In 2016, an Iraqi-American artist sat down with Bahjat Abdulwahed — the so-called “Walter Cronkite of Baghdad” — with the idea of launching a radio project that would be part documentary, part radio play and part variety show.

Abdulwahed was the voice of Iraqi radio from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, but came to Philadelphia as a refugee in 2009 after receiving death threats from insurgents.

“He represented authority and respectability in relationship to the news through many different political changes,” said Elizabeth Thomas, curator of “Radio Silence,” a public art piece that resulted from the meeting with Abdulwahed.

Thomas had invited artist Michael Rakowitz to Philadelphia to create a project for Mural Arts Philadelphia, which has been expanding its public art reach from murals into new and innovative spaces.

After nearly five years of research, Rakowitz distilled his project into a radio broadcast that would involve putting the vivacious and caramel-voiced Abdulwahed back on the air, and using Philadelphia-area Iraqi refugees and local Iraq war veterans as his field reporters. It would feature Iraqi music, remembrances of the country and vintage weather reports from a happier time in Iraq.

“One of the many initial titles was “Desert Home Companion,” Rakowitz said, riffing on “A Prairie Home Companion,” the radio variety show created by Garrison Keillor.

Rakowitz recorded an initial and very informal session with Abdulwahed in his living room in January 2016. Two weeks later, Abdulwahed collapsed. He had to have an emergency tracheostomy and was on life support until he died seven months later.

At Abdulwahed’s funeral, his friends urged Rakowitz to continue with the project, to show how much of the country they left behind was slipping away and to help fight cultural amnesia.

Rakowitz recalibrated the project, which became “Radio Silence,” a 10-part radio broadcast with each episode focusing on a synonym of silence, in homage to Abdulwahed.

“The voice of Baghdad had lost his voice,” Rakowitz said, calling him a “narrator of Iraq’s history.”

It will be hosted by Rakowitz and features fragments of that first recording session with Abdulwahed, as well as interviews with his wife and other Iraqi refugees living in Philadelphia.

Rakowitz and Thomas also worked with Warrior Writers, a nonprofit based in Philadelphia that helps war veterans work through their experiences using writing and art.

The first episode, on speechlessness, will launch Aug. 6. It will be broadcast on community radio stations across the country through Prometheus Radio Project.

One participant is Jawad Al Amiri, an Iraqi refugee who came to the United States in the 1980s. He said silence in Iraq has been a way of life for many decades.

“Silence is a way of survival. Silence is a decree by the Baath regime, not to tell what you see in front of your eyes. Silence is synonymous with fear. If you tell, you will be put through agony,” he said at a preview Tuesday of the live broadcast. He said he saw his own sister poisoned and die and wasn’t allowed to speak of it.

When he came to the U.S. in 1981, his father told him: “We send you here for education and to speak for the millions of Iraqis in the land where freedom of speech is practiced.”

Lawrence Davidson is an Army veteran who served during the Iraq War and works with Warrior Writers also contributed to the project. He said the project is a place to exchange ideas and honestly share feelings with refugees and other veterans.

The project kicks off on July 29 with a live broadcast performance on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall — what Rakowitz calls the symbolic home of American democracy. It will feature storytelling, food from refugees and discussions from the veterans with Warrior Writers.
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Stories of survival in turbulent times, including David Gordon Green’s world premiere of Stronger about a victim of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, are among the highlights in store at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

Angelina Jolie’s First They Killed My Father, set in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge reign, and horror mystery Mother! by Darren Aronofsky, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, were also among the films announced Tuesday in the first look at the festival’s lineup for 2017.

Audiences can also catch social satire Downsizing, directed by Alexander Payne and starring Matt Damon, and George Clooney-directed crime-comedy Suburbicon. Guillermo del Toro’s fantastical The Shape of Water will also screen.

The Toronto event, which kicks off September 7, has become one of the world’s largest film festivals, known for debuting critically acclaimed films that have later won Academy Awards for best picture.

Stronger stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Jeff Bauman, who lost both his legs during the Boston Marathon, and Tatiana Maslany as his girlfriend.

“It’s a moment of incredible transformation, disruption, change, challenge, so I think you’ll see that reflected in the films we’re showing,” said Piers Handling, chief executive and director of the film festival, now in its 42nd year.

“One of the ideas that struck me is the whole notion of survival,” he said about the films announced so far. “It seems to be a topic that a lot of people are thinking about.”

Hany Abu-Assad’s The Mountain Between Us, starring Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, is about two strangers stranded on a mountain after surviving a plane crash.

Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier’s Long Time Running is a documentary about the 2016 tour of The Tragically Hip, a Canadian rock band, as frontman Gord Downie battles terminal brain cancer.

