Category: Новини

More than 650-million copies of Dr. Seuss books have sold around the world since author Theodor Seuss Geisel published his first title in the 1930s. The prolific author of books like “The Cat in the Hat” is credited with helping millions of children learn to read. But this month, Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced it will no longer publish six of the celebrated author’s books due to racist and insensitive imagery. VOA’s Dora Mekouar has our report. But first, a warning the story you are about to watch contains images that many may find offensive.
Camera: Griffin Harrington
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Tokyo Olympics creative head Hiroshi Sasaki said he had resigned after making a derogatory comment about a popular female Japanese entertainer, in the latest controversy over insensitive remarks toward women to hit games organizers.Sasaki, who was the head creative director for the opening and closing ceremonies at this year’s games, said he had told a planning group through a group chat that Naomi Watanabe could play a role as an “Olympig.””There was a very inappropriate expression in my ideas and remarks,” Sasaki said in a statement issued through games organizers early Thursday. “I sincerely apologize to her and people who have felt discomfort with such contents.”Sasaki said he had told Tokyo 2020 President Seiko Hashimoto late Wednesday evening that he was stepping down.Hashimoto and Tokyo 2020 CEO Toshiro Muto plan to address the matter at a news conference on Thursday, organizers said.Sasaki’s resignation came swiftly after weekly magazine Shukan Bunshun reported his remarks on Wednesday.Last month, Yoshiro Mori stepped down from his role as president of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee after causing a furor with sexist remarks when he said women talk too much.Mori, 83, a former prime minister, was replaced by athlete-turned-politician Hashimoto, who has pledged to make gender equality a top priority at the games.Sasaki was named head of the creative team in December as Olympic organizers looked to revamp plans for simplified ceremonies after the Tokyo Games were pushed back a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.The Olympics are scheduled for July 23-August 8;  the Paralympics are set for August 24-September 5.  
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James Levine, one of the world’s most acclaimed conductors who served as music director for the Metropolitan Opera in New York for four decades before sexual abuse accusations ended his career, has died at age 77.Dr. Len Horovitz, his personal physician, said Levine died on March 9 in Palm Springs, California, of natural causes. The maestro, known for his wild hair and bespectacled face, was long revered by the Met’s audiences, singers and symphony-sized orchestra at America’s cathedral of opera whose standards he helped place among the highest in the world.
 
Levine, considered the foremost American conductor of his time and perhaps the most celebrated since Leonard Bernstein, led about 2,500 performances of 85 different operas since his Met debut in 1971, more than anyone else since it was founded in 1880. He also conducted some of the major orchestras of America and Europe, most notably the Munich Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
 
He stepped down as music director in 2016 after struggling with health problems, but was fired in 2018 from his reduced role with the Met after three men accused him of abusing them as teenagers as far back as 1968. His final appearance at the Met was leading a concert performance of Verdi’s Requiem in 2017.
 
Levine and the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the United States, reached an out-of-court settlement in 2019 resolving his lawsuit accusing the company of breach of contract and defamation and the company’s countersuit. The settlement called for him to get $3.5 million.
 
Peter Gelb, the Met general manager who made the decision to part ways with Levine, called the outcome “a tragedy.” Levine called the accusations “unfounded” and said he was not “an oppressor or an aggressor.”
 
In a statement on Wednesday, the Met said it “honors the memory” of Levine and acknowledged his “undeniable artistic achievements” but said his relationship with the opera company frayed in the wake of the sexual misconduct allegations.
 
Levine worked with the greatest opera singers of his era, including Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Renee Fleming, Anna Netrebko, Marilyn Horne, Jessye Norman, Samuel Ramey, Kathleen Battle, Frederica von Stade, Bryn Terfel, Roberto Alagna, Kiri Te Kanawa, Cecilia Bartoli, Renata Scotto, Leontyne Price and Grace Bumbry.
 
“He is one of the greatest artists of all time. He has created one of the greatest orchestras in modern history. He may be one of the greatest opera conductors who ever lived,” Gelb told The New York Times in 2011.
 ‘Music chose me’
 
Levine was respected for his conducting abilities, his penchant for eliciting the finest performances from musicians and his endless enthusiasm.
 
