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 WASHINGTON — President Obama on Wednesday will announce that the government will no longer threaten criminal prosecution of the families of American hostages who are held abroad by groups like the Islamic State if they attempt to pay ransom for the release of their loved ones. The change is one of many that are intended to fix what the administration has acknowledged is a broken policy on United States captives, a senior administration official said. |
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 South Africa's tourism sector is in crisis as a series of new visa regulations have prompted dramatic falls in arrivals, particularly from the world's largest source of tourists: China. The number of Chinese visitors to South Africa has plunged a staggering 32 percent since last year.The new visa regulations require that all applicants apply in person and bring an official birth certificate for any children under 18 years old. In a country as large as China, that is apparently too much to ask as travel agents and tour operators are increasingly directing their clients to abandon travel plans to South Africa in favor of other destinations. After all, in some cases, it's actually more expensive for a Chinese traveler to go to Beijing or Shanghai to get the visa than it would be to make the actual trip to South Africa itself. So it's not surprising that Chinese tourists are choosing to go elsewhere other than South Africa for their holidays. With the world's largest number of outbound tourists who spend more than visitors from any other country, the Chinese tourist is a prized asset. In the case of South Africa, the effects of the Chinese absence are being felt across the economy as flights are cancelled, hotel rooms go unfilled and restaurants operate below capacity. The South African tourism industry, for its part, is doing its best to try and persuade the government to either amend or abandon these new restrictive policies that are encouraging ever larger numbers of visitors from China and Asia to go elsewhere. David Frost, CEO of the South African Tourism Services Association, is leading that effort and joins Eric & Cobus to discuss what's at stake. |
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 We all need help maintaining our personal spiritual practice. We hope that these Daily Meditations, prayers and mindful awareness exercises can be part of bringing spirituality alive in your life.Today's meditation is a recording by the musical group Pink Martini that tells the simple, yet moving story of a little tomato that is struggling to survive a dark, stormy night. He learns a lesson that may be good for us to remember -- "Just hang on, hang on to the vine. Stay on, soon you'll be divine." Hang On Little Tomato The sun has left and forgotten me It's dark, I cannot see Why does this rain pour down I'm gonna drown In a sea Of deep confusion Somebody told me, I don't know who Whenever you are sad and blue And you're feelin' all alone and left behind Just take a look inside you and you'll find You gotta hold on, hold on through the night Hang on, things will be all right Even when it's dark And not a bit of spark Sing-song sunshine from above Spreading rays of sunny love Just hang on, hang on to the vine Stay on, soon you'll be divine If you start to cry, look up to the sky Something's coming up ahead To turn your tears to dew instead And so I hold on to his advice When change is hard and not so nice If you listen to your heart the whole night through Your sunny someday will come one day soon to you. |
 Are "Smog Meringues" -- egg whites whipped in sugar and noxious fumes -- a new level of dessert decadence or an insightful critique of air pollution policies? The question was posed at last weekend's "Ideas City," a New Museum festival in New York City that mixed street stands and speaker panels to examine current and future urban environments. Borrowing its theme from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, this year's rendition promised engagement with voices and topics that remain transparent or unseen. Evidently, one such entity is smog, and making it visible meant making it edible.
Vendors positioned outside at Manhattan's Rivington and Bowery offered free, bite-sized meringues in three flavors: "London-Style Pea-Souper," "Atlantic-Style Biogenic Photochemical" and "Los Angeles in the 1950s." The names were pristine, the wording ready for retweet, but I wanted a clearer explanation of the stunt's political basis, its environmental rationale: "So what exactly ... What are you … Why?" I stuttered. "What's the point?" offered a woman, helpfully, as she passed me a pea-souper. It turned out there wasn't much of a point, or at least not one that she could provide, save a wonderfully detailed explanation of how the meringues are made. Based on consultation with professors at UC Riverside, the inventor developed a series of containers that house ingredients akin to trash, like orange peels and diesel. When heated under UV light, they combine to form the noxious fumes in which egg whites are beaten. Since meringue is 90 percent air, smog meringue is 90 percent smog! Different ingredients are selected for each urban airscape. London requires a sulfurous kick, while the Atlanta recipe calls for a pinch of local pine. Listening to the taste profiles, I found, ironically, that any dangers from those ingredients had faded back to Calvino's invisible realm. Games of molecular gastronomy had taken priority.
