A 1955 Mercedes-Benz, one of only two such versions in existence, was auctioned off earlier this month for a whopping $143 million, making it the world’s most expensive car ever sold, RM Sotheby’s announced Thursday.

The 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupe was sold to a private collector for almost triple the previous record, which was set in 2018 by a 1962 Ferrari 250 GTO that fetched over $48 million.

The invitation-only auction took place on May 5 at the MercedesBenz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, the auction house said.

The car is one of just two prototypes built by the Mercedes-Benz racing department and is named after its creator and chief engineer, Rudolf Uhlenhaut, according to RM Sotheby’s.

“The private buyer has agreed that the 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupe will remain accessible for public display on special occasions, while the second original 300 SLR Coupe remains in company ownership and will continue to be displayed at the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart,” the auction company added.

RM Sotheby’s said the proceeds from the auction will be used to establish a worldwide Mercedes-Benz Fund that will fund environmental science and decarbonization research. 
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Vangelis, the Greek electronic composer who wrote the unforgettable Academy Award-winning score for the film “Chariots of Fire” and music for dozens of other movies, documentaries and TV series, has died at 79. 

Greek media reported that Vangelis — born Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou — died in a French hospital late Tuesday. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis and other government officials expressed their condolences Thursday.

“Vangelis Papathanassiou is no longer among us,” Mitsotakis tweeted. 

The opening credits of “Chariots of Fire” roll as a bunch of young runners progress in slow motion across a glum beach in Scotland, as a lazy, beat-backed tune rises to a magisterial declamation. It’s one of the most instantly recognizable musical themes in cinema — and its standing in popular culture has only been confirmed by the host of spoofs it has sired. 

The 1981 British film made Vangelis, but his initial encounter with success came with his first Greek pop band in the 1960s. 

He evolved into a one-man quasi-classical orchestra, using a vast array of electronic equipment to conjure up his enormously popular undulating waves of sound. A private, humorous man — burly, with with shoulder-length hair and a trim beard — he quoted ancient Greek philosophy and saw the artist as a conduit for a basic universal force. He was fascinated by space exploration and wrote music for celestial bodies, but said he never sought stardom himself. 

Still, a micro-planet spinning somewhere between Mars and Jupiter — 6354 Vangelis — will forever bear his name. 

Born on March 29, 1943, near the city of Volos in central Greece, Vangelis started playing the piano at age 4, although he got no formal training and claimed he never learned to read notes. 

“Orchestration, composition — they teach these things in music schools, but there are some things you can never teach,” he said in a 1982 interview. “You can’t teach creation.” 

At 20, Vangelis and three friends formed the Forminx band in Athens, which did very well in Greece. After it disbanded, he wrote scores for several Greek films and later became a founding member — together with another later-to-be internationally famous Greek musician, Demis Roussos — of Aphrodite’s Child. Based in Paris, the progressive rock group produced several European hits, and their final record “666,” released in 1972, is still highly acclaimed. 

Aphrodite’s Child also broke up, and Vangelis pursued solo projects. In 1974, he moved to London, built his own studio and cooperated with Yes frontman Jon Anderson, with whom he recorded as Jon and Vangelis and had several major hits. 

Signature piece

But his huge breakthrough came with the score for “Chariots of Fire” that told the true story of two British runners competing in the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris. Vangelis’ score won one of the four Academy Awards the film won, including best picture. The signature piece is one of the hardest-to-forget movie tunes worldwide — and has also served as the musical background to endless slow-motion parodies. 

Vangelis later wrote music scores for Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982) and “1492: Conquest of Paradise” (1992), as well as for “Missing” (1982) and “Antarctica” (1983), among others. 

He refused many other offers for film scores, saying in an interview: “Half of the films I see don’t need music. It sounds like something stuffed in.” 

Vangelis was wary of how record companies handled commercial success. With success, he said, “you find yourself stuck and obliged to repeat yourself and your previous success.” 

His interest in science — including the physics of music and sound — and space exploration led to compositions linked with major NASA and European Space Agency projects. When British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking died in 2018, Vangelis composed a musical tribute for his interment that the ESA broadcast into space. 

Vangelis brought forth his symphonic swells playing alone on a bank of synthesizers, while flipping switches as his feet darted from one volume pedal to another. 

“I work like an athlete,” he once said. 

He avoided the lifestyle excesses associated with many in the music industry, saying that he never took drugs — “which was very uncomfortable, at times.” 

Vangelis said he didn’t ever experiment with his music and usually did everything on the first take. 

“When I compose, I perform the music at the same time, so everything is live, nothing is pre-programmed,” he said. 

The composer lived in London, Paris and Athens, where he bought a house at the foot of the Acropolis that he never dolled up, even when his street became one of the most desirable pedestrian walks in town. The neoclassical building was nearly demolished in 2007 when government officials decided that it spoiled the view of the ancient citadel from a new museum built next door, but eventually reconsidered. 

Vangelis received many awards in Greece, France and the U.S. Little was known of his personal life besides that he was an avid painter. 

“Every day I paint and every day I compose music,” he said — in that order.
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Female referees will make World Cup history this year by working games at a major men’s tournament for the first time in Qatar.

Three female referees and three female assistant referees were announced Thursday by FIFA among 129 officials selected for World Cup duty, including one man who caused controversy when refereeing a chaotic African Cup of Nations game in January while suffering with heatstroke.

French referee Stéphanie Frappart already worked men’s games in World Cup qualifying and the Champions League, after handling the 2019 Women’s World Cup final. She also refereed the final of the men’s French Cup this month.

“As always, the criteria we have used is ‘quality first’ and the selected match officials represent the highest level of refereeing worldwide,” said FIFA Referees Committee chairman Pierluigi Collina, who worked the 2002 World Cup final. “In this way, we clearly emphasize that it is quality that counts for us and not gender.”

Salima Mukansanga of Rwanda and Yoshimi Yamashita of Japan are also on the list of 36 referees preparing for the 64 games at the tournament, which will be played from Nov. 21-Dec. 18.

The 69 assistant referees include Neuza Back of Brazil, Karen Díaz Medina of Mexico and Kathryn Nesbitt of the United States.

“I would hope that in the future the selection of elite women’s match officials for important men’s competitions will be perceived as something normal and no longer as sensational,” Collina said.

Among the male referees is Janny Sikazwe of Zambia, who blew the final whistle at an African Cup group match after 85 minutes and again 13 seconds before the 90 minutes were complete, with Mali leading Tunisia 1-0.

About 30 minutes after the match, officials ordered the teams back on the field to restart play but Tunisia refused. The result was later ratified by the Confederation of African Football despite an official protest by Tunisia.

The match was played in heat and humidity in Cameroon, and Sikazwe later explained he started to become confused in the intense conditions.

Sikazwe will be working at his second World Cup after handling two group games at the 2018 tournament in Russia.

The extreme heat in Qatar led FIFA to decide in 2015 to move the tournament to the cooler months in the Gulf emirate.

FIFA has picked 24 men to work on video reviews. The VAR system made its debut in 2018.