Organizers did not announce which film would kick off the 10-day festival, but said the world premiere of C’est La Vie! by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the duo behind The Intouchables, would close.

Women will also grab the festival spotlight, with Haifaa Al Mansour’s Mary Shelley and Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston & the Wonder Women having their world premieres in Toronto.

“We don’t program for themes, but as you begin to step back … and you look at the films that you’ve chosen, some things begin to emerge,” Cameron Bailey, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview.

The festival will run until September 17.
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Kathryn Bigelow hasn’t forgotten the out-of-body experience she felt when she won the best director Academy Award for her 2009 The Hurt Locker. At that moment, she became the first woman to win the award. None have been nominated since.

“The gender inequity that exists in the industry, I thought it would maybe be the beginning of that inequity not being quite so pronounced,” said Bigelow in a recent interview. “Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case. And I don’t know why that is. I just don’t know. But I sort of feel like on behalf of all the women who might yearn to tell challenging, relevant, topical, entertaining stories, that I was standing there for them. And that emboldened me.”

Boldness is not a fleeting quality for Bigelow. Since The Hurt Locker, she has, with the reporter-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, continued to craft an ambitious, intrepid kind of cinema that marries visceral big-screen immersion with deeply researched journalism. Their previous collaboration, the Osama bin Laden-hunt thriller Zero Dark Thirty, proved an unparalleled flashpoint in both Hollywood and Washington, prompting debates over its representation of the role torture played in the manhunt.

“I’m the messenger. I didn’t invent the message,” she said. “I’m just compelled to make these challenging pieces. And I’m compelled by stories that are informational, that tell you what you didn’t know going in — that I didn’t know going in.”

Incident amid 1967 riots

Her latest film, Detroit, is a no less challenging dive into the violent soul of America, but this time, she’s on the home front. The film, also from a script from Boal, is about the Algiers Motel incident, a relatively little-remembered event that took place amid the 1967 Detroit riots — an uprising sparked by a police raid of an after-hours club — and a reaction to a long history of oppression of the city’s African-Americans. The riots, among the largest in U.S. history, left 43 dead and led to the deployment of thousands of national guardsmen to a Detroit that raged in fire and fury.

Detroit seeks to show the historical context and individual reality of the riots, which many say should be called a “rebellion.” Within the chaos was the particularly heinous act at the Algiers Motel. Three unarmed black males were killed in an encounter with police, and nine others (seven of them black) were beaten and terrorized. Three officers were charged with murder, as well as other crimes, but found not guilty.

Boal approached Bigelow about making a film about the incident shortly after a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson, whose fatal shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014 prompted the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. The relevance of the Detroit tale, Bigelow said, fueled her motivation for making it.

“There was something sadly, tragically contemporaneous about this story,” Bigelow said. ” ‘How can this conversation happen in a meaningful way?’ is what I walk away asking. I’m just telling this story in as authentic and truthful and honest a way as we could, given the information that is out there.”

Swept into a nightmare

The story for Boal began with Cleveland Larry Reed. During the riots, Reed (played by Algee Smith in the film) was an 18-year-old singer in the Dramatics, an up-and-coming Motown group whose concert was canceled that night. He and another bandmate hunkered down at the Algiers, only to find themselves swept into a nightmare. Reed, who met with Boal and later with Smith, never recovered from the ordeal; he gave up professional music, singing instead in church choirs.

“In the summer of 2014, I was drawn to this story after meeting Larry Reed and hearing him recount what had happened to him 50 years ago, and then, later on, hearing from other survivors of the Algiers,” Boal wrote in an email. “My idea for the movie was driven from the start by real people, being moved by the fine-grained particulars of what they went through.”

Smith, a 22-year-old actor from Saginaw, Michigan, described the set as a profoundly emotional one where the cast merely needed to “log on to our social medias for inspiration.” 

“We were shooting a movie about history but it felt like today,” he said.

He and other actors playing the terrorized victims weren’t given scripts for much of the production so that their reactions of shock and horror were more genuine.

“She wanted us to have a tomorrow’s-not-promised type of mindset,” Smith said. “We just got there and then the first day it was just total chaos. It was: ‘Put your hands on the wall.’ Screaming. I’m getting lightheaded because I’m breathing so hard in between takes. It was emotionally and physically draining every day for those first two weeks. Will Poulter (who plays the ringleader officer) broke down on set. In the middle of a scene, he just started crying. The whole set just stopped. Everyone stopped. Will went outside and I put my arm around him, but I just started crying, too.”

Not the perfect storyteller

Some may say Detroit is a story that ought to have been told by black filmmakers. Bigelow, who has spent her career either ignoring or exploding gender stereotypes, understands such criticism.

