CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M: THE OLYMPICS

Two more handed suspended jail terms in Tokyo Olympics scandal

AFP
Wed, 10 May 2023 

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics took place a year late because of the pandemic

Two Japanese businessmen were handed suspended prison sentences on Thursday in the latest convictions in a bribery scandal surrounding the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

Corruption allegations have spiralled in the aftermath of the pandemic-delayed Games, implicating major companies and damaging Japan's bid to host the 2030 Winter Olympics in Sapporo.

Shigeharu Hisamatsu, a 64-year-old former executive at advertising firm ADK Holdings, received a sentence of 18 months, suspended for three years, a Tokyo District Court spokesman told AFP.

His former assistant, 61-year-old Toshiaki Tada, was given a sentence of one year, also suspended for three years.

The pair did not contest charges during their first hearing in March that they bribed a Tokyo Olympics committee member, according to local media.

The pair were arrested along with former ADK president Shinichi Ueno in October last year.

Local media reported that Ueno admitted in a court hearing in February that he paid over $100,000 to Haruyuki Takahashi, who is facing several separate bribery charges and has reportedly pleaded not guilty.

Last month, the former chairman of a high-street business suit retailer and sponsor of the Tokyo Games became the first person to be convicted in the bribery scandal.

Hironori Aoki, the 84-year-old head of Aoki Holdings, received a suspended prison sentence of two and a half years.

Other parties involved in bribery allegations include a major publishing firm and a merchandise company licensed to sell soft toys of the Games' mascots.

As investigations continue, the country's Olympic chief warned last month that Japan could push its Winter Olympics bid back four years to 2034.

Japanese Olympic Committee president Yasuhiro Yamashita said it would be "difficult to move ahead without gaining people's understanding" following the scandals.

amk/pst

US panel recommends nonprescription use of contraception pill

Issued on: 10/05/2023

A student holds a sign calling for reproductive freedom at an event in Washington, DC, in April 2023 © Stefani Reynolds / AFP/File

Washington (AFP) – A US panel of health experts voted Wednesday in favor of making birth control pills available without a prescription, a move backed by reproductive rights advocates especially in the wake of a Supreme Court ruling overturning the national right to abortion.

The independent panel voted unanimously that the benefits of allowing the medicine, Opill, to be sold over the counter, outweighed the risks and would reduce hurdles associated with visiting a doctor that impact lower income groups disproportionately.

"I believe that the efficacy and safety of this birth control form was established over half a century ago," said panelist Jolie Haun of the James A. Haley Veterans' Hospital.

"We now have been presented with ample data demonstrating the effective safe use and benefits for people who want to have access to reproductive autonomy."

The committee's votes are usually accepted by the Food and Drug Administration, which means the pill, which is made by HRA Pharma, might be available without prescription in the coming weeks.

While likely, approval is not assured. FDA scientists highlighted safety concerns, such as the potential impact on people with a history or current diagnosis of breast cancer, or whether they would understand the pill needs to be taken the same time every day to prevent pregnancy.

"There is also concern that some consumers may not consistently use the product correctly on a chronic basis and be at risk for pregnancy, but not recognize that they are pregnant because of the irregular bleeding that would be ascribed to the known side effect," the FDA wrote in a document.

The push for a non-prescription pill has taken on new urgency in light of a Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, leading to numerous bans and severe restrictions in conservative states.

It has received support from health groups such as the American Medical Association and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

If the pill is approved, the US would join more than 100 other countries where the pill is available without a prescription, including the UK which requires a consultation with a pharmacist.

Opill is known as a "mini pill" because it contains progestin only.

Another company, Cadence, is in talks with the FDA about making its combination pill, which contains both estrogen and progestin, available over the counter.

FRENZIED FINAL DAYS OF VAN GOGH FEATURE IN NEW SHOW

Van Gogh Museum is exhibiting a new show to mark the 50th anniversary of the most famous Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh. His masterpieces that he worked during his feverish final months in a French village are the subject of the one-off exhibition opening this week in Amsterdam.

