Magazine
new york — Dabney Coleman, the mustachioed character actor who specialized in smarmy villains such asd the chauvinist boss in “9 to 5” and the nasty TV director in “Tootsie,” has died. He was 92.
Coleman died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, his daughter, Quincy Coleman, said in a statement to The Associated Press. She said he “took his last earthly breath peacefully and exquisitely.”
“The great Dabney Coleman literally created, or defined, really — in a uniquely singular way — an archetype as a character actor. He was so good at what he did it’s hard to imagine movies and television of the last 40 years without him,” Ben Stiller wrote on X.
Coleman’s delivery drew fans
For two decades Coleman labored in movies and television shows as a talented but largely unnoticed performer. That changed in 1976 when he was cast as the incorrigibly corrupt mayor of the hamlet of Fernwood in “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” a satirical soap opera that was so over the top no network would touch it.
Producer Norman Lear finally managed to syndicate the show, which starred Louise Lasser in the title role. It quickly became a cult favorite. Coleman’s character, Mayor Merle Jeeter, was especially popular and his masterful, comic deadpan delivery did not go overlooked by film and network executives.
A six-footer with an ample black mustache, Coleman went on to make his mark in numerous popular films, including as a stressed out computer scientist in “War Games,” Tom Hanks’ father in “You’ve Got Mail,” and a firefighting official in “The Towering Inferno.”
He won a Golden Globe for “The Slap Maxwell Story” and an Emmy Award for best supporting actor in Peter Levin’s 1987 small screen legal drama “Sworn to Silence.” Some of his recent credits include “Ray Donovan” and a recurring role on “Boardwalk Empire,” for which he won two Screen Actors Guild Awards.
In the groundbreaking 1980 hit “9 to 5,” he was the “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” boss who tormented his unappreciated female underlings — Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton — until they turned the tables on him.
Opposite Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie,” he was the obnoxious director of a daytime soap opera that Hoffman’s character joins by pretending to be a woman.
Coleman’s obnoxious characters didn’t translate quite as well on television, where he starred in a handful of network comedies. Although some became cult favorites, only one lasted longer than two seasons, and some critics questioned whether a series starring a lead character with absolutely no redeeming qualities could attract a mass audience.
Underneath all that bravura was a reserved man. Coleman insisted he was really quite shy.
“I’ve been shy all my life. Maybe it stems from being the last of four children, all of them very handsome, including a brother who was Tyrone Power-handsome. Maybe it’s because my father died when I was 4,” he told The Associated Press in 1984. “I was extremely small, just a little guy who was there, the kid who created no trouble. I was attracted to fantasy, and I created games for myself.”
As Coleman aged, he began to put his mark on pompous authority figures, notably in 1998’s “My Date with the President’s Daughter,” in which he was not only an egotistical, self-absorbed president of the United States, but also a clueless father to a teenager girl.
Abandons law school to act
Dabney Coleman — his real name — was born in 1932 in Austin, Texas. After two years at the Virginia Military Academy, two at the University of Texas and two in the Army, he was a 26-year-old law student when he met another Austin native, Zachry Scott, who starred in “Mildred Pierce” and other films.
“He was the most dynamic person I’ve ever met. He convinced me I should become an actor, and I literally left the next day to study in New York. He didn’t think that was too wise, but I made my decision,” Coleman told the AP in 1984.
Twice divorced, Coleman is survived by four children and five grandchildren.
“My father crafted his time here on earth with a curious mind, a generous heart, and a soul on fire with passion, desire and humor that tickled the funny bone of humanity,” Quincy Coleman wrote in his honor.
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The effects of recent extreme weather in Southeast Asian countries are far-reaching, from school closures to drought and health advisories. While climate change is part of the problem, this year it was made worse by the cyclical weather pattern called El Nino. VOA’s Chris Casquejo explains.
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LONDON — Paul McCartney is a billionaire Beatle.
According to figures released Friday, the former member of the Fab Four is the first British musician to be worth 1 billion pounds ($1.27 billion).
The annual Sunday Times Rich List calculated that the wealth of the 81-year-old musician and his wife, Nancy Shevell, had grown by 50 million pounds since last year thanks to McCartney’s 2023 Got Back tour, the rising value of his back catalogue and Beyonce’s cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” on her “Cowboy Carter” album.
