BUNIA, CONGO (AP) – A top United Nations (UN) peacekeeping official has vowed to step up humanitarian assistance to Congo’s Ituri province, where militiamen killed at least 60 people at a displaced persons camp this month.
UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix made the pledge on Tuesday on a visit to the region, stepping in after UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres cancelled his trip because of the mounting crisis in Ukraine.
“The UN has not forgotten the people of Ituri and will continue to support the Congolese government to restore peace,” said Lacroix, who visited the Roe displaced persons camp and also met with local leaders.
The CODECO militia that a monitoring group blamed for the early February attack on the camp also is considered responsible for scores of other deaths over the past year. Rebels from the Allied Democratic Forces, or ADF, are also active in the area.
The instability has caused many humanitarian agencies to suspend their work, and advocates say the local population’s needs are now enormous with limited resources available.
Lacroix said he discussed with local officials the importance of providing security to displaced persons camps.
“More needs to be done against the armed groups and the humanitarian access must continue to be ensured,” Lacroix tweeted.
TOKYO (AP) – A musical revolution in Jamaica has a connection with a bouncy rhythm from a portable electronic keyboard that’s the brainchild of a Japanese woman.
The pattern that resonates in the 1985 reggae hit by Wayne Smith, Under Mi Sleng Teng, came from Casiotone MT-40, which went on sale in 1981, the first product Hiroko Okuda worked on after joining the Tokyo-based company behind G-Shock watches.
“It’s really like my first child, and the child turned out so well it’s outright moving,” said Okuda, honoured as “the mother of Sleng Teng” among the hardcore reggae aficionados.
Sleng Teng is a form of digital Jamaican music that began in the mid-1980s, part of the rich repertoire of the disco-like genre called “dancehall”. No one contests the key role played by artistes like Smith and King Jammy, as well as the humble, battery-operated, USD150 MT-40.
One of the rhythm patterns Okuda created called “rock” on the MT-40 evolved into “Sleng Teng riddim”.
As legend goes, Noel Davey, the Grammy-winning keyboard player for the Marley Brothers, got an MT-40 from a friend, who picked it up in California. Before, Davey was blowing into a Melodica portable keyboard for that sound.
Hiroko Okuda holds the Casio MT-40 portable keyboard player, which she created in 1981, the first product she worked on after joining the Japanese company; and Okuda at Casio’s technology centre in Tokyo in the 1980s. PHOTOS: AP
Davey was toying around with the MT-40 and chanced upon the beat that’s in Smith’s megahit Under Mi Sleng Teng. And the rest is history, so to speak.
“You don’t plan,” Davey said, when asked about that moment.
There are so many buttons on the MT-40, he was “fooling around”, found it, lost it, then had to look for it and found it again.
“It was a searching process”, he said from Kingston, Jamaica.
The power of reggae comes from its healing effect, like “therapy,” being a music for the poor, for those moving up against apartheid, for the people, he said.
Davey, who has never been to Japan, said he would like to meet Okuda. The two share something in common – just as he feels he has never been properly credited for his role in the history of reggae, he stressed Okuda deserves credit for the Casio instrument.
That groove went on to inspire much of subsequent reggae, distinctly heard in works by Sugar Minott, Ibo Cooper, Gregory Isaacs and Dennis Brown.
Michael ‘Megahbass’ Fletcher, a musician in Jamaica, said repetitive music isn’t inferior.
“It has its place,” he said, demonstrating Sleng Teng on his bass. “A good song is a good song.”
Fletcher said other keyboards were also used to play Sleng Teng, such as Casio CZ-101 and Yamaha DX100, from Casio’s Japanese rival.
“Sleng Teng will never die,” said Fletcher, who has performed or produced songs for Shaggy, Maxi Priest and Alborosie. Okuda, whose graduation thesis at Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo was on reggae, was among the first recruits at Casio Computer Co assigned
to work on musical instruments, then a new sector for the company.