A traditionalist, he conducted sparkling performances of venerable operas by composers including Verdi, Mozart, Puccini, Rossini and Wagner, as well as new compositions. A piano prodigy, Levine remained active as a keyboard recitalist. He worked to create an exceptional rapport with his musicians.
 
During his career, he was bothered by health problems, notably a series of back operations. This forced him to cut back on performances and conduct while sitting down. He injured his spine in a fall while on vacation in 2011 that required surgery and left him partially paralyzed.
 
Complications related to Parkinson’s disease prompted Levine in 2016 to step down as the Met’s full-time music director and become music director emeritus, a position in which he would still conduct. His later suspension and dismissal ended that arrangement.
 
“I sometimes say that music chose me because I can’t remember my life without it,” Levine said in a PBS documentary. “I feel music gave me a real continuum of creative, constructive life. … As I look around at other professions in the world, it seems that to have a life in music is the most beautiful life I could imagine.”
 
Levine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1943. He made his debut as a piano soloist at age 10 with the Cincinnati Symphony. After studying at the Juilliard school of music in New York, he was invited in 1963 to serve as assistant conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra under prominent conductor George Szell.
 
He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1971, conducting Puccini’s Tosca. He was appointed the Met’s principal conductor in 1973, its musical director in 1975 and was given the expanded role of artistic director in 1986.
 
“The crisis of how to enact opera onstage visually has some alarming facets,” Levine once told New York magazine. “I’m referring to productions the composer and librettist would denounce. I’m speaking of a production that uses a piece instead of presents the piece. People will say, ‘Oh, Jimmy, he’s so fanatic.’ … But there are so many contemporary productions that just destroy the piece, for nothing.”
 
From 1996 to 2000, he also led more than a dozen concerts on the popular “Three Tenors World Tour,” with Domingo, Pavarotti and Jose Carreras. 
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White supremacist propaganda reached alarming levels across the U.S. in 2020, according to a new report that the Anti-Defamation League provided to The Associated Press.There were 5,125 cases of racist, anti-Semitic, anti-LGBTQ and other hateful messages spread through physical flyers, stickers, banners and posters, according to Wednesday’s report. That’s nearly double the 2,724 instances reported in 2019. Online propaganda is much harder to quantify, and it’s likely those cases reached into the millions, the anti-hate organization said.The ADL, which was founded more than a century ago, said that last year marked the highest level of white supremacist propaganda seen in at least a decade. Its report comes as federal authorities investigate and prosecute those who stormed the U.S. Capitol in January, some of whom are accused of having ties to or expressing support for hate groups and anti-government militias.’Bookends'”As we try to understand and put in perspective the past four years, we will always have these bookends of Charlottesville and Capitol Hill,” group CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said.”The reality is there’s a lot of things that happened in between those moments that set the stage,” he said.Christian Picciolini, a former far-right extremist who founded the deradicalization group Free Radicals Project, said the surge in propaganda tracks with white supremacist and extremist recruiters seeing crises as periods of opportunity.FILE- Members of the white supremacist KKK are escorted by police past a large group of protesters during a KKK rally in Charlottesville, Va., July 8, 2017.”They use the uncertainty and fear caused by crisis to win over new recruits to their ‘us vs. them’ narrative, painting the ‘other’ as the cause of their pain, grievances or loss,” Picciolini told the AP. “The current uncertainty caused by the pandemic, job loss, a heated election, protest over extrajudicial police killings of Black Americans, and a national reckoning sparked by our country’s long tradition of racism has created a perfect storm in which to recruit Americans who are fearful of change and progress.”Propaganda, often distributed with the intention of garnering media and online attention, helps white supremacists normalize their messaging and bolster recruitment efforts, the ADL said in its report. Language used in the propaganda is frequently veiled with a patriotic slant, making it seem benign to an untrained eye.But some flyers, stickers and posters are explicitly racist and anti-Semitic. One piece of propaganda disseminated by the New Jersey European Heritage Association included the words “Black Crimes Matter,” a derisive reference to the Black Lives Matter movement, along with cherry-picked crime statistics about attacks on white victims by Black assailants.A neo-Nazi group known as Folks Front distributed stickers that include the words “White Lives Matter.”According to the report, at least 30 known white supremacist groups were behind hate propaganda. But three groups — NJEHA, Patriot Front and Nationalist Social Club — were responsible for 92% of the activity.Where it occurredThe propaganda appeared in every state except Hawaii. The highest levels were seen in Texas, Washington, California, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Virginia and Pennsylvania, according to the report.Despite the overall increase, the ADL reported a steep decline in distribution of white supremacist propaganda at colleges and universities, due in large part to the coronavirus pandemic and the lack of students living and studying on campus. There were 303 reports of propaganda on college campuses in 2020, down from 630 in 2019.Greenblatt acknowledged that free speech rights allow for rhetoric that “we don’t like and we detest.” But when that speech spurs violence or creates conditions for normalizing extremism, it must be opposed, he said.”There’s no pixie dust that you can sprinkle on this, like it’s all going to go away,” Greenblatt said. “We need to recognize that the roots of this problem run deep.” 
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A Japanese district court ruled Wednesday that a ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional.
 
