North Korea has cancelled a joint cultural performance with the South planned ahead of the winter Olympic Games, South Korea’s unification ministry said Monday.

Pyongyang blamed South Korean media for encouraging “insulting” public sentiment regarding the North and cancelled the February 4th event to be held in the North to celebrate the upcoming games in PyeongChang, South Korea. Seoul called the decision “very regrettable” and urged its neighbor to uphold all agreements made between the two countries, Reuters reported.

Last week, twelve North Korean female ice hockey players crossed the border to join their counterparts in the South to form the first-ever unified Korean Olympic team since the two sides split in the 1950s civil war.

The surprise offer by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to send a delegation to the PyeongChang Games during his New Year’s Day speech paved the way for restored dialogue between Pyongyang and Seoul, which had been frozen due to North Korea’s development of its nuclear and ballistic missile weapons programs in defiance of international sanctions.

The talks led to an agreement for both sides to march in the February 9 opening ceremonies under a unified flag, as well as the formation of the joint women’s hockey squad.

But South Koreans have grown increasingly angry over the combined team, believing their compatriots will lose playing time to the North Koreans and that President Moon Jae-in gave up too much to the North in his eagerness to have Pyongyang participated in the Games.

 
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Politics took the stage at the 60th annual Grammy awards this year, along with some great music. 

Hillary Clinton, who ran against Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign, made a surprise appearance in a pre-taped skit about people auditioning to be the voice for the spoken word recording of Michael Wolff’s best-seller “Fire and Fury” about Trump’s first unconventional year in office. 

Clinton followed John Legend, Cher, Snoop Dogg, Cardi B and DJ Khaled who also “auditioned.” Grammys host James Corden told Clinton that she beat out the competition to win. 

“The Grammys in the bag,” Clinton said at the end. Political observers say Clinton thought her presidential win was “in the bag.”

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley did not see the humor. “I have always loved the Grammys, but to have artists read the Fire and Fury book killed it,” she tweeted. “Don’t ruin great music with trash. Some of us love music without the politics thrown in it.

Neil Portnow, head of the recording academy, told the Associated Press that he thought Clinton’s appearance was more satirical than political. 

The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted: “Getting to read a #fakenews book excerpt at the Grammys seems like a great consolation prize for losing the presidency.” 

Singer/actor Janelle Monae, meanwhile, reminded the audience that the music industry needed to face its sexual harassment and gender discrimination issues. “To those who would dare try and silence us, we offer you two words: Time’s Up,” 

Monae introduced singer Kesha who has long sought to break her deal with her producer whom she says raped her. 

Kesha’s song “Praying” included the lyrics, “After everything you’ve done, I can thank you for how strong I have become.” 

Cuban American singer Camila Cabello spoke out for legal protection for “dreamers,” the immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and do not have legal status. “This country was built by dreamers for dreamers,” she said. 

Cabello introduced a pre-recorded performance by the band U2, who sang their song “Get Out of Your Own Way” on a barge in the New York harbor with the State of Liberty, the beacon that welcomed millions of immigrants to their new lives in the U.S. in the background. 
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Bruno Mars was the big winner Sunday night at the 60th annual Grammy Awards in New York, winning album, record, and song of the year. Mars also won Grammys for best R&B album, best R&B performance and best R&B song. 

In accepting the top prize of album of the year for “24K Magic,” Mars said the album’s songs were “written with love” and he just “wanted everybody to dance” to the album’s tunes. 

Mars also joined flamboyant rapper Cardi B on the stage Sunday to perform their hit Finesse. 

In contrast to Cardi B., Pink stood alone on the stage, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, to sing her new song “Wild Hearts Can’t Be Broken.” 

Pink was nominated Sunday for pop solo performance for “What About Us,” but that prize went to Ed Sheeran for “Shape of You.” 

This year’s show was hosted by late night talk show host and musician James Corden. 

Rapper Kendrick Lamar took home Grammys for best rap album, rap song and rap performance.

Crooner Tony Bennett’s album “Tony Bennett Celebrates 90” won the Grammy for best traditional pop vocal album.

Comedian Dave Chappelle beat out Jerry Seinfeld, Kevin Hart, Sarah Silverman and Jim Gaffigan, to win the best comedy album prize for the double album of his two Netflix specials – “The Age of Spin” and “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” 

Alessia Cara won the best new artist Grammy. She said she had dreamed of winning a Grammy since she was a child, but she didn’t have a speech prepared. 

She said, “I’ve been like pretend winning Grammys since I was a kid like in the shower, so you’d think I have the speech thing down, but I absolutely don’t.”
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Stars, including Lady Gaga and Kelly Clarkson, turned out on the Grammys red carpet Sunday displaying white roses in solidarity with the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements against sexual misconduct on music’s biggest night for what is usually the wildest display of fashion during awards season.

