In Egypt, Christmas celebrations are officially sanctioned by Islamic clerics for people of all faiths, despite objections from some conservative Muslims. On Friday, January 7, the holiday season concluded with Coptic Christmas, observed by the vast majority of Christians in Egypt. For VOA, Hamada Elrasam has this photo essay, with words by Elle Kurancid.
…
Sidney Poitier, who broke through racial barriers as the first Black winner of the best actor Oscar for his role in Lilies of the Field, and inspired a generation during the civil rights movement, has died at age 94, an official from the Bahamian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said Friday.
Eugene Torchon-Newry, acting director general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, confirmed Poitier’s death.
Poitier created a distinguished film legacy in a single year with three 1967 films at a time when segregation prevailed in parts of the United States.
In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner he played a Black man with a white fiancee, and In the Heat of the Night he was Virgil Tibbs, a Black police officer confronting racism during a murder investigation. He also played a teacher in a tough London school that year in To Sir, With Love.
Poitier had won his history-making best actor Oscar for Lilies of the Field in 1963, playing a handyman who helps German nuns build a chapel in the desert. Five years before that Poitier had been the first Black man nominated for a lead actor Oscar for his role in The Defiant Ones.
His Tibbs character from In the Heat of the Night was immortalized in two sequels — They Call Me Mister Tibbs! in 1970 and The Organization in 1971 — and became the basis of the television series In the Heat of the Night starring Carroll O’Connor and Howard Rollins.
His other classic films of that era included A Patch of Blue in 1965 in which his character is befriended by a blind white girl, The Blackboard Jungle and A Raisin in the Sun, which Poitier also performed on Broadway.
Poitier was born in Miami on February 20, 1927, and raised on a tomato farm in the Bahamas, and had just one year of formal schooling. He struggled against poverty, illiteracy and prejudice to become one of the first Black actors to be known and accepted in major roles by mainstream audiences.
Poitier picked his roles with care, burying the old Hollywood idea that Black actors could appear only in demeaning contexts as shoeshine boys, train conductors and maids.
“I love you, I respect you, I imitate you,” Denzel Washington, another Oscar winner, once told Poitier at a public ceremony.
As a director, Poitier worked with his friend Harry Belafonte and Bill Cosby in Uptown Saturday Night in 1974, and Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in 1980’s Stir Crazy.
Started on stage
Poitier grew up in the small Bahamian village of Cat Island and in Nassau before he moved to New York at 16, lying about his age to sign up for a short stint in the Army and then working at odd jobs, including dishwasher, while taking acting lessons.
The young actor got his first break when he met the casting director of the American Negro Theater. He was an understudy in Days of Our Youth and took over when the star, Belafonte, who also would become a pioneering Black actor, fell ill.
Poitier went on to success on Broadway in Anna Lucasta in 1948 and, two years later, got his first movie role in No Way Out with Richard Widmark.
In all, he acted in more than 50 films and directed nine, starting in 1972 with Buck and the Preacher in which he co-starred with Belafonte.
In 1992, Poitier was given the Life Achievement Award by the American Film Institute, the most prestigious honor after the Oscar, joining recipients such as Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Fred Astaire, James Cagney and Orson Welles.
“I must also pay thanks to an elderly Jewish waiter who took time to help a young Black dishwasher learn to read,” Poitier told the audience. “I cannot tell you his name. I never knew it. But I read pretty good now.”
In 2002, an honorary Oscar recognized “his remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being.”
Poitier married actress Joanna Shimkus, his second wife, in the mid-1970s. He had six daughters with his two wives and wrote three books — This Life (1980), The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography (2000) and Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter (2008).
“If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you’re not going to get very far,” he told the Washington Post. “The journey has been incredible from its beginning. So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.”
Poitier wrote three autobiographical books and in 2013 published Montaro Caine, a novel that was described as part mystery, part science fiction.
Poitier was knighted by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II in 1974 and served as the Bahamian ambassador to Japan and to UNESCO, the U.N. cultural agency. He also sat on Walt Disney Co’s board of directors from 1994 to 2003.
In 2009, Poitier was awarded the highest U.S. civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by President Barack Obama.
The 2014 Academy Awards ceremony marked the 50th anniversary of Poitier’s historic Oscar and he was there to present the award for best director.