Titled "In Auvers - his final months", the collection highlights his last 70 days spent in the town of Auvers before he took his own life - a fitting topic to mark the Van Gogh Museum's 50th anniversary. The Museum’s Curator said it is still amazing by not just the number of paintings that he did in Auvers in this short period but also the great quality of it and the great audacity, the expressiveness, the experiment until the very last day shows how great of a painter he was.

Amsterdam (AFP) – Vincent Van Gogh's feverish final months in a French village, when he churned out masterpieces even as he spiralled into despair, are the subject of a one-off exhibition opening this week in Amsterdam.

The show at the Van Gogh Museum in the Dutch capital, which opens Friday, features 50 of the 74 works produced in his frenzied last days in Auvers-sur-Oise, just northwest of Paris, before his death at the age of 37.

More than 30 drawings are also featured among the works that have been loaned from museums and private collections all over the world and have never previously been shown together, curators said.

"It is fair to say that this is a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition about Van Gogh's very last period, his last 70 days," museum director Emilie Gordenker said at a press preview on Wednesday.

"During that period, he worked like a man possessed," producing some of his best works including the ominous "Wheatfield with Crows" and the melancholic portrait of his friend and physician Dr Paul Gachet.

Vincent Van Gogh is buried next to his brother Theo in Auvers-sur-Oise, a northwestern suburb of Paris where the Dutch painter spent his final days © MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP

The painting "Dr Paul Gachet", which the museum's researchers said was made on 6 and 7 June 1890, is one of eight works provided by the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, along with "The Church at Auvers".

What makes the exhibition unique is that all its paintings are arranged in chronological order, from the first painting when Vincent arrived in the village until his very last work, "Tree Roots", painted two days before his death.

Van Gogh arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris on May 20, 1890, after spending time in Arles and Saint-Remy-de-Provence in southern France, where he already struggled with bouts of mental illness.

The painter arrived in Auvers full of hope and fresh enthusiasm, mainly because of the presence of Dr Gachet, a physician specialising in the treatment of "melancholia".

Once there, the painter entered one of his most productive periods.

"Vincent had a really tough time before he came to Auvers. He really suffered very much from his mental condition," Gordenker told AFP.

"He comes to Auvers and he really has a new energy and he really gets to work," she said.
'The audacity'

"He must have worked very fast. But he knew exactly what he was doing," added Nienke Bakker, senior curator at the Van Gogh Museum.

"Working on this exhibition, we are not just amazed by the number of paintings that he did in Auvers in this short period, but also the great quality of it and the audacity, the expressiveness, the experimenting that was there until the very last day," Bakker told AFP.

"It shows what an amazing artist he was," she said.

But as time went on, a feeling of unease again crept over Van Gogh, as seen in paintings like "Wheatfield with Crows", which was followed by another ominous landscape, "Wheatfield under Thunderclouds".

Indeed, Van Gogh, in one of his last letters to his brother Theo, says about his final painting, "Tree Roots", that "my life too is attacked at the very root, my step is also faltering".

Feelings of failure, loneliness and melancholy gradually gained the upper hand.

Van Gogh shot himself in the chest shortly after finishing "Tree Roots" and died two days later.

The exhibition "Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months" runs from May 12 to September 3 before moving to the Musee d'Orsay from October 3 until February 4, 2024.

New York's Met Museum to probe possibly looted art

AFP
Wed, May 10, 2023

The United States has returned to China two stolen 7th-century antiquities that had been loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by a private art collector

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art said Wednesday it would examine the provenance of "several hundred or more" objects that were possibly stolen from their country of origin, and then return them where necessary.

The move comes as Manhattan prosecutors work to repatriate hundreds of artifacts worth millions of dollars to dozens of countries across the world.

The Met will hire additional "provenance" researchers to study some of the museum's 1.5 million works of art, director Max Hollein told staff in a letter published on the institution's website.

"We will broaden, expedite, and intensify our research into all works that came to the museum from art dealers who have been under investigation," he wrote.