Gaga was in a black lace top and leggings with a full skirt and train, white rose in place and her hair swept into a fishtail braid with black pins. Her signature towering platform shoes – black boots this time around- were on her feet. Rita Ora also wowed in black, a gown with a silver embellished lining open on one side to the hip. She, too, had a white rose pinned on.

There was lots of black, perhaps spillover from the anti-sexual misconduct message of the recent Golden Globes, but there was also plenty of color.

Elton John didn’t disappoint on that score in a geometric-pattern, blue, gold and red sparkler of a jacket from Gucci, encrusted sunglasses to match. Country’s trio Midland – Mark Wystrach, Cameron Duddy and Jess Carson – went big in the cowboy hat department, including a topper with a rainbow feather to match a similarly adorned jacket for one.

Multiple-nominee Sza was accompanied by her grandmother and donned embellished white, her hair loose and natural. Cardi B made a big statement in white with a short tiered dress and train.

“It was an interesting choice for her,” Cosmopolitan’s senior fashion editor said of Cardi. “I loved it. It was very playful and fun.”

Sam Smith was in a green suit – yes he wore the rose – and a red scoop-neck shirt underneath, while Ne-Yo wore a yellow jacket. In a red tuxedo look, including red bow tie, was DJ Khaled and his adorable, mini-me 1-year-old son, who got a matching red suit.

Khaled called Asahd: “My partner in crime, my best friend, my biggest blessing. … When he smiles it’s like God smiling on me.”

Khaled’s red was a win for Reid as well: “I thought it was very whimsical and he did it well.”

Maren Morris was in a chain-link silver sparkler that brought the wow in a barely there design. Also in silver: A pregnant Chrissie Teigen as she posed with husband John Legend.

“My favorite is definitely Chrissie Teigen in her all-silver sequin look. I think she’s taking maternity style to the next level.”

Lana Del Rey, meanwhile, joined Sir Elton in Gucci, an angelic gown in cream with a high slit and crystal star theme, including a star head piece. Ashanti was a princess in long-sleeved gold.

Rapper K. Flay, in a black tuxedo jacket, chose a Time’s Up button instead of the flower but noted all such symbols are important expressions of solidarity for women. Songwriter Diane Warren, a 15-time Grammy nominee, wore black and white and went her own way on symbols. She wore white gloves with “Girl” on one hand and “Power” on the other, explaining: “I didn’t want to wear the rose. I’m a rebel.”

Nominees The Secret Sisters won for largest white roses, noting it’s time for the music industry to step up and better acknowledge sexual misconduct.

Perhaps the New York vibe – the Grammys hadn’t been held here in 15 years – added to the parade of music men and women opting for black, including traditional tuxedos and suits. Women in black went for both edgy and chic.

Country star Reba McEntire, the latest pitch person as Col. Sanders for KFC, was among them in a Jovani sleeveless studded gown in black with silver embellishment, white rose in place as a reminder to everybody to “treat each other like we want to be treated. It’s the golden rule.”

Clarkson’s black gown was embellished in silver and gold. Her white rose was long stemmed and she carried it as opposed to pinning it on. Miley Cyrus also opted for the long-stem rose option to go with her black, skinny-legged trouser look.

Newcomer Julia Michaels was in lavender, her arm tattoos on display in an open-sided long gown. The deep V-neck with a butterfly motif was by Paolo Sebastian.

Veteran performer Andra Day, nominated for one Grammy, popped in pink trimmed with red, her hair up in a beehive. It was a long tuxedo-style dress with a high side slit. Why did she carry a white rose?

“For me, Time’s Up means time’s up on being silent about it,” she said. “I think it also means understanding when we’ve been taken advantage of and when we’ve been abused.”

Joy Villa, ever provocative on the red carpet, made a statement last year in a pro-President Donald Trump dress. This year, she wore a white gown with a rainbow uterus with fetus on one side and carried a “Choose Life” handbag. Oh, and a huge crown topped her head.
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Robert Parry, a longtime investigative journalist who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1985 for his Associated Press exclusives about the CIA’s production of an assassination manual for Nicaraguan rebels, has died. He was 68.

Parry died Saturday in hospice care after a series of strokes brought on by undiagnosed pancreatic cancer, said his wife, Diane Duston.

Parry joined the AP in 1974 and went on to work in the Washington bureau, where he covered the Iran-Contra scandal as it rocked the Reagan administration. His work on the scandal also brought a George Polk Award in 1984.

After leaving the AP in 1987, Parry worked for Newsweek until 1990 and then became an investigative reporter for the PBS series “Frontline.”

In 1995, frustrated with what he saw as dwindling venues for serious investigative reporting, Parry founded the Consortium for Independent Journalism. Its website, Consortiumnews.com, sought to provide a home for such reporting in the early days of the internet, though it struggled financially and relied on contributions.

