however, Chinese authorities proceeded to block all those web services plus Instagram, which was launched in 2010.

Datt emphasized the limited nature of China’s pledge to make another one-off opening of its enlarged Great Firewall.

“The vast majority of likely Olympics spectators — Chinese nationals — will not have access to the free and open internet, and thus the IOC failed to use its leverage to make the Olympics a force for good for the people of China,” she said.

Athletes’ expression 

As for foreign athletes, they will be allowed to use China’s unrestricted internet service to express their views through digital and social media channels, under the IOC’s Rule 50 Guidelines, which govern athletes’ expression. But their online expression will be subject to the same IOC limits as for previous Games and will include requirements to respect “applicable laws” of the host nation and Olympic values prohibiting expression that “constitutes or signals discrimination, hatred, hostility or the potential for violence on any basis.”

Some international athletes have already used the unrestricted Chinese Wi-Fi service at several test events held in October and November at Beijing Winter Olympics venues. American bobsledder Elana Meyers Taylor, who competed at the Beijing bobsled time trials in late October, told VOA that her team used the Wi-Fi service to access WhatsApp, a messaging app that is owned by Meta (formerly Facebook) and that China has blocked since 2017.

Meyers Taylor said team coaches stationed at different points along the bobsled track recorded videos of athletes’ runs and shared them via WhatsApp as a way of providing feedback to the athletes. “The Wi-Fi worked great, and the coaches were able to send us our videos, the same as we usually do,” she said, speaking from a competition in Winterberg, Germany, last week. 

Some athletes at the test events did not use the Chinese Wi-Fi service. Swiss ski crosser Alex Fiva, who competed in the Ski Cross World Cup in Beijing last month, told VOA he had not been informed that such a service would be available, so he installed a virtual private network app on his phone to connect to WhatsApp and Instagram through a server outside of China’s Great Firewall.

Fiva, who was speaking last week from a competition in Val Thorens, France, said his VPN app worked smoothly in China. He said he used it to post an Instagram video of his practice run on a slope at the Genting Resort Secret Garden.

Other athletes may have a tougher time using VPNs during February’s Games. Datt of Freedom House said China has increasingly cracked down on VPN usage and providers in the country since 2017, when, she said, it banned certain hotels from offering VPNs to foreign visitors.

Datt said athletes who decide to use the unrestricted Chinese Wi-Fi service will be taking a risk. “Being forced to use the networks provided by the Chinese organizers leaves the visitors susceptible to surveillance,” she said.

Sophisticated digital surveillance 

The Chinese government runs one of the world’s most sophisticated digital surveillance networks, using its own technologies and those of private Chinese companies to monitor and censor the flow of information and opinion among its more than 1 billion citizens.

That surveillance extends to foreigners. The Reuters news agency reported last month that authorities in China’s third most populous province, Henan, awarded a contract to a Chinese tech company in September to build a surveillance system specifically targeting foreign journalists and students.

Visiting athletes who expect to be surveilled while using the Beijing Games’ unrestricted Wi-Fi service may also censor themselves: Quinn McKew, executive director of London-based rights group Article 19, told VOA that the athletes may refrain from posting any criticisms of China and its poor human rights record to avoid subjecting themselves and their corporate sponsors to Chinese wrath. 

“A lot of top athletes are sponsored by U.S. brands that sponsor the Games as well, and those companies are incredibly concerned about maintaining their access to the Chinese market,” McKew said. “They are concerned because of the aggressive moves that the Chinese have made when they feel that their national narrative is threatened by foreign individuals.”

The general manager of the U.S. NBA team Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, triggered Beijing’s wrath in October 2019 when he posted a tweet supporting Hong Kong pro-democracy activists who were protesting the Chinese government’s efforts to curb the city’s freedoms. Chinese state-run network CCTV retaliated immediately by dropping regular season NBA games from its programming, and it has not resumed the broadcasts. U.S. sports news network ESPN estimated in September 2020 that the NBA had lost $200 million in the China market as a result.

Bobsledder Meyers Taylor said she expects athletes in Beijing to self-censor, but for other reasons, such as wanting to focus on their performance at a time when the Winter Olympics give their sporting disciplines much greater international visibility than usual.

“I would always expect there to be some self-censorship, because you want people to associate you with positivity and attract sponsors and donors for the next four years,” she said.

Ski crosser Fiva said any Chinese digital surveillance of visiting athletes will not stop him from going online again in Beijing if he qualifies for the Games.

“You kind of know that they’re watching you and probably listening to you,” he said. “But my thinking is, if I don’t have to hide something, I don’t care if they read it, you know?” 

Australian Olympic Committee CEO Matt Carroll, speaking to VOA from Sydney, said his organization urged athletes seeking to qualify for the Games to avoid pre-competition distractions that could put them under additional pressure while in Beijing.

“But if they want to tweet something, after competing, about human rights, whether it’s about (China’s treatment of ethnic minority) Uyghurs or whatever, they are free to do so,” he said. “And the Chinese authorities — they have to live with that.”

VOA Mandarin Service reporter Bo Gu contributed. Some information was provided by Reuters. 

 
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Yarnbombing is part street art, part graffiti, and part activism. A new art trend in New York City takes the age-old craft of crocheting to the streets, where traditionally walls and fences have been serving as canvases for graffiti artists. Nina Vishneva has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
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A family who went to court to ensure a quarter of the classes for their five-year-old son at a primary school are taught in Spanish were offered police protection Wednesday after they said they were harassed and abused. 