FIFA said 50 referee-and-assistant trios began preparing in 2019 for World Cup duty, with the project affected by limits on international travel during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Two referees were picked from each of Argentina, Brazil, England and France.

All the officials — who were not allocated into specific teams of three — face future technical, physical and medical assessments this year, FIFA said.
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Taras Topolya is a Ukrainian rock singer. From the first day of the war in Ukraine, he has been working as a paramedic with the country’s Territorial Defense. But when he has a break, he plays with big names in the Western music industry. Lesia Bakalets has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. VOA footage by Yuriy Zakrevskiy.
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At Colorado’s Adventure Room Selfie Museum, it’s the visitors who make the art, shooting social media videos and photos in a variety of colorful settings. For VOA, Svitlana Prystynska went to have a look.
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A renowned Iranian filmmaker has said that the offices and homes of several filmmakers and other industry professionals were raided and some of them arrested in recent days.

Mohammad Rasoulof made the comments on Instagram late Saturday, posting a statement signed by dozens of movie industry professionals.

The statement also claimed that security forces confiscated film production equipment during the raids. It condemned the actions and called them “illegal.”

In a separate Instagram post, Rasoulof identified two of the detained filmmakers as Firouzeh Khosravani and Mina Keshavarz. Rasoulof himself was not targeted in the recent raids.

There were no immediate comments from the Iranian authorities on the raids, and no additional details were immediately available.

Rasoulof won the Berlin Film Festival’s top prize in 2020 for his film “There Is No Evil.” The film tells four stories loosely connected to the themes of the death penalty in the Islamic republic and personal freedoms under oppression.

Rasoulof was sentenced to a year in prison shortly after receiving the award, but his lawyer appealed the sentence. He has been banned from making films and traveling abroad.

Iran occasionally arrests activists in cultural fields over alleged security violations.

Iran’s conservative authorities have long viewed many cultural activities as part of a “soft war” by the West against Iran and an attempt to tarnish the country’s Islamic beliefs.
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Yelena Osipova barely slept ahead of Russia’s pomp-filled Victory Day celebrations on May 9.

The 76-year-old artist was up late, making placards to protest about the conflict in Ukraine.

But the moment she stepped out of her home in St. Petersburg on her way to demonstrate, two unknown men snatched the work from her and ran off. 

“It was upsetting. I’d worked half the night and really liked those placards,” the white-haired painter told AFP. 

“It’s obvious that it was an organized attack.”

Indefatigable as ever, within an hour, the tiny, stooped woman, who moves with difficulty, already had a new poster and was heading out again to protest.

Osipova is well-known in her hometown.

She has been called the “conscience of St. Petersburg,” Russia’s second city, after two decades spent publicly opposing the rule of President Vladimir Putin.

Since the Kremlin’s forces rolled into Ukraine, she has also become a symbol of Russians standing up against the conflict.

Footage of her frequent detentions by riot police has been widely circulated on social media.

“The main thing is that people should say these forbidden words today: ‘No to war,'” said the former art professor.

But in Russia that is a risky prospect.

Protests have been ruthlessly stamped out and those criticizing the campaign — a “special military operation” in official parlance — risk a 15-year jail term.

‘Silence means agreement’

Osipova first started taking to the streets two years after former KGB agent Putin took power in 2000.

She has been demonstrating ever since against what she says are the crimes committed by the Russian authorities.

She protested in 2014 when Moscow seized the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine and against the fighting sparked in the east of the country.

Now she is focused on Putin’s full-fledged offensive against Russia’s pro-Western neighbor.

“If people accept all this, then it means they are not thinking about their children,” she said as she showed AFP her work in her flat.

“I’m dedicating my placards to this idea: what world are we leaving to our children?”

She shows off one poster with the face of a young girl shouting “No to war” on a yellow and blue background, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. 

Another of a child has the slogan “What world are we leaving behind us?”

“Since 2002 I haven’t been able to stay silent, because silence means agreement with what is happening in my country,” she said.

“That’s why I go to protest.”

Her flat with its decrepit vaulted ceilings is in the heart of Russia’s former imperial capital and has been home to her family for three generations.

Its two rooms are cluttered with pictures and posters with pacifist and anti-Kremlin messages.

“I don’t want to serve as cannon fodder,” reads one poster of a soldier. “Wives and mothers, stop the war,” says another.

A third proclaims: “We are all hostages of the provocative politics of imperial power.”

On one wall hangs a large photo of a young man: her only son, Ivan, who died of tuberculosis in 2009 at 28.

Osipova has been frequently detained by the police, but they now know her so well that they sometimes just take her straight home rather than to the station.

“I’ve long ago stopped being scared for myself,” she said defiantly.

“In your own homeland you should not be afraid, but if you love it you should feel that you are the one in charge.” 
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In his first visit to the American Museum of Natural History, Morgan Guerin had a list. Not of things he wanted to check out, though — a list of things that he hated.

It started with seeing certain regalia from his Musqueam Indian Band — sacred objects not intended for public display — in the museum’s Northwest Coast Hall.

This wasn’t just any visit. Guerin was there at the museum’s invitation in 2017 for the start of a project to renovate the hall, incorporating Indigenous perspectives. For him and representatives of other Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, the 5-year, $19-million renovation of the Northwest Coast Hall, which reopened to the public Friday, was an opportunity to tell their stories themselves.

“Our people are very, very tired of being ‘studied,’ because the misconception of who we are has always been the outside community’s downfall,” he said. “We have always been here, ready to tell people who we are.”

The hall was the museum’s first gallery, opened in 1899 under the auspices of Franz Boas, an anthropologist who was deeply interested in the Indigenous cultures of the Northwest and western coastal Canada. Boas was also a proponent of what was then a revolutionary idea that different cultures should be looked at in their own right and not on some kind of comparative scale.

It had largely remained unchanged, though, since the early 1900s. When museum officials decided it was time to renovate, they knew they couldn’t do it without input from the people whose cultures are on display.

“A lot of what we did was trying to bring this historic collection to the 21st century, and that’s by telling new stories with active voices in all of these communities and nations,” said Lauri Halderman, vice president for exhibition.

The museum brought together the representatives of the Indigenous communities to talk about what the gallery should contain and what it should look like for the showcase of 10 Pacific Northwest tribal nations.

It wasn’t a simple process, made even less so by the impact of the pandemic with its forcing of remote instead of in-person collaborations.

The hall includes some iconic pieces that anyone who has been to the museum will remember – including a massive 63-foot-long canoe that for decades was placed outside the hall but has now been brought in and suspended from the ceiling as well as several giant carvings. But its new exhibit, items are accompanied by text in both English and Indigenous languages and includes a gallery section showing how younger Indigenous artists are using motifs and designs from prior generations.

There was also, and continues to be, the fundamental question of whether museums should be holding these collections and trying to tell these stories in the first place, given the role that theft and colonialization has played in building them, and the way Indigenous communities have been treated.