Hollein said most of the suspect pieces were acquired between 1970 and 1990, "when there was less information available and less scrutiny on the provenance of many of these works."

The Met has been cited in court cases related to stolen works.

On Tuesday, the Manhattan district attorney returned to China two 7th-century stone carvings worth $3.5 million that were smuggled out of the country in the early 1990s.

Authorities had earlier this year seized the artifacts from the Met, where they had been since 1998.

The carvings were among 89 antiquities from 10 different countries purchased by Shelby White, a private art collector in New York and Met trustee.

Since January 2022, the DA has returned more than 950 antiquities worth over $165 million to 19 countries.

"The Met has a longstanding history in the rigorous review of our collection and, when appropriate, the return of art," said Hollein, citing returns to Egypt, Greece, Italy, Nepal, Nigeria, Turkey, and India.

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Brazilians say emotional goodbye to rock icon Rita Lee

AFP
Wed, May 10, 2023 

People file past the coffin of Brazilian singer Rita Lee during her wake at the planetarium in a Sao Paulo park

Fans flocked to a Sao Paulo park Wednesday to say an emotional farewell to Brazil's "Queen of Rock," the trailblazing singer-songwriter Rita Lee, who died this week at age 75.

Brazil is holding three days of national mourning for the Latin Grammy-winning icon, who shot to fame in the 1960s with legendary band Os Mutantes and captivated the country across a five-decade career with her rebellious spirit and irreverent songs on sex, love and freedom.

Standing in the rain, hundreds of fans joined a long line that formed early Wednesday outside the planetarium at Sao Paulo's Ibirapuera Park, where a public wake was held for Lee, as she had requested.

"She was a woman before her time, a genius," said 27-year-old fan Barbarhat Sueyassu.

"She's our biggest national symbol of women's rock," she told AFP.

Inside the planetarium dome, fans filed past Lee's simple brown coffin -- some in tears, some singing her songs.

Lee, a leading figure in the "Tropicalismo" movement that revolutionized Brazilian music amid the country's 1964-1985 military dictatorship, was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2021.

She died Monday at home in Sao Paulo, her family said.

With her eye-grabbing outfits, bright red hair and colored sunglasses, Lee was a national fixture across the decades in Brazil, releasing more than 30 albums and racking up hits including "Ovelha Negra" (1975), "Mania de Voce" (1979) and "Lanca Perfume" (1980).

Her body will be cremated in a private ceremony, in line with her wishes, her family said.

Ovelha Negra BLACK SHEEP

French star Adele Haenel quits cinema over ’sexual abuse’ in industry

Issued on: 10/05/2023 -

Actress Adele Haenel poses for photographers at the photo call for the film 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' at the 72nd international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Monday, May 20, 2019. 

© Arthur Mola, Invision/AP

Text by:  NEWS WIRES

French actor Adele Haenel, who has for years spoken out against sexual abuse in the film industry, announced she was giving up movie acting over the industry's "complacency".

Haenel, whose role in "Portrait of a Lady on Fire" (2019) brought her international recognition, also hit out at "the way that cinema cooperates with capitalism".

'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' trailer

The 34-year-old, who has won France's highest Cesar film award twice, in 2019 went public with a description of sexual assault she suffered at the hands of a film director with whom she worked as a teenager, and who she said had "a hold" over her.

In 2020 she made a noisy exit at the Cesars ceremony in protest against an award for director Roman Polanski who is wanted by the US over statutory rape allegations.

Polanski award sparks walk out at French Oscars

In a letter to culture weekly Telerama first published on Tuesday, Haenel said she wanted to "denounce the general complacency in our industry towards sexual abusers".

She also said she rejected "how this business collaborates with the global, deadly, ecocidal and racist world order", capitalism.

In a reference to anti-pension reform protests in France, she said that "we're waiting to see whether the bigwigs in cinema are counting on the police, just like luxury industry sponsors, to make sure that everything goes well at the Cannes Festival", the annual film festival that opens next week.

