French film star Catherine Deneuve received Japan’s most prestigious art award on Tuesday at a ceremony in Tokyo, where she was greeted by Emperor Akihito.

Deneuve received the Praemium Imperiale for her achievement in film and theater performances.

The 84-year-old Akihito, who is abdicating at the end of April, shook hands with Deneuve at a reception afterward and congratulated her, according to Japan’s Kyodo News agency.

Deneuve has appeared in more than 100 films during a career spanning over 60 years.

Deneuve, 75, is currently working on a new film by Japanese award-winning director Hirokazu Koreeda in Paris.

She said at a news conference Monday that she’s lucky to be able to work with Koreeda and thanked him for giving her a break to pick up her award.

 
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More than 40 years after working on the impeachment of Richard Nixon, former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman is back on the case.

This time, it’s with a book: “The Case for Impeaching Trump.”

“The book really forced me to think this through,” Holtzman, a New York Democrat and member of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, said during a recent telephone interview. “There’s so much news every day being thrown at you that it’s hard to separate it all out. When I did, it became clear there was a basis for proclaiming the president had committed high crimes and misdemeanors.”

“The Case for Impeaching Trump” is part of a wave of new books and reissues of older works that is inspired by ongoing debate about President Trump and such allegations as collusion with the Russians during his 2016 campaign and his May 2017 firing of FBI Director James Comey, who had been looking into Trump’s Russia ties. While few imagine Trump’s actual expulsion — a two-thirds vote in the Senate would be required — polls do show backing for impeachment that rivals calls for Nixon’s removal in the final year of his administration. An August Suffolk University/USA TODAY poll found 44 percent saying that the House of Representatives should seriously consider impeaching Trump, and 47 percent opposing. A March 1974 Harris poll, released five months before Nixon’s resignation, had 43 percent supporting his removal.

Holtzman’s book is being published in November by the Skyhorse imprint Hot Books as a response to Alan Dershowitz’s “The Case Against Impeaching Trump,” which the publisher released over the summer. Dershowitz, whose book briefly appeared on The New York Times’ hardcover nonfiction bestseller list, is a retired Harvard Law professor (Holtzman was a former student) and longtime Democrat who has often defended Trump in his media appearances on Fox News and other outlets.

Other recent works include Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz’s “To End a Presidency: The Power of Impeachment” and Allan J. Lichtman’s “The Case for Impeachment,” both written by liberal critics of Trump.

Impeachment books are a specialized genre if only because impeachment itself is relatively rare. Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton are the only presidents who have faced Senate trials after the House of Representatives voted for impeachment, for reasons many scholars have challenged, and neither were voted out. Meanwhile, a handful of federal judges have been ousted, one as recently as 2010.

There has never been a consensus for what merits impeachment, although then-Rep. Gerald Ford may have had the most realistic answer when in 1970 he declared that “An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.” Clinton’s impeachment stemmed from his lying about an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Johnson, a Democrat who fought so-called “Radical Republicans” over his opposition to granting blacks equal rights in the former Confederate states, was nearly unseated in 1868 over whether he had the right to fire Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton.

Article Two, Section Four of the Constitution states that “The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” For Holtzman and Dershowitz, the debate comes down to the meaning of “high crimes.” Dershowitz says that “high crimes” means serious crimes, those that would be punishable for anyone under the law. For instance, he does not consider Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey an impeachable offense, even if his intent was to impede the Russia investigation, because there’s nothing illegal in itself about a president changing FBI directors.

“When the president asked the director of the FBI to drop its investigation into Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, or fired James Comey from the FBI, or provided classified information to the Russians, he was acting within his constitutional powers. Those actions may deserve opprobrium, but they should not be deemed criminal,” Dershowitz writes in his book.

Holtzman says “high crimes” means crimes unique to those in power, like the charges of obstruction of justice faced by Nixon and possibly by Trump. In her book, she quotes impeachment scholars such as the late Raoul Berger and includes a passage by Alexander Hamilton from the Federalist papers, in which he defines impeachable acts as “offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.”

″‘High crime,’ it’s a term of art,” Holtzman told the AP. “Basically, what it means is a crime that can be committed by someone who holds office. This covers crimes of a political nature.”