A “final” Beatles song, “Now and Then,” was also released in November and topped music charts in the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries. Surviving Beatles McCartney and Ringo Starr completed a demo track recorded in 1977 by the late John Lennon, adding in a guitar recording by George Harrison, who died in 2001.
The newspaper estimated 50 million pounds of the couple’s wealth is due to Shevell, daughter of the late U.S. trucking tycoon Mike Shevell.
McCartney ranked 165th overall on the newspaper’s respected and widely perused list of the U.K.’s 350 richest people. The top spot went to Gopi Hinduja and his family, who own the banking, media and entertainment conglomerate Hinduja Group and are worth an estimated 37 billion pounds ($47 billion).
Other entertainment figures on the list include “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, whose fortune is estimated at 945 million pounds ($1.2 billion), and singer Elton John, estimated to be worth 470 million pounds ($597 million).
King Charles III ranked 258th with an estimated wealth of 610 million pounds ($775 million). The king’s fortune includes the large inherited private estates of Sandringham in England and Balmoral in Scotland. The total does not include items held in trust by the monarch for the nation, such as the Crown Jewels.
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Gigantic metal sculptures made by Kosovo-born artist Petrit Halilaj adorn the rooftop of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in an ode to a childhood affected by war. Garentina Kraja has the story. Camera: Vladimir Badikov
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SYDNEY — Australian scientists say they have discovered how an enzyme “hidden in nature’s blueprint” could help develop climate-resilient crops able to remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
An Australian study, by researchers from Australian National University and the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, focuses on a type of bacteria researchers call “tiny carbon superheroes.”
Cyanobacteria, a type of algae-like bacteria also called blue-green algae, are found in fresh and coastal waters, as well as oceans. They are commonly known for their toxic blooms in lakes and rivers.
Through the process of photosynthesis, Australian scientists say, they capture about 12% of the world’s carbon dioxide each year.
Their study says a carbon dioxide-concentrating mechanism in cyanobacteria lets them turn atmospheric carbon dioxide into sugars for cells to eat more quickly than most standard plants and crops.
Until now, the Australian team was unaware how critical an enzyme in cyanobacteria, called carboxysomal carbonic anhydrase, was to the process. The study says the mystery of how the enzyme maximizes the cyanobacteria’s ability to extract atmospheric carbon dioxide has been solved.
Ben Long, a senior lecturer in molecular plant biology at Australia’s University of Newcastle and is the study’s lead author.
He told VOA that the aim is to engineer crops that can absorb more greenhouse gases.
“We are actually interested in utilizing this CO2-concentrating mechanism from cyanobacteria, which we know is a remarkably efficiently system for capturing CO2 and we want to engineer that into plant cells to make plant cells able to capture CO2 far more effectively and efficiently,” Long said.
The research says that engineered plants that are more efficient at capturing carbon dioxide could increase crop yield, making global food systems that are more resilient to climate change.
Long says the findings should be part of international efforts to reduce greenhouse gases.
“Every technology has to be brought to bear to try to reduce CO2 emissions and reduce CO2 in the atmosphere and I think to date we have not really focused much on those potential biological applications to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Long said.
The study has been published in the journal Science Advances.
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Washington — Aleksander Dugin, a Russian nationalist ideologue and strong supporter of President Vladimir Putin, has been bombarded with attacks on Chinese social media, where netizens criticized and mocked his Russian expansionist views that had once included the dismembering of China.
Two years after Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine, pro-Russia sentiment has been prevalent on Chinese internet.
But the backlash against Dugin has revealed a less mentioned side of what has so far appeared to be a cozy alliance between Beijing and Moscow — hostility between Chinese nationalists and their Russian counterparts, the result of centuries of territorial disputes and political confrontations that Beijing has been reticent about displaying publicly in recent decades.
On May 6, Dugin opened an account on two of the most popular Chinese social media apps Weibo, China’s X, formerly known as Twitter, and Bilibili, a YouTube-like video site.
In the first video posted on both Weibo and Bilibili, Dugin greeted the Chinese audience and praised Beijing’s economic and political achievements in recent decades.
