PARIS: It is not easy to lead a good and virtuous life in Iran if the filmmaker M. Rasoulof’s latest film, “A Man of Integrity,” is anything to go by.
Its downtrodden hero struggles to make an honest rial from his goldfish farm, caught in a nightmarish, distorting fish bowl of corruption at every turn.
The film, which won the prestigious Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes film festival in May, is a damning indictment of how the “daily reality of graft” is sapping Tehran.
“Corruption has penetrated every layer of society,” Rasoulof told AFP by Skype from his home in Tehran, where he is effectively under house arrest since his passport was confiscated when he returned from the Telluride film festival in the US in September.
The dark thriller tells the story of Reza, who refuses to pay a bribe for a loan that would save his business, and finds himself confronting a rotten array of officials and businessmen who run a small town in the north of the country.
“Corruption goes from the bottom of the social ladder right to the top of the pyramid of power,” said Rasoulof, whose earlier acclaimed films “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” and “Iron Island” were banned in his homeland.
“A Man of Integrity” is unlikely to see the light of day there either despite being praised by Variety and the Hollywood Reporter as a “compelling... tense, enraging drama.”
Rasoulof, 34, already has a suspended 12-month prison sentence hanging over his head after he was arrested on set in 2010 with his friend, the “Taxi” director Jafar Panahi, who was subsequently banned from making films for 20 years.
Initially jailed for six years, Rasoulof’s sentence was reduced on appeal.
This time he faces similar charges of “propaganda against the regime” and “endangering national security.”
But the threat of prison did not stop Rasoulof squaring up to the uncomfortable truth he insists is undermining the country from within.
Iranians are exhausted by graft, he said. “They want to leave it behind but they cannot, because corruption has become a system.
“This system forces you to be both corrupted, and a corrupter yourself. Even my friends are repulsed by it but cannot get away from it,” he added.
“People become oppressed and oppressors at the same time,” Rasoulof argued.
In the film, no one gets a free pass, not even Reza’s long-suffering wife Hadis, the head of a secondary school.
She does nothing to stop a girl being excluded because she comes from a religious minority.
Nor is the fact that Reza is a goldfish farmer without significance. Iranians traditionally display goldfish on their tables for Persian New Year, Norouz, to symbolize renewal and perpetual life, and release them into ponds and rivers afterwards, where they inevitably perish.
President Hassan Rouhani tried to suggest a more humane alternative last year by putting an orange in his fish bowl.
For now, Rasoulof’s own fate is not dissimilar to that of his character’s goldfish.
“I am completely in the dark, I do not know what is going to happen,” he told AFP. “But I will not allow myself to be beaten by it.”
“I cannot see my film being shown in Iran while I am waiting to be tried,” he added, lamenting how the country’s “intellectuals had either left, were in prison, or had been reduced to silence.”
Iranian director facing jail for film attacking corruption
Iranian director facing jail for film attacking corruption
Britain’s Stonehenge is yet again a source of fascination ahead of the winter solstice
LONDON: It’s that time of year when crowds of pagans, druids, hippies and tourists head to Stonehenge in Britain to celebrate the winter solstice, with the shortest day and the longest night in the Northern Hemisphere.
Thousands are expected on Saturday at the megalithic circle on a plain in southern England as the first rays of sun break through the giant stones that make up one of world’s most famous prehistoric monuments.
Rain has been forecast but there is no doubt it won’t be able to drown out the drumming, chanting and cheering.
Beyond the fascination of the ritual, the eternal question may still linger in the back of the minds of many visitors: What was the real meaning and purpose of Stonehenge?
The site has been the subject of vigorous debate, with some theories seemingly more outlandish, if not alien, than others.
This year, those gathering will have something new to discuss.
In a paper published in the journal Archaeology International, researchers from University College London and Aberystwyth University say that the site on Salisbury Plain, about 128 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of London, may have had some unifying purpose in ancient times.
They base that on a recent discovery that one of Stonehenge’s stones — the unique stone lying flat at the center of the monument, dubbed the “altar stone” — originated in Scotland, hundreds of miles north of the site.