In a tribute posted on the site, son Nat Parry said, “With my dad, professional work has always been deeply personal, and his career as a journalist was thoroughly intertwined with his family life.”

Parry was born on June 24, 1949, in Hartford, Connecticut. He graduated from Colby College with a degree in English in 1971. He worked in Massachusetts journalism before joining the AP.

The author of six books, Parry received the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence from the Nieman Foundation in 2015 and the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2017. In his remarks in London at the presentation of the Gellhorn Prize, Britain-based journalist John Pilger said, “Bob Parry’s career has been devoted to finding out, lifting rocks – and supporting others who do the same.”

Survivors include his wife, a former Associated Press newswoman; sons Sam Parry and Jeff Parry of Arlington and Nat Parry of Copenhagen, Denmark; daughter Elizabeth Parry of Alexandria, Virginia; and six grandchildren.

A memorial service is planned for later in the year.
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For musicians from the West African nation of Burkina Faso, a nomination for a Grammy Award should have been the crowning achievement of a musical career.

Instead, musicians based in Bobo-Dioulasso, whose work is featured on the three-disk compilation “Bobo Yeye,” didn’t even know they had been nominated or that the album even existed.

“As a musician, I am totally disappointed to learn that we have spent time moaning, suffering and that someone else can just make a compilation of our music and that it is going for an award,” musician Stanislas Soré told VOA French to Africa Service on Friday.

Soré is a member of the Volta Jazz group, whose songs are part of the album titled “Bobo Yeye, Belle époque in Upper Volta,” which is nominated for two Grammy Awards.

It is a compilation of recordings in the 1970s in Bobo, second-largest city of Burkina Faso, then known as Upper Volta.

The news of the Grammy nomination surprised the musicians, who wondered how their music was put on CDs and distributed worldwide without their knowledge or consent. It turns out French music producer Florent Mazzoleni made the compilation produced by The Numero Group, a Chicago-based production company.

“These are artists that I have always admired and I wrote about 20 books on African music, including a book in 2015 called ‘Burkina Faso Modern Music Voltaic,’” Mazzoleni said in a phone interview.

Mazzoleni said he wanted “to pay tribute to all those people in the shadows, who made the culture of Bobo-Dioulasso.”

At the time, he said, Upper Volta was a poor country with limited ability for people to communicate with the outside world or record music. “People recorded with what they could get and yet they managed to create one of the most fascinating modern music of the continent,” Mazzoleni said.

Disagreement over book, compilation

But the artists themselves are not happy, saying he has been unfair to them. They pointed out that when they met him, he talked only about a book project.

“All I know, there was this white guy who came here; he tried to get information on what life was like in the orchestras of the old days. We understood he was going to make a book of the history of our music. But when it comes to producing a compilation or stuff like that, we’ve never talked about that, never, never, ever,” Soré, of Volta Jazz, said.

His account was backed up by Nouhoun Traoré Banakourou, saxophonist and guitarist of the group Echo Del Africa, who acknowledged that he worked with Mazzoleni on a book project, but not a compilation.

“What he is doing now is not what he offered me. When he came for the book, my son asked him for a gift for me. He gave me 200,000 CFA francs (around $380) that day,” Nouhoun Traoré recalls.

“He took a recording of our boss, Tanou Bassoumalo, an old recording, and told me he would see if he can recover the tracks and fix them. He left and never came back. Nor did he call me, or say anything else,” Traoré said.

The French producer denies these allegations. He claims to have followed all the necessary steps. “I have all the permissions, all the contracts,” he told VOA.

“I met the founders of the group, the people who had the contracts at the time, what more do you want me to tell you? Obviously, I cannot meet everyone. Obviously, when you have a project like this that comes to fruition, people talk about it and the fact that it is nominated for the Grammy Awards, it attracts the interest of some people,” Mazzoleni said.

Whatever the outcome at the award ceremony on Sunday in Madison Square Garden, Burkinabe musicians and citizens see it as an honor for their music and culture, which is getting world exposure, despite the controversy.
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Without the use of traditional instruments and in an interconnected world, what makes a Chinese composition distinctively Chinese? The Juilliard School’s Focus! Festival 2018 seeks to challenge our preconceptions of the 1.4 billion-population nation, led by a cast of contemporary Chinese composers and acclaimed Juilliard orchestral students. VOA’s Ramon Taylor sat down with one of China’s most prominent young conductors and the festival’s founding director on the evolving commonalities and differences of orchestral music, East and West.
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Comic strip artist Mort Walker, a World War II veteran who satirized the Army and tickled millions of newspaper readers with the antics of the lazy private Beetle Bailey, died Saturday. He was 94. 

Walker died at his home in Stamford, Connecticut, said Greg Walker, his eldest son and a collaborator. His father’s advanced age was the cause of death, he said.