Museums “seem to function as very expensive, and in the case of the American Museum of Natural History, maybe the most expensive, trophy cases in the world,” said Haa’yuups, co-curator of the hall, who is Head of the House of Taḳiishtaḳamlthat-ḥ, of the Huupa’chesat-ḥ First Nation.

He said, “They seem to have a meta language about them or a meta message, ‘Aren’t we powerful? Don’t we go forth and dominate the world?'”

He saw his involvement as a way to help spur a difference, to get people thinking about whether the items on display would be better served by being with the people they came from.

“Does it make sense to have a bunch of people who have nothing to do with objects, to have them spend their lives managing them?” he said. “Or does it make sense to send those treasures back to the communities where they come from?”

It’s an issue the museum has and is continuing to grapple with, said Peter Whiteley, curator of North American ethnology. He said the institution, which has repatriated items over the years, had decided through the renovation process that it was willing to do some additional limited repatriation and develop greater collaboration between the museum and the native tribes.

Deeper questions notwithstanding, those who took part in the process, both from the Indigenous nations and the museum staff, said it was a valuable one in terms of showing what is possible in terms of collaboration and listening to Indigenous voices.

“The best thing about this, the result of these consultants from the different native tribes,” said David Boxley, representing the Tsimshian tribe, “is that it’s our voice speaking.”
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Former Australian test cricketer Andrew Symonds has died after a single-vehicle auto accident near Townsville in northeast Australia. He was 46.

Cricket Australia reported Symonds’ death on its website on Sunday, citing a police statement with details of the accident late Saturday night.

It described Symonds as “a cult hero during the peak of his international playing career and one of the most skilled all-rounders Australian cricket has seen.”

“The Queenslander was a larger-than-life figure who drew a widespread fan base during his peak years for not only his hard-hitting ways but his larrikin persona.”

Symonds played 26 test matches for Australia and posted two centuries, but he was better known as a limited-overs specialist. He played 198 one-day international for Australia and won two World Cups.

After retiring as a player, Symonds became a popular commentator for cricket broadcasters.

Queensland Police said the accident occurred at Hervey Range, about 50 kilometers from Townsville.

“Early information indicates, shortly after 11 p.m. the car was being driven on Hervey Range Road, near Alice River Bridge when it left the roadway and rolled,” a police statement said. “Emergency services attempted to revive the 46-year-old driver and sole occupant. However, he died of his injuries.”

Symonds’ family appealed for privacy.

Former Australian captain Allan Border was among those to pay tribute to Symonds on Sunday.

Border said Symonds “hit the ball a long way and just wanted to entertain.

“He was, in a way, a little bit of an old-fashioned cricketer,” Border told the Nine Network. “He was an adventurer, loved his fishing, he loved hiking, camping. People liked his very laid-back style.”

That style brought Symonds into conflict with authority late in his career. In 2008 he missed Australia’s one-day series against Bangladesh after going fishing when he was required to attend a team meeting. He also was disciplined before the 2009 Twenty20 World Cup for breaching team rules around alcohol.

With dreadlocks and his face daubed with zinc cream, Symonds always cut a flamboyant figure in the Australian team.

His loss is another bitter blow for Australian cricket after the death in Thailand in March of legendary leg-spinner Shane Warne. Wicketkeeper Rod Marsh also died in March aged 74. 
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Ukrainian band Kalush Orchestra won the Eurovision Song Contest in the early hours of Sunday in a clear show of support for the war-ravaged nation.

The six-man band that mixes traditional folk melodies and contemporary hip hop in a purposeful defense of Ukrainian culture was the sentimental and bookmakers’ favorite among the 25 bands and performers competing in the grand finale. The public vote from home was decisive in securing their victory.

The band’s front man, Oleg Psiuk, took advantage of the enormous global audience to make impassioned plea to free fighters still trapped beneath a sprawling steel plant in the southern port city of Mariupol following the six-man band’s performance.

“I ask all of you, please help Ukraine, Mariupol. Help Azovstal, right now,” he said to the live crowd of about 7,500, many of whom gave a standing ovation, and global television audience of millions.

The plea to free the remaining Ukrainian fighters trapped beneath the Azovstal plant by Russians served as a somber reminder that the hugely popular and at times flamboyant Eurovision song contest was being played out against the backdrop of a war on Europe’s eastern flank.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gave signs that he was watching from Kyiv and rooting for Ukrainian band.

“Indeed, this is not a war, but nevertheless, for us today, any victory is very important,” Zelenskyy said, according to a presidential statement. “So, let’s cheer for ours. Glory be to Ukraine!”

25 bands

Kalush Orchestra was among 25 bands performing in the Eurovision Song Contest final in front of a live audience in the industrial northern city of Turin, while millions more watched on television or via streaming around the world.

Fans from Spain, Britain and elsewhere entering the Italian venue from throughout Europe were rooting for their own country to win. Still, Ukrainian music fan Iryna Lasiy said she felt global support for her country in the war and “not only for the music.”

Russia was excluded this year after its Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine, a move that organizers said was meant to keep politics out of the contest that promotes diversity and friendship among nations.

The band’s song Stefania was written as a tribute to Psiuk’s mother but has transformed since the war into an anthem to the beleaguered nation, as lyrics take on new meaning. “I’ll always find my way home, even if all roads are destroyed,” Psiuk wrote.The six-member, all-male band received special permission to leave the country to represent Ukraine and Ukrainian culture at the music contest. One of the original members stayed to fight, and the others plan to return as soon as the contest is over.

‘World supports us’

Back in Ukraine, in the battered northeastern city of Kharkiv, Kalush Orchestra’s participation in the contest is seen as giving the nation another platform to garner international support.

“The whole country is rising, everyone in the world supports us. This is extremely nice,” said Julia Vashenko, a 29-year-old teacher.

“I believe that wherever there is Ukraine now and there is an opportunity to talk about the war, we need to talk,” said Alexandra Konovalova, a 23-year-old makeup artist in Kharkiv. “Any competitions are important now, because of them more people learn about what is happening now.”

The winner is chosen in equal parts by panels of music experts in each competing nation and votes by the viewing public — leaving room for an upset. Britain’s Sam Ryder and Sweden’s Cornelia Jakobs are each given a 10% shot while the Italian duo of Mahmood & Blanco have a 6% chance of winning.

The winner takes home a glass microphone trophy and a potential career boost.

The event was hosted by Italy after local rock band Maneskin won last year in Rotterdam. The victory shot the Rome-based band to international fame, opening for the Rolling Stones and appearing on Saturday Night Live and numerous magazine covers in their typically genderless costume code.

Twenty bands were chosen in two semifinals this week and were competing along with the Big Five of Italy, Britain, France, Germany and Spain, which have permanent berths because of their financial support of the contest. 
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Fred Ward, a veteran actor who brought a gruff tenderness to tough-guy roles in such films as The Right Stuff, The Player and Tremors, has died. He was 79.

Ward died Sunday, his publicist Ron Hofmann said Friday. No cause or place of death was disclosed per the family’s wishes.