“Am I the perfect person to tell that story? Absolutely not,” Bigelow said. “But I felt honored to tell this story. It’s a story that’s been out of circulation for 50 years. And if it can encourage a conversation about race in this country, I would find that extremely encouraging and important.”

Her films, she said, are about creating empathy and, she hopes, dialogue. Earlier this year, she co-directed an eight-minute virtual reality film about park rangers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Protectors: Walk in the Rangers’ Shoes.

“Institutionalized racism is at the heart of the piece,” Bigelow said of Detroit. “I think the purpose of art is to agitate for change. But you can’t change anything unless you’re aware of it.”
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Eight siblings who grew up in southwestern Indiana have amassed nearly 450 years of combined marriage.

Bruce Clinkenbeard of Freelandville, Indiana, and his wife Sally have been married for 53 years, but that’s just the tip of the Clinkenbeard family’s matrimonial iceberg.

Bruce and his seven siblings have together racked up a combined 448 years of marriage, and counting. Seven of the eight siblings either have been or were married for more than a half-century. That includes a sister who died in 2013 after 63 years of matrimony.

Bill Clinkenbeard has been married 59 years, but he and his wife Karen have always worked out any differences they’ve had. He tells the Vincennes Sun-Commercial their marriage is “a lot of give and take – and a lot of love.”
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Katinka Hosszu has a case full of medals.

She wants so much more.

From marketing marvel to ambitious businesswoman to fledgling union organizer, the Hungarian swimmer known as the “Iron Lady” knows how to make a splash – in and out of the pool.

Along with American star Katie Ledecky, Hosszu is perhaps the biggest name at the world championships this week, the home-country favorite whose face seemingly appears on every billboard around Budapest, whose every appearance at Duna Arena is accompanied by foot-stomping, flag-waving euphoria.

She lived up to the enormous expectations in her first event of the meet, winning the 200-meter individual medley Monday night.

“Katinka’s Gold!” blared the front-page headline on the country’s largest daily sports newspaper.

While Hosszu and her American husband-coach, Shane Tusup, have built a rapidly growing swimsuit and apparel company based on the “Iron Lady” moniker – it now has about 50 employees and is omnipresent in retail stores around Hungary – the 28-year-old has turned her sights to what she considers an even greater cause.

After governing body FINA changed its the rules to limit the number of events a swimmer could enter on the World Cup circuit, a capricious decision that seemed targeted specifically at Hosszu and her grueling program (that’s how she got her nickname, after all), the swimmer vowed to fight back.

“I’m obviously trying to do a lot more for swimming than what I do in the pool,” Hosszu said. “I think it’s important to put the same effort into it outside the pool.”

She formed the Global Association of Professional Swimmers (GAPS) and quickly drew attention by persuading more than two dozen of her fellow competitors to come on board, including such major stars as Australian sisters Cate and Bronte Campbell, Britain’s Adam Peaty, Sweden’s Sarah Sjostrom and American Katie Meili.

Hosszu has been outspoken in her criticism of scandal-plagued FINA and seems intent on giving swimmers a much bigger voice in governing the sport.

“I’ve been talking to a lot of swimmers lately,” she said. “I had no idea that all over the world, swimmers from different continents, we really speak the same language.”

As swimming’s first millionaire based strictly on her race-prize earnings, Hosszu wants to spread the wealth to others. Given the sport’s enormous popularity during the Olympics and financial strides it made while riding the wave of Michael Phelps, she sees no reason for so many accomplished swimmers to be struggling to make ends meet.

“The main thing is for all these swimmers to come together,” Hosszu said. “That’s something that hasn’t happened before. I think if we can put more effort into swimming, we can push the sport even further.”

She’s still a bit vague about her goals, but it’s clear she wants to give swimmers the same sort of influence that athletes have in sports such as soccer and NBA basketball.

“I don’t think swimming should be watched only during the Olympics,” Hosszu went on. “We deserve to be treated as professional swimmers. We’re partners in this relationship.”

That Hosszu finds herself in such a prominent position would have seemed totally improbable after the 2012 London Olympics, when she was a medal favorite in several events but didn’t make the podium at all. She likely would have retired from the sport if not for Tusup, whom she had first met when both were swimming for the University of Southern California.

Tusup took over as her coach, becoming well known for his boisterous antics on deck, and their personal and professional relationship yielded an Olympics of redemption in Rio de Janeiro last summer. Hosszu won three golds and a silver, more than any other swimmer in individual events.

“I wouldn’t be where I am if it wasn’t for Shane,” Hosszu said.