What was surprising was that it came from so far away. It was long known that the other stones come from all over Britain — including the so-called bluestones, the smaller stones at the site that came from Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, nearly 240 kilometers (150 miles) away.
That varied geology is what makes Stonehenge unique among over 900 stone circles in Britain.
“The fact that all of its stones originated from distant regions ... suggests that the stone circle may have had a political as well as a religious purpose,” said lead author Professor Mike Parker Pearson from UCL’s Institute of Archaeology.
It may have served as a “monument of unification for the peoples of Britain, celebrating their eternal links with their ancestors and the cosmos,” Parker Pearson said.
Whatever its original purpose, Stonehenge today retains an important place in Britain’s culture and history and remains one of the country’s biggest tourist draws — despite the seemingly permanent traffic jams on the nearby A303 highway, a popular route for motorists traveling to and from the southwest of England.
Stonehenge was built on the flat lands of Salisbury Plain in stages, starting 5,000 years ago, with the unique stone circle erected in the late Neolithic period, about 2,500 B.C.
English Heritage, a charity that manages hundreds of historic sites, including Stonehenge, has noted several explanations — from the circle being a coronation place for Danish kings, a druid temple, a cult center for healing, or an astronomical computer for predicting eclipses and solar events.
So as far as symbolism and unification go — maybe Stonehenge really was a Mount Rushmore of its day?
Starbucks workers’ union to strike in LA, Chicago, Seattle before Christmas
The workers’ union representing more than 10,000 Starbucks baristas said its members will strike at stores in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle on Friday morning during the busy holiday season.
Workers United, representing employees at 525 Starbucks stores across the United States, said that walkouts are expected to escalate daily, potentially reaching hundreds of stores nationwide by Christmas Eve, unless Starbucks and the union finalize a collective bargaining agreement.
The union and Starbucks created a “framework” in February to guide organizing and collective bargaining. Negotiations between the company and Workers United began in April, based on the framework, that could also help resolve numerous pending legal disputes.
“Since the February commitment, the company repeatedly pledged publicly that it intended to reach contracts by the end of the year, but it has yet to present workers with a serious economic proposal,” the union said in a statement late on Thursday.
Starbucks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The coffee chain is undergoing a turnaround under its newly appointed top boss Brian Niccol, who aims to restore “coffee house culture” by overhauling cafes, adding more comfortable seating, reducing customer wait-time to less than four minutes, and simplifying its menu.
Invasive ‘murder hornets’ are wiped out in the US, officials say
- There had been no detections of the northern giant hornet in Washington since 2021
- Northern giant hornets pose significant threats to pollinators and native insects
SEATTLE: The world’s largest hornet, an invasive breed dubbed the “murder hornet” for its dangerous sting and ability to slaughter a honeybee hive in a matter of hours, has been declared eradicated in the US, five years after being spotted for the first time in Washington state near the Canadian border.
The Washington and US Departments of Agriculture announced the eradication Wednesday, saying there had been no detections of the northern giant hornet in Washington since 2021.
The news represented an enormous success that included residents agreeing to place traps on their properties and reporting sightings, as well as researchers capturing a live hornet, attaching a tiny radio tracking tag to it with dental floss, and following it through a forest to a nest in an alder tree. Scientists destroyed the nest just as a number of queens were just beginning to emerge, officials said.
“I’ve gotta tell you, as an entomologist — I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now, and it is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects,” Sven Spichiger, pest program manager of the Washington State Department of Agriculture, told a virtual news conference.
The hornets, which can be 5 centimeters long and were formerly called Asian giant hornets, gained attention in 2013, when they killed 42 people in China and seriously injured 1,675. In the US, around 72 people a year die from bee and hornet stings each year, according to data from the National Institutes of Health.
The hornets were first detected in North America in British Columbia, Canada, in August 2019 and confirmed in Washington state in December 2019, when a Whatcom County resident reported a specimen. A beekeeper also reported hives being attacked and turned over specimens in the summer of 2020. The hornets could have traveled to North America in plant pots or shipping containers, experts said.