Ward earned a Golden Globe and shared the Venice Film Festival ensemble prize for his performance in Robert Altman’s Short Cuts, and played the title character in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins. He also reached new heights playing Mercury 7 astronaut Virgil “Gus” Grissom in 1983′s Academy Award-nominated film The Right Stuff.

“Devastated to learn about the passing of my friend, Fred Ward,” tweeted actor Matthew Modine, who co-starred with Ward in Short Cuts and Alan Rudolph’s Equinox. “A tough façade covering emotions as deep as the Pacific Ocean. Godspeed amigo.”

A former boxer, lumberjack in Alaska and short-order cook who served in the U.S. Air Force, Ward was a San Diego native who was part Cherokee. One early big role was alongside Clint Eastwood in 1979’s Escape From Alcatraz.

“I mourn the loss of Fred Ward, who was so kind to me when we worked together on Remo Williams,” actor Kate Mulgrew tweeted. “Decent and modest and utterly professional, he disarmed with a smile that was at once warm and mischievous.”

Ward’s other roles included a rumpled cop chasing a psychotic criminal played by Alec Baldwin in George Armitage’s Miami Blues. He was a formidable and intimidating father to both Freddie Prinze Jr.’s character in Summer Catch and David Spade’s title character in Joe Dirt.

Ward played President Ronald Reagan in the 2009 Cold War espionage thriller Farewell and had a supporting role in the 2013 action flick 2 Guns, starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg.

In the horror-comedy Tremors, Ward paired with Kevin Bacon to play a pair of repairmen who end up saving a hardscrabble Nevada desert community beset by giant underground snakes.

With the sexually charged, NC-17 Henry & June, Ward showed more than just grit. Based on the book by Anais Nin and directed by Philip Kaufman, Ward played novelist Henry Miller, opposite Maria de Medeiros as Nin and Uma Thurman as Miller’s wife, June. “My rear end seemed to have something to do with (that rating),” he told The Washington Post.

He also reteamed with Altman for the part of a studio security chief in the director’s 1992 Hollywood satire The Player, and played a union activist and Meryl Streep’s workmate in Mike Nichols’ Silkwood in 1983.

Ward demonstrated his comedy chops playing a terrorist intent on blowing up the Academy Awards in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult in 1994.

On the small screen, he had recurring roles on NBC’s ER playing the father of Maura Tierney’s Abby Lockhart in 2006-07 and guest starred on such series as Grey’s Anatomy, Leverage and United States of Tara. Ward most recently appeared in the second season of HBO’s True Detective as the retired cop father of Colin Farrell’s Detective Ray Velcoro.

Ward is survived by his wife of 27 years, Marie-France Ward, and his son, Django Ward.
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Rugby’s biggest tournament is finally heading to the United States. 

Now comes the hard part for the sport’s leadership: Generating enough interest and sustainability to secure the sport’s place in a crowded U.S. market. 

The Rugby World Cup will be staged in the U.S. for the first time after being voted on Thursday as the host of the men’s event in 2031 and the women’s tournament two years later. 

It marks rugby’s biggest attempt to move into the wider American sporting consciousness and unlock what World Rugby — the sport’s international governing body — regards as an area of untapped potential, in both a commercial and sporting sense. 

“The golden nugget that everybody wants to get hold of” was how World Rugby chairman Bill Beaumont described America. 

“What we will leave in the U.S.,” he said, “is an extremely sustainable, vibrant sport that will go from strength to strength.” 

USA Rugby’s vision is of countrywide membership more than quadrupling to 450,000 by 2031, of stadiums “from coast to coast” staging matches — there have been around 25 venue bids, including from NFL and Major League Soccer arenas — and of significant investment in the domestic Major League Rugby so the U.S. Eagles are a competitive team in time for 2031. 

A competitive, perhaps quarterfinal-bidding team, would crucially be necessary for the Eagles and the World Cup to get traction in the U.S. The Rugby World Cup is staged during September-October, when America is already transfixed by the NFL and college football, the Major League Baseball pennant races and playoffs, and the start of the NBA and NHL. 

USA Rugby already has some experience. The Rugby World Cup Sevens at the baseball home of the San Francisco Giants in July 2018 drew more than 100,000 people across three days, and U.S.-decent TV ratings on NBC. 

“(The World Cups are) an invitation to increase our levels of awareness, to increase our sport’s fan base,” said Victoria Folayan, who played sevens rugby for the U.S. and is USA Rugby’s athlete representative. “The doors are opening. Being able to take that step is just the beginning.” 

To that end, World Rugby’s experience of taking its men’s showpiece tournament to Asia for the first time in 2019 — when Japan was the host and reached the quarterfinals — will be key in getting the U.S ready for its debut. Not just the public, but the national team itself. 

While the U.S. women’s team won the inaugural women’s Rugby World Cup in 1991 and reached the final in the next two events, the men’s national team has never got out of the pool stage in eight trips to the World Cup — three wins in 25 matches — and is basically shut out from playing the world’s top teams on an annual basis. 

As it did successfully for Japan, World Rugby will pour coaching expertise into the Eagles and work to give them more test matches to improve. There is an ongoing attempt to shake up the men’s international calendar so that emerging teams like the United States have more opportunities. 

Hosting the two World Cups will cost around $500 million, and profits and losses will be shared between World Rugby and USA Rugby, which filed for bankruptcy as recently as 2020. 

The bid received support from the White House, with U.S. President Joe Biden sending a letter to World Rugby last month giving government guarantees and his backing for the “development of rugby in the United States.” 

The men’s Rugby World Cup is regarded by some as the world’s third biggest sporting event, after the soccer World Cup and the summer Olympics. 

The United States is hosting all three of those in a five-year span from 2026, starting with the men’s soccer World Cup that year — with Mexico and Canada as co-hosts — and then the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028. 

For the first time, World Rugby used a streamlined bid process to enable it to announce the hosts of all the World Cups from 2025-33, for both men and women. 

The Sydney Harbour Bridge was lit up in green and gold after two-time-champion Australia was awarded the men’s World Cup in 2027 and the women’s tournament in 2029. The men’s World Cup is returning to Australia for the first time since 2003. 

It is being viewed as a chance to rejuvenate rugby in the country as the World Cups come after the British and Irish Lions tour of Australia in 2025, bringing much-needed revenue to its governing body that was badly hit by the pandemic. 

Rugby Australia chief executive Andy Marinos described it as “the start of a new era for Australian Rugby.” 

“Australia will become the center of the rugby world over the next decade,” he said, “and that is incredibly exciting.” 

The 2027 tournament will be the 40th anniversary of Australia and New Zealand hosting the first Rugby World Cup in 1987. 

England was announced as the host of the women’s World Cup in 2025. 

 
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Ncuti Gatwa will take the mantle from Jodie Whittaker on “Doctor Who,” the BBC announced Sunday, ending speculation over the iconic Time Lord’s next regeneration.

“Sometimes talent walks through the door and it’s so bright and bold and brilliant, I just stand back in awe and thank my lucky stars,” returning showrunner Russell T Davies said in the broadcaster’s release. “Ncuti dazzled us, seized hold of the Doctor and owned those TARDIS keys in seconds.”