In the same video, he also criticized an article published in April in The Economist by Feng Yujun, director of Russian and Central Asian studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. Feng said in the article that Russia will inevitably lose the Ukraine war.
Dugin countered that Feng and some Chinese people underestimated Russia’s “tenacity and perseverance.”
The video was quickly condemned by Chinese citizens, who posted comments such as “Russia must lose,” which received thousands of likes.
“This is an extremist who is extremely unfriendly to China and has made plans to dismember China,” another message posted by a Weibo user named “Zhixingbenyiti” said.
Dugin, 62, was born in Moscow. In the 1980s, he became an anti-communist dissident.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he began to promote Russian expansionism. He believes that Moscow’s territorial expansion in Eurasia will allow it to counter Western forces led by the United States.
In his 1997 book, Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin wrote that dismembering China was a necessary step for Russia to become strong. People within Putin’s inner circle have reportedly shown interest in Dugin’s writing, which gave rise to his nickname “Putin’s brain.”
However, Dugin’s attitude toward China has changed significantly in recent years. In 2018, he visited China for the first time. In a speech at Fudan University, he praised China’s economy, culture and leadership in the fight against colonialism.
He also changed his previous support for containing China and said in a speech that China and Russia could work together to “form a very important and non-negligible containment/pull effect” on Western powers.
Dugin is now a senior fellow at Fudan University’s China Institute and one of the columnists for China’s nationalist news organization, Guancha.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Dugin said in a column that the alliance between China and Russia would “mean the irreversible end of Western hegemony.”
Philipp Ivanov, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told VOA that “Dugin is an opportunist. As the Ukraine war dramatically accelerated the alignment between China and Russia, his position started to change, resulting in his current attempt to engage with China’s intellectual and broader community.”
Ivanov also thinks Dugin’s influence on the Kremlin has been exaggerated.
Since joining Chinese social media, Dugin has gained more than 100,000 followers on Weibo and 25,000 followers on BiliBili. He has published fewer than five posts on Weibo, but nearly every one of them has more than 1,000 comments, most of which criticized him.
Under a post in which Dugin supported Putin on his fifth presidential term, people responded with comments such as “Russia is about to lose the war” and “The gates of hell are waiting for you.”
Wang Xiaodong, China’s most influential nationalist scholar, shared a Weibo post he made two years ago criticizing Dugin and Chinese pro-Russian groups.
“Introducing Dugin’s ideas is not because I worry that the Kremlin will implement his ideas; He has the intention but not the strength! I just want to tell the Chinese people how some Russians, including elites in the powerful departments, view China. Do we Chinese need to risk our lives for them?” the post read.
Ivanov was not surprised by the attacks on Dugin on the Chinese internet.
“While Chinese netizens may support Putin’s anti-Western/anti-US agenda, they are skeptical or outright negative about Russia’s assault on an independent country’s sovereignty and Russian expansionism, nationalism and chauvinism (which Dugin represents),” he told VOA in an email.
He said the history of China-Russia relations is predominantly about confrontation, competition and mistrust.
Among the attacks on Dugin, many netizens also brought up former Chinese territories that Russia occupied in the past 200 years.
“For the sake of ever-lasting friendship between China and Russia, please return Sakhalin and Vladivostok,” one Weibo comment posted by “lovejxcecil” read.
Although China has not been involved in the war, the Russia-Ukraine war has been a hot topic on the Chinese internet.
According to Eric Liu, a former Weibo censor, Dugin’s joining the platform undoubtedly brought more traffic to Weibo. However, it also means that Weibo needs to invest more resources in censorship to prevent him from making remarks that Beijing considers sensitive.
“He is a foreigner. He has no idea about China’s ‘political correctness’ or where the boundaries are,” Liu said. “This risk will have to be taken care of by Weibo, which brought him in.”
On Thursday, Dugin posted on Weibo that China and Russia could achieve “anything” together. His comment section has been turned off.
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WASHINGTON — U.S. prosecutors on Thursday announced the arrests of an American woman and a Ukrainian man they say helped North Korea-linked IT workers posing as Americans to obtain remote-work jobs at hundreds of U.S. companies.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said the elaborate scheme, aimed at generating revenue for North Korea in contravention of international sanctions, involved the infiltration of more than 300 U.S. firms, including Fortune 500 companies and banks, and the theft of the identities of more than 60 Americans.