While some works specifically review Trump’s time in office, others offer a more general history. Oxford University Press has published Michael J. Gerhardt’s “Impeachment: What Everyone Needs to Know” and Yale University Press has reissued “Impeachment: A Handbook,” by the late Yale scholar Charles L. Black Jr., a widely read text during the time of the Watergate scandal that Holtzman quotes in her book.

Also this fall, the Modern Library released “Impeachment: An American History,” including essays by presidential historian Jon Meacham and historian Timothy Naftali, former director of the Nixon presidential library. The book includes an introduction by Jeffrey A. Engel, an author, commentator and founding director of the Center for Presidential History, at Southern Methodist University.

“You are most likely reading this book because of impeachment’s contemporary salience, and also because you realize history matters,” Engel writes. “You know the old aphorism ‘Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it’ is, in fact, wrong. Those who study history are also destined to repeat it. But we are less surprised.”
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When Washington’s $500 million Museum of the Bible held its grand opening in November 2017, attended by Vice President Mike Pence, there were questions even then about the authenticity of its centerpiece collection of Dead Sea Scrolls.

Now the museum has been forced to admit a painful truth: Technical analysis by a team of German scholars has revealed that at least five of the museum’s 16 scroll fragments are apparent forgeries.

The announcement has serious implications not only for the Bible Museum but for other evangelical Christian individuals and institutions who paid top dollar for what now seems to be a massive case of archaeological fraud.

Jeffrey Kloha, chief curator for the Museum of the Bible, said in a statement that the revelation is “an opportunity to educate the public on the importance of verifying the authenticity of rare biblical artifacts, the elaborate testing process undertaken and our commitment to transparency.” 

The scrolls are a collection of ancient Jewish religious texts first discovered in the mid-1940s in caves on the western shore of the Dead Sea in what is now Israel. The massive cache of Hebrew documents is believed to date back to the days of Jesus. With more than 9,000 documents and 50,000 fragments, the entire collection took decades to fully excavate.

Most of the scrolls and fragments are tightly controlled by the Israeli Antiquities Authority. But around 2002, a wave of new fragments began mysteriously appearing on the market, despite skepticism from Biblical scholars.

These fragments, they warned, were specifically designed to target American evangelical Christians, who prize the scrolls. That appears to be exactly what happened; a Baptist seminary in Texas and an evangelical college in California reportedly paid millions to purchase alleged pieces of the scrolls.

Also eagerly buying up fragments was the Green family — evangelical Oklahoma billionaires who run the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores and who famously sued the Obama administration on religious grounds, saying they didn’t want to pay to provide their employees access to the morning-after pill or intrauterine devices.

The Greens are the primary backers of the Museum of the Bible and went on an archaeological acquisition spree in the years leading up to the museum’s opening. In addition to the alleged Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, the Greens ran afoul of the Justice Department, which said they had acquired thousands of smuggled artifacts looted from Iraq and elsewhere. The family agreed last year to return those artifacts and pay a $3 million fine.
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For 150 years, the British Museum has housed one of the iconic, heavy-browed stone figures that Chile’s Easter Island is famous for.

Now the islanders are hoping desperately to get it back.

They plan to build a copy of the four-ton monolith and, potentially swap it for the real thing.

The statue, known as a “moai” and named the Hoa Hakananai’a, is one of hundreds originally found on the island. Carved by Polynesian colonizers somewhere between the 13th and 16th centuries, each of the big-headed figures was considered to represent tribal leaders or deified ancestors.

About a dozen have been removed from the island over the years. Now Camilo Rapu, president of the island’s Ma’u Henua community, said it’s time Hoa Hakananai’a was returned.

The Ma’u Henua community, with Chilean government support, launched a campaign in August to persuade the British Museum and Queen Elizabeth II to return the famous moai — in exchange for an exact replica to be carved on Easter Island.

“Our expert carvers will make a copy in basalt, the original stone used in the Hakananai’a moai, as an offering to Queen Elizabeth in exchange for the original,” Rapu told reporters in Santiago.

The Ma’u Henua have signed an agreement with the Bishop Museum — Hawaii’s largest museum, with a huge collection of Polynesian artifacts — to produce a polycarbonate copy of the Hakananai’a, to be ready by November 3.

