Artists accuse Royal Academy of ‘anti-Palestinian censorship’ over removed works

The Royal Academy of Arts in London. (File/Getty Images)
The Royal Academy of Arts in London. (File/Getty Images)
Short Url
Updated 29 July 2024
Follow

Artists accuse Royal Academy of ‘anti-Palestinian censorship’ over removed works

The Royal Academy of Arts in London. (File/Getty Images)
  • Decision to cut ‘stop genocide’ image, ‘shameful,’ open letter says
  • RA ‘in breach of its ethical responsibilities,’ Artists for Palestine UK says

LONDON: Hundreds of artists, writers and actors on Monday sent an open letter to the UK’s Royal Academy of Arts accusing it of anti-Palestinian censorship after it removed two artworks from its Young Artists’ Summer Show.

The letter, written by Artists for Palestine UK, which includes members of the academy, described the decision as “shameful.”

The furor was caused by the academy’s decision to remove a photograph of a protester holding a placard that read: “Jews Say Stop Genocide on Palestinians. Not In Our Name.”

Visual artists Rosalind Nashashibi, Adam Broomberg, curator David Campany and writers Natasha Walter, Kamila Shamsie, Sabrina Mahfouz, Fatima Bhutto and Gillian Slovo were among those who said the decision had “stigmatized the work of the young artists” and helped bring about the “erasure of Jewish contribution to solidarity with Palestinians.”

Among the other signatories were fashion designer Bella Freud, director Mike Leigh, musician Brian Eno, actors Juliet Stevenson and Alia Shawkat, and several Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Socialists’ Group.

“Far from protecting Jews, the RA is lending support to a racist, anti-Palestinian campaign that aims to silence expressions of support for Palestinian people,” the letter said.

A spokesperson for Artists for Palestine UK said: “By failing to stand up to deplorable bullying and ludicrous accusations against young artists, the Royal Academy is in breach of its ethical responsibilities and duty of care. This needs urgent repair.”

In conjunction with the open letter, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign on Monday launched an online petition, which has been sent to its 300,000 supporters, asking them to write to the CEO of the Royal Academy to voice their opposition.

The PSC said that in silencing solidarity for Palestine, the academy was “complicit in shielding the state of Israel from accountability for its actions” and that it should not “be regarded as inherently illegitimate for artists to draw comparisons between one genocide and others in history.”

The decision to remove the artworks “violated its duty to uphold freedom of expression, and contributes to the dehumanization of Palestinian people and the erasure of the facts of their history,” it said.


Burkina Faso put civilians at ‘unnecessary risk’ during militant attack, rights group says

Burkina Faso put civilians at ‘unnecessary risk’ during militant attack, rights group says
Updated 2 sec ago
Follow

Burkina Faso put civilians at ‘unnecessary risk’ during militant attack, rights group says

Burkina Faso put civilians at ‘unnecessary risk’ during militant attack, rights group says
  • In August, at least 100 villagers were killed by fighters from a militant group linked to Al-Qaeda
  • It was one of the deadliest attacks this year in the conflict-battered West African nation
DAKAR, Senegal: Burkina Faso’s government unnecessarily exposed civilians to danger during a militant attack earlier this year, Human Rights Watch said in a report released Tuesday.
In August, at least 100 villagers were killed by fighters from a militant group linked to Al-Qaeda in central Burkina Faso, in one of the deadliest attacks this year in the conflict-battered West African nation.
Villagers in the Barsalogho commune, which is 80 kilometers from the capital Ouagadougou, were forcibly helping security forces dig up trenches to protect security outposts and villages when fighters with the Jama’at Nusrat Al-Islam wal-Muslimin group invaded the area and opened fire on them, according to the report.
The JNIM group, which claimed responsibility for the attack, said that all of the villagers targeted were members of militias affiliated with Burkina Faso in its response to the report.
Human Rights Watch said it confirmed through video analysis and witness accounts that at least 133 people were killed, including dozens of children, and at least 200 more were injured.
“The massacre in Barsalogho is the latest example of atrocities by Islamist armed groups against civilians whom the government has put at unnecessary risk,” Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior Sahel researcher at Human Rights Watch, said in the report.
About half of Burkina Faso is outside of government control as the country has been ravaged by increasing militant attacks, encircling the capital. The militants linked to Al-Qaeda and the Daesh group have killed thousands and displaced more than 2 million people.
The violence contributed to two coups in 2022. Still, the military junta that promised to end the attacks has struggled to do so, even after seeking new security partnerships with Russia and other junta-led, conflict-hit countries in Africa’s Sahel region.
The government’s reliance on armed civilian auxiliaries, known as Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland, or VDP, to fight militants is putting civilians in great danger, Allegrozzi said, as many become targets of militants who accuse them of being supporters or even members of the VDP.
Witnesses quoted in the report said Burkina Faso’s military forced male residents to dig a new trench section near the village without providing payment but that many refused fearing they would be exposed to attacks. But soldiers coerced them to do the work by threatening and beating them.
The country’s justice minister, Edasso Rodrigue Bayala, in his response to Human Rights Watch, said that forced labor was forbidden by law in Burkina Faso and that “testimonies according to which the military forced the populations to dig the trench are not proven.”