An Edible Geography piece from Nicola Twilley, the mastermind behind the smog meringue endeavor, offered a more compelling explanation for the whimsical treats: "Our hope is that the meringues will serve as a kind of 'Trojan treat,' creating a visceral experience of disgust and fear that prompts a much larger conversation about the aesthetics and politics of urban air pollution, as well as its health and environmental effects." Let's parse out that Homeric metaphor: an outwardly attractive dessert, once ingested, releases a team of toxic warriors -- like those hidden inside history's infamous horse -- that furtively infiltrate a body. But once inside, does chaos ensue? Back in Troy, the horse's initial sweetness was pretty clearly outweighed by the siege's catastrophic repercussions. But with the smog meringue, it's just the opposite. Our digestive systems, Twilley explains, render the treat less dangerous than inhaling toxins -- and they actually taste pretty good. So much for a fall.
On top of the failed metaphor, instead of ushering discussion, the meringues provoked a series of aestheticized tweets and Instagram posts, most of which focused on the quirky idea of the dessert instead of any conversations about pollution. Perhaps, in another era, this would not have been the case, but in today's cult of circulated images, clever captions can bring more likes and more social validation than serious content. So smog becomes a fun-flavor instead of an invisible force to be feared. This turn to the frivolous is not the fate of all smog-inspired art. In "Smog Free Project," Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde has developed an ambitious "smog vacuum cleaner" meant to make a tangible impact on air conditions in first Rotterdam, then China. Cai Guo-Quiang's "Ninth Wave" relied on spectacle, but it managed a mix of forceful and grim, similarly addressing China's pollution crisis with a harrowing display of ill animals.
Twilley's post shies away from this bleakness, bookending its environmental critique with reflections on "aerior": a reworking of the term "terroir" to describe the infusion of atmosphere -- rather than soil -- into taste. Future projects, she writes, include matching (presumably haute) street food menus to city-specific air tastes and developing devices that add olfactory "smog seasoning" to meals. Overall, a gesture was made at pollution critique, but meringues gravitate toward culinary fancies rather than meaningful discussion or true aesthetic intervention. Ideas City had the right impulse to make the invisible visible, but we must be cautious with the forms that visibility takes. Rivington and Bowery is a far cry from Troy, and any horse that is too showy, too saccharine will blind us to the severity of what lies hidden inside.
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 Rows of rigidly posed, plastic-looking green figures stand at attention. Guns in tow, they're dwarfed by the vast expanse of desert surrounding them. But these are no toy soldiers. The subjects of Simon B. Thorpe's photographs are real men, modeled to look like the symbols of so many childhood playtimes. Thorpe became interested in calling attention to the ongoing conflict in Western Sahara, a disputed territory which Thorpe says has received inadequate media coverage, after embarking on a project about land mine victims. In an email to The Huffington Post, he said staging actual soldiers as mere toys "fit perfectly with the situation on the ground," and allowed "people in the West to have an emotional, physical and nostalgic response to a completely foreign reality, triggered by a familiar symbol of their own childhood and culture." Contrasting Thorpe's bird's-eye imagery of make-believe fighters are zoomed-in, head-on portraits of Western Saharan soldiers, most wearing anguished expressions, with their eyes cast downward. Though their features are clear and humanizing, their shared solemnity lends to the project's overall tone of our unfortunate tendency to view soldiers as anonymous harbingers of pain rather than emotional individuals. Thorpe arranged these portraits, as well as the staged images of the soldiers posing as toys, through a collaboration with a commander of the Liberated Western Sahara region, with whom communication was difficult due to the area's isolation and the language barrier between the two of them. Though arduous, working directly with Western Saharan soldiers was essential to the themes and mood of the project -- calling attention to "a powerless state of being." |
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 Imagine "Game of Thrones" with Michael Fassbender speaking Shakespearean. Then you've got "Macbeth."The first teaser trailer for Justin Kurzel's "Macbeth" shows Fassbender's titular fighter covered in streaks of dirt and blood on the battlefield. After receiving a prophecy that he will be King, Macbeth slips into the King's tent with a dagger. Between brooding looks of stern conviction from Fassbender, intense battle scenes and Marion Cotillard as Lady MacBeth, Kurzel's adaptation is sure to be an epic awards contender. The film was also nominated for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, so there's a lot to look forward to. "Macbeth" does not yet have a U.S. release date. |
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In Japan, the color red has varied meanings, depending on its shade. On the country's flag, a bold, red circle depicts the vivacity of the sun; on clothing and makeup worn by women beginning in the Heian period, a deep red dye made from safflower denoted rank.