The company didn’t have very many musicians, and she was the one with background in world music. Okuda had immersed herself in reggae in the late 1970s, including going to Bob Marley’s concerts in Japan.
Okuda worked out six kinds of rhythms for the MT-40, including samba, swing and waltz, creating a bass line and a beat.
She also created two licks called “fill ins” to be played between sections of a song – or at the start of a song, as it is in Under Mi Sleng Teng.
For the prototype, she initially had an even more brash punk-rock-like rhythm called “avant garde”. The managers killed it as “too crazy”.
At least the “rock” pattern got approved, Okuda recalled with a laugh.
Casio’s main business was calculators, not keyboards, and so Okuda’s invention didn’t make much of a wave at her company. Okuda said she was usually among a handful of women in a room filled with men.
“I was a pioneer in so many places, and there were Japan’s old ways everywhere I went. I had to put up a fight each time,” she said.
She was never promoted to managerial positions, and never chosen for a business trip abroad. She has not travelled to Jamaica, or anywhere else except for China.
When asked if she has any advice for working women, Okuda pointed out having a special skill tends to help. She also has an extremely supportive husband, who took on much of
That definitely helped, she said.
The family shares a love for music, and music is always playing in their house.
When they were younger, Okuda did feel a bit sad when her daughter and son would see her off at the door, singing, “Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it’s work she loves to go”, to the tune in Walt Disney’s Snow White. These days, they joke maybe she’ll win the Nobel for the MT-40.
A more recent Casio technology Okuda has worked on is Music Tapestry, which translates music being played into a fluid visual image on the computer. Flowers float and swirl in time to the notes. Circles, squares and triangles dance about on the screen. Its sale date is undecided.
She doubts any of the reggae musicians know she is behind the MT-40. And how her MT-40 became part of such great music is nothing short of “a miracle”, she said.
“If I can ever meet them, I just want to express my deep gratitude. I want to tell them thank you so much for finding the rhythm and for using it,” she told The Associated Press.
Casio still sells keyboards. The CT-S1000V, set to go on sale in March, turns words into vocaloid-like singing. The smaller portable versions come with dozens of preset rhythms.
In the 2010 model, the rock pattern was called “MT-40 riddim” in honour of where it all began.
WATFORD, ENGLAND (AP) – Crystal Palace distanced itself from the Premier League’s relegation zone with a 4-1 win over next-to-last Watford at Vicarage Road early yesterday.
The Eagles had gone into the game on the back of a six-match winless run in the league, but took a 15th-minute lead when Jean-Philippe Mateta’s shot took a deflection off a defender and into the net.
Watford struck back three minutes later through Moussa Sissoko’s header, but Conor Gallagher’s sharp strike in the 42nd retook the lead for Palace.
Wilfried Zaha then wrapped up all three points for the visitors with a low drive past goalkeeper Ben Foster, before capping it off with a curling 85th-minute strike.
Palace had been without a victory since December 28 which, coupled with Newcastle’s resurgence, saw the bottom four close the gap to the others in the lower half of the table.
However, Patrick Vieira’s side looked composed and clinical in the final third as he got the better of his immediate predecessor, Roy Hodgson. Palace climbed above Leicester into 11th place, nine points above third-to-last Burnley.
The result leaves Watford four points from safety, and with just one win since the former England boss took over following Claudio Ranieri’s departure.
THE STRAITS TIMES – The husband of Malaysia’s former Bank Negara governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz has denied he received any bribes as alleged by a star witness in a case linked to state fund 1Malaysia Development Bhd (1MDB).
Dismissing the testimony of former Goldman Sachs banker Tim Leissner as totally untrue, Tawfiq Ayman said he neither knew nor communicated with Leissner or Roger Ng, the former Goldman investment banker who has been charged in the New York District Court with conspiring to launder funds.
“I wish to categorically state that throughout my life, I have never received any bribes from anyone,” online portal Malaysiakini quoted Tawfiq as saying.
Tawfiq said in view of the ongoing proceedings in New York, he has been advised not comment further and will be seeking legal advice on the next course of action.
