The newest group of Kennedy Center honorees, including comedian Billy Crystal and actor Queen Latifah, are being feted Sunday night at a star-studded event marking their lifetime achievement in arts and entertainment.

Opera singer Renee Fleming, music star Barry Gibb and prolific hitmaker Dionne Warwick also are being honored at the black-tie gala. Each will receive personalized tributes that typically include appearances and performances that are kept secret from the honorees themselves.

In announcing the recipients earlier this year, the Kennedy Center’s president, Deborah F. Rutter, called this year’s group of inductees “an extraordinary mix of individuals who have redefined their art forms.”

Crystal, 75, came to national prominence in the 1970s playing Jodie Dallas, one of the first openly gay characters on American network television, on the sitcom “Soap.” He went on to a brief but memorable one-year stint on “Saturday Night Live” before starring in a string of movies, including hits such as “When Harry Met Sally…” “The Princess Bride” and “City Slickers.”

Crystal, who also received the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for lifetime achievement in comedy in 2007, joins an elite group of comedians cited for both: David Letterman, Steve Martin, Lorne Michaels, Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett and Neil Simon. Bill Cosby received both honors, but they were rescinded in 2018 following his sexual assault conviction, which later was overturned.

Warwick, 82, shot to stardom in the 1960s as the muse for the superstar songwriting team of Burt Bacharach and Hal David. Her discography includes a multidecade string of hits, both with and without Bacharach, that includes “I Say a Little Prayer,” “I’ll Never Love This Way Again” and “That’s What Friends Are For.”

Fleming, 64, is one of the leading sopranos of her era, with a string of accolades that includes a National Medal of Arts bestowed by President Barack Obama, a Cross of the Order of Merit from the German government and honorary membership in England’s Royal Academy of Music.

Gibb, 76, achieved global fame as part of one of the most successful bands in the history of modern music, the Bee Gees. Along with his late brothers Robin and Maurice, the trio launched a nearly unmatched string of hits that defined a generation of music.

Latifah, 53, has been a star since age 19 when her debut album and hit single “Ladies First” made her the first female crossover rap star. She has gone on to a diverse career that has included seven studio albums, starring roles in multiple television shows and movies and an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress for her role in the movie musical “Chicago.”

Fleming and Latifah, real name Dana Owens, also share an obscure bit of Kennedy Center Honors historical trivia. They both performed at the 2014 Super Bowl. Fleming sang the national anthem while Latifah performed “America the Beautiful.”
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Beyoncé ruled the box office this weekend. Her concert picture, “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” opened in first place with $21 million in North American ticket sales, according to estimates from AMC Theatres Sunday.

The post-Thanksgiving, early December box office is notoriously slow, but “Renaissance” defied the odds. Not accounting for inflation, it’s the first time a film has opened over $20 million on this weekend in 20 years (since “The Last Samurai”).

Beyoncé wrote, directed and produced “Renaissance,” which is focused on the tour for her Grammy-winning album. It debuted in 2,539 theaters in the U.S. and Canada, as well as 94 international territories, where it earned $6.4 million from 2,621 theaters.

“On behalf of AMC Theaters Distribution and the entire theatrical industry, we thank Beyoncé for bringing this incredible film directly to her fans,” said Elizabeth Frank, AMC Theaters executive vice president of worldwide programming, in a statement. “To see it resonate with fans and with film critics on a weekend that many in the industry typically neglect is a testament to her immense talent, not just as a performer, but as a producer and director.”

Despite several other new releases including “Godzilla Minus One,” the Hindi-language “Animal,” Angel Studios’ sci-fi thriller “The Shift,” and Lionsgate’s John Woo-directed revenge pic “Silent Night,” it was a slow weekend overall. Films in the top 10 are expected to gross only $85 million in total. But it was in this traditional “lull” that AMC Theaters found a good opportunity for “Renaissance” to shine.

“They chose a great weekend,” said Paul Dergarabedian, the senior media analyst for Comscore. “There was competition, but it was from very different kinds of movies.”

Though “Renaissance” did not come close to matching the $92.8 million debut of “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” in October, it’s still a very good start for a concert film. No one expected “Renaissance” to match “The Eras Tour,” which is wrapping up its theatrical run soon with over $250 million globally. Prior to Swift, the biggest concert film debuts (titles held by Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber for their 2008 and 2011 films) had not surpassed the unadjusted sum of $32 million.

The 39-city, 56-show “Renaissance” tour, which kicked off in Stockholm, Sweden in May and ended in Kansas City, Missouri in the fall, made over $500 million and attracted over 2.7 million concertgoers. Swift’s ongoing “Eras Tour,” with 151 dates, is expected to gross some $1.4 billion.

Both Beyoncé and Swift chose to partner with AMC Theaters to distribute their films, as opposed to a traditional studio. Both superstars have been supportive of one another, making splashy appearances at the other’s premieres. Both had previously released films on Netflix (“Miss Americana” and “Homecoming”). And both are reported to be receiving at least 50% of ticket sales.

Movie tickets to the show were more expensive than average, around $23.32 versus Swift’s $20.78, according to data firm EntTelligence.

Critics and audiences gave “Renaissance” glowing reviews – it’s sitting at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and got a coveted A+ CinemaScore from opening weekend audiences who were polled. EntTelligence also estimates that the audience, around 900,000 strong, skewed a little older than Swift’s.

“To have two concert films topping the chart in a single year is pretty unprecedented,” Dergarabedian said. But to compare them too closely would be a mistake.

“Taylor Swift was a total outlier and the result of a very specific set of circumstances,” he said. “These two films are similar in genre only.”

Lionsgate’s “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes” fell to second place in its third weekend with an estimated $14.5 million. The prequel has now earned over $121 million domestically.

“Godzilla Minus One” took third place on the North American charts with $11 million from 2,308 locations — the biggest opening for a foreign film in the U.S. this year. The well-reviewed Japanese blockbuster distributed by Toho International cost only $15 million to produce and has already earned $23 million in Japan.

“This year, we made a concentrated effort to answer the demand of the marketplace and make Godzilla globally accessible across many different platforms,” said Koji Ueda, President of Toho Global, in a statement.

“Trolls Band Together” landed in fourth place in its third weekend with $7.6 million, bringing its domestic total to $74.8 million.

Fifth place went to Disney’s “Wish,” which fell 62% from its underwhelming first weekend, with $7.4 million from 3,900 locations. Globally, it’s now made $81.6 million.

The studio’s other major film in theaters, “The Marvels” is winding down in its fourth weekend with a disastrous global tally of $197 million against the reported $300 million it cost to make and market the superhero film.

In its second weekend, Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” earned an estimated $7.1 million from 3,500 locations. Produced by Apple Original Films and distributed by Sony Pictures, the film starring Joaquin Phoenix has now made $45.7 million domestically against a $200 million budget.

Things should pick up in the final weeks of 2023, with films like “Wonka” and “The Color Purple” yet to come. The industry is looking at a $9 billion year — still trailing the $11 billion pre-pandemic norm, but a marked improvement from the last few years. And there are still many solid options for moviegoers, as the industry’s awards season gets into full swing.

“We had a slow Thanksgiving and we’re having a pretty slow weekend this weekend, but it’s a great weekend to be a moviegoer in terms of the breadth and depth of the movies out there,” Dergarabedian said.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” $21 million.

2. “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes,” $14.5 million.