Gatwa, whose first name is pronounced ’SHOO-tee, currently stars in Netflix’s high school comedy-drama “Sex Education” as the effervescent Eric Effiong, who is openly gay but from a highly religious family.

The Rwanda-born, Scotland-raised Gatwa, 29, will be the first Black actor to helm the quintessential British sci-fi show, but he won’t be the first Black Doctor — Jo Martin has played “Fugitive Doctor” in several episodes.

Whittaker became the 13th doctor — and the first woman to play the central galaxy-hopping, extraterrestrial Time Lord who regenerates into new bodies — in 2017, when she took over from Peter Capaldi. Her last episode of “Doctor Who” is expected to air later this year.

The original run of “Doctor Who” spanned 1963 to 1989. Since the show was revived in 2005, the Doctor has been played by Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant and Matt Smith, in addition to Capaldi and Whittaker. Other stars, like Karen Gillan and Billie Piper, have made their names on the show as the Doctor’s “companion.”

“This role and show means so much to so many around the world, including myself, and each one of my incredibly talented predecessors has handled that unique responsibility and privilege with the utmost care. I will endeavor my utmost to do the same,” the release quoted Gatwa — who described his emotions as “a mix of deeply honored, beyond excited and of course a little bit scared” — as saying.

In addition to seeing the start of Gatwa’s tenure, next year also marks Davies’ return to “Doctor Who” after more than a decade’s absence.

“Russell T Davies is almost as iconic as the Doctor himself and being able to work with him is a dream come true,” Gatwa said.

The writer and producer ran the reboot until 2009, and has worked on shows like “A Very English Scandal” and “It’s A Sin” in the interim. He promises a “spectacular” 2023.

“Unlike the Doctor, I may only have one heart but I am giving it all to this show,” Gatwa said.
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Irish rock group U2’s frontman Bono and his bandmate The Edge performed a 40-minute concert in a metro station in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv on Sunday and praised Ukrainians fighting for their freedom from Russia.

“Your president leads the world in the cause of freedom right now … The people of Ukraine are not just fighting for your own freedom, you’re fighting for all of us who love freedom,” Bono told a crowd of up to 100 gathered inside the Khreshchatyk metro station. He was referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Russia, which calls its action in Ukraine a “special military operation,” continues to carry out missile strikes across Ukraine. However, some life has returned to Kyiv even though air raid sirens sound regularly.

Bono rallied the crowd between songs during his performance.

“This evening, 8th of May, shots will ring out in the Ukraine sky, but you’ll be free at last. They can take your lives, but they can never take your pride,” he said.
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Almost 400 years ago, the Catholic residents of a small Bavarian village vowed to perform a play of “the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ” every 10 years, if only God would spare them any further losses from the plague known as the Black Death.

Legend has it that ever since 1634, when the villagers of Oberammergau first performed their passion play, no more residents died of that pestilence or any other plagues — until 2020, when the world was hit by a new plague, the coronavirus pandemic.
Oberammergau, like so many places worldwide, suffered some COVID-19 deaths, though residents who confirmed that were unsure how many.

Another consequence: The villagers could not fulfill their vow to stage the play after a 10-year interval. It was set to open in the spring of 2020 but was postponed due to the pandemic.

Now, after a two-year delay, the famous Oberammergau Passion Play is finally opening on May 14 — the 42nd staging since its long-ago debut. Almost half of the village’s residents — more than 1,800 people, including 400 children — will participate in the play about the last five days before Christ’s crucifixion.

It’s a production modernized to fit the times, stripped of antisemitic allusions and featuring a diverse cast that include refugee children and non-Christian actors.

The play will be one of the first major cultural events in Germany since the outbreak of the pandemic, with almost half a million visitors expected from Germany and all over the world, notably from the United States.

“Just a few weeks ago, many could not believe that the Passion Play would premiere,” said director Christian Stueckl, who was born in Oberammergau and has been in charge of the play for more than 30 years.

“We don’t know what COVID-19 will do, if there will be another wave,” he said. “But we have an endless desire to bring our passion play back to the stage and we are highly motivated.”

All the actors tested themselves for the virus before every rehearsal and will continue to do so for all 103 performances which run through Oct. 2, Stueckl said. They have all been letting their hair grow — and the men letting beards grow — for over a year, as tradition dictates.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine still underway, themes such as war, hunger, persecution and displacement play prominent roles in this year’s production — showing the timelessness of human suffering from 2,000 years ago and from today.

The play — which for hundreds of years reflected a conservative, Catholic outlook — has received a careful makeover to become reflective of Germany’s more diverse society. It includes a leading Muslim actor for the first time and has been purged of the many notorious antisemitic plot lines which drew widespread criticism.

“The history of the Oberammergau Passion Play as being one which manifests these antisemitic tropes — Jews as villainous, Jews as deceptive, Jews as bloodthirsty, Jews as manipulative, Jews as Christ killers — was always part of the story,” Rabbi Noam Marans told The Associated Press in a recent interview in Oberammergau.

Marans, the director for interreligious and intergroup relations for the American Jewish Committee in New York, has been advising Stueckl together with a team of Christian and Jewish American experts for several years on how to rid the play of antisemitic content.

It’s been a success story. The play no longer depicts the Jews as Christ’s killers and shows clearly that Jesus was a Jew himself. It places the story of Jesus’ last days in historical context, with all its intra-Jewish tensions and the Jews’ oppression by the Romans.

The male performers wear yarmulkes, making them clearly recognizable as Jews. Of course, there are many Christian elements as well, such as the famous choir and orchestra whose musical compositions go back to the early 19th century.

The mix of Christian and Jewish influences on the current performance is vividly illustrated during the depiction of the Last Supper, when a huge Menorah is lit on the table and the disciples of Jesus recite both Hebrew prayers and the Christian Lord’s Prayer.

“Let there be no doubt: in Oberammergau, in the play, antisemitism has no place, and it has no place in the lives of the performers either,” Stueckl said.

Along with tackling the play’s antisemitism, Stueckl made it a more inclusive performance overall.

Until the 1990s, when Stueckl took over as director, performers had to belong to one of the two major German churches, Roman Catholic or Lutheran. These days, people who have left the church, atheists, Muslims, and members of any other religious affiliation are welcome to participate as long as they are residents of Oberammergau.

Judas is played by Muslim actor Cengiz Gorur. The deputy director, Abdullah Karaca, is the son of Turkish immigrants. And several children of refugees from Africa and elsewhere, who only recently arrived in Oberammergau after fleeing their home countries, were invited to perform.

When it comes to women, there’s still some work to be done. Stueckl called the play “very male-dominated” — all leading roles are male, with the exception only of Jesus’ mother, Mary, and Mary Magdalene.

Asked whether he could imagine a future performance in which women played leading male roles, Stueckl shook his head.