The family, residents of Canet de Mar, a Mediterranean coastal town 50 kilometers northeast of Barcelona, won their case at the Catalan High Court last week.

The case has spotlighted a bitter battle in Spain over languages and identity politics not just in Catalonia but in the Basque Country, Galicia, and the Balearic Islands.

Spain has four official languages: Castilian Spanish, Catalan, Galician and Basque. Officially they have equal status in law. However, Castilian emerged as the dominant language because of widespread use of the language across the empire from 1492 until 1976. One of the largest empires in the world, it covered large portions of the Americas, Europe, the Philippines and Africa.

During his rule from 1939 to 1975, General Francisco Franco banned the use of regional languages other than Castilian in schools and other public spaces. 

After democracy returned to Spain in 1978, the nationalist regional government in Catalonia adopted the so-called ‘linguistic immersion’ model to re-establish the language. Under this model, Catalan is the primary language in state schools. Other versions were implemented in the Basque Country and Galicia.

Angry reaction 

The actions of the family, whose identity has not been released to protect the child, prompted an angry reaction from Catalan nationalists and activists who claim their actions threaten the region’s language and culture.

Plataforma per la Lleguna Catalana, or Platform for the Catalan Language, a group that advocates for the Catalan language, condemned the court ruling in the Canet de Mar case. 

Oscar Escuder, the group’s president, said his organization did not oppose the teaching of Spanish in schools but wanted to defend the right to be taught Catalan well.

“We are not against any language. We just want people to be taught Catalan properly, not more than any other language,” he told VOA.

The organization pointed to a recent poll that found 82% of the 7.5 million residents of Catalonia surveyed support the linguistic immersion model. 

Josep González-Cambray, education minister for the pro-independence Catalan government, condemned threats to the family but told a press conference last week: “The Catalan school model is a model of success which guarantees us social cohesion, equity and equal opportunities.”

Vox, a far-right party, led a demonstration Tuesday in Barcelona demanding families have the right to speak Spanish while other right-wing political parties have seized on the issue.

 

Language is a potent political issue as Spain’s minority left-wing government depends on the support of nationalist parties in Catalonia and the Basque Country to pass laws.

Gloria Lagos, president of Hablamos Español, or We Speak Spanish, a group that promotes Spanish, said the issue of linguistic politics was not confined to Catalonia.

Other regions 

Maria Luisa Sánchez González, 44, went to court in San Sebastián, in the Basque Country, to fight for the right for her nine-year-old son to be taught in Spanish. She says all the classes were in Basque. 

She originally asked for him to be taught partly in Spanish at primary school but was told this was not available.

Sánchez says after suffering threats and abuse, she and her husband were victorious when a court ruled the Basque educational authorities failed to uphold her rights under the Spanish Constitution. Her son now goes to a school where 30% of classes are taught in Spanish — at a cost of $565 per month to regional authorities.

Ten years after the Basque separatist organization ETA declared a permanent cease-fire stopping a bloody 40-year conflict, sensibilities about the region’s language remain high.

“People in Catalonia are afraid to speak out about this, but they are more scared here in the Basque Country because only ten years ago if you said anything against the Basque language you got two shots in the head,” Sánchez told VOA. 

Paul Bilbao, of the Council of Social Entities in the Basque Country, which promotes Basque, told VOA that he would like to see a “total immersion model” in the region like Catalan model.

“That way we could ensure that all children left school with a proper level of the Basque language,” he said.

In Galicia, in northwestern Spain, Rodrigo Villar Cerviño, 49, a businessman, is considering taking legal action so his two children, aged nine and six, can be taught in Spanish instead of Galician.

“The teacher in my son’s class does not allow him to express himself in his mother tongue- Spanish — something which is a right in the Constitution. I have nothing against Galician, but I think my children will learn better in their mother tongue,” he told VOA. 

When VOA sought a response from the Galician regional government, a spokesman denied that pupils were prohibited from speaking Spanish in any school.

On Wednesday, the Spanish government and the pro-independence Catalan Republic Left party agreed a deal to guarantee the 2022 budget is passed. Under the deal, Spain will pay $16.9 million every year to Netflix, HBO and other streaming platforms to make 15% of their content in Catalan and other regional languages.
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Congolese rumba is among at least nine new entries on UNESCO’s “representative list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity.”

UNESCO is making its 2021 designations this week, recognizing cultural heritage ranging from Arabic calligraphy to falconry to Nordic clinker boat traditions. 

Congolese rumba was named to the list Tuesday. The Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo jointly bid for UNESCO to recognize the music and dance, which helped energize people in those countries to shake off colonial rule by Belgium and France, respectively, in Congo, in 1960. 

UNESCO’s director general, Audrey Azoulay, summarized rumba’s significance. 

“In the 20th century, the Congolese rumba was a symbol for the fight for emancipation, dignity and political independence on the African continent,” she said in a statement shared with VOA. “Therefore, the inscription of this music is not just the recognition of a cultural practice but a historic decision. It underlines the political nature of this music, which inspires so many artists all around the world today.” 

Through its ongoing list, UNESCO aims to safeguard cultural practices and ensure that they’re handed down through generations. 

The list of new entries includes:

— Pasillo song and poetry from Ecuador.

— Pottery-related practices and knowledge of Peru’s Awajún people.

— Dances and other expression affiliated with Panama’s Corpus Christi festivities.

— Venezuela’s festive cycle around worship of St. John the Baptist. 

— Bolivia’s Grand Festival of Tarija. 
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