3. “Godzilla Minus One,” $11 million.

4. “Trolls Band Together,” $7.6 million.

5. “Wish,” $7.4 million.

6. “Napoleon,” $7.1 million.

7. “Animal,” $6.1 million.

8. “The Shift,” $4.4 million.

9. “Silent Night,” $3 million.

10. “Thanksgiving,” $2.6 million.
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On Saturday night, Kiss closed out the final performance of their “The End of the Road” farewell tour at New York City’s famed Madison Square Garden.  

But as dedicated fans surely know — they were never going to call it quits. Not really.  

During their encore, the band’s current lineup — founders Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons as well as guitarist Tommy Thayer and drummer Eric Singer — left the stage to reveal digital avatars of themselves. After the transformation, the virtual Kiss launched into a performance of “God Gave Rock and Roll to You.”  

The cutting-edge technology was used to tease a new chapter of the rock band: after 50 years of Kiss, the band is now interested in a kind of digital immortality.  

The avatars were created by George Lucas’ special-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, in partnership with Pophouse Entertainment Group, the latter of which was co-founded by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus. The two companies recently teamed up for the “ABBA Voyage” show in London, in which fans could attend a full concert by the Swedish band — as performed by their digital avatars.  

Per Sundin, CEO of Pophouse Entertainment, says this new technology allows Kiss to continue their legacy for “eternity.” He says the band wasn’t on stage during virtual performance because “that’s the key thing,” of the future-seeking technology. “Kiss could have a concert in three cities in the same night across three different continents. That’s what you could do with this.”  

In order to create their digital avatars, who are depicted as a kind of superhero version of the band, Kiss performed in motion capture suits.  

Experimentation with this kind of technology has become increasingly common in certain sections of the music industry. In October K-pop star Mark Tuan partnered with Soul Machines to create an autonomously automated “digital twin” called “Digital Mark.” In doing so, Tuan became the first celebrity to attach their likeness to OpenAI’s GPT integration, artificial intelligence technology that allows fans to engage in one-on-one conversations with Tuan’s avatar.  

Aespa, the K-pop girl group, frequently perform alongside their digital avatars — the quartet is meant to be viewed as an octet with digital twins. Another girl group, Eternity, is made up entirely of virtual characters — no humans necessary.  

“What we’ve accomplished has been amazing, but it’s not enough. The band deserves to live on because the band is bigger than we are,” Kiss frontman Paul Stanley said in a roundtable interview. “It’s exciting for us to go the next step and see Kiss immortalized.”  

“We can be forever young and forever iconic by taking us to places we’ve never dreamed of before,” Kiss bassist Gene Simmons added. “The technology is going to make Paul jump higher than he’s ever done before.”  

And for those who couldn’t make the Madison Square Garden show — stay tuned, because a Kiss avatar concert may very well be on the way. 
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Developers at the University of Maryland are using a holographic camera to capture people’s movements in three dimensions for what could be high-impact training, education and entertainment. It is technology with the power to transform how we learn and entertain ourselves. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more. VOA footage by Adam Greenbaum.
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A new campaign for Myanmar led by the son of imprisoned democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Kim Aris, is using tattoos as a publicity tool to raise humanitarian aid for the millions displaced following the 2021 military coup.

People in Myanmar’s diaspora are getting tattoos of a Burmese water dragon as a symbol of solidarity with the ongoing resistance movement inside Myanmar. And they are sharing pictures and videos of their tattoos and the associated live fundraising events on social media to create a buzz around the symbolic tattoo, and drive participants to its GoFundMe page.

A military junta overturned Myanmar’s election in February 2021 and arrested the leaders of the democratically elected government, including longtime democracy activist Suu Kyi. Thousands have been killed in the ensuing violence.

Aris, who himself just got a tattoo of the Burmese water dragon and shared a video of the procedure on the campaign’s Facebook page, told VOA that the dragon motif is a traditional symbol from Burmese culture and was inspired by the tattoo worn by famous Burmese kickboxer Too Too, who lost his life in prison along with many other political prisoners arrested during anti-coup protests.

“He represents a great deal of what has happened to many people in Burma,” Aris told VOA. “His body was never returned to his family, and it’s said he was tortured before he died. This has happened to many people in Burma.

“My mother has spoken often about freedom — freedom from fear — and the fact that nobody will be free until everybody is free,” Aris said. “There’s a long way to go until that happens, but I hope it can be sooner rather than later, and that this campaign can help it happen.”

The campaign, called “Freedom Tattoo for Burma Aid,” has taken off internationally since its launch October 30.

According to Aris, it has raised nearly $126,000 in donations from around the world, including donations from the United Kingdom, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand and the United States. Those who do not get the dragon tattoo are urged by campaign organizers to make donations through their GoFundMe page. From there, the funds are distributed to charities inside the country.

“We’re working with trusted charities who are actually on the ground in Burma, who can get the aid to where it’s needed. We can’t name them as it makes their work very difficult,” Aris told VOA.

Organizers of a November 22 campaign event in Thailand shut it down early, citing in a statement “unforeseen circumstances involving pressure from the Myanmar military on Thai authorities.”

Aris expressed his disappointment in the shutdown. “It’s very sad to hear about the Thais stopping an event like this, which is purely for humanitarian aid,” he said.

Aris said he recognizes that a major challenge of his campaign is getting international attention.

“It’s very hard to get the attention of the international media at present,” he said. “The way things are in the world, Burma gets pushed further and further back.”

Despite the challenges, Aris said he still has hope that his campaign can bring more awareness of what is happening in Myanmar to the wider world.

“I thought a tattoo would be something interesting,” he said.

“It’s not like someone going for a marathon or a walk, it’s something different. I thought it might get a bit more attention outside the Burmese community.”  
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Shane MacGowan, the boozy, rabble-rousing singer and chief songwriter of The Pogues, who infused traditional Irish music with the energy and spirit of punk, died Thursday, his family said. He was 65.

MacGowan’s songwriting and persona made him an iconic figure in contemporary Irish culture, and some of his compositions have become classics — most notably the bittersweet Christmas ballad “Fairytale of New York,” which Irish President Michael D. Higgins said “will be listened to every Christmas for the next century or more.”

“It is with the deepest sorrow and heaviest of hearts that we announce the passing of our most beautiful, darling and dearly beloved Shane MacGowan,” his wife Victoria Clarke, his sister Siobhan and father Maurice said in a statement.

The singer died peacefully with his family by his side, the statement added.

The musician had been hospitalized in Dublin for several months after being diagnosed with viral encephalitis in late 2022. He was discharged last week, ahead of his upcoming birthday on Christmas Day.

The Pogues melded Irish folk and rock ‘n’ roll into a unique, intoxicating blend, though MacGowan became as famous for his sozzled, slurred performances as for his powerful songwriting.

His songs blended the scabrous and the sentimental, ranging from carousing anthems to snapshots of life in the gutter to unexpectedly tender love songs. The Pogues’ most famous song, “Fairytale of New York” is a tale of down-on-their-luck immigrant lovers that opens with the decidedly unfestive words: “It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank.” The duet between the raspy-voiced MacGowan and the velvet tones of the late Kirsty MacColl is by far the most beloved Pogues song in both Ireland and the U.K.

Singer-songwriter Nick Cave called Shane MacGowan “a true friend and the greatest songwriter of his generation.”