Ng, 49, Goldman’s former head of investment banking in Malaysia, is charged with conspiring to launder money and violate an anti-bribery law, while Leissner is the star witness in the ongoing case.
LAS VEGAS (AP) – A note that a Las Vegas schoolgirl gave her teacher saying her mother was being held captive and thought the girl’s brother was dead led to the discovery of the boy’s body in a garage freezer and the arrest of the mother’s boyfriend on murder and kidnapping charges, authorities said on Wednesday.
Brandon Lee Toseland, 35, was arrested on Tuesday after police saw him leave his house with the mother in a vehicle in which officers also found handcuffs, Las Vegas homicide Lieutenant Ray Spencer said.
A lawyer speaking for the woman and her family told The Associated Press she endured months in physical, sexual and emotional control of a man who told her he would kill her children if she ever left him.
More than 10 weeks after she last saw her son, she resorted to sending a message with her daughter to school.
“There was never a time when her daughter was with her that she was not locked in a room, bound or handcuffed,” attorney Stephen Stubbs said of the mother. “There was never an opportunity to take her daughter and run.”
AP is not naming the mother or children to avoid identifying a victim of sexual abuse. Stubbs said the mother does not want her name made public.
Spencer said she told detectives Toseland sometimes used restraints to keep her in his custody, and that she had not seen her four-year-old son since December 11, when she said Toseland told her the boy had become sick and “that it was too late”.
“I remember that quote,” Spencer told AP. “There are still a lot of questions that we don’t have answers to.” Later, Toseland told the mother the boy was dead, police said in Toseland’s arrest report, “and said she would not be allowed to see his body because he would lose his freedom”. The report noted that Toseland never called police or paramedics.
Stubbs said the mother knew Toseland as an acquaintance of her husband, the father of her children, before the man died in January 2021 of an unspecified respiratory illness. Stubbs said the girl is now seven.
After the three moved into Toseland’s house in March 2021, he “slowly and methodically” increased control over them, Stubbs said: covering windows; using video surveillance; taking the mother’s cellphone; cutting her ties to her family; handling her social media.
“The mother was physically, sexually and emotionally abused,” Stubbs said. “The children were physically and emotionally abused and separated from their mother most of
the time.”
BEIJING (AP) – Asian stock markets plunged yesterday after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Russian military action in Ukraine.
Market benchmarks in Tokyo and Seoul fell two per cent. Hong Kong and Sydney lost more than three per cent.
Oil prices jumped more than USD4 on anxiety about possible disruptions of Russian supplies. The ruble fell 4.4 per cent against the dollar.
United States (US) futures were also sharply lower and the future for Germany’s DAX lost more than four per cent.
Putin said the military operation was needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine, a claim Washington had predicted he would make to justify an invasion. As Putin spoke, explosions were heard in Kyiv, Kharkiv and other areas of Ukraine.
US President Joe Biden denounced the attack as “unprovoked and unjustified” and said Moscow would be held accountable, which many took to mean Washington and its allies would impose additional sanctions. Putin accused them of ignoring Russia’s demand to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and to offer Moscow security guarantees.
“The relief rally has quickly reversed course,” said Jeffrey Halley of Oanda in a report.
Currency traders working at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea. PHOTO: AP
“Equities are tanking in Asia.”
On Wednesday, Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 index fell 1.8 per cent to an eight-month low after the Kremlin said rebels in eastern Ukraine asked for military assistance. Moscow had sent soldiers to some rebel-held areas after recognising them as independent.
Washington, Britain, Japan and the 27-nation European Union (EU) earlier imposed sanctions on Russian banks, officials and business leaders. Potential options for more penalties including barring Russia from the global system for bank transactions.
The Nikkei 225 in Tokyo fell 2.2 per cent to 25,855.04 and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong lost 3.1 per cent to 22,925.60. The Shanghai Composite Index was off 0.9 per cent at 3,458.12.