The actual carving of the statue will take place on Easter Island, using thousand-year-old Rapa Nui techniques — combined with some modern technology to allow the job to be completed in seven months.

The Hakananai’a moai in the British Museum stands 2.4 meters tall (eight feet) and weighs about four tons.

On November 23, a committee of islanders and Chilean officials plans to travel to London in hopes of negotiating the moai’s return.

“This is a historic demand of the Rapa Nui people,” said Rapu. The Rapa Nui were the island’s aboriginal settlers, and their descendants still make up a large part of the population.

“This moai has a spiritual value; it is part of our family and our culture. We want her (the queen) to understand that for us, this is its value — not as a museum piece,” he said.

The islanders will bring with them a book, in support of their demand, signed by some of the thousands of tourists who every year visit the Pacific island paradise some 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) off Chile’s mainland.

 
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78th Street in Cleveland, Ohio, has been transformed from an industrial area into an art mecca. Once home to a car manufacturer, its old metal doors and freight elevators serve as a setting for bright paintings and abstract sculptures. Maxim Moskalkov has the story.
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It’s been a mystery in the United States since the Great Depression: Who are the 11 men pictured in a famous photograph called “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper”? In the 1932 photo, the construction workers are enjoying their lunch break on a metal beam, 256 meters up in the air above New York City streets. That skyscraper is now part of the Rockefeller Center complex, and that’s where Boris Koltsov went in search of answers. Anna Rice narrates his report.
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Halloween may still be a few weeks away, but New York City is getting ready to be frightened. The Morgan Library and Museum is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s book “Frankenstein,” one of the most famous horror novels of all time. VOA’s Elena Wolf went to the exhibition and got a look at the original Frankenstein manuscript.
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There are more than 650,000 restaurants in the United States, enough to satisfy the pickiest eater. New venues open every day, yet staying in business with such tremendous competition is no easy task. One restaurant has been able to stay open for nearly 200 years. Karina Bafradzhian takes us to an oyster house in Boston, Massachusetts, that stakes its claim as the oldest restaurant in the U.S.
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Melissa Madara was not surprised to receive death threats Friday as her Brooklyn witchcraft store prepared to host a public hexing of newly confirmed U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh this weekend.

The planned casting of an anti-Kavanaugh spell, one of the more striking instances of politically disgruntled Americans turning to the supernatural when frustrated by democracy, has drawn backlash from some Christian groups but support from like-minded witch covens.

“It gives the people who are seeking agency a little bit of chance to have that back,” Madara said. The ritual was to be livestreamed on Facebook and Instagram at 8 p.m. EDT Saturday (1200 GMT Sunday).

Seated at a desk phone among bird skulls and crystal balls at Catland Books, the occult shop she co-owns, Madara said the Kavanaugh hex is expected to be the most popular event the store has hosted since its 2013 opening, including spells aimed at President Donald Trump. Madara declined to provide details of what the latest ritual will entail.

More than 15,000 people who have seen Catland Books promotions on Facebook have expressed interest in attending the event, vastly exceeding the shop’s 60-person capacity.

​Irate, threatening calls

Not everyone is a witchcraft fan. Madara said she had fielded numerous irate calls from critics, with at least one threatening violence. 

“Every time we host something like this there’s always people who like to call in with death threats or read us scripture,” she said.

As far as supporters go, some are sexual assault survivors still angry that the U.S. Senate confirmed Kavanaugh’s lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court despite accusations that he had sexually assaulted multiple women.

Kavanaugh has denied the allegations, and an FBI investigation failed to corroborate his accusers’ accounts.

Democrats hope lingering outrage over Kavanaugh, particularly among women, will translate into election gains for them Nov. 6. Republicans are likewise trying to seize on anger among conservatives at how they perceive Kavanaugh was mistreated.

Counter hexes and prayers

Believers in mysticism on both sides of the political divide are taking matters into their own hands.

Plans for the Catland Books event have sparked “counter hexes” around the country by those seeking to undo the spell that the Brooklyn witches cast against Kavanaugh, Madara said.

Even mainstream clergy was joining the fray. Rev. Gary Thomas of the Diocese of San Jose in California said Friday that he would include Kavanaugh in his prayers at Saturday mass.
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