Higgins, the Irish president, said “his songs capture within them, as Shane would put it, the measure of our dreams.”

“His words have connected Irish people all over the globe to their culture and history, encompassing so many human emotions in the most poetic of ways,” Higgins said.

Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said MacGowan’s songs “beautifully captured the Irish experience, especially the experience of being Irish abroad.”

Sinn Fein President Mary Lou McDonald said: “Nobody told the Irish story like Shane — stories of emigration, heartache, dislocation, redemption, love and joy.”

Born on Christmas Day 1957 in England to Irish parents, MacGowan spent his early years in rural Ireland before the family moved back to London. Ireland remained the lifelong center of his imagination and his yearning. He grew up steeped in Irish music absorbed from family and neighbors, along with the sounds of rock, Motown, reggae and jazz.

He attended the elite Westminster School in London, from which he was expelled, and spent time in a psychiatric hospital after a breakdown in his teens.

MacGowan embraced the punk scene that exploded in Britain in the mid-1970s. He joined a band called the Nipple Erectors, performing under the name Shane O’Hooligan, before forming The Pogues alongside musicians including Jem Finer and Spider Stacey.

The Pogues — shortened from the original name Pogue Mahone, a rude Irish phrase — fused punk’s furious energy with traditional Irish melodies and instruments including banjo, tin whistle and accordion.

“It never occurred to me that you could play Irish music to a rock audience,” MacGowan recalled in “A Drink with Shane MacGowan,” a 2001 memoir co-authored with Clarke. “Then it finally clicked. Start a London Irish band playing Irish music with a rock and roll beat. The original idea was just to rock up old ones but then I started writing.”

The band’s first album, “Red Roses for Me,” was released in 1984 and featured raucous versions of Irish folk songs alongside originals including “Boys from the County Hell,” “Dark Streets of London” and “Streams of Whisky.”

Playing pubs and clubs in London and beyond, the band earned a loyal following and praise from music critics and fellow musicians from Bono to Bob Dylan.

MacGowan wrote many of the songs on the next two albums, “Rum, Sodomy and the Lash” (1985) and “If I Should Fall from Grace with God” (1988), ranging from rollicking rousers like the latter album’s title track to ballads like “A Pair of Brown Eyes” and “The Broad Majestic Shannon.”

The band also released a 1986 EP, “Poguetry in Motion,” which contained two of MacGowan’s finest songs, “A Rainy Night in Soho” and “The Body of an American.” The latter featured prominently in early-2000s TV series “The Wire,” sung at the wakes of Baltimore police officers.

“I wanted to make pure music that could be from any time, to make time irrelevant, to make generations and decades irrelevant,” he recalled in his memoir.

The Pogues were briefly on top of the world, with sold-out tours and appearances on U.S. television, but the band’s output and appearances grew more erratic, due in part to MacGowan’s struggles with alcohol and drugs. He was fired by the other band members in 1991 after they became fed up with a string of no-shows, including when The Pogues were opening for Dylan. The band briefly replaced MacGowan with Clash frontman Joe Strummer before breaking up.

MacGowan performed with a new band, Shane MacGowan and the Popes, with whom he put out two albums: “The Snake” in 1995 and “The Crock Of Gold” in 1997. He reunited with The Pogues in 2001 for a series of concerts and tours, despite his well-documented problems with drinking and performances that regularly included slurred lyrics and at least one fall on stage.

MacGowan had years of health problems and used a wheelchair after breaking his pelvis a decade ago. He was long famous for his broken, rotten teeth until receiving a full set of implants in 2015 from a dental surgeon who described the procedure as “the Everest of dentistry.”

MacGowan received a lifetime achievement award from the Irish president on his 60th birthday. The occasion was marked with a celebratory concert at the National Concert Hall in Dublin with performers including Bono, Nick Cave, Sinead O’Connor and Johnny Depp.

Clarke wrote on Instagram that “there’s no way to describe the loss that I am feeling and the longing for just one more of his smiles that lit up my world.”

“I am blessed beyond words to have met him and to have loved him and to have been so endlessly and unconditionally loved by him and to have had so many years of life and love and joy and fun and laughter and so many adventures,” she wrote.
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Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi, who had been previously detained for showing support to anti-government protests and was released on bail earlier this month, was arrested again, Iran’s state media reported on Thursday.

“Salehi has been arrested for publishing false information and disturbing public opinion, after being released upon an order by Iran’s supreme court to revise his case,” the judiciary news agency said.

Following the death in custody of 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in September 2022, Iran has seen months of nationwide protests that represented one of the fiercest challenges to the Islamic Republic since its establishment in 1979.

Salehi, who wrote songs about the protests, was initially sentenced to six years in prison on multiple charges, including “corruption on earth,” a ruling that was then rejected by Iran’s supreme court.

The 33-year-old rapper spent one year and 21 days in prison, including 252 days in solitary confinement, during which he sustained physical injuries, according to his official page on the social media website X, formerly known as Twitter.
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British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has accused his Greek counterpart Kyriakos Mitsotakis of public “grandstanding” over the ownership of Parthenon sculptures. 

The two leaders have been at odds with one another after Sunak canceled a scheduled meeting between the two just hours before it was set to take place. 

In a weekly question period with the house of commons, Sunak told parliament that Mitsotakis had broken a promise that he would not publicly bring up the sculptures.

“Specific assurances on that topic were made to this country and then were broken,” Sunak said. “When people make commitments, they should keep them.” 

Greek officials denied that any such promise had been made.

In an interview with British television on Sunday, Mitsotakis called for the return of the sculptures so they could be displayed beside the rest of the sculptures still in Athens. He also said that removing them was like cutting the “Mona Lisa” in half.

Athens has long urged the British Museum to return 2,500-year-old sculptures, known in Britain as the Elgin Marbles. The Marbles were taken from the Parthenon temple by British diplomat Lord Elgin in 1806, when Greece was under Ottoman Turkish rule.

Greek officials have said Mitsotakis only promoted a longstanding position, and he called Sunak’s cancelation of the meeting disrespectful.

Mitsotakis said the cancelation was “an unfortunate event,” but he added that “the move will not hurt relations between Greece and Britain in the longer term.”

The Greek leader also went on to say the cancelation of the meeting had a positive side to it and that his calls for reunification of the sculptures have gained more attention.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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A new America House is celebrating its opening in Odesa, making it the third major cultural and educational center in Ukraine supported and financed by the U.S. Embassy. America House Odesa was supposed to open in early 2022, but Russia’s invasion changed those plans. Anna Kosstutschenko visited the center and found out how the war altered its program. Camera — Pavel Suhodolskiy.
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The Walt Disney Co.’s “Wish” had been expected to rule the Thanksgiving weekend box office, but moviegoers instead feasted on leftovers, as “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” led ticket sales for the second weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday. 

Neither of the weekend’s top new releases — “Wish” and Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” — could keep up with Lionsgate’s “Hunger Games” prequel. After debuting the previous weekend with $44.6 million, the return to Panem proved the top draw for holiday moviegoers, grossing $28.8 million over the weekend and $42 million over the five-day holiday frame. 

In two weeks of release, “Songbirds and Snakes” has grossed nearly $100 million domestically and $200 million globally. 

The closer contest was for second place, where “Napoleon” narrowly outmaneuvered “Wish.” Scott’s epic outperformed expectations to take $32.5 million over the five-day weekend and an estimated $20.4 million Friday through Sunday. The film, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the French emperor and Vanessa Kirby as his wife Joséphine de Beauharnais, was also the top movie globally with $78.8 million. 