Haenel, who has not been in a movie since 2021, said "to make this system look desirable is a criminal act".

In her letter she also mentioned French A-list actor Gerard Depardieu, charged with rape, and Dominique Boutonnat, boss of the national film centre (CNC) who is being investigated for sexual assault, and said the industry had "joined hands to help them save face".

Haenel said she would now focus on stage acting.

(AFP)

Race row as Egyptian archaeologist releases Cleopatra documentary

Issued on: 10/05/2023 - 

The head of a statue depicting Cleopatra © ERIC FEFERBERG / AFP/File

Cairo (AFP) – An Egyptian archaeologist on Wednesday released a documentary on the life of Cleopatra, the same day Netflix began streaming a controversial production depicting the ancient queen as black.

For weeks, pundits and officials in Egypt have reacted angrily to streaming platform Netflix's decision to cast British actress Adele James in the lead role of its production "Queen Cleopatra" -- insisting the ruler had lighter skin.

Archaeologist Zahi Hawass's 90-minute documentary "Cleopatra", released on director Curtis Ryan Woodside's YouTube channel, describes itself as telling the "true" story of the Ptolemaic dynasty's last ruler.

"Was Cleopatra black? First of all, I have nothing against black people at all, but I am stating the facts -- look at the Macedonian queens, none of them were black", Hawass, a former antiquities minister, says in the documentary.

In April, Egypt's antiquities ministry weighed in on the debate, insisting the historical Cleopatra had "white skin and Hellenistic characteristics".

Netflix promoted its documentary-drama "Queen Cleopatra", produced by Jada Pinkett Smith, as featuring "reenactments and expert interviews".

Cleopatra was the last sovereign of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which was of Greek origin and ruled Egypt between 332 and 30 BC.

While legend holds the queen, born around 69 BC, was a great beauty, her appearance and the colour of her skin are largely open to interpretation.

Following the release of a trailer for the Netflix production, an online petition accusing the streaming service of rewriting history had garnered more than 40,000 signatures by late April.

In a country where some were already calling for Netflix to be banned for content deemed offensive to Egypt or "its family values", legislator Saboura al-Sayyed last month repeated her call for parliament to block the platform.

Commentators in Egypt often decry campaigns among mostly African-American groups claiming the black origins of pharaonic civilisation.

In 2009, a BBC documentary claimed that Cleopatra had African blood, an assertion that passed without incident.

© 2023 AFP

‘Glorifying violence’: Serbian protesters blame mass shootings on shock reality TV shows

Issued on: 10/05/2023 - 

A demonstrator holds a poster reading "I don't want my child to be born in a country of violence" in Belgrade on May 8, 2023. © Andrej Isakovic, AFP

Text by: Sébastian SEIBT

A massive protest in Belgrade on Monday expressed anger at the role of reality TV programmes in creating a culture of violence seen as a factor in the two mass shootings that plunged Serbia into mourning last week.

The two mass shootings in a space of a week in Serbia were a shockingly rare occurrence, even if Serbia has Europe’s highest rate of firearms possession.

With 19 people killed, including children in a nursery school, the shootings prompted Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic’s vow to “disarm” the country.

But for many of the demonstrators on the streets of Belgrade on May 8, sections of the media share a significant part of the blame for last week’s tragedies.

“There were many calls for the heads of the media regulatory body to resign, as well as calls for the media to stop promoting violence,” said Aleksandra Krstic, an expert on the Serbian media at Belgrade University who took part in the demonstration.

This anger at the violence relayed on television screens is reminiscent of the endless frustration at the violence on TV and in video games blamed for many of the mass shootings in the US.

“These tragic events come out of a social context in which the media increasingly glorifies violence,” said Nebojsa Vladisavljevic, an expert on authoritarianism at Belgrade University.

Over the past decade, an alternative media reality has risen to the fore in Serbia, characterised by “rampant hate speech against any political opposition to the government, alongside the promotion of violent content”, Vladisavljevic continued.