A DoJ statement said the overseas IT workers also attempted to gain employment and access to information at two U.S. government agencies, although these efforts were “generally unsuccessful.”
An earlier State Department statement said the scheme had generated at least $6.8 million for North Korea. It said the North Koreans involved were linked to North Korea’s Munitions Industry Department, which oversees development of the country’s ballistic missiles, weapons production, and research and development programs.
An indictment filed in federal court in Washington last week and unsealed on Thursday said charges had been filed against Christina Marie Chapman, 49, of Litchfield Park, Arizona; Ukrainian Oleksandr Didenko, 27, of Kyiv; and three other foreign nationals.
A Justice Department statement said Chapman was arrested on Wednesday, while Didenko was arrested on May 7 by Polish authorities at the request of the United States, which is seeking his extradition.
The State Department announced a reward of up to $5 million for information related to Chapman’s alleged co-conspirators, who used the aliases Jiho Han, Haoran Xu and Chunji Jin, and another unindicted individual using the aliases Zhonghua and Venechor S.
Court records did not list lawyers for those arrested and it was not immediately clear whether they had legal representation.
The head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Nicole Argentieri, said the alleged crimes “benefited the North Korean government, giving it a revenue stream and, in some instances, proprietary information stolen by the co-conspirators.”
The charges “should be a wakeup call for American companies and government agencies that employ remote IT workers,” she said in the statement.
It said the scheme “defrauded U.S. companies across myriad industries, including multiple well-known Fortune 500 companies, U.S. banks, and other financial service providers.”
The DoJ said Didenko was accused of creating fake accounts at U.S. IT job search platforms, selling them to overseas IT workers, some of whom he believed were North Korean. It said overseas IT workers using Didenko’s services were also working with Chapman.
Didenko’s online domain, upworksell.com, was seized Thursday by the Justice Department, the statement said.
The DOJ statement said the FBI executed search warrants for U.S.-based “laptop farms” – residences that hosted multiple laptops for overseas IT workers.
It said that through these farms, including one Chapman hosted from her home, U.S.-based facilitators logged onto U.S. company computer networks and allowed the overseas IT workers to remotely access the laptops, using U.S. IP addresses to make it appear they were in the United States.
The statement said search warrants for four U.S. residences associated with laptop farms controlled by Didenko were issued in the Southern District of California, the Eastern District of Tennessee, and Eastern District of Virginia, and executed between May 8 and May 10.
North Korea is under U.N. sanctions aimed at cutting funding for its missile and nuclear weapons programs and experts say it has sought to generate income illicitly, including through IT workers.
Confidential research by a now-disbanded U.N. sanctions monitoring panel seen by Reuters on Tuesday showed they had been investigating 97 suspected North Korean cyberattacks on cryptocurrency companies between 2017 and 2024, valued at some $3.6 billion.
The U.N. sanctions monitors were disbanded at the end of April after Russia vetoed renewal of their mandate.
A research report from a Washington think tank in April said North Korean animators may have helped create popular television cartoons for big Western firms despite international sanctions.
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Protesters disrupted Google’s annual conference this week over the tech giant’s deal providing artificial intelligence and other services to the Israeli government. Matt Dibble reports from Mountain View, California. Camera: Matt Dibble.
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In Africa, about 15% of the population faces disability challenges despite advancements in technology. Limited infrastructure and high cost of assistive tech create barriers to digital access, leading to exclusion. A conference in Nairobi this week aims to help change that. Mohammed Yusuf reports.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — The Webb Space Telescope has discovered the earliest known merger of black holes.
These two gigantic black holes and their galaxies consolidated just 740 million years after the universe-forming Big Bang. It’s the most distant detection ever made of merging black holes, scientists reported Thursday.
One black hole is 50 million times more massive than our sun. The other is thought to be similar in size, but is buried in dense gas, which makes it harder to measure.
Until now, astronomers weren’t sure how supermassive black holes got so big.
The latest findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggest mergers are how black holes can grow so rapidly — “even at cosmic dawn,” said lead author Hannah Ubler of the University of Cambridge.
“Massive black holes have been shaping the evolution of galaxies from the very beginning,” Ubler said in a statement.