Tusup returns the compliment, praising his wife for her commitment to the sport beyond winning more championships and selling more merchandise.

“It means so much more than a medal,” he said. “At the end of the day, you’re like, ‘Great, I did all those hours for this?’ The object itself is not that valuable. It’s what it does and what it means. For us, it’s the stories, the process, the journeys.”

Hosszu’s cause seemed to take on increased urgency during these championships.

At a meeting held last weekend in a luxury hotel along the Danube, FINA re-elected its 81-year-old president, Julio Maglione, to a third term after changing the rules to remove the age limits. The organization also retained another top official, first vice president Hussain al-Musallam, even though he is facing bribery allegations.

In Hosszu’s eyes, it’s time for swimmers to start cleaning up the sport.

It’s past time for them to get their rightful share.

“I’m not only talking about the top swimmers getting paid more,” she said. “I’m talking about swimmers trying to be professional, trying to make money from swimming. It should be the goal that all people who make the semifinals can make a living from swimming and not have to worry about their next job. They can just focus on swimming – be like basketball players and football players, just focusing on their sport.”
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The shocking announcement on July 26, 1985, came via press release.

Rock Hudson, age 59, tall, dark and undeniably handsome, was sick with AIDS, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, a disease that was, at the time, disproportionately killing gay men in the United States.

Just four months later, Hudson was dead. 

AIDS had begun to be recognized as a public-health crisis during the early 1980s, but the general public had relatively little knowledge about it. Little knowledge, but plenty of suspicion and fear. 

Despite a small, vocal community of activists calling for a government response to the crisis, AIDS was a deeply stigmatizing burden.

Most Americans believed the complex disease affected only gay men; it was some time before it became known that intravenous drug users, those who received blood transfusions containing the HIV virus and other groups also were at risk. 

President Ronald Reagan would not speak publicly about AIDS and the need to combat the disease for years after he took office in 1981.

He defended his administration’s anti-AIDS research spending during a news conference in September 1985, about two weeks before Rock Hudson died.

The president also expressed skepticism about whether children infected with the AIDS virus should be allowed to remain in school.

That worsened the stigma for those who were afflicted, and it diluted the advice of U.S. government health officials who said “casual person-to-person contact, as would occur among schoolchildren, appears to pose no risk.” 

By 1985, AIDS had killed an estimated 12,000 or more Americans, with a very high mortality rate among those infected.

That same year the U.S. government licensed a blood test to detect the AIDS virus and screening of the national blood supply began, but overall efforts to find drugs to treat, and perhaps cure, sufferers were still moving slowly. 

Double life 

Since his first days in Hollywood in his 20s, rumors about Hudson’s sexual preferences had been common. To suppress a former lover’s threats to expose him as homosexual, and thus very likely wreck his budding film career, Hudson married Phyllis Gates, his business agent’s secretary, in 1955.

Initially, even his wife did not know that her husband was living a lie. 

The union lasted only three years. Gates was silent about their relationship for a quarter-century, but she wrote a book in 1987 that depicted her husband as bisexual, but also indicated that their marriage included sex. 

After his marriage failed, Hudson went on to star in one of his best known films, an unforgettable pairing with actress Doris Day in the comic romance Pillow Talk. He was the main attraction in literally scores of films during the 1950s, ’60s and early ’70s, and also had a number of popular television roles. 

Although his homosexuality was kept secret – Hudson once said that coming out as gay would have been “career suicide” – some of his close friends, including Doris Day, were fully aware of his private life. Another great friend of his in Hollywood was Elizabeth Taylor, a former co-star. 

Worldwide scope of epidemic 

After Hudson died in October 1985, Taylor became an AIDS activist and formed a foundation to raise funds for research on how to combat AIDS. By the late 1980s AIDS was beginning to be known as no longer simply a “gay scourge,” but a massive threat to public health worldwide. 

Taylor gained fame as a humanitarian for her work on anti-AIDS research, which continued until her death in 2011. She has been credited with helping persuade the scientific establishment to focus more attention on the disease, and for informing the public that AIDS was not a moral stigma to hide due to a gay lifestyle.  

Since the AIDS epidemic began, more than 70 million people around the world have been infected with the HIV virus, and more than 35 million have died, according to the World Health Organization.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the area most severely affected by AIDS, which still kills about 1 million people per year worldwide. 

Thanks in large part to improved detection and more effective medications and treatment, the American share of the AIDS toll has declined sharply. Since the epidemic began, about 675,000 people in the United States have died of HIV/AIDS. 

In less than a decade, the number of HIV infections in the United States has declined 18 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Still, more than one million Americans are living with HIV, and one in seven of them are unaware they have the virus.

 
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