Asian economies face lower risks than Europe does, but those that need imported oil might be hit by higher prices if supplies from Russia, the third-largest producer, are disrupted, forecasters said.
The Kospi in Seoul lost 2.6 per cent to 2,649.29 and Sydney’s S&P-ASX 200 fell 3.1 per cent to 6,983.40.
New Zealand lost 2.8 per cent and Southeast Asian markets also fell.
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 fell to 4,225.50. That put it 11.9 per cent below its January 3 record, solidly in a correction, or a decline of more than 10 per cent from its latest peak.
More than 85 per cent of stocks in the S&P 500 fell. Tech companies weighing down the
index most.
The Nasdaq, dominated by technology stocks, lost 2.6 per cent to 13,037.49, led by steep losses in Apple and Microsoft. That put the index 18.8 per cent below its November 2021 high.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.4 per cent to 33,131.76.
Investors already were uneasy about the possible impact of the Federal Reserve’s plans to try to cool inflation by withdrawing ultra-low interest rates and other stimulus that boostedshare prices.
Since the start of the year, Facebook parent Meta is down 41.4 per cent, Tesla is off 36.3 per cent and Microsoft is down 16.3 per cent, while Apple and Google’s parent Alphabet are both down 12.9 per cent.
In energy markets, benchmark US crude jumped USD4.36 to USD96.46 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
The contract fell 25 cents to USD92.10 on Wednesday. Brent crude, the price basis for international oils, advanced USD4.32 to USD98.37 per barrel in London. It lost 20 cents to USD94.05 the previous session.
The dollar weakened to JPY114.56 from Wednesday’s JPY114.98. The euro fell to USD1.1211 from USD1.1306.
The Ministry of Health (MoH) will cease the issuance of digital quarantine orders (QO) via the BruHealth application effective today.
Minister of Health Dato Seri Setia Dr Haji Mohd Isham bin Haji Jaafar announced this at the press conference yesterday, in view of the reduced quarantine period for COVID-19 cases and contacts. However, the required quarantine period for positive cases and close contacts remains.
“This is to facilitate the transition of people whose BruHealth code has changed from purple or red to green or yellow,” he said, before urging the public to check their BruHealth colour code before leaving home.
FORT ORD NATIONAL MONUMENT, CALIFORNIA (AP) – For nearly 80 years, recruits reporting to central California’s Fort Ord considered themselves the lucky ones, privileged to live and work amid sparkling seas, sandy dunes and sage-covered hills.
But there was an underside, the dirty work of soldiering. Recruits tossed live grenades into the canyons of “Mortar Alley”, sprayed soapy chemicals on burn pits of scrap metal and solvents, poured toxic substances down drains and into leaky tanks they buried underground.
When it rained, poisons percolated into aquifers from which they drew drinking water. Through the years, soldiers and civilians who lived at the United States (US) Army base didn’t question whether their tap water was safe to drink.
But in 1990, four years before it began the process of closing as an active military training base, Fort Ord was added to the Environmental Protection Agency’s list of the most polluted places in the nation. Included in that pollution were dozens of chemicals, some now known to cause cancer, found in the base’s drinking water and soil.
Decades later, several Ford Ord veterans who were diagnosed with cancers – especially rare blood disorders – took the question to Facebook: Are there more of us?
Soon, the group grew to hundreds of people who had lived or served at Fort Ord and were concerned that their health problems might be tied to the chemicals there.
ABOVE & BELOW: Waves break in the Pacific Ocean beneath sand dunes at Fort Ord; and Rusted barrels rest outside barracks at Fort Ord. PHOTOS: AP
ABOVE & BELOW: Labelled with asbestos and lead warnings, sheeting covers rubble from demolished barracks at Fort Ord; and Julie Akey during her time at Ford Ord
The Associated Press interviewed nearly two dozen of these veterans for this story and identified many more. AP also reviewed thousands of pages of documents, and interviewed military, medical and environmental scientists.