DNA evidence suggested the populations found in British Columbia and Washington were not related and appeared to originate from different countries. There also have been no confirmed reports in British Columbia since 2021, and the nonprofit Invasive Species Center in Canada has said the hornet is also considered eradicated there.
Northern giant hornets pose significant threats to pollinators and native insects. They can wipe out a honeybee hive in as little as 90 minutes, decapitating the bees and then defending the hive as their own, taking the brood to feed their own young.
The hornet can sting through most beekeeper suits, deliver nearly seven times the amount of venom as a honeybee, and sting multiple times. At one point the Washington agriculture department ordered special reinforced suits from China.
Washington is the only state that has had confirmed reports of northern giant hornets. Trappers found four nests in 2020 and 2021.
Spichiger said Washington will remain on the lookout, despite reporting the eradication. He noted that entomologists will continue to monitor traps in Kitsap County, where a resident reported an unconfirmed sighting in October but where trapping efforts and public outreach have come up empty.
He noted that other invasive hornets can also pose problems: Officials in Georgia and South Carolina are fighting yellow-legged hornets, and southern giant hornets were recently detected in Spain.
“We will continue to be vigilant,” Spichiger said.
Re-discovered tapes bear witness to Somaliland identity
HARGEISA: In a library in Somaliland, Hafsa Omer presses play on a small cassette player. The sound of a Somali lute interwoven with a woman’s soft singing fills the room.
Tapping her keyboard, Omer bobs with the rhythm of the pentatonic melody typical in the northern region of the Horn of Africa.
Since 2021, the 21-year-old has been painstakingly archiving and digitising a collection of some 14,000 cassettes at the Cultural Center in Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital.
Bought back, found or donated, the tapes contain more than half a century of the musical, cultural and political life of the region.
Somaliland has run its own affairs since unilaterally declaring independence from Somalia in 1991 but remains unrecognized by any country.
That makes cultural heritage — like the tapes — vital.
“Many people don’t consider these things to be important, but they contain the whole history of my country,” Omer told AFP.
“My people don’t write, they don’t read. All they do is talk.”
Somalis have traditionally been primarily nomadic shepherds, with culture transmitted orally from one generation to another.
What is now Somaliland has long been a center of music and poetry — art that plays a crucial, even political, role in this corner of Africa.
The public radio station, Radio Hargeisa, also has a collection of over 5,000 reels and cassettes, programs and music recorded in its studios since its founding in 1943.
The tens of thousands of hours of tapes in the cultural center tell a less official story — ranging from 1970s counterculture “Somali funk,” to unreleased recordings of play rehearsals and accounts of people’s daily lives.
With small tape recorders becoming widely available in the 1970s and 1980s, Somalilanders got into the habit of corresponding with exiled relatives via cassette.
Gathered around a tape recorder, they would recount intimacies of family life but also survival during a decade-long war that culminated in the declaration of independence in 1991.
The conflict between rebels and the Mogadishu-based military regime of Siad Barre saw around 70 percent of Hargeisa destroyed in 1988.
Jama Musse Jama, director of the cultural center, described how troves of cassettes were recorded “underground” as people met clandestinely to chat, chew the stimulant khat and talk politics.
“They cannot say (these things) in public,” he said. “You find all what didn’t end up in the ordinary, formal recordings of the state — what was happening in the streets.”
Fewer than 5,000 cassettes have been catalogued and only 1,100 digitised, leaving a titanic task for Omer and her team of four friends.
But it has become a fitting cultural odyssey in a place still searching for recognition.
“It’s proof against those who say Somaliland doesn’t exist,” said Jama.
He believes his and Omer’s work will guide younger generations searching for their past — a storied history that stretches beyond their regional conflict to its time as an Italian and British colony and beyond.
“We need to give them an identity,” he said.
“All these stories that make up the identity of the Somaliland people are in these recordings.”
Drones, planes or UFOs? Americans abuzz over mysterious New Jersey sightings
- The saga of the drones reported over New Jersey has reached incredible heights
- ‘How can you say it’s not posing a threat if you don’t know what it is?’