Reviews were mixed (61% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and ticket buyers were non-plussed (a “B-” CinemaScore), but “Napoleon” fared far better in theaters than its subject did at Waterloo. 

“Napoleon,” like Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” is a big-budget statement by Apple Studios of the streamer’s swelling Hollywood ambitions. With an estimated budget of $200 million, “Napoleon” may still have a long road to reach profitability for Apple, which partnered with Sony to distribute “Napoleon” theatrically. But it’s an undeniably strong beginning for an adult-skewing 168-minute historical drama. 

“Wish,” however, had been supposed to have a more starry-eyed start. Disney Animation releases like “Frozen II” ($123.7 million over five days in 2019), “Ralph Breaks the Internet” ($84.6 million in 2018) and “Coco” ($71 million in 2017), have often owned Thanksgiving moviegoing. 

But “Wish” wobbled, coming in with $31.7 million over five days and $19.5 million Friday through Sunday. It added $17.3 million internationally. It had been forecast to debut closer to $50 million. 

“Wish,” at least, is faring better than Disney’s Thanksgiving release last year: 2022’s “Strange World” bombed with a five-day $18.9 million opening. But hopes had been higher for “Wish,” co-written and co-directed by the “Frozen” team of Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee and featuring the voices of Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine. “Wish,” a fairy tale centered around a wished-upon star, is also a celebration of Disney, itself, timed to the studio’s 100th anniversary and rife with callbacks to Disney favorites. 

Critics weren’t impressed, saying “Wish” felt more like marketing than movie magic. So instead of righting an up-and-down year for Disney, “Wish” is, for now, adding to some of the studio’s recent headaches, including the underperforming “The Marvels.” The Marvel sequel has limped to $76.9 million domestically and $110.2 million overseas in three weeks. 

“Wish” also faced direct competition for families in “Trolls Band Together.” The DreamWorks and Universal Pictures release opened a week prior and took in $17.5 million in its second frame ($25.3 million over five days). 

“‘Wish’ ran into a much more competitive market than what Disney might normally see in the Thanksgiving corridor,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for data firm Comscore. “We’re accustomed to seeing those Disney films at the top of the chart. They kind of had to split the audience with ‘Trolls.’” 

Still, the storybook isn’t written yet on “Wish.” It could follow the lead of Pixar’s “Elemental,” which launched with a lukewarm $29.6 million in June but found its legs, ultimately grossing nearly $500 million worldwide. 

Also entering wide-release over the holiday weekend was Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn,” the writer-director’s follow-up to 2020’s “Promising Young Woman.” After debuting in seven packed theaters last weekend, “Saltburn” grossed $3.1 million over five days for Amazon and MGM. Barry Keoghan stars as an Oxford student befriended by a rich classmate (Jacob Elordi) and invited to his family’s country manor. 

As Hollywood’s award season accelerates (Netflix debuted Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” in select theaters but didn’t report grosses), Focus Features’ “The Holdovers” continues to be one of the top choices in cinemas. Alexander Payne’s film starring Paul Giamatti as a boarding school instructor made $3.8 million over the five-day weekend. In five weeks, it grossed $12.9 million. 

Ticket sales overall reached $172 million in U.S. and Canada theaters over the five-day holiday weekend, according to Comscore. That’s up significantly from recent years but well behind the typical pre-pandemic Thanksgiving weekends. (In 2019, sales boosted by “Frozen 2” surpassed $262 million.) 

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday. 

1. “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” $28.8 million. 

2. “Napoleon,” $20.4 million. 

3. “Wish,” $19.5 million. 

4. “Trolls Band Together,” $17.5 million. 

5. “Thanksgiving,” $7.2 million. 

6. “The Marvels,” $6.4 million. 

7. “The Holdovers,” $2.8 million. 

8. “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” $2.3 million. 

9. “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” $1.8 million. 

10. “Saltburn,” $1.7 million. 
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Cambodians are celebrating the return of dragon boat races at this year’s Water Festival after a three-year absence amid hopes it will bolster the tourism industry and an economy struggling to recover in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Luke Hunt reports. Camera: Luke Hunt, David Brown, Vicheka Kol
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Greece’s prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said Sunday he would push for the return of the Parthenon Marbles when he meets UK leader Rishi Sunak in Britain this week.

The sculptures, also known as the Elgin Marbles, were taken from the Parthenon temple at the Acropolis in Athens in the early 19th century by British diplomat Thomas Bruce, the earl of Elgin.

Greece maintains the marbles were stolen, which Britain denies, and the issue has been a source of contention between the countries for decades.

Mitsotakis, who is due to see Sunak on Monday, likened the collection being held at the British Museum in London to the Mona Lisa painting being cut in half.

“They do look better in the Acropolis Museum, a state-of-the-art museum that was built for that purpose,” he told the BBC.

“It’s as if I told you that you would cut the Mona Lisa in half, and you will have half of it at the Louvre and half of it at the British Museum, do you think your viewers would appreciate the beauty of the painting in such a way?”

Mitsotakis added that “this is exactly what happened with the Parthenon sculptures”.

“That is why we keep lobbying for a deal that would essentially be a partnership between Greece and the British Museum but would allow us to return the sculptures to Greece and have people appreciate them in their original setting,” he told the Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg programme.

The 2,500-year-old collection has been on display at the British Museum since 1817.

In January, the UK government ruled out a permanent return after media reported the British Museum was close to signing a loan agreement that would see the marbles back in Athens.

Mitsotakis, who won a second term in June, said his government “had not made as much progress as I would like in the negotiations”.

But added: “I’m a patient man and we’ve waited for hundreds of years, and I will persist in these discussions.”

Mitsotakis said he would also raise the issue with UK opposition leader Keir Starmer, who — if opinion polls are believed — is set to be Britain’s next prime minister after an election expected next year.

The Parthenon temple — built in the 5th century BCE to honor the goddess Athena — was partially destroyed during a Venetian bombardment in 1687, then looted.

Its fragments are scattered throughout many renowned museums.

Earlier this year, three marble fragments of the Parthenon temple that had been held by the Vatican for centuries were returned to Greece.

 
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Pepe’s meal is so good he licks the plate clean. In any other Rome establishment, slobbering on one’s chicken and mashed potato would be frowned upon — but this is “Fiuto”, Italy’s first dogs’ restaurant.

The lighting is soft, lounge music plays in the background, attentive staff show people and pets to their tables and ask whether furry, four-legged customers might fancy a boiled egg with pureed peas and fontina cheese? Or perhaps a simple fish with ricotta and courgettes?

Thirsty pups can opt for a green apple and watermelon juice, or go wild and have a pear, strawberry or banana one instead.

“We drew up the menu with a veterinary nutritionist with whom I determined the ingredients, taking allergies into account, because dogs have many more allergies than humans,” said head chef Luca Grammatico, who previously worked as a dog trainer.

Pepe, a four-year-old Bichon with a naughty face, licks every last crumb off his elegant black bowl, almost taking the geometric patterns off too.

Pets “are part of our family, so why not treat them like family?” says Sara Nicosanti, as she takes a selfie with Mango, her five-year-old Jack Russell, in the mirror-lined area designed especially for this purpose.

There is not a bark to be heard: guests focus on their designer bowls, sitting on fleece blankets next to their owners’ tables.