 This crimson-like hue, along with other colors symbolic and not, was added with paint to photos taken in 1865 by Italian-British photographer Felice Beato. A prolific chronicler of the East, Beato was granted access to far-flung areas of Japan seldom seen by Westerners of his time. Though his earlier work in China has been characterized as imperialistic, his colorized pictures of samurai and courtesans from the Japanese Edo period have been lauded for capturing their subjects more honestly. In the below images, a long-haired woman gazes apprehensively at the camera while bathing; two sumo wrestlers pose in unison; a crew of proud samurai don blue uniforms. Beato's added shades of crimson and cherry give the viewer a fuller view of what the country was like just before Western infiltration. |
 TOKYO (AP) — North Korean space agency officials say the country is developing a more advanced Earth observation satellite and are defending their right to conduct rocket launches whenever they see fit, despite protests by the United States and others that the launches are aimed primarily at honing military-use technologies.The North launched its first and only satellite in 2012. The claim that it is working on another, made in an interview last week with an AP Television crew in Pyongyang, comes amid a flurry of attention to the country's fledgling space agency, including a visit by leader Kim Jong Un to a new satellite control center that was repeatedly broadcast on North Korean TV early last month. "We are developing a more advanced Earth observation satellite and when it's complete, before launching it, we will inform international organizations and other countries," Paek Chang Ho, vice director of the scientific research and development department of the North's space agency, said in the interview. Paek did not provide further details of what the satellite will do, how close it is to completion, when development began or when the next launch might be. Speculation the North may be planning a rocket launch to mark the 70th anniversary this October of the ruling Korean Workers Party heated up after the release of recent satellite imagery at North Korea's Sohae rocket launch site. Analysts at the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies say the images show significant new construction. Concern has also been rising over North Korea's weapons development. The North recently claimed it tested a new type of missile from a submarine and reiterated that it had built a nuclear warhead small enough to be mounted on a long-range missile. Outside analysts are skeptical about both claims, but they believe the North has built a small but growing nuclear bomb arsenal and advanced its missile program since international nuclear disarmament talks stalled in early 2009. Paek, echoing the North's often-repeated public statements about its intentions, dismissed any linkage between the space program and weapons development. "Our National Aerospace Development Administration has peaceful objectives," he said. "America and its impure allies are always trying to persecute us ... We will continue launching satellites in the designated place when necessary and whether it is recognized or not. The high dignity of our republic will be exalted." The North was strongly criticized by Washington and subjected to tougher sanctions by the United Nations after the 2012 rocket launch carrying its first satellite. Most experts believe that launch did in fact place a satellite into orbit, though it's unclear whether the spacecraft was able to do anything beyond that. Opinion is divided over whether the North's primary goal was to bolster national pride with a high-profile technological achievement or, as Washington maintains, to move a step closer toward being able to field a long-range missile that could threaten U.S. cities. It could be a combination of both, as was the case with the United States and the Soviet Union during their own Cold War space race years. Either way, there is no doubt the North is actively promoting its space program to its people as a symbol of national accomplishment and prestige. Mock-ups, big and small, of the blue-and-white Unha-3 rocket launched three years ago are common in Pyongyang. Children climb on them in playgrounds; they are featured in amusement parks, assembly halls and even flower exhibitions. One of the catchiest tunes by North Korea's most popular singing group — the Moranbong Band — commemorated the launch as evidence of how the nation is single-mindedly roaring off into the future. "The eagerness of our people for space development and conquest is becoming the mainstream of the era and it cannot be dammed up," Paek said. Yun Chang Hyok, vice chief of the space agency's research institute, said North Korea is also looking into developing and launching a communications satellite, and sees weather satellites as potentially useful for agricultural forecasting and planning. He said Pyongyang believes investment in space technology is good policy, even in a country like the North that is strapped for resources, because its ripple effects through the economy bring "eightfold" benefits. "Outer space is becoming more of crucial part of people's lives," he said. "It is impossible to establish a powerful country without the development of space technology." |