CHATHAM, New Jersey: That buzzing coming out of New Jersey? It’s unclear if it’s drones or something else, but for sure the nighttime sightings are producing tons of talk, a raft of conspiracy theories and craned necks looking skyward.
Cropping up on local news and social media sites around Thanksgiving, the saga of the drones reported over New Jersey has reached incredible heights.
This week seems to have begun a new, higher-profile chapter: Lawmakers are demanding (but so far not getting) explanations from federal and state authorities about what’s behind them. Gov. Phil Murphy wrote to President Joe Biden asking for answers. New Jersey’s new senator, Andy Kim, spent Thursday night on a drone hunt in rural northern New Jersey, and posted about it on X.
More drone sightings have been reported in New York City, and Mayor Eric Adams says the city is investigating and collaborating with New Jersey and federal officials. And then President-elect Donald Trump posted that he believes the government knows more than it’s saying. “Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!” he posted on his social media site.
But perhaps the most fantastic development is the dizzying proliferation of conspiracies, none of which has been confirmed or suggested by federal and state officials who say they’re looking into what’s happening. It has become shorthand to refer to the flying machines as drones, but there are questions about whether what people are seeing are unmanned aircraft or something else.
Some theorize the drones came from an Iranian mothership. Others think they are the Secret Service making sure President-elect Donald Trump’s Bedminster property is secure. Others worry about China. The deep state. And on.
In the face of uncertainty, people have done what they do in 2024: Create a social media group.
The Facebook page, New Jersey Mystery Drones — let’s solve it, has nearly 44,000 members, up from 39,000 late Thursday. People are posting their photo and video sightings, and the online commenters take it from there.
One video shows a whitish light flying in a darkened sky, and one commenter concludes it’s otherworldly. “Straight up orbs,” the person says. Others weigh in to say it’s a plane or maybe a satellite. Another group called for hunting the drones literally, shooting them down like turkeys. (Do not shoot at anything in the sky, experts warn.)
Trisha Bushey, 48, of Lebanon Township, New Jersey, lives near Round Valley Reservoir where there have been numerous sightings. She said she first posted photos online last month wondering what the objects were and became convinced they were drones when she saw how they moved and when her son showed her on a flight tracking site that no planes were around. Now she’s glued to the Mystery Drones page, she said.
“I find myself — instead of Christmas shopping or cleaning my house — checking it,” she said.
She doesn’t buy what the governor said, that the drones aren’t a risk to public safety. Murphy told Biden on Friday that residents need answers. The federal Homeland Security Department and FBI also said in a joint statement they have no evidence that the sightings pose “a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus.”
“How can you say it’s not posing a threat if you don’t know what it is?” she said. “I think that’s why so many people are uneasy.”
Then there’s the notion that people could misunderstand what they’re seeing. William Austin is the president of Warren County Community College, which has a drone technology degree program, and is coincidentally located in one of the sighting hotspots.
Austin says he has looked at videos of purported drones and that airplanes are being misidentified as drones. He cited an optical effect called parallax, which is the apparent shift of an object when viewed from different perspectives. Austin encouraged people to download flight and drone tracker apps so they can better understand what they’re looking at.
Nonetheless, people continue to come up with their own theories.
“It represents the United States of America in 2024,” Austin said. “We’ve lost trust in our institutions, and we need it.”
Federal officials echo Austin’s view that many of the sightings are piloted aircraft such as planes and helicopters being mistaken for drones, according to lawmakers and Murphy.
That’s not really convincing for many, though, who are homing in on the sightings beyond just New Jersey and the East Coast, where others have reported seeing the objects.
For Seph Divine, 34, another member of the drone hunting group who lives in Eugene, Oregon, it feels as if it’s up to citizen sleuths to solve the mystery. He said he tries to be a voice of reason, encouraging people to fact check their information, while also asking probing questions.
“My main goal is I don’t want people to be caught up in the hysteria and I also want people to not just ignore it at the same time,” he said.
“Whether or not it’s foreign military or some secret access program or something otherworldly, whatever it is, all I’m saying is it’s alarming that this is happening so suddenly and so consistently for hours at a time,” he added.