Nicosanti, a 36-year-old real estate agent, says she is “very happy” with the choice at the restaurant, which opened just a month ago, because the dogs “can have a balanced diet too”, with “suitable ingredients”.

“No spices, no salt and no oils,” insists Grammatico. Food for canine customers is prepared in a separate kitchen to that of their human owners.

Portions are tailored to the dogs’ size — S (for those weighing two to 10 kilograms), M (11-20 kg), L (21-30 kg) and even XL (over 30 kg).

“Fish is very popular because it is a different flavor to their usual food,” Grammatico said.

Birthday cake

The mood is festive as Romina Lanza, a 40-year-old lawyer, celebrates her dog Rudy’s fourth birthday.

She sees “Fiuto” (Sense of Smell) as “a very welcome initiative” and brushes off questions as to whether it is right to wait hand and paw on pets, serving them freshly prepared, costly dishes, while people in other parts of the world go hungry.

“It’s a personal choice, I don’t see anything wrong with it,” she said.

Neither does Maria Gliottone, a 20-year-old student who discovered the restaurant on TikTok and came with Nala, her two-year-old dog, and Nala’s friend Douglas, a four-month-old Corsican puppy.

“Those who don’t have a dog think that, but those who do (have one) are more than happy to come here with their companion,” she said.

Since it opened, the restaurant has welcomed an average of six to 10 dogs every evening during the week and 10 to 15 at weekends, for a price per head of between eight and 20 euros (around $22), depending on the size of the dog.

“We’ve installed screens (between tables) so that when the dogs eat, they can’t see each other or disturb each other by invading each other’s spaces,” said Marco Turano.

The restaurant’s three co-founders did not expect the establishment in the heart of Rome’s Ponte Milvio district to be so successful.

“We are obviously super happy,” said Turano, 33, as he wrapped up a surprise present — a detangling conditioner — for Rudy.

And while there won’t be candles, he will get a birthday cake of sorts: “a cheese biscuit with ricotta cheese and an end note of green apple”.
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For the annual fall renewal of her shaman spirit, Mee Vang Yang will soon ritually redecorate the tall altar in her living room where she keeps her father’s ring-shaped shaman bells.

She carried them across the Mekong River as the family fled the communist takeover of her native Laos four decades ago. Today, they facilitate the connection to the spiritual world she needs to help fellow refugees and their American-raised children who seek restoration of lost spirits.

“Like going to church, you’re giving beyond yourself to a greater power,” said the mother of six through a translator in Hmong.

It’s the language spoken for the most important spiritual celebration in the Hmong calendar, the “Noj Peb Caug” — translated as “new year,” but literally meaning “eat 30,” because the ceremonies traditionally were tied to the fall’s post-harvest abundance shared with the clan and offered to spirits.

During new year, which is celebrated mostly in November and December among Hmong Americans, shamans send off their spirit guides to regenerate their energy for another season of healing. Male heads of households who embrace traditional animist practices perform soul-calling ceremonies, venerate ancestor spirits and invoke the protection of good spirits.

“A traditional Hmong home is not just a home, but also a place of worship,” said Tzianeng Vang, Vang Yang’s nephew, who came to Minnesota as a teen and grew up a Christian. He’s among the community leaders trying to share knowledge of these animist traditions so they won’t be lost for his children’s generation.

“You preserve it here or you have nowhere,” he said.

Moving from east to west

Persecuted as an ethnic minority in their ancestral lands in China, the Hmong fled first to the mountains of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. There, tens of thousands fought for the United States in the Vietnam War. When communist regimes swept the region, they escaped to refugee camps in neighboring Thailand and, starting in the mid-1970s, resettled largely in California farm country and Minnesota’s capital city.

The majority of the estimated 300,000 Hmong in the United States are animists and believe that spirits live throughout the physical world. That includes multiple souls in a person — any of which can leave and needs to be ceremonially called back, said Lee Pao Xiong, director of the Center for Hmong Studies at Concordia University in St. Paul.

But many younger Hmong haven’t learned the spiritual significance of cultural traditions, even popular ones like the Thanksgiving weekend dance, music and craft performances in one of St. Paul’s largest entertainment venues, Xiong said.

“It’s intricate, it’s not just ‘go to church and pray.’ There are all these spirits to atone to. It’s about spirits that you have to appease,” said Xiong, who teaches classes about these traditions, which often include the ritual slaughter of cows, pigs or chickens as an offering or an exchange of spirits.

Educating youth in ancestral culture is a crucial aim of the Hmong Cultural Center just down the street from St. Paul’s capitol, said its director, Txongpao Lee.

“They need to learn from parents and prepare for when they have children,” said Lee, who estimates about one-third of young Hmong have converted to Christianity. Acceptance of ancestral customs differs among church denominations, he added — his family’s Lutheran and Catholic members vary in participation in new year rituals.

Lee leads them for his household, though his wife, Hlee Xiong Lee, has been a shaman since she fell ill when pregnant with the fourth of her seven children. Shamans, like other traditional healers across cultures, often associate the revelation of their gift with life-threatening sickness and believe they could die if they refuse the call.

Xiong Lee’s path to shamanism has been arduous, entailing rigorous training with a shaman mentor to learn how to communicate with the spirit world. But so was her journey to the United States, arriving in a small Minnesota town as a 14-year-old refugee with no English-speaking skills, too embarrassed to ask for help getting a lunch ticket on her first day of school.

She’s proud of how her own children wear string bracelets and effortlessly explain to inquisitive teachers or classmates they’re meant to tie the family to protecting spirits.

“They’re good at adapting to my tradition and American tradition,” she said.

Connecting with spirits

Kevin Lee, a shaman’s son who says he also first started experiencing spiritual energies when he was 5, similarly has had to navigate a regular childhood in St. Paul with his ability to connect with good and bad spirits “on the other side.”

“Kids would be like, ‘this guy is weird.’ For me, it was just another day,” he said in front of the three living-room altars in the house he shares with his parents and brother.

They will be redecorated with new paper designs for the new year after his father, Chad Lee, finishes helping his shaman mentees and has time to send off his shaman spirit for a much-deserved break — short, though, because up to half a dozen people call for his help each day. Last year, his “angel” only got three days off, the older Lee said.

“Spiritual world is confusing, but once you find a path, everything is natural,” Chad Lee said.
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New York City on Thursday hosted its 97th Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, featuring 48 character and novelty balloons, 26 floats, 12 marching bands and more than 700 clowns. Aron Ranen reports.
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In most of the United States, November and December are prime time for turkey lovers. The U.S. Poultry and Egg Association says 46 million turkeys are eaten on Thanksgiving, with another 22 million consumed on Christmas.

But in the Southern state of Louisiana, known for its decadence and creative cuisine, turkey has a competitor. For people in and around cities including New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Lafayette, it’s turducken that is the talk of the town.

“Turducken is a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey,” said Ellis Lanaux, chief executive officer of Langenstein’s, the oldest full-service grocery store in New Orleans, open since 1922.

“It’s part of this unique culinary culture we have down here,” Lanaux told VOA. “There’s nothing like our food elsewhere in America, and you see that uniqueness on our Thanksgiving table. In addition to mainstream staples like mashed potatoes and green beans, you also find Cajun dishes like chargrilled oysters, oyster dressing, cornbread and crawfish stuffing, mirliton casserole, and — if you’re lucky — a turducken.”