The historic ruling by the Sapporo District Court was in response to a lawsuit filed by six plaintiffs, including two male couples and one female couple, who demanded more than $9,100 each (1 million yen), in damages from the Japanese government.  The court said the prohibition violates Article 14 of the Japanese constitution, which declares all people are equal under the law, but it rejected the plaintiff’s demand for damages.   
 
The lawsuit is one of five that have been filed in various Japanese courts seeking to overturn the ban.  
 
Japan is the lone holdout in the world’s top seven economies, known as the Group of Seven, that refuses to recognize same-sex marriage.  The government says the constitution defines marriage as one based on “the mutual consent of both sexes,” meaning one solely between a man and a woman.  The ban prevents same-sex couples from sharing in the same benefits granted to opposite-sex couples, such as inheriting their partner’s houses and other assets, or maintaining parental control over their children.    
 
Several municipalities have issued “partnership certificates” that give same-sex couples some of the same rights as heterosexual couples.
 
Homosexuality itself has been legal in Japan since 1880.  Taiwan is the only place in Asia that has legalized same-sex marriage.
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South by Southwest, the annual event in Austin, Texas, that brings together technology, music, politics and Hollywood, is happening digitally this year after being canceled last year due to COVID-19. Michelle Quinn reports.Producer: Matt Dibble  
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Britain’s Prince Philip left a London hospital on Tuesday after being treated for an infection and undergoing a heart procedure.
Philip, 99, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, had been hospitalized since being admitted to the private King Edward VII’s Hospital in London on Feb. 16, where he was treated for an infection.  
He was later transferred to a specialized cardiac care hospital, St. Bartholomew’s, for a short stay, before returning to King Edward VII’s.
Photographers standing outside the door of the private hospital captured his departure in the back of a black car. Buckingham Palace has not yet commented on the matter.
Philip’s illness is not believed to be related to the coronavirus. Both Philip and Elizabeth received COVID-19 vaccinations in January and chose to publicize the matter to encourage others to also take the vaccine.
Philip, also known as the Duke of Edinburgh, retired in 2017 and rarely appears in public. Before his hospitalization, he had been isolating at Windsor Castle, west of London, with the queen.
His illness comes as the royal family has been rocked by an interview with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and Prince Harry. In the explosive broadcast, Meghan, who is biracial, said the palace had failed to help her when she had suicidal thoughts and that an unidentified member of the royal family had raised “concerns” about the color of her baby’s skin when she was pregnant with her son, Archie.
The interview, conducted by Oprah Winfrey, divided people around the world. While many say the allegations demonstrate the need for change inside a palace that hasn’t kept pace with the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, others have criticized Harry and Meghan for dropping their bombshell while Philip was hospitalized.
The longest-serving royal consort in British history, Philip married the then-Princess Elizabeth in 1947. He and the queen have four children, eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
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