“I don’t think I will live to see Jesus being played by a woman — or Mary by a man,” he said. Then he paused for a moment, smiled, and added: “Even though the world would not come to an end because of that.”
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For Allyson Jacobs, life in her 20s and 30s was about focusing on her career in health care and enjoying the social scene in New York City. It wasn’t until she turned 40 that she and her husband started trying to have children. They had a son when she was 42.

Over the past three decades, that has become increasingly common in the U.S., as birthrates have declined for women in their 20s and jumped for women in their late 30s and early 40s, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau. The trend has pushed the median age of U.S. women giving birth from 27 to 30, the highest on record.

As an older parent celebrating Mother’s Day on Sunday, Jacobs feels she has more resources for her son, 9, than she would have had in her 20s.

“There’s definitely more wisdom, definitely more patience,” said Jacobs, 52, who is a patients’ services administrator at a hospital. “Because we are older, we had the money to hire a nanny. We might not have been able to afford that if we were younger.”

While fertility rates dropped from 1990 to 2019 overall, the decline was regarded as rather stable compared to previous eras. But the age at which women had babies shifted. Fertility rates declined by almost 43% for women between ages 20 and 24 and by more than 22% for women between 25 and 29. At the same time, they increased by more than 67% for women between 35 and 39, and by more than 132% for women between 40 and 44, according to the Census Bureau analysis based on National Center for Health Statistics data.

Decisions by college-educated women to invest in their education and careers so they could be better off financially when they had children, as well as the desire by working-class women to wait until they were more financially secure, have contributed to the shift toward older motherhood, said Philip Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist.

In the past, parents often relied on their children for income — putting them to work in the fields, for example, when the economy was more farm-based. But over the last century or more in the U.S., parents have become more invested in their children’s futures, providing more support while they go to school and enter young adulthood, he said.

“Having children later mostly puts women in a better position,” Cohen said. “They have more resources, more education. The things we demand of people to be good parents are easier to supply when you are older.”

Lani Trezzi, 48, and her husband had their first child, a son, when she was 38, and a daughter followed three years later. Even though she had been with her husband since she was 23, she felt no urgency to have children. That changed in her late 30s, once she’d reached a comfortable spot in her career as an executive for a retail company.

“It was just an age when I felt confident all around in the many areas of my life,” said Trezzi, who lives in New Jersey, outside New York City. “I didn’t have the confidence then that I have now.”

Over the last three decades, the largest increases in the median age at which U.S. women give birth have been among foreign-born women, going from ages 27 to 32, and Black women, going from ages 24 to 28, according to the Census Bureau.

With foreign-born women, Cohen said he wasn’t quite sure why the median age increased over time, but it likely was a “complicated story” having to do with their circumstances or reasons for coming to the U.S.

For Black women, pursuing an education and career played roles.

“Black women have been pursuing higher education at higher rates,” said Raegan McDonald-Mosley, an obstetrician and gynecologist, who is CEO of Power to Decide, which works to reduce teen pregnancies and unwanted births. “Black women are becoming really engaged in their education and that is an incentive to delay childbearing.”

Since unintended pregnancies are highest among teens and women in their 20s, and more of their pregnancies end in abortion compared to older women, ending Roe v. Wade would likely shift the start of childbearing earlier on average, in a reverse of the trend of the past three decades, “although the magnitude is unknown,” said Laura Lindberg, principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

“The burden will fall disproportionately on women of color, Black women, people without documentation, people living in rural areas, people in the South — where there are a lot of Black women — and in the Midwest,” said McDonald-Mosley, who also has served previously as chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Motherhood also has been coming later in developed countries in Europe and Asia. In the U.S., it could contribute to the nation’s population slowdown since the ability to have children tends to decrease with age, said Kate Choi, a family demographer at Western University in London, Ontario.

In areas of the U.S. where the population isn’t replacing itself with births, and where immigration is low, population decline can create labor shortages, higher labor costs and a labor force that is supporting retirees, she said.

“Such changes will put significant pressure on programs aimed at supporting seniors like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare,” Choi said. “Workers may have to pay higher taxes to support the growing numbers of the retired population.”

Although the data in the Census Bureau report stops in 2019, the pandemic over the past two years has put off motherhood even further for many women, with U.S. birth rates in 2020 dropping 4% in the largest single-year decrease in nearly 50 years. Choi said there appears to have been a bit of a rebound in the second half of 2021 to levels similar to 2019, but more data is needed to determine if this is a return to a “normal” decline.

During the pandemic, some women at the end of their reproductive years may have given up on becoming parents or having more children because of economic uncertainties and greater health risks for pregnant women who get the virus, she said.

“These women may have missed their window to have children,” Choi said. “Some parents of young children may have decided to forego the second … birth because they were overwhelmed with the additional child-caring demands that emerged during the pandemic, such as the need to homeschool their children.”
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Country star Mickey Gilley, whose namesake Texas honky-tonk inspired the 1980 film Urban Cowboy and a nationwide wave of Western-themed nightspots, has died. He was 86.

Gilley died Saturday in Branson, Missouri, where he helped run the Mickey Gilley Grand Shanghai Theatre. He had been performing as recently as last month but was in failing health over the past week.

“He passed peacefully with his family and close friends by his side,” according to a statement from Mickey Gilley Associates.

Gilley — cousin of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis — opened Gilley’s, “the world’s largest honky tonk,” in Pasadena, Texas, in the early 1970s. By mid-decade, he was a successful club owner and had enjoyed his first commercial success with Room Full of Roses. He began turning out country hits regularly, including Window Up Above, She’s Pulling Me Back Again and the honky-tonk anthem Don’t the Girls All Get Prettier at Closing Time.

Overall, he had 39 Top 10 country hits and 17 No. 1 songs. He received six Academy of Country Music Awards, and also worked on occasion as an actor, with appearances on Murder She Wrote, The Fall Guy, Fantasy Island and The Dukes of Hazzard.

“If I had one wish in life, I would wish for more time,” Gilley told The Associated Press in March 2001 as he celebrated his 65th birthday. Not that he’d do anything differently, the singer said.

“I am doing exactly what I want to do. I play golf, fly my airplane and perform at my theater in Branson, Missouri,” he said. “I love doing my show for the people.”

‘Urban Cowboy’

Meanwhile, the giant nightspot’s attractions, including its famed mechanical bull, led to the 1980 film Urban Cowboy, starring John Travolta and Debra Winger and regarded by many as a countrified version of Travolta’s 1977 disco smash, Saturday Night Fever. The film inspired by Gilley’s club was based on an Esquire article by Aaron Latham about the relationship between two regulars at the club.

“I thank John Travolta every night before bed for keeping my career alive,” Gilley told the AP in 2002. “It’s impossible to tell you how grateful I am for my involvement with Urban Cowboy. That film had a huge impact on my career, and still does.”

The soundtrack included such hits as Johnny Lee’s Lookin’ for Love, Boz Scaggs’ Look What You’ve Done for Me and Gilley’s Stand by Me. The movie turned the Pasadena club into an overnight tourist draw and popularized pearl snap shirts, longneck beers, the steel guitar and mechanical bulls across the country.

But the club shut down in 1989 after Gilley and his business partner Sherwood Cryer feuded over how to run the place. A fire destroyed it soon after.