Walker began publishing cartoons at age 11 and was involved with more than a half dozen comic strips in his career, including Hi and Lois, Boner’s Ark and Sam & Silo. But he found his greatest success drawing slacker Beetle, his hot-tempered sergeant and the rest of the gang at fictional Camp Swampy for nearly 70 years.

‘Beetle’ was originally ‘Spider’

The character that was to become Beetle Bailey made his debut as Spider in Walker’s cartoons published by The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s. Walker changed Spider’s name and launched Beetle Bailey as a college humor strip in 1950.

At first the strip failed to attract readers, and King Features Syndicate considered dropping it after just six months, Walker said in a 2000 interview with The Associated Press. The syndicate suggested Beetle join the Army after the start of the Korean War, Walker said.

“I was kind of against it, because after World War II, Bill Mauldin and Sad Sack were fading away,” he said. But his misgivings were overcome and Beetle “enlisted” in 1951.

Walker attributed the success of the strip to Beetle’s indolence and reluctance to follow authority.

“Most people are sort of against authority,” he said. “Here’s Beetle always challenging authority. I think people relate to it.”

Beetle Bailey led to spinoff comic strip Hi and Lois, which he created with Dik Browne, in 1954. The premise was that Beetle went home on furlough to visit his sister Lois and brother-in-law Hi.

Fellow cartoonists remembered Walker on Saturday as a pleasant man who adored his fans. Bill Morrison, president of the National Cartoonists Society, called Walker the definition of “cartoonist” in a post on the society’s website.

“He lived and breathed the art every day of his life. He will be sorely missed by his friends in the NCS and by a world of comic strip fans,” Morrison said.

Fellow cartoonist Mark Evanier said on his website that Walker was “delightful to be around and always willing to draw Beetle or Sarge for any of his fans. He sure had a lot of them.”

Beetle Bailey, which appeared in as many as 1,800 newspapers, sometimes sparked controversy. The Tokyo editions of the military newspaper Stars & Stripes dropped it in 1954 for fear that it would encourage disrespect of its officers. But ensuing media coverage spurred more than 100 newspapers to add the strip.

Shortly after President Bill Clinton took office, Walker drew a strip suggesting that the draft be retroactive in order to send Clinton to Vietnam. Walker said he received hundreds of angry letters from Clinton supporters.

Sensitivity training for general

For years, Walker drew Camp Swampy’s highest-ranking officer, General Amos Halftrack, ogling his well-endowed secretary, Miss Buxley. Feminist groups claimed the strip made light of sexual harassment, and Walker said the syndicate wanted him to write out the lecherous general. 

That wasn’t feasible because the general was such a fixture in the strip, Greg Walker said Saturday. His father solved the problem in 1997 by sending Halftrack to sensitivity training.

“That became a whole theme that we could use,” said Greg Walker, who with his brother, Brian, intends to carry on his father’s work. Both have worked in the family business for decades.

Beetle Bailey also featured one of the first African-American characters to be added to a white cast in an established comic strip. (Peanuts had added the character of Franklin in 1968.) Lieutenant Jack Flap debuted in the comic strip’s panels in 1970.

In a 2002 interview, Walker said that comics are filled with stereotypes and he likes to find humor in all characters.

“I like to keep doing something new and different, so people can’t say I’m doing the same thing all the time. I like to challenge myself,” he said.

Walker also created Boner’s Ark in 1968 using his given first name, Addison, as his pen name, and Sam & Silo with Jerry Dumas in 1977. He was the writer of Mrs. Fitz’s Flats with Frank Roberge.

In 1974, he founded the International Museum of Cartoon Art in Connecticut to preserve and honor the art of comics. It moved twice before closing in 2002 in Boca Raton, Florida. Walker changed the name to the National Cartoon Museum and announced in 2005 plans to relocate to the Empire State Building in New York. But the following year, the deal to use that space fell through.

In 2000, Walker was honored at the Pentagon with the Army’s highest civilian award — the Distinguished Civilian Service award — for his work, his military service and his contribution to a new military memorial.

He also developed a reputation for helping aspiring cartoonists with advice.

“I make friends for people,” he said.

Kansas native

Addison Morton Walker was born September 3, 1923, in El Dorado, Kansas, and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri.

In 1943, he was drafted into the U.S. Army, serving in Europe during World War II. He was discharged as a first lieutenant, graduated from the University of Missouri-Columbia and pursued a career as a cartoonist in New York.

Walker most recently oversaw the work of the staff at his Stamford studio, Comicana.

Besides sons Greg and Brian, Walker is survived by his second wife, Catherine; daughters Polly Blackstock and Margie Walker Hauer; sons Neal and Roger Walker; stepdaughters Whitney Prentice and Priscilla Prentice Campbell; and several grandchildren.

Funeral services will be private.
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