0The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled Friday to hear oral arguments against two of President Joe Biden’s administration’s COVID-19 vaccine policies issued by government agencies to combat the deadly coronavirus.
The policies “are critical to our nation’s COVID-19 response,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement.
The mandates coming under review were issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The OSHA policy requires employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workers are either fully vaccinated or tested weekly. The CMS mandate for workers at health care facilities accepting federal Medicare and Medicaid funds requires workers to be fully vaccinated, with exemptions, including for sincerely held religious beliefs.
Republican-led states and an alliance of business and religious groups are challenging the policies’ broad sweep and the effects the mandates are having on companies and workers.
The policies have, however, been endorsed by the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association and a number of former federal health officials.
The challenge is being presented before the Supreme Court after a number of lower courts issued differing opinions on the policies.
COVID-19 has infected millions of people in the U.S. and killed more than 800,000.
…
Midday queues snake out to the street in an upmarket Shanghai neighborhood, but it’s not lunch at the city’s hottest restaurant that people are lining up for — it’s cosmetic “micro-procedures”, which are surging in popularity in China.
The “lunchtime facelift” and other “medical aesthetics” procedures are booming as a new generation of Chinese consumers grapple with the pressure to look good on social media as well as in person.
Kayla Zhang has never actually gone under the knife for cosmetic reasons, but she’s had laser treatments, injections and a thread lift — a barbed string inserted under the skin and pulled up to “lift” the face.
“I’m not changing my nose or my eyes, which would be an extreme change in my looks,” the 27-year-old told AFP, adding that she’s seeking a “better version” of herself rather than “a totally new face.”
Already popular in the West because they are less invasive and more affordable than traditional cosmetic surgery, micro-procedures — from laser facials and fillers to thread lifts — are fast becoming the norm in China’s cities where disposable incomes have jumped in the past decade.
The Chinese Association of Plastics and Aesthetics estimates, overall, the cosmetic industry will grow to $46 billion this year compared to around $6.5 billion in 2013.
Micro-procedures are now an expanding segment of that market, while traditional surgery’s growth rates slow, according to data from consulting firm Frost and Sullivan.
Changing values
But a government crackdown looms over the boom.
The ruling Communist Party is pushing a broad campaign to “purify” social values, which includes taking aim at mounting youth pressure to go under the knife.
The government has banned industry advertising practices that contribute to “appearance anxiety” such as before-and-after images, and has levied tens of millions of dollars in fines this year over various infractions.
Model Li Li already gets monthly laser treatments to correct skin blemishes but admits she feels social pressure to continually fix her appearance.
After friends said her face was out of proportion she opted for a “chin filler,” which makes the chin more prominent.
“I went to get it immediately,” the 27-year-old confessed.
But Li and Zhang insist that micro-procedures — which can cost on average a third of the price of cosmetic surgery, according to research by Deloitte — are a less-invasive alternative to traditional surgery and are being unfairly stigmatized.
“Everyone had the same standard of beauty before, but now it feels like this norm is being tipped over,” added Zhang, who likens micro-procedures to skincare, but faster.
A decade ago, cosmetic doctor Yang Kaiyuan said customers often came to him with a picture of a celebrity, telling him: “I want to look like this.”
“Nowadays, people just hope to make slight improvements on what they already have,” Yang explained.
Unrestrained growth
But the government is concerned by the rise in unlicensed, unregulated providers.
In 2019, 15 percent of the 13,000 licensed beauty clinics in China were operating outside of their business scope and only 28 percent of doctors in the industry were certified, according to iResearch.
Its report added that for every up-to-standard needle used, two unapproved ones were in circulation.
Earlier this year, a Chinese actress shared cautionary photos online of a botched operation that left her nose badly infected.
But Ken Huang, CEO at beauty clinic PhiSkin, says the societal factors pushing young Chinese to seek cosmetic adjustments to advance their careers or to boost social media popularity remain strong.
“Good-looking people will have more opportunities than others,” Huang said.
“If you don’t look good on the outside, even if you have an interesting personality, people might not get the chance to see it.”
Still in her twenties, Zhang already opts for monthly micro-procedures and will keep this routine until she feels her appearance leaves her “no choice but to go under the knife.”
She explained: “Then I may need stronger methods to be able to return to a younger state.”
…