An upscale version of the old Gilley’s nightclub opened in Dallas in 2003. In recent years, Gilley moved to Branson.

He was married three times, most recently to Cindy Loeb Gilley. He had four children, three with his first wife, Geraldine Garrett, and one with his second, Vivian McDonald.

A Natchez, Mississippi, native, Gilley grew up poor, learning boogie-woogie piano in Ferriday, Louisiana, alongside Lewis and fellow cousin Jimmy Swaggart, the future evangelist. Like Lewis, he would sneak into the Louisiana clubs to listen to R&B music. He moved to Houston to work construction but played the local club scene at night and recorded and toured for years before catching on in the ’70s.

Gilley had suffered health problems in recent years. He underwent brain surgery in August 2008 after specialists diagnosed hydrocephalus, a condition characterized by an increase in fluid in the cranium. Gilley had been suffering from short-term memory loss and credited the surgery with halting the onset of dementia.

He underwent more surgery in 2009 after he fell off a step, forcing him to cancel scheduled performances in Branson. In 2018, he sustained a fractured ankle and fractured right shoulder in an automobile accident.
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Rich Strike came off a blistering pace at odds of more than 80-1 to beat 19 blue-blooded opponents and produce one of the biggest upsets in history while capturing the 148th running of the Kentucky Derby on Saturday afternoon at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.

Rich Strike, who was only entered into the field on Friday when Ethereal Road was scratched, is trained by Eric Reed, and owned by RED TR-Racing. Sonny Leon, a journeyman jockey based in Ohio, rode Rich Strike and won his first Kentucky Derby in his first attempt.

Race-favorite Epicenter was second by a length, with Zandon third by another half-length.

Rich Strike had raced just seven times before the Derby, winning once and finishing third three times.

He found his way through the field after starting in the 21st and far outside post position and under the fastest opening quarter mile in race history.

Rich Strike was still far back under a very fast pace as the horses turned for home down the long Churchill Downs stretch but went to the rail to save ground. Leon moved out to get past a fading Messier and then returned to the rail to run down Epicenter and Zandon, who were eye to eye with the finish line in sight but could not hold off the winner.

The winner is the second longest shot to win the Derby after Donerail took the post at 91-1 odds to win the Run for the Roses in 1913. 
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Elvis Costello, Patti Smith and Mavis Staples will be among the dignitaries expected in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this weekend for the opening of the Bob Dylan Center, the museum and archive celebrating the Nobel laureate’s work.

Dylan himself won’t be among them, unless he surprises everyone.

The center’s subject and namesake has an open invitation to come anytime, although his absence seems perfectly in character, said Steven Jenkins, the center’s director. Oddly, Dylan was just in Tulsa three weeks ago for a date on his concert tour, sandwiched in between Oklahoma City and Little Rock, Arkansas. He didn’t ask for a look around.

“I don’t want to put words in his mouth,” Jenkins said. “I can only guess at his reasoning. Maybe he would find it embarrassing.”

It’s certainly unusual for a living figure — Dylan is due to turn 81 on May 24 — to have a museum devoted to him, but such is the shadow he has cast over popular music since his emergence in the early 1960s. He’s still working, performing onstage in a show devoted primarily to his most recent material.

And he’s still pushing the envelope. “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan’s nearly 17-minute rumination on the Kennedy assassination and celebrity, is as quietly stunning as “Like a Rolling Stone” was nearly a half-century ago, even if he’s no longer at the center of popular culture.

The center offers an immersive film experience, performance space, a studio where visitors can play producer and “mix” different elements of instrumentation in Dylan’s songs and a curated tour where people can take a musical journey through the stages of his career. The archive has more than 100,000 items, many accessed only by scholars through appointment.

Museum creators said they wanted to build an experience both for casual visitors who might not know much of Dylan’s work and for the truly fanatical — the skimmers, the swimmers and the divers, said designer Alan Maskin of the firm Olson Kundig.

The museum hopes to celebrate the creative process in general, and at opening will have an exhibit of the work of photographer Jerry Schatzberg, whose 1965 image of Dylan is emblazoned on the building’s three-story facade.

Since Dylan’s still creating, “we’re going to continue to play catch-up” with him, Jenkins said.

So for a figure who was born and raised in Minnesota, came of musical age in New York and now lives in California, how does a museum devoted to his life’s work end up in Oklahoma?

He’s never seemed the nostalgic type, but Dylan recognized early that his work could have historical interest and value, Jenkins said. Together with his team, he put aside boxes full of artifacts, including photos, rare recordings and handwritten lyrics that show how his songs went through revisions and rewrites.

With use of those lyrics, two of the early displays will focus on how the songs “Jokerman” and “Tangled Up in Blue” took shape — the latter with lyrics so elastic that Dylan was still changing verses after the song had been released.

Dylan sold his archive in 2016 to the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation, which also operates the Woody Guthrie Center — a museum that celebrates one of Dylan’s musical heroes and is only steps away from the new Dylan center.

Dylan likes the Guthrie museum, and also appreciates Tulsa’s rich holdings of Native American art, Jenkins said. Much of that is on display at another new facility, the Gilcrease Museum, which is also the world’s largest holding of art of the American West.

“I think it’s going to be a true tourist draw to Tulsa for all the right reasons,” said Tulsa Mayor G. T. Bynum. “This is one of the great musicians in the history of humankind and everyone who wants to study his career and see the evolution of his talent will be drawn to it.”

Bynum hopes that it also encourages others who may someday want to put their archives on display, and make Tulsa a center for the study of modern American music.

Dylan designed and built a 16-foot-high metal sculpture that will be displayed at the entrance to the museum. Otherwise, he had nothing to do with the museum’s design and declined, through a spokesman, to offer a comment about the opening.

“If Bob were telling us what we could or couldn’t do, it would have felt like a vanity project, in a way,” Maskin said. “It was a tremendous relief not to have to satisfy Bob Dylan.”

Still, it’s safe to assume the lines of communication are open if necessary: Jenkins, the center’s director, is the brother of Larry Jenkins, Dylan’s long-time media representative.

In addition to a dinner to celebrate the opening this weekend, Costello, Smith and Staples will all perform separate concerts at Cain’s Ballroom. Costello was asked to program a jukebox that will be on display at the museum and, within a day, submitted his suggestions for 160 Dylan songs and covers, Steven Jenkins said.

The Bob Dylan Center is open to the public on May 10.

Maskin has no expectation that Dylan will ever see the designer’s work. Still, he indulges himself in a fantasy of a slow summer day, a security guard dozing in the corner, and someone slipping in wearing black jeans, sunglasses and a familiar mop of hair to wander among the displays.

“To be honest, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he said. “I think he’s interested in the work he’s doing, and not the work he’s done.”
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An Andy Warhol portrait of Marilyn Monroe worth an estimated $200 million headlines this month’s spring sales in New York that collectors say are among the most anticipated ever.

Christie’s expects Warhol’s 1964 Shot Sage Blue Marilyn to become the priciest 20th century artwork when the auction house puts it under the hammer on Monday. 