In addition to the trio of birds, dressing (a term in some parts of the U.S. often used interchangeably with stuffing) is added between each layer. Some turducken creators ask shoppers to choose a single dressing, with oyster dressing and cornbread and crawfish dressing among the most popular.

Others, including Hebert’s Specialty Meats, allow as many as three dressings, with alligator, boudin sausage, shrimp etouffee and rice, crawfish jalapeno cornbread, jambalaya, and wild rice and pecan among the many possibilities between layers of poultry.

When sliced, the creation presents almost like a layered French terrine.

“Eating turducken isn’t for the faint of heart, and neither is preparing one,” laughed restaurateur Brenda Prudhomme. “It takes forever. You have to prepare your dressing, you have to get your birds, you have to debone each of them, you have to stuff them and layer the dressings, you have to season them, and then you basically have to become a seamstress and sew them in together. It isn’t easy, but it brings a lot of people joy so we do it!”

Part of a long tradition

Hebert’s Specialty Meats sells thousands of turduckens each year, with spikes at both Thanksgiving and Christmas. At Chris’s Specialty Foods, the Turducken Roll Package is advertised as “enough turducken for a small banquet,” while its Holiday Turducken Feast serves even more.

The words “banquet” and “feast” aren’t accidental: Turducken is part of a larger, and older, tradition known as engastration, a cooking technique in which the remains of one animal are stuffed into another.

“It’s a tradition that reaches back to the Middle Ages, and even has roots in ancient Rome,” said Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans. “It’s a culinary practice that would show up at feasts for royalty and enjoyed by the wealthy. Compared to what they were stuffing back then, filling a turkey with a duck and a chicken, quite frankly, is chump change.”

The famed Trojan Boar from the Roman Empire, for example, was a 1,000-pound hog stuffed with game birds and other small animals.

The Roti Sans Pareil, or the Roast Without Equal, was a 19th-century dish created by French gastronomist Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de la Reyniere. The creation included an extraordinary 17 stuffed birds: bustard, chicken, duck, garden warbler, goose, guinea fowl, lapwing, lark, ortolan bunting, partridge, pheasant, plover, quail, teal, thrush, turkey and woodcock.

And, still today, the Inuits of Greenland are known to enjoy kiviak, a traditional winter community dish of seal stuffed with as many as 500 birds.

While turducken is far more modest, Lenore Newman, author of Lost Feast: Culinary Extinction and the Future of Food, said this Louisiana Thanksgiving feast food likely comes from a similar tradition.

“It’s a dish intended to impress,” she told VOA. “That’s a commonality among dishes using engastration: They are meant to wow.”

Debated origin

Turducken most definitely wows – so much so that there are competing claims to its origin.

Many say it was Paul Prudhomme, who popularized Cajun cuisine on a national stage with his catalog of successful cookbooks and his public television show, “Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Always Cooking!” Prudhomme copyrighted the name in 1986, but others believe it was Hebert’s that created the dish a year earlier.

“A farmer walked into our store carrying a turkey, a duck and a chicken, and they asked our owners to stuff them into each other,” said Scott Catlett, the owner of several Hebert’s locations. “We thought it was a little weird, but we’re always willing to try anything once and thankfully we did!”

Some even credit turducken’s invention to New Orleans surgeon Gerald R. LaNasa. As early as the 1960s, he was locally known to use his scalpel while deboning the three birds before stuffing them — sometimes adding pork or veal roasts, andouille sausage or foie gras into the final hen’s cavity.

“I think it’s usually impossible to pin food down to one inventor because cuisine evolves and people build off of each other’s ideas,” said Williams from the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. “But the fact that there are so many competing popular stories shows just how beloved turducken has become.”

Though the debate over who created the trilogy of birds continues, there is no dispute about when the dish rose to national prominence.

That was in 1997 when American football television announcer John Madden carved into a turducken during a Thanksgiving game hosted by the New Orleans Saints. Turducken became a regular part of his Thanksgiving broadcasts, with Madden handing out turkey legs to that game’s best players.

Despite its popularity, with thousands now shipped annually from Louisiana, not everyone is impressed.

“I call it a medieval pile of poo!” laughed Poppy Tooker, host of a weekly radio show, “Louisiana Eats!” “If you’re hoping for the familiar flavor of a turkey breast, or a rich duck, or a delicious chicken, I’m afraid you’re not going to get any of that because it all gets jumbled together into a mess.”

Still, Tooker acknowledged there is something about turducken that captures the spirit of the region from which it came.

“Louisianians — men and women — aren’t afraid to roll their sleeves up in the kitchen and take on a complicated dish,” she said. “This is definitely one of them. It might not be a recipe that came from your grandmother, but it’s a newer tradition that says something about our culture, for sure. People are wild about it here.”

To find out what side of the turducken debate you fall on — delicious or not — Prudhomme advised in his 1987 “The Prudhomme Family Cookbook” to try making one yourself.

“Each time you do a turducken, it will become easier,” he wrote. “It doesn’t take magical cooking ability; it just takes care. What is magical is the way people who eat it will feel about your cooking.”
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Beloved characters like Snoopy and SpongeBob SquarePants soared through the skies above New York City Thursday while bands marched along the streets below as the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade ushered in the holiday season.

The parade started on Manhattan’s Upper West Side making its way alongside Central Park in front of big crowds and a national television audience before ending in front of Macy’s flagship store on 34th Street.

Among the big names performing is Cher, who just released her first Christmas album. The Oscar-, Emmy- and Grammy Award-winner has a prime spot — performing just before the arrival of Santa Claus, which marks the end of the parade.

Other celebrities and musical groups taking part include Jon Batiste, Bell Biv DeVoe, Brandy, Jessie James Decker, Pentatonix and Miss America 2023 Grace Stanke. The parade also includes performances from the casts of some Broadway shows.

New balloons debuting this year include Leo the lizard, a character from a Netflix film, who is more than 40 feet (12.5 meters) tall, as well as ones that have been there before — like SpongeBob, coming in at 44 feet (13.4 meters).

Some characters, like Snoopy, have been in the parade for many years, but this year’s balloon is a new Beagle Scout Snoopy version — celebrating the 50th anniversary of his first appearance in the Peanuts comics.

The parade isn’t just about what’s going on in the skies, though. At street level, the procession includes more than two dozen floats, interspersed with marching bands from around the country and a number of clown crews among the 8,000 people participating, organizers said.

Thousands lined the streets in coats on a sunny morning. Children were on the shoulders of their parents, shouting as Snoopy and SpongeBob and Leo the Lizard went by.

Terri Brown, her husband and their children, ages 3, 5 and 8, were groggy after the 30-mile (50-kilometer) drive from Westfield, New Jersey. But their faces lit up as the parade started.

“I’ve always wanted to bring them here since I used to come as a kid,” Brown said. “I’m happy it’s good weather.”

Ross Greenstein drove 10 hours from Michigan to catch the parade with his daughter, who is studying law in New York, as well as his wife and two other children. Before Thursday, he had only seen the parade on TV.

“I grew up every Thanksgiving, waking up and jumping on the couch and watching the parade,” Greenstein said. “We came to see the parade for the first time in my life and it feels very surreal.”

This is the 97th time the parade has been held since 1924.

President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, called NBC during the parade. The president told Al Roker that people should take a moment to be thankful to live in a country with so much.