Launched in 2021 as the eventual successor to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is the biggest and most powerful observatory ever sent into space. A joint U.S.-European project, the infrared observatory surveys the universe from a location 1.6 million kilometers from Earth.
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TAIPAI, TAIWAN — Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC said Thursday there was no damage to its facilities after an incident at its Arizona factory construction site where
a waste disposal truck driver was transported to a hospital.
Firefighters responded to a reported explosion Wednesday afternoon at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company plant in Phoenix, the Arizona Republic reported, citing the local fire department.
TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker whose clients include Apple and Nvidia, said in a statement none of its employees or onsite construction workers had reported any related injuries.
“This is an active investigation with no additional details that can be shared at this time,” it added.
TSMC’s Taipei-listed shares pared earlier gains after the news and were last up around 0.8% on Thursday morning. TSMC last month agreed to expand its planned investment by $25 billion to $65 billion and to add a third Arizona plant by 2030.
The company will produce the world’s most advanced 2 nanometer technology at its second Arizona facility expected to begin production in 2028.
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General public gets to visit White House grounds in spring and fall
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NEW YORK — The number of fatal overdoses in the U.S. fell last year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data posted Wednesday.
Agency officials noted that the data is provisional and could change after more analysis, and that they still expect a drop when the final counts are in. It would be only the second annual decline since the current national drug death epidemic began more than three decades ago.
Experts reacted cautiously. One described the decline as relatively small and said it should be thought of as part of a leveling off rather than a decrease. Another noted that the last time a decline occurred — in 2018 — drug deaths shot up in the years that followed.
“Any decline is encouraging,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends. “But I think it’s certainly premature to celebrate or to draw any large-scale conclusions about where we may be headed long term with this crisis.”
It’s also too soon to know what spurred the decline, Marshall and other experts said. Explanations could include shifts in the drug supply, expansion of overdose prevention and addiction treatment, and the grim possibility that the epidemic has killed so many that now there are basically fewer people to kill.
CDC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry called the dip “heartening news” and praised efforts to reduce the tally, but she noted that “there are still families and friends losing their loved ones to drug overdoses at staggering numbers.”
About 107,500 people died of overdoses in the U.S. last year, including American citizens and noncitizens who were in the country at the time they died, the CDC estimated. That’s down 3% from 2022, when there were an estimated 111,000 such deaths, the agency said.
The drug overdose epidemic, which has killed more than 1 million people since 1999, has had many ripple effects. For example, a study published last week in JAMA Psychiatry estimated that more than 321,000 U.S. children lost a parent to a fatal drug overdose from 2011 to 2021.
“These children need support” and are at a higher risk of mental health and drug use disorders themselves, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped lead the study. “It’s not just a loss of a person. It’s also the implications that loss has for the family left behind.”
Prescription painkillers once drove the nation’s overdose epidemic, but they were supplanted years ago by heroin and more recently by illegal fentanyl. The dangerously powerful opioid was developed to treat intense pain from ailments such as cancer but has increasingly been mixed with other drugs in the illicit drug supply.
For years, fentanyl was frequently injected, but increasingly it’s being smoked or mixed into counterfeit pills.
A study published last week found that law enforcement seizures of pills containing fentanyl are rising dramatically, jumping from 44 million in 2022 to more than 115 million last year.
It’s possible that the seizures indicate that the overall supply of fentanyl-laced pills is growing fast, not necessarily that police are whittling down the illicit drug supply, said one of the paper’s authors, Dr. Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California, San Francisco.
He noted that the decline in overdoses was not uniform. All but two of the states in the eastern half of the U.S. saw declines, but most Western states saw increases. Alaska, Washington and Oregon each saw 27% increases.
The reason? Many Eastern states have been dealing with fentanyl for about a decade, while it’s reached Western states more recently, Ciccarone said.
Nevertheless, some researchers say there are reasons to be optimistic. It’s possible that smoking fentanyl is not as lethal as injecting it, but scientists are still exploring that question.
Meanwhile, more money is becoming available to treat addiction and prevent overdoses, through government funding and legal settlements with drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies, Ciccarone noted.
“My hope is 2023 is the beginning of a turning point,” he said.
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