There is rarely a way to directly connect toxic exposure to a specific individual’s medical condition. Indeed, the concentrations of the toxics are tiny, measured in parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of an immediate poisoning. Local utilities, the Defense
Department and some in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) insist Fort Ord’s water is safe and always has been.
But the VA’s own hazardous materials exposure website, along with scientists and doctors, agree that dangers do exist for military personnel exposed to contaminants.
The problem is not just at Fort Ord. This is happening all over the US and abroad, almost everywhere the military has set foot, and the federal government is still learning about the extent of both the pollution and the health effects of its toxic legacy.
AP’s review of public documents shows the Army knew that chemicals had been improperly dumped at Fort Ord for decades. Even after the contamination was documented, the Army downplayed the risks.
And ailing veterans are being denied benefits based on a 25-year-old health assessment. The Center for Disease Control’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded in 1996 that there were no likely past, present or future risks from exposures at Fort Ord.
But that conclusion was made based on limited data, and before medical science understood the relationship between some of these chemicals and cancer.
This is what is known: Veterans in general have higher blood cancer rates than the general population, according to VA cancer data. And in the region that includes Fort Ord, veterans have a 35-per-cent higher rate of multiple myeloma diagnosis than the general US population. Veterans like Julie Akey.
Akey, now 50, arrived at Fort Ord in 1996 with a gift for linguistics. She enlisted in the Army on the condition that she could learn a new language. And so the 25-year-old was sent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and lived at Fort Ord as a soldier. By then the base was mostly closed but still housed troops for limited purposes.
“It was incredibly beautiful,” she said. “You have the ocean on one side, and these expansive beaches, and the rolling hills and the mountains behind.”
What she didn’t know at the time was that the ground under her feet, and the water that ran through the sandy soil into an aquifer that supplied some of the base’s drinking water was polluted. Among the contaminants were cancer-causing chemicals including trichloroethylene, also known as the miracle degreaser TCE.
She’d learn this decades later, as she tried to understand how, at just 46 and with no family history of blood cancers, she was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. “No one told us,” she said.
Despite the military’s claims that there aren’t any health problems associated with living and serving at Fort Ord, nor hundreds of other shuttered military bases, almost every closure has exposed widespread toxic pollution and required a massive cleanup. Dozens have contaminated groundwater. Fort Ord is 25 years into its cleanup as a federal Superfund site, and it’s expected to continue for decades.
Curt Gandy, a former airplane mechanic, recalls being routinely doused with toxic chemicals from the 1970s to the 1990s. He said he hosed down aircraft with solvents, cleaned engine parts and stripped paint off fuselages without any protection. There were barrels of toluene, xylene, jet fuel and more.
On Fridays, crews would forklift barrels of the used flammable liquids down a bumpy sandy road, dumping solvents, paint and metal chips onto the hulks of broken aircraft and tanks at a burn pit. One weekend a month, airfield firefighters would light up the toxic sludge and then douse the roaring fires with foam.
In 1984, an anonymous caller tipped off Fort Ord’s officials that “approximately 30 55-gallon drums”, containing about 600 gallons of a “solvent-type liquid” had been illegally spilled there, an Army report said. The state, which ordered a cleanup two years later, determined the Army had mismanaged the site in a way that threatened both ground and surface waters.
And the burn pit wasn’t the base’s only polluted site. In 1991, when the Army began investigating what had actually been disposed of at the base’s dump overlooking Monterey Bay, officials told the public the trash was similar to what one would find in the landfill of any small city, according to transcripts of community meetings.
While it’s true that much of the trash going into that dump came from nearby houses, the Army officials who spoke at the meetings made no mention of the toxic stew of paints and solvents that today are banned from open landfills.
The solvent TCE was among dozens of pollutants that scientists discovered as early as 1985 and today still exists in concentrations above the legal limit for drinking water in the aquifer below, according to local and federal water quality reports.