‘More and more violent’

He singled out reality TV shows, which have become ratings machines dominating Serbian broadcasting. Zadruga on Pink TV and Parovi on Happy TV have pushed the genre’s boundaries, taking trash TV so far that they make the likes of Big Brother look like broadcasts of philosophical discussions.

The French public got a taste of this in 2016, when the Serbo-French dual citizen Zelko recounted how he managed to escape six months of hell in Serbian reality TV. As a contestant on Parovi, Zelko was regularly beaten and humiliated by the other contestants. Then the production team refused to let him go, placing him in solitary confinement.

In 2019, another former Parovi contestant, Andelina Nikolic, told Serbia media how she had self-harmed and swallowed detergent in a desperate effort to leave the Parovi set – even if this escape attempt sent her straight to hospital. But the producers just filmed the whole episode, forced her to vomit, and put her in isolation.

These are hardly isolated cases in Serbian reality TV. “These shows promote violence on various levels,” Vladisavljevic said. “They show it on screen; they invite convicted criminals to participate; and they talk about violence as if it were completely normal.”

In 2015, a Bosnian NGO launched a petition against the Serbian reality TV show Farma, accusing it of inciting ethnic violence just two decades after the Yugoslav Wars tore the Balkans apart.

Nevertheless, Vladisavljevic lamented, vociferous criticism of Serbian reality TV has changed nothing – in actual fact, “the programmes have become more and more violent”.

It is no co-incidence that these reality shows have only increased in popularity since Vucic’s Serbian Progressive Party came to power in 2012. Analysts see Serbian reality TV as almost part of a political vicion of media manipulation inspired by the regimes of authoritarian leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Media ‘essential to maintaining power’

By making violence acceptable to viewers, these vicious shows allow the state media to increase hate speech against opposition figures without causing much of a stir.

“You’ve got to realise that Vojislav Seselj, the former Serbian deputy prime minister accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, has become a regular on TV and uses it as a platform for very violent speeches,” Vladisavljevic said.

“These reality shows are part of a system where violence is omnipresent at all levels,” Krstic said. Contestants fights each other and these fights become “the talk of the tabloids controlled by people with ties to the governments, and then they are made into clips relayed on social media where young people – who are too young to watch the programmes on TV – are able to watch these violent extracts over and over again”, she continued.

This media culture could be seen as a factor in last week’s shootings because it has “created a generation of young people whose heroes are criminals featuring in reality TV shows, which lends a certain legitimacy to the use of violence”, Krstic said.

She expressed hope that last week’s tragedies will open people’s eyes to the dangers of this dynamic – and that Monday’s demonstrations will put pressure on the government and the media to make changes.

“We’re asking for the head of the media regulator to resign, because this organisation is supposed to deal with the broadcasting of violent content but has actually done nothing about it,” Krstic said.

There is a decent prospect that Vucic will “react” in response to the protests, Vladisavljevic added, because the president “knows that large gatherings like this create risks for the government”.

The “huge protests against [then Serbian leader] Slobodan Milosevic in the 1990s played a role in the end of his reign”, Vladisavljevic continued. “The education minister resigned on Sunday and others could follow.”

Yet Vladisavljevic concluded that Vucic is unlikely to make any substantial changes to Serbia’s media landscape because the media are “essential to maintaining power” in an “authoritarian regime like his”.

In the meantime, public anger has not gone away, with further protests planned for next Friday to try and push the government to make more concessions.

This article was translated from the original in French.

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What does the Wagner Group mean for erupting conflicts like Sudan?

DW
Issued on: 10/05/2023 

06:40

Guests on the France 24 Debate, Raphael Parens, Dominique Trinquand, and Thierry Vircoulon, share views on how crucial the revenue stream provided by Wagner is for Russia, where their recruits from places like Russian prisons go, and what it all means for erupting conflicts like in Sudan, a country with plentiful gold mines.

Climate maths 'doesn't add up' without carbon capture: COP28 chief

by Hashem OSSEIRAN

COP28 president Sultan Al Jaber urged a greater focus on carbon capture technologies.