“We’re the greatest nation in the world. We should focus on that. We should focus on dealing with our problems and stop the rancor,” Biden said.
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The Indian side of Kashmir is home to very few Christians, but people from the region put their blood and sweat into preparing gifts for Christmas celebrations. For VOA, Muheet Ul Islam has more from Srinagar in Indian-administered Kashmir. Camera: Wasim Nabi
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Russia has placed a Ukrainian singer who won the 2016 Eurovision Song Contest on its wanted list, state news agencies reported Monday.

The reports said an Interior Ministry database listed singer Susana Jamaladinova as being sought for violating a criminal law.

The independent news site Mediazona, which covers opposition and human rights issues, said Jamaladinova was charged under a law adopted last year that bans spreading so-called fake information about the Russian military and the ongoing fighting in Ukraine.

Jamaladinova, who performs under the stage name Jamala, is of Crimean Tatar descent. She won the 2016 Eurovision contest with the song “1944,” a title that refers to the year the Soviet Union deported Crimean Tatars en masse.

Her winning performance came almost exactly two years after Russia annexed Crimea as political turmoil gripped Ukraine. Most other countries regard the annexation as illegitimate.

Russia protested “1944” being allowed in the competition, saying it violated rules against political speech in Eurovision. But the song made no specific criticism of Russia or the Soviet Union, although it drew such implications, opening with the lyrics “When strangers are coming, they come to your house, they kill you all and say ‘We’re not guilty.'”
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Pope Francis’ recent gesture of welcome for transgender Catholics has resonated strongly in a working class, seaside town south of Rome, where a community of trans women has found help and hope through a remarkable relationship with the pontiff forged during the darkest times of the pandemic.

Thanks to the local parish priest, these women now make monthly visits to Francis’ Wednesday general audiences, where they are given VIP seats. On any given day, they receive handouts of medicine, cash and shampoo. When COVID-19 struck, the Vatican bused them into its health facility so they could be vaccinated ahead of most Italians.

On Sunday, these women — many of whom are Latin American migrants and work as prostitutes — will join over 1,000 other poor and homeless people in the Vatican auditorium as Francis’ guests for lunch to mark the Catholic Church’s World Day of the Poor. For the marginalized trans community of Torvaianica, it is just the latest gesture of inclusion from a pope who has made reaching out to the LGBTQ+ community a hallmark of his papacy, in word and deed.

“Before, the church was closed to us. They didn’t see us as normal people, they saw us as the devil,” said Andrea Paola Torres Lopez, a Colombian transgender woman known as Consuelo, whose kitchen is decorated with pictures of Jesus. “Then Pope Francis arrived and the doors of the church opened for us.”

Francis’ latest initiative was a document from the Vatican’s doctrine office asserting that, under some circumstances, transgender people can be baptized and can serve as godparents and witnesses in weddings. It followed another recent statement from the pope himself that suggested same-sex couples could receive church blessings.

In both cases, the new pronouncements reversed the absolute bans on transgender people serving as godparents issued by the Vatican doctrine office in 2015, and on same-sex blessings announced in 2021.

Prominent LGBTQ+ organizations have welcomed Francis’ message of inclusivity, given gay and transgender people have long felt ostracized and discriminated against by a church that officially teaches that homosexual acts are “intrinsically disordered.”

Starting from his famous “Who am I to judge” comment in 2013 about a purportedly gay priest, to his assertion in January that “being homosexual is not a crime,” Francis has evolved his position to increasingly make clear that everyone — “todos, todos, todos” — is a child of God, is loved by God and welcome in the church.

That judgment-free position is not necessarily shared by the rest of the Catholic Church. The recent Vatican gathering of bishops and laypeople, known as a synod, backed off language explicitly calling for welcoming LGBTQ+ Catholics. Conservative Catholics, including cardinals, have strongly questioned his approach. And a 2022 Pew Research Center analysis showed most U.S. Catholics, or 62%, believe that whether a person is a man or woman is determined by the sex assigned at birth, while only a minority, 37%, said it can change.

After his latest statement about trans participation in church sacraments, GLAAD and DignityUSA said Francis’ tone of inclusion would send a message to political and cultural leaders to end their persecution, exclusion and discrimination against transgender people.

For the trans community in Torvaianica, it was a more personal message, a concrete sign that the pope knew them, had heard their stories and wanted to let them know that they were part of his church.

Carla Segovia, a 46-year-old Argentine sex worker, said for transgender women like herself, being a godparent is the closest thing she will ever get to having a child of her own. She said that the new norms made her feel more comfortable about maybe one day returning fully to the faith that she was baptized in but fell away from after coming out as trans.

“This norm from Pope Francis brings me closer to finding that absolute serenity,” she said, which she feels is necessary to be fully reconciled with the faith.

Claudia Vittoria Salas, a 55-year-old transgender tailor and house cleaner, said she had already served as a godparent to three of her nieces and nephews back home in Jujuy, in northern Argentina. She choked up as she recalled that her earnings from her former work as a prostitute put her godchildren through school.

“Being a godparent is a big responsibility, it’s taking the place of the mother or father, it’s not a game,” she said as her voice broke. “You have to choose the right people who will be responsible and capable, when the parents aren’t around, to send the kids to school and provide them with food and clothes.”

Francis’ unusual friendship with the Torvaianica trans community began during Italy’s strict COVID-19 lockdown, when one, then two, and then more sex workers showed up at the Rev. Andrea Conocchia’s church on the main piazza of town asking for food, because they had lost all sources of income.

Over time, Canocchia got to know the women and as the pandemic and economic hardships continued, he encouraged them to write to Francis to ask for what they needed. One night they sat around a table and composed their letters.

“The pages of the letters of the first four were bathed in tears,” he recalled. “Why? Because they told me ‘Father, I’m ashamed, I can’t tell the pope what I have done, how I have lived.'”

But they did, and the first assistance arrived from the pope’s chief almsgiver, who then accompanied the women for their COVID-19 vaccines a year later. At the time of the pandemic, many of the women weren’t legally allowed to live in Italy and had no access to the vaccine.

Eventually, Francis asked to meet them.

Salas was among those who received the jab at the Vatican and then joined a group from Torvaianica to thank Francis at his general audience on April 27, 2022. She brought the Argentine pope a platter of homemade chicken empanadas, a traditional comfort food from their shared homeland.

Showing the photo of the exchange on her phone, Salas remembered what Francis did next: “He told the gentleman who receives the gifts to leave them with him, saying ‘I’m taking them with me for lunch,'” she said. “At that point, I started to cry.”

For Canocchia, Francis’ response to Salas and the others has changed him profoundly as a priest, teaching him the value of listening and being attentive to the lives and hardships of his flock, especially those most on the margins.

For the women, it is simply an acknowledgement that they matter.

“At least they remember us, that we’re on Earth and we haven’t been abandoned and left to the mercy of the wind,” said Torres Lopez.
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Country singers, romance novelists, video game artists and voice actors are appealing to the U.S. government for relief — as soon as possible — from the threat that artificial intelligence poses to their livelihoods.

“Please regulate AI. I’m scared,” wrote a podcaster concerned about his voice being replicated by AI in one of thousands of letters recently submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office.

Technology companies, by contrast, are largely happy with the status quo that has enabled them to gobble up published works to make their AI systems better at mimicking what humans do.