“The water from the aquifer above leaks down into the aquifer below and the pollution just gets deeper,” said Dan O’Brien, a former board member of the Marina Coast Water District, which took over the Army’s wells in 2001. “The toxic material remains in the soil under where it was dumped. Every time it rains, more of the toxin in the soil leeches down into the water table.”
For Akey and other veterans with cancer, it’s a matter of accountability. Health insurance, disability benefits and an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, she said, “isn’t asking for too much”.
“You’re not just serving for six years, like me, and then you’re out,” she said. “If you’ve been given cancer, that’s a life sentence.”
On a recent foggy morning, Gandy, the former airplane mechanic, walked past the rusting hangar at the old airfield where he used to work. The single-landing strip and buildings are now the Marina Municipal Airport. But much of the legacy military infrastructure remains, including sheds with old paint cans, an oil separator the size of a school bus and disconnected nozzles and hoses.
Gandy became an outspoken activist along with Levonne Stone, and also founded community groups to maintain pressure on the military to clean up the site.
His group repeatedly sued the Army, but a judge agreed with Defense Department attorneys who said the claims were moot because a rigorous clean-up was underway.
Gandy, now 70, said he talked to the base commanders, every mayor and health and safety officer. Twenty-five years later, Gandy’s comments – captured in videos and transcripts of contentious community meetings – seem prescient.
“I told them, ‘If we do what we need to do now, nobody will know that we did the right thing. But if we do it wrong, they’re going to know, because in about 20 years people are going to start dying’,” he said.
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES (AP) – Dubai will open the doors today to an architecturally stunning building housing the new Museum of the Future, a seven-storey structure that envisions a dreamlike world powered by solar energy and the Gulf Arab state’s frenetic quest to develop.
The torus-shaped museum is a design marvel that forgoes support columns, relying instead on a network of diagonal beams. It is enveloped in windows carved by Arabic calligraphy, adding another eye-popping design element to Dubai’s piercingly modern skyline that shimmers with the world’s tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa.
The Museum of the Future projects Dubai’s ambitions and its desire to be seen as a modern, inclusive city even as its political system remains rooted in hereditary rule and hard limits exist on the types of expression permitted. It is the latest in a stream of feats for Dubai, which is the first country in the Middle East to host the World’s Fair.
The museum envisions what the world could look like 50 years from today. It’s a vision that crystalises the United Arab Emirates’ own 50-year transformation from a pearl-diving backwater to a global interconnected hub fuelled by oil and gas wealth.
“It was an imperative requirement to develop so fast because we needed to catch up with the rest of the world,” said UAE minister of state for advanced technology and chair of the UAE Space Agency Sarah Al-Amiri. “Prior to 1971, (we had) no basic road networks, no basic education, electricity network and so on.”
A man take a photo at the Museum of the Future. PHOTOS: APStaff member briefs a visitorsPeople visit the Museum of the Future, an exhibition space for innovative and futuristic ideas in Dubai
The UAE last year announced it would join a growing list of nations cutting greenhouse gas emissions, shifting away at least domestically from the fossil fuels that still drive the Arabian Peninsula’s growth, clout and influence.
However, the museum’s focus on a sustainable future brings to the forefront the inherent tension between the push by Gulf Arab states to keep pumping oil and gas and global pledges to cut down on carbon emissions, including the UAE’s 2050 net-zero pledge.
Moreover, the museum invites visitors to reconnect with their senses and disconnect from their phones, but digital screens and experiences flow throughout its installations. The museum also encourages visitors to think about the planet’s health and biodiversity in a city that celebrates consumption, luxury and consumerism.
Al-Amiri said the museum’s ethos is that the drive toward a sustainable future and healthy planet should not prohibit progress and economic growth.
“It needs to not be prohibitive, but rather an opportunity to create new opportunities out of this challenge that we’re all facing,” she said.
The museum’s creative director, Brendan McGetrick, said addressing climate change “doesn’t mean that you have to return to like some hunter gatherer lifestyle”.
“You can actually mobilise and continue progressing and continue innovating, but it should be done with an awareness of our relationship to the planet and that we have a lot of work to do,” he said.