 In a television address on Thursday, former FIFA vice president Jack Warner claimed to have substantial evidence of the soccer organization's alleged corruption. Speaking from his native Trinidad and Tobago, Warner, who for 21 years served as the president of CONCACAF, soccer's North and Central American governing body, said that he feared for his life, but was prepared to unleash all of his knowledge of FIFA's wrongdoings. "I will no longer keep secrets for them," he said, before adding, "I reasonably actually fear for my life." Last week, Warner and 13 other top FIFA officials were included in a 47-count indictment from the U.S. Department of Justice, and were subsequently arrested. While most of the Swiss-assisted, U.S.-led arrests happened near FIFA's headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, Warner was arrested and released on bail in Trinidad. Warner claims that he was "afforded no due process," and continued to deny all charges. In 2011, he had stepped down as CONCACAF president amid bribery allegations. In his Thursday speech, which was broadcast as a paid political advertisement, he claimed to have financial evidence that would link FIFA officials with the 2010 Trinidad election, and that he would be handing it over to his lawyers. While he has yet to tangibly produce any of the evidence he alleges to have, Warner said that he possessed documents that "also deal with my knowledge of transactions at FIFA, including -- but not limited to -- its president, Mr. Sepp Blatter." "Not even death will stop the avalanche that is coming," Warner said. "The die is cast. There can be no turning back. Let the chips fall where they fall." Blatter, who resigned from the FIFA presidency just four days after being reelected to a fifth term, has yet to respond to Warner's allegations. Warner's stunning address came hours after Chuck Blazer, an ex-FIFA official, saw his 2013 guilty plea released. In those court documents, Blazer admits to bribery in connection with the 1998 and 2010 World Cup bids. On Wednesday, Interpol added Warner and five other FIFA officials to their most wanted list, issuing an international "red notice" on the men for charges of racketeering and corruption. If Warner tries to leave Trinidad, the Interpol alert puts him at risk for arrest anywhere he travels. |
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 Context: In April 2015 Anders Kompass, an experienced human rights officer at the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), was suspended by the High Commissioner for three months. During this time, the UN is carrying out an investigation of the events surrounding his transmission in late July 2014 of a report containing multiple allegations of sex abuse of displaced children by French troops in the Central African Republic (CAR). In May the UN Dispute Tribunal ruled that Kompass' suspension was improper, and he returned to work. The internal investigation continues, but it has been so controversial that yesterday the Secretary General announced that he would convene an independent inquiry.Meanwhile, misinformation and disinformation continue to surround the Kompass episode. What follows is an effort to separate the fact from the fiction. Myth 1: The French troops were UN Peacekeeping troops. Fact 1: The troops implicated in the abuse were French troops -- the SANGARIS operation -- deployed to the CAR in response to UN Security Council Resolution 2127. They were under French command, and only French law enforcement had the jurisdiction to discipline them. Further, the French were accompanied in the CAR by military troops from Chad and Equatorial Guinea, and military personnel from these two countries were also implicated in sexual abuse of children in the CAR. Myth 2: The UN was therefore not responsible for the abuse. Fact 2: While the UN was not responsible for the abuse that had occurred before victims reported what had happened, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) was responsible for taking steps to report the abuse to the appropriate jurisdiction once the office had knowledge of the allegations and information sufficient to address them. The mandate of the OHCHR reads: The mandate includes preventing human rights violations, securing respect for all human rights, promoting international cooperation to protect human rights, coordinating related activities throughout the United Nations, and strengthening and streamlining the United Nations system in the field of human rights. In addition to its mandated responsibilities, the Office leads efforts to integrate a human rights approach within all work carried out by United Nations