The nation’s top copyright official hasn’t yet taken sides. She told The Associated Press she’s listening to everyone as her office weighs whether copyright reforms are needed for a new era of generative AI tools that can spit out compelling imagery, music, video and passages of text.

“We’ve received close to 10,000 comments,” said Shira Perlmutter, the U.S. register of copyrights, in an interview. “Every one of them is being read by a human being, not a computer. And I myself am reading a large part of them.”

What’s at stake?

Perlmutter directs the U.S. Copyright Office, which registered more than 480,000 copyrights last year covering millions of individual works but is increasingly being asked to register works that are AI-generated. So far, copyright claims for fully machine-generated content have been soundly rejected because copyright laws are designed to protect works of human authorship.

But, Perlmutter asks, as humans feed content into AI systems and give instructions to influence what comes out, “is there a point at which there’s enough human involvement in controlling the expressive elements of the output that the human can be considered to have contributed authorship?”

That’s one question the Copyright Office has put to the public.

A bigger one — the question that’s fielded thousands of comments from creative professions — is what to do about copyrighted human works that are being pulled from the internet and other sources and ingested to train AI systems, often without permission or compensation.

More than 9,700 comments were sent to the Copyright Office, part of the Library of Congress, before an initial comment period closed in late October. Another round of comments is due by December 6. After that, Perlmutter’s office will work to advise Congress and others on whether reforms are needed.

What are artists saying?

Addressing the “Ladies and Gentlemen of the US Copyright Office,” the Family Ties actor and filmmaker Justine Bateman said she was disturbed that AI models were “ingesting 100 years of film” and TV in a way that could destroy the structure of the film business and replace large portions of its labor pipeline.

It “appears to many of us to be the largest copyright violation in the history of the United States,” Bateman wrote. “I sincerely hope you can stop this practice of thievery.”

Airing some of the same AI concerns that fueled this year’s Hollywood strikes, television showrunner Lilla Zuckerman (Poker Face) said her industry should declare war on what is “nothing more than a plagiarism machine” before Hollywood is “coopted by greedy and craven companies who want to take human talent out of entertainment.”

The music industry is also threatened, said Nashville-based country songwriter Marc Beeson, who’s written tunes for Carrie Underwood and Garth Brooks. Beeson said AI has potential to do good but “in some ways, it’s like a gun — in the wrong hands, with no parameters in place for its use, it could do irreparable damage to one of the last true American art forms.”

While most commenters were individuals, their concerns were echoed by big music publishers — Universal Music Group called the way AI is trained “ravenous and poorly controlled” — as well as author groups and news organizations including The New York Times and The Associated Press.

Is it fair use?

What leading tech companies like Google, Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI are telling the Copyright Office is that their training of AI models fits into the “fair use” doctrine that allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different.

“The American AI industry is built in part on the understanding that the Copyright Act does not proscribe the use of copyrighted material to train Generative AI models,” says a letter from Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The purpose of AI training is to identify patterns “across a broad body of content,” not to “extract or reproduce” individual works, it added.

So far, courts have largely sided with tech companies in interpreting how copyright laws should treat AI systems. In a defeat for visual artists, a federal judge in San Francisco last month dismissed much of the first big lawsuit against AI image-generators, though allowed some of the case to proceed.

Most tech companies cite as precedent Google’s success in beating back legal challenges to its online book library. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 let stand lower court rulings that rejected authors’ claim that Google’s digitizing of millions of books and showing snippets of them to the public amounted to copyright infringement.

But that’s a flawed comparison, argued former law professor and bestselling romance author Heidi Bond, who writes under the pen name Courtney Milan. Bond said she agrees that “fair use encompasses the right to learn from books,” but Google Books obtained legitimate copies held by libraries and institutions, whereas many AI developers are scraping works of writing through “outright piracy.”

Perlmutter said this is what the Copyright Office is trying to help sort out.

“Certainly, this differs in some respects from the Google situation,” Perlmutter said. “Whether it differs enough to rule out the fair use defense is the question in hand.”
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A 23-year-old Taylor Swift fan died at the singer’s Eras Tour concert in Rio de Janeiro Friday night, according to a statement from the show’s organizers in Brazil. Both fans and politicians reacted to the news with outrage.

While a cause of death for Ana Clara Benevides Machado has not been announced, fans complained they were not allowed to take water into Nilton Santos Olympic Stadium despite soaring temperatures.

A group launched an online petition Saturday morning calling for a “Benevides Law” to “make water in events mandatory.”

The petition garnered more than 150,000 signatures in just a few hours. Federal authorities announced that free water would be made available at all future concerts.

In a handwritten note shared on her social media, Swift said she had a “shattered heart.”

“There’s very little information I have other than the fact that she was so incredibly beautiful and far too young,” the singer wrote of the young woman.

The show’s organizer, Time4Fun, said on Instagram that paramedics attended to Benevides after she reported feeling unwell. She was taken to a first-aid center and then to a hospital, where she died an hour later, the statement from the Brazilian live entertainment company said.

Concertgoers said they were not allowed to bring water bottles into the stadium even though Rio and most of Brazil have had record-breaking temperatures this week amid a dangerous and lasting heat wave. The daytime high in Rio on Friday was 39.1 degrees Celsius (102.4 degrees Fahrenheit), but it felt much hotter.

Elizabeth Morin, 26, who recently moved to Rio from Los Angeles, described “sauna-like” conditions inside the stadium.

“It was extremely hot. My hair got so wet from sweat as soon as I came in,” she said. “There was a point at which I had to check my breathing to make sure I wasn’t going to pass out.”

Morin said she drank plenty of water but saw “a good amount of people looking distressed” and others “yelling for water.” She said that she was able to get water from the sidelines of the area she was standing in, but that water was a lot harder to access from other parts of the stadium, “especially if you were concerned about losing your specific position.”

During the show, Swift paused her performance and asked from the stage for water to be brought to a group of people who had successfully caught the singer’s attention, according to Morin.

“They were holding up their phones saying ‘We need water,’” she recalled.

Justice Minister Flávio Dino said on X that the ministry would implement “emergency rules” in response to the situation. He later announced that “water bottles for personal use, in suitable material, will be allowed” at concerts and other events and that show producers must provide free and easily accessible drinking water.

Before the show, Benevides posted a video of herself on Instagram wearing a Taylor Swift T-shirt and waiting in line to enter the stadium while seeking shade under an umbrella. Like her, thousands of fans waited hours in the sun before being allowed inside.

She told her followers while fanning her face that she’d arrived at 11 a.m. — the show began around 7:30 p.m. — and was “still in the mess.”

Benevides’ friend, Daniele Menin, who attended the concert with her, told online news site G1 that her friend passed out at the beginning of the concert as Swift performed her second song, “Cruel Summer.”

“We always said that when [Taylor Swift] came to Brazil we would find a way to go. The ticket was very expensive, but we still found a way,” Menin told G1.

Rio de Janeiro Mayor Eduardo Paes said on X the “loss of a young woman’s life … is unacceptable.”

While authorities are investigating the circumstances of the death, Paes wrote, the municipality will demand Saturday that the show’s production company provide new water distribution points, more brigades and ambulances, and advance entrance to the show by one hour.

Swift has two more shows scheduled in Rio, one Saturday and one Sunday.

“I’m not going to be able to speak about this from stage because I feel overwhelmed by grief when I even try to talk about it,” she wrote. “I want to say now I feel this loss deeply and my broken heart goes out to her family and friends.” 
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