China’s ‘Hawaii’ under water as tropical storm dumps record rainfall

China’s ‘Hawaii’ under water as tropical storm dumps record rainfall
Updated 29 October 2024
Follow

China’s ‘Hawaii’ under water as tropical storm dumps record rainfall

China’s ‘Hawaii’ under water as tropical storm dumps record rainfall
  • Cities in Hainan including Sanya, famed for its palm trees, seafront hotels and sandy beaches, remained waterlogged due to Tropical Storm Trami
  • China’s entire eastern coastline has been tested by extreme weather events this year, scientists warn more intense weather is in the offing

BEIJING: For a third day, extreme rainfall pounded the southern Chinese province of Hainan, known as China’s “Hawaii,” amid the transit of yet another tropical cyclone, leaving the island half-submerged in a year of record-breaking wet weather.
Cities in Hainan including Sanya, famed for its palm trees, seafront hotels and sandy beaches, remained waterlogged on Tuesday due to Tropical Storm Trami to the south. On Monday, Sanya logged 294.9mm (11.6 inches) of rainfall over a 24-hour window, the most for any day in October since 2000.
Trami made landfall in central Vietnam on Sunday after a slow trek across the South China Sea from the Philippines, where it left at least 125 people dead and 28 missing. While Hainan did not take a direct hit from Trami, Chinese authorities took no chances, recalling all fishing vessels and evacuating over 50,000 people.
China’s entire eastern coastline has been tested by extreme weather events this year — from the violent passage of Super Typhoon Yagi across Hainan in September to the strongest tropical cyclone to strike Shanghai since 1949. Scientists warn more intense weather is in the offing, spurred by climate change.
“In October, the national average precipitation was 6.3 percent higher than the same period in previous years,” Jia Xiaolong, a senior official at the National Climate Center, said at a news conference on Tuesday.
Last week, the water along China’s Bohai Sea inexplicably rose up to 160 cm (5.2 feet) in a matter of hours despite the absence of any wind, leading to a tidal surge that flooded the streets of Tianjin and many cities in the northern provinces of Hebei and Liaoning.
“It’s hard to imagine how much power was needed to push such a large area of sea water to one place,” Fu Cifu, an official at the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center, told state-run Xinhua news agency at the time.
China is historically no stranger to floods, but its prevention infrastructure and emergency response planning are coming under increasing pressure as record rains flood populous cities, ravage crops and disrupt local economies.
Amid disaster recovery efforts this summer, authorities had to provide billions of dollars in additional funding to support reconstruction in multiple regions from the south to the northeast of China.
In July, the country suffered 76.9 billion yuan ($10.8 billion) in economic losses from natural disasters, with 88 percent of those losses caused by heavy rains and floods from Typhoon Gaemi, the most for the month of July since 2021.


Indonesia and Russia to hold first joint naval drills

Indonesia and Russia to hold first joint naval drills
Updated 29 October 2024
Follow

Indonesia and Russia to hold first joint naval drills

Indonesia and Russia to hold first joint naval drills
  • The region’s biggest economy maintains a neutral foreign policy, refusing to take sides in the Ukraine conflict or in great power competition between Washington and Beijing

JAKARTA: Indonesia and Russia will hold their first joint naval drills next month, Jakarta’s navy said Tuesday, as the Southeast Asian archipelago’s new leader seeks to boost ties with Moscow.
The region’s biggest economy maintains a neutral foreign policy, refusing to take sides in the Ukraine conflict or in great power competition between Washington and Beijing.
But newly inaugurated Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto has pledged to be bolder on the world stage and in July visited Moscow for talks with Vladimir Putin.
The Indonesian navy said the drills would take place from November 4 to 8 in the Java Sea near a naval base in Surabaya.
“(It) is a milestone bilateral exercise between TNI AL and the Russian navy,” the navy said in the statement, using its Indonesian acronym.
Russia will send three corvette class warships, a medium tanker ship, a military helicopter, and a tugboat, it said.
Russian ambassador to Indonesia Sergey Tolchenov confirmed the drills and said they were not aimed at any rival power.
“It’s... just to increase the capabilities and potential of our two fleets,” he told a press briefing Monday.
Indonesia has repeatedly called for a peaceful resolution to Russia’s years-long invasion of Ukraine.
Former president Joko Widodo became the first Asian leader to visit both Kyiv and Moscow since the outbreak of war in February 2022.
Kyiv derided Prabowo in June 2023 when he was Indonesia’s defense minister over what it called a “strange” peace proposal he made at the Shangri-La Dialogue defense summit in Singapore.
His plan included demilitarized zones and referendums in disputed areas of eastern Ukraine.
Indonesia last week also started the process of becoming a member of the BRICS bloc led by Russia, Brazil, India, China and South Africa, newly appointed foreign minister Sugiono, who goes by one name, said at a BRICS Plus summit in the Russian city of Kazan.