Not to be outdone, competitor Sotheby’s is offering $1 billion of modern and contemporary art, including the second helping of the famed Macklowe Collection, during its marquee week in May.

“The excitement is certainly unprecedented,” Joan Robledo-Palop, a collector and CEO of Zeit Contemporary Art in New York City, told AFP, about the buzz surrounding this season’s auctions.

The 100-centimeter by 100-centimeter silk-screen Warhol is part of a series of portraits the pop artist made of Monroe following her death from a drug overdose in August 1962.

They became known as the Shot series after a visitor to Warhol’s “Factory” studio in Manhattan fired a gun at them, piercing the portraits which were later repaired.

Alex Rotter, head of 20th and 21st century art at Christie’s, has called the portrait “the most significant 20th century painting to come to auction in a generation.”

The current most expensive 20th century auctioned work is Picasso’s Women of Algiers, which fetched $179.4 million in 2015.

The auction record for a Warhol is the $104.5 million paid for Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster) in 2013.

Other highlights offered by Christie’s include Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict (1982), expected to go for more than $30 million, and Untitled (Shades of Red) by Mark Rothko, tipped to fetch up to $80 million.

The auction house is also offering three Claude Monet oil on canvases that are predicted to sell for upwards of $30 million each.

Rothko, Picasso, Richter

“Every couple of decades you have a sale where the quality is so high that you don’t see all of this at once normally. This season really grew into one of those unique moments,” Rotter told AFP.

After selling the first batch of works from the Macklowe Collection — the most expensive to hit the market at $600 million — last fall, Sotheby’s will auction the remaining 30 items when its sales open on May 16.

Highlights include Gerhard Richter’s 1975 Seascape, estimated at up to $35 million, and Rothko’s Untitled from 1960 that has a high-end pre-sale estimate of $50 million.

Sotheby’s said its modern evening auction of 19th and 20th century works, including by Pablo Picasso and Philip Guston, is its “most valuable” in the category in 15 years.

Picasso’s Femme nue couchée is appearing at auction for the first time, and Sotheby’s expects it to fetch more than $60 million. Other highlights include a Monet view of Venice tipped to fetch $50 million.

Brooke Lampley, head of sales for global fine art at Sotheby’s, said she expects records to be broken across categories.

“The art market is very strong. That’s why we see such an amazing array of works on offer this season,” she told AFP. 
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China is stepping up censorship of U.S. films as producers make movies with an eye toward pleasing Beijing yet without isolating the global audience, industry insiders say.    

The roughly 25-year-old practice of cutting scenes that don’t conform to Communist Party ideals from Hollywood movies has expanded.  

“Now it’s kind of escalated in the sense that they’re much more direct in banning films outright rather than just tampering or asking for scenes to be removed,” said Stanley Rosen, a University of Southern California political science professor who follows China’s film industry.  

Industry observers say censors are also asking that versions of movies for audiences outside China follow Beijing’s script.  

Hollywood movies, Chinese censors  

It is unlikely that censors will allow the 2022 Marvel Studios movie “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” to be shown in China. The state-affiliated Global Times tabloid published a scathing op-ed on the film Sunday, saying that it contains nods to Falun Gong, a spiritual movement Beijing has banned and labeled as a cult. According to the op-ed, a news rack for The Epoch Times, a publication the writer calls “the mouthpiece of the Falun Gong,” appears in the frame as Doctor Strange battles a tentacled monster. 

Liu Pengyu, spokesperson of the Chinese embassy in Washington, said, “As a country under the rule of law, China regulates the film industry in accordance with the Film Administration regulations.” Liu, however, did not describe the process in detail.  

Marvel Studios did not reply to VOA’s questions about “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”  

The China Film Administration, an oversight body for the $7.4 billion market, banned Marvel Studios’ 2021 superhero films “Eternals” and “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” which were released last year.  

The 2021 superhero film “Spider-Man: No Way Home” missed Chinese approval because authorities wanted Sony Pictures to remove images of the Statue of Liberty from the film, several news outlets reported.  

The 2015 sci-fi movie “Pixels” made it into China after removing a scene of aliens blasting a hole into the Great Wall, news reports said at the time.  

“As the dragon gets bigger, its leverage gets bigger, and no one’s pushed back yet,” said Chris Fenton, Hollywood executive and lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.  

An increase in Sino-U.S. tensions since the administration of former U.S. president Donald Trump may have exacerbated China’s treatment of American movies, said James Tager, research director at the free-speech advocacy group PEN America in New York.  

Film studios stuck in the middle  

Film studios have been operating under the pressure of satisfying censors in China — a massive market in normal times, when cinemas are not closed because of COVID-19 — while appearing before American audiences and legislators as supporters of artistic freedom, Tager said.  

Hollywood doesn’t want a “pinball”— a situation in which both U.S. and Chinese officials take aim at the film industry, he said.  

Hollywood companies are pre-censoring films to avoid losing access to China’s lucrative box office market, PEN America said in a 2020 report.  

Refusal of a Chinese order to cut a scene would risk the studio’s future business in China, such as the next Disney or Marvel film or other assets, Tager said. Walt Disney Co., for example, has a 47% stake in Shanghai Disneyland, according to the PEN America report.  

“You may get a reputation as someone who doesn’t play ball, which could have even further knock-on effects, possibly for other films or possibly for other business relationships that large studios have in China,” he said.   

Self-censorship is getting worse, Fenton said. Some studios even worry that China will punish them for leaving objectionable scenes in film versions for audiences outside China.  

“To me, the bigger issue is when China tells us we can’t have stuff in movies for other markets,” Fenton said. “That’s where we’re suddenly allowing them to spread their narrative rather than the narrative of the filmmakers or the studio or of Hollywood — or the U.S. or the Western side of things. Who gives them that right to tell us we can’t have that in a movie that someone in Argentina sees?”  

China wants its view of the world to resonate worldwide, said James Gomez, regional director of the Asia Centre, a Bangkok-based think tank.    

“It’s competing powers, it’s competing narratives,” he said. “It’s a different world view, and China wants to be able to shape the world view.”  

Objections to Chinese-tailored films  

The Philippines pushed back against studios’ attempt to woo China in the case of the 2022 American action movie “Uncharted.” The Southeast Asian country’s cinemas yanked the movie at the request of the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs. The department objected to a scene that showed Beijing’s nine-dash line claim to the South China Sea, which Manila vigorously disputes. The nine dashes demarcate China’s claim to about 90% of the sea.  

Manila moved earlier to block the showing of “Abominable,” a 2019 animated collaboration between a U.S. and a Chinese production company, because the same nine-dash line was shown in the cartoon.  

Some studios may eventually forego the China market to be seen elsewhere as “celebrating artistic freedom elsewhere on the globe,” Tager said.  

Hollywood is slowly factoring in the “arbitrary” demands from China, Rosen said. One thing it has learned, he said, is to avoid making Chinese-themed films such as “Shang-Chi” because those can be better done in China.  
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