ENTERTAINMENT
February 12, 2013 | By Steven Zeitchik
On Tuesday night at the Berlin Film Festival, the Iranian director Jafar Panahi will debut his new movie “Closed Curtain.” Panahi himself won't be there to present it, of course; he remains under house arrest in Iran, and the premiere is scheduled to be anchored by Kamboziya Partovi, Panahi's actor and co-director. Since being sentenced to a 20-year filmmaking and publicity ban in late 2010, Panahi has been downright prolific. While many bans tend to have a paradoxically healthy effect on filmmaking, in Panahi's case it's been something of an IV injection.
WORLD
December 23, 2012 | By Morgan Little
Though some have claimed that 2012 was “the best year ever” on a global scale, it certainly doesn't seem that way from a cursory glance at the headlines. Civil wars, revolutions and natural disasters seemed as rampant as ever, but amid the chaos, there appeared to be steps in the right direction. In the Middle East, the "Arab Spring" continued to revolutionize the region. Egypt's elections, which brought Mohamed Morsi to power, have since sparked fighting between his supporters and those accusing him of trying to consolidate power . There was the continuing crisis in Syria ; an increasingly isolated and nuclear-ambitious Iran; yet another military flare-up between Israelis and Palestinians; and the lethal attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi , Libya, prompted political controversy in the U.S. The Great Recession clung to Europe, with Greece and Spain particularly volatile as citizens resisted austerity measures . The European Union won the Nobel Peace Prize , but violent protests in Athens and beyond tested fiscal resolve.
WORLD
November 15, 2012 | By Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times
YANGON, Myanmar - Ko Paul had been warned that the old Yamaha piano in the upstairs sitting room of the dilapidated lakeside mansion was in bad shape. Tropical climates aren't great for pianos. Heat warps their sound boxes, humidity swells their pin blocks, reducing string tension, and termites savor an easy meal. But this one was worse than the piano tuner expected that day in 2009. "Pretty much everything had to be changed, the pins, the dampers, all the hammers," he said in a coffee shop in Yangon.
NEWS
September 19, 2012 | By Kathleen Hennessey
President Obama will meet Wednesday with Myanmar activist Aung San Suu Kyi, the White House said. The human rights advocate and member of the Myanmar National Assembly is visiting the U.S. for the first time in two decades, after a lengthy series of house arrests from 1989 to 2010. Her tour includes a meeting with the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and leaders on the Hill, who will award her the Congressional Gold Medal. Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was initially awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2008 during a house arrest imposed by Myanmar's military junta.
WORLD
September 19, 2012 | By Kathleen Hennessey and Danielle Ryan, Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON - Myanmar's opposition leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, met privately with President Obama after accepting Congress' highest honor in an emotional ceremony Wednesday, signs of the stunning shift in U.S. relations with the onetime pariah Asian nation over the last year. The Obama administration not only welcomed the former political prisoner and Nobel laureate, but it offered a gesture of goodwill by easing sanctions against Myanmar's leaders, as Suu Kyi has urged since she arrived Monday on a 17-day U.S. tour, including a visit to Los Angeles.
ENTERTAINMENT
September 13, 2012 | By Sheri Linden
The self-taught filmmaker behind the documentary "5 Broken Cameras" says he uses the lens "to hold onto my memories. " For the Palestinian resident of the occupied West Bank, those memories involve not just family milestones but daily political struggle. Emad Burnat first got a camera in 2005 to film his newborn fourth son, Gibreel, and neighborhood activities in the village of Bil'in. Those activities included, with increasing frequency, demonstrations against Israel-erected barriers and the encroachment of Jewish settlements.