agencies. It is noteworthy that the first aspect of the OHCHR mandate is "preventing human rights violations...." Myth 3: Anders Kompass leaked the report of sex abuse to the French Mission in Geneva. Fact 3: As a senior official with the OHCHR, Anders Kompass transmitted the report formally and confidentially to the French Mission with a signed cover letter for purposes of official investigation (see paragraph 4). In return, he received a formal response expressing the appreciation of the French government for the report and an intention to act immediately. The French Mission responded to Kompass: Given the seriousness of the allegations and the need to check the reality, it was immediately decided to go to court which will decide on the action to be taken, including possible criminal prosecution. Moreover, a disciplinary command investigation was launched immediately, under the responsibility of the General Staff of the Armies. (Translated from French) Myth 4: Kompass violated UN protocols by disclosing the report to the responsible government without redacting victims' names and descriptions of suspects. Fact 4: Because Kompass did not leak the report but rather transmitted it through the Mission to French law enforcement (see above), it would have been senseless to redact names and identities. Kompass transmitted the report to the French government so that French law enforcement could investigate, and therefore the identities of victims and perpetrators were evidence to be used to advance the investigation. Myth 5: The United Nations (the OHCHR) is concerned about the disclosure of the report because its protocols were violated by the disclosure of victims' identities. Fact 5: The OHCHR has no clear protocols for addressing ongoing, immediate and serious sexual abuse of children, and this is precisely why Anders Kompass finds himself at the center of this firestorm. Nonetheless, he is a senior OHCHR official with 30 years of experience in the field of human rights reporting. In a situation like this, where crimes are committed against child victims, he had to use his best judgment about how to proceed. He reported the evidence, with first names and nicknames of the victims and identifying characteristics of the perpetrators, the location of the camp in question, and the character of the abuses to law enforcement through official channels. Appropriate protocols must be developed. Myth 6: The United Nations facilitated the French investigation. Fact 6: The OHCHR appears to have obstructed the French investigation. The Human Rights Officer responsible for the report informed her/his supervisors that he/she had been contacted by French police in early August 2014. The Office of Legal Affairs (OLA) at the OHCHR then informed the French investigators that the reporting official could not be interviewed but would respond to written questions, thus slowing the investigation. The Human Rights Officer reported in a statement to investigators that he/she heard nothing about the case between September 2014 and March 2015. French authorities were negotiating contact with the officer in November and December 2014, but he/she did not receive a list of questions to be answered from investigators until early March 2015. The questions came through OLA. At the same time, the Deputy High Commissioner asserted that he and the High Commissioner did not pursue the issue because they believed that the French were handling it (page 2 of statement, top). Myth 7: The oversight offices of the United Nations, which operate independently of each other as well as impartially, are conducting a legitimate investigation of Kompass to clarify his responsibilities and actions in this episode. Fact 7: Before information was gathered, the Ethics Office, the Chief of Staff of the Secretary General, the Deputy High Commissioner and the Under-Secretary for OIOS consulted each other to determine how to proceed against Kompass. Moreover, the Chief of Staff informed the Fifth Committee and the press that she believed Kompass to be guilty of breaching OHCHR protocols while the investigation -- which was launched collectively by putatively independent oversight offices -- was underway. Myth 8: In proceeding as they did, transmitting information from the interviews with abused children only internally at the OHCHR and UNICEF, the reporting officials acted responsibly and properly. Fact 8: As cited above, the first responsibility of an official of the OHCHR is to prevent human rights violations. According to Inter Press Service: The documents show that the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) had evidence of abuse by the soldiers on May 19, 2014. Then, during a June 18 interview, a 13-year-old boy said he couldn't number all the times he'd been forced to perform oral sex on soldiers but the most recent had been between June 8 and 12, 2014 -- several weeks after the first UNICEF interview. Remaining Questions: Under the protocols in place for documenting and reporting sex abuse among soldiers deployed under a resolution of the UN Security Council, when reports involve the armed forces of a member state and information has been provided to two different UN entities:
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 JIANLI, China (AP) — Disaster teams that have recovered 77 bodies from a capsized cruise ship in the Yangtze River finished righting the previously overturned vessel on Friday to quicken the search for more than 360 other victims still missing.The operation started late Thursday to right the Eastern Star and shifted the focus from finding survivors from Monday night's sudden capsizing in a severe storm to retrieving bodies. State broadcaster CCTV announced Friday morning that the boat had been righted, and that teams would still try to lift the vessel even though the water inside it was weighing it down. Transport Ministry spokesman Xu Chengguang said earlier that the operation would involve divers putting steel bars underneath the ship, which would then be lifted by two 500-ton cranes. A huge net was placed near the cranes and another one a few meters (yards) downstream to catch any bodies. Two smaller cranes were also on site and boats were stopped from entering the area. Authorities say 14 people survived the disaster, some by jumping from the ship during the early moments and swimming or drifting ashore. Three of them were pulled by divers from air pockets inside the overturned hull Tuesday after rescuers heard yells for help coming from inside. Xu told a news conference that no further signs of life had been found and the chance of finding anyone else alive was "very slim." On Thursday, rescuers had cut three holes into the overturned hull in unsuccessful attempts to find more survivors. More than 200 divers have worked underwater in three shifts to search the ship's cabins one by one, state broadcaster CCTV said. Rescuers pulled out dozens of bodies Thursday which were taken to Jianli's Rongcheng Crematorium, in Hubei province, where relatives tried to identify them. Many of the more than 450 people on board the multi-decked, 251-foot (77-meter) -long Eastern Star were reported to be retirees taking in the scenic vistas of the Yangtze on a cruise from Nanjing to the southwestern city of Chongqing. "I can't imagine how terrifying it must have been for them," said farmer Wang Xun, who was among the crowd observing developments outside the crematorium. "Old people should be with their families and go peacefully, not like this." The capsize of the Eastern Star will likely become the country's deadliest boat disaster in seven decades, and Chinese authorities have launched a high-profile response that has included sending Premier Li Keqiang to the accident site, while tightly controlling media coverage. The Communist Party's Politburo Standing Committee, the country's highest power, convened a meeting and issued a directive for officials to step up efforts to control public opinion about the disaster response, while ordering them to both "understand the sorrow of the families" and "concretely preserve social stability." The survivors included the ship's captain and chief engineer, both of whom have been taken into police custody. Some relatives have questioned whether the captain should have brought the ship ashore at the first sign of a storm, and whether everything possible was done to ensure the safety of the passengers after the accident. They have demanded help from officials in Nanjing and Shanghai to travel to the site in unruly scenes that have drawn a heavy police response. Records from a maritime agency show the capsized ship was cited for safety violations two years ago. Authorities in Nanjing held the ship after it violated standards during a safety inspection campaign in 2013, according to a report on the city's Maritime Safety website, which didn't specify the violations. The shallow-draft boat, which was not designed to withstand winds as heavy as an ocean-going vessel can, overturned in what Chinese weather authorities have called a cyclone with winds up to 130 kilometers (80 miles) per hour. The sudden capsizing meant many passengers were unable to grab life jackets, Zhong Shoudao, president of the Chongqing Boat Design Institute, said Wednesday. Access to the accident site was blocked by police and paramilitary troops stationed along the Yangtze embankment. China's deadliest maritime disaster in recent decades was when the Dashun ferry caught fire and capsized off Shandong province in November 1999, killing about 280. The Eastern Star disaster could become China's deadliest boat accident since the sinking of the SS Kiangya off Shanghai in 1948, which is believed to have killed anywhere from 2,750 to nearly 4,000 people. ___ Watt reported from Beijing. Associated Press writers Jack Chang and Ian Mader and news assistant Yu Bing in Beijing, video journalist Helene Franchineau in Jianli, China, and Elaine Kurtenbach in Tokyo contributed to this report. |