The Emirati oil chief leading this year's UN climate talks said Wednesday the world must get "serious" about new emission-capturing technology, rather than focussing only on replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.

Sultan Al Jaber said renewables such as solar and wind "cannot be the only answer", especially in the steel, cement and aluminium industries, where emissions are particularly hard to reduce.

While major oil producers Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are touting carbon capture and storage as a remedy for global warming, some experts caution that the nascent technology is unproven and expensive, and should not replace efforts to phase out hydrocarbons.

"Renewable energies are not and cannot be the only answer," argued Al Jaber, who is simultaneously the head of state oil giant ADNOC and the country's climate envoy.

"If we are serious about curbing industrial emissions, we need to get serious about carbon capture technologies," he told the United Arab Emirates' Climate Tech event in Abu Dhabi.

"In any realistic scenario that gets us to net zero... carbon capture technology will have a role to play. Without it, the math just doesn't add up.

"We need to phase out emissions," added Al Jaber, reiterating his position that crude remains indispensable to the global economy and crucial to financing the energy transition.

Globe showing temperature anomalies recorded in April 2023.

COP battleground issue

The debate between carbon capture and reduced fossil fuel use is shaping as a key battleground at COP28, beginning in November in Dubai, the UAE's commercial hub.

Earlier this year, the UN's climate expert panel (IPCC) said the world risks crossing the key 1.5-degree Celsius global warming threshold in about a decade, urging a drastic reduction in planet-heating emissions.

One of the fastest transformations will need to be in energy, the report said, with solar and wind power already expanding dramatically.

Major economies are taking key steps, with the European Union banning sales of new fossil fuel cars from 2035 and planning to nearly double renewable energy production by 2030.

But greenhouse gas emissions from existing fossil fuel infrastructure will still push the world beyond 1.5C unless the costly and emerging carbon capture and storage technologies are utilised, the IPCC said.

A photo taken in Finland on May 3, 2023, shows ice chunks drifting in the Bothnia Gulf near the shore at the beginning of the spring.

"Cost remains a barrier," said Al Jaber, president-designate of COP28.

He said policymakers must provide incentives to companies to commercialise technological solutions, including carbon capture and storage (CCS) and direct air capture (DAC).

CCS syphons off CO2 pollution from energy production and heavy industry and stores it underground, thus preventing it from entering the atmosphere.

By contrast, direct air capture -– still in its infancy—removes CO2 directly from ambient air, which makes it a "negative emissions" technology.


'Distraction we can't afford'

Some environmentalists are sceptical about the focus on carbon capture, with Rex Weyler from Greenpeace last year labelling it a "scam".

"Carbon offset technologies are a distraction that we cannot afford," Julien reissati, programme director at Greenpeace MENA, told AFP on Wednesday.

Worsening droughts have hit Iraq and over the past four years prompted Iraqi authorities to drastically limit areas under cultivation.

A Pakistan town damaged by flash floods of the river Swat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Pakistan was lashed by unprecedented monsoon rains in the summer of 2022 that put a third of the country underwater.

'Renewable energies are not and cannot be the only answer,' argued Al Jaber, who is simultaneously the head of state oil giant ADNOC and the country's climate envoy.

"They have yet to be commercially viable and are not proven at scale despite years of development and billions of dollars of investment."

Worldwide, there are about 35 commercial facilities applying carbon capture, utilisation and storage to industrial processes, fuel transformation and power generation, with a total annual capture capacity of almost 45 million tonnes of CO2, according to the International Energy Agency.

Current global CO2 emissions from all sources are about 40 billion tonnes.

Novel DAC technologies only account for a tiny fraction—about 0.1 percent—of worldwide carbon dioxide removal, the first global assessment of CO2 removal said in January.

More than 99 percent of extraction is done through "conventional" techniques such as restoring and expanding CO2-absorbing forests and wetlands, according to the State of Carbon Dioxide Removal report.

The report stated that capping global warming at liveable levels will be impossible without massively scaling up the extraction of planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

© 2023 AFP


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