Mother crashes car through Australian school fence, killing a child and injuring 4 others

Mother crashes car through Australian school fence, killing a child and injuring 4 others
Updated 29 October 2024
Follow

Mother crashes car through Australian school fence, killing a child and injuring 4 others

Mother crashes car through Australian school fence, killing a child and injuring 4 others

MELBOURNE: A mother collecting a child crashed a car through a Melbourne school fence on Tuesday, fatally injuring one child and leaving four others seriously hurt, police said.
The 40-year-old mother had collected a child from the Auburn South Primary School and was making a U-turn on the road outside when she crashed through a fence and into an outdoor table where five children were seated after 2:30 p.m. local time, Police Insp. Craig McEvoy said.
“It appears it is a tragic accident,” McEvoy told reporters.
An 11-year-old boy was taken to hospital with critical injuries and later died, a police statement said.
Two girls, aged 11, a 10-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy were taken to hospital with serious injuries, police said.
The driver was arrested at the scene and remained in custody, police said. Neither she nor her student passenger was uninjured.
Police were questioning the mother, McEvoy said but had no further updates. Specialist accident investigation detectives were at the scene gathering evidence.
Video showed the station wagon with obvious damage to its front-left fender had came to a halt after passing through a shade-cloth covered recreation area.


Pope Francis’s commission against clerical child abuse to publish first report

Pope Francis’s commission against clerical child abuse to publish first report
Updated 29 October 2024
Follow

Pope Francis’s commission against clerical child abuse to publish first report

Pope Francis’s commission against clerical child abuse to publish first report
  • Pontiff set up the independent panel of experts in December 2014 amid an avalanche of revelations of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy across the world, and its cover-up

VATICAN CITY: The Vatican on Tuesday publishes its first annual report on protecting minors in the Catholic Church, a move requested by Pope Francis amid pressure for more action to tackle clerical child sex abuse.
The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors said its report will be a “first step toward a process of data gathering and reporting,” and will document “where risks remain, and where advances can be found.”
Pope Francis set up the independent panel of experts in December 2014 amid an avalanche of revelations of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy across the world, and its cover-up.
But the commission has faced strong criticism over its organization, funding and role, with several high-profile members quitting.
In 2022, Francis incorporated the commission into the Roman Curia — the government of the Holy See — and asked for an annual, “reliable account on what is presently being done and what needs to change.”
The first of these will be published on Tuesday, launched at the Vatican by the commission’s president, US Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the former archbishop of Boston who has spent decades listening to abuse survivors.
In a statement ahead of the launch, the commission described the report as a “new tool,” part of a process to set out clear standards on protecting children and vulnerable adults.
It will be divided into four areas — a review of safeguarding policies in 15 to 20 local churches each year, trends across continents, policies within the Vatican and the Church’s broader role in society.
“It collects resources and practices to be shared across the Universal Church, and makes specific recommendations to promote further progress in safeguarding,” it said.
Since becoming pope in March 2013, Francis has taken numerous measures to tackle abuse, from opening up internal Church documents to punishing high-ranking clergy, while making it compulsory to report suspicions of sexual assault to Church authorities.
But clergy are still not required to report abuse to civil authorities, unless the laws of that country require it, while any revelations made in confession remain private.
“The global church must implement true zero tolerance on sexual violence by clergy,” Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the US group Bishop Accountability, which documents abuse in the Church, said earlier this year.
She called for the Church to name convicted priests and insisted that “any priest found to have abused a child or vulnerable adult or credibly accused of abusing a child or adult must be permanently removed from public ministry.”
For all his efforts so far, she said “Pope Francis has shown an absolute aversion to transparency.”
Maud de Boer Buquicchio, a Dutch lawyer and former UN special rapporteur on the sexual exploitation of children who chaired the abuse commission report, said last week it would help promote a “change of mindset in the Church that embraces accountability and transparency.”
During its compilation, “we have been able to explore many of the concerns about the lack of available data,” she added.
Members of the abuse commission are directly appointed by the pope and are experts in fields related to safeguarding, from clinical psychology to law as well as human rights.
But two members representing abuse survivors resigned in 2017, while last year, influential German Jesuit priest Hans Zollner also quit, complaining about “structural and practical issues.”
Francesco Zanardi, founder of Italian survivors group Rete L’Abuso (The Abuse Network), said in 2023 that the commission was “absolutely useless.”