The museum’s goal is to inspire people to think about what is possible and to channel that into real world action, he added.
Visitors to the Museum of the Future are ushered by an artificial intelligence guide named “Aya”. She beckons people to experience a future with flying taxis, windfarms and a world powered by a massive structure orbiting Earth that harnesses the sun’s energy and beams it to the moon. The so-called “Sol Project” imagines the moon covered by countless solar panels that direct that energy toward nodes on Earth, where humanity thrives and the planet’s biodiversity includes innovative plant species resistant to fire.
“What we tried to do is create a sort of compelling vision of what would happen if we imagine space as a shared resource,” McGetrick said.
The museum envisions that humanity’s collective energy project is directed by a space station called the OSS Hope, the same word in Arabic the UAE named its real-life mission gathering data from Mars’ atmosphere. Last year, the UAE became the first Arab country to launch a functioning interplanetary mission.
The museum’s imagined future also draws from Islam’s past with a mesmerising display of the planets in our solar system mapped by astrolabes, the complex devices refined by Muslims during the Golden Age of Islam to aid in navigation, time and celestial mapping.
The museum’s Arab thumbprint flows throughout, including in a meditation space that is part of a larger sensory experience guided by vibration, light and water.
These three elements underpinned life for tribes in the Arabian Peninsula.
The oil-fuelled cities of the Gulf that have emerged from the desert over the past few decades unearthed seismic changes in the ways people in the region live, interact and connect with nature.
“It’s always important to continue to evolve and develop and understand what parts of the culture actually push development forward,” said Al-Amiri. “Creating new norms and new ways of living and new ways of coexisting is okay.”
A stunning centrepiece of the museum is a darkened mirrored space illuminated by columns of tiny glass cylinders with the illusory DNA of animals and species that have gone extinct, including the polar bear whose Arctic habitat is currently threatened by warming temperatures. In this dreamscape future, the health of the planet is monitored like a person’s pulse, temperature and vitals are.
NEW YORK (AP) – Ben Gibbard wasn’t necessarily looking for music by Yoko Ono when he went record shopping a few decades ago. He was just browsing in the “O” section and stumbled on a copy of her 1973 album Feeling the Space.
“It wasn’t super-expensive and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll take a shot on this. I’m feeling adventurous,’” recalled the lead vocalist and guitarist for Death Cab for Cutie.
He took it home, anticipating something experimental and challenging from the avant-garde and multimedia artiste who became John Lennon’s collaborator in life and art. But Gibbard found something warm and lovely.
“As I started to delve deeper into her catalogue, I found her songwriting just incredibly arresting,” he said. “Yoko is, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant artistes of the 20th century, hands down across all media.”
This month he’s hoping more music fans will hear Ono’s work with the release of Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono” a 14-track album of covers from such artistes as David Byrne, Yo La Tengo, Sharon Van Etten, Thao, Japanese Breakfast and The Flaming Lips. The album’s release on February 18 coincided with Ono’s 89th birthday.
“I have a hard time believing that when people hear this music that they will just shrug and walk away from it. I think it’s too good to be ignored,” said Gibbard. “I think it’s incredibly overdue for a reevaluation or in some cases, just an evaluation, because it wasn’t as if there was much of an evaluation in the first place.”
Yoko OnoBen Gibbard of the band Death Cab for Cutie. PHOTOS: AP
The offerings include Byrne and Yo La Tengo covering Who Has Seen the Wind?, Deerhoof doing No, No, No and Japanese Breakfast trying Nobody Sees Me Like You Do. A portion of the album’s proceeds will be donated to WhyHunger.
“This record ended up being kind of amalgamation of old-school Yoko fans like myself and David and Yo La Tengo, and then some younger artists,” said Gibbard.
“The thing I’m the most proud of this record is just how it seems to have a very cross-generational feel to it.”
Singer and songwriter Thao, who is friends with Gibbard and has opened for Death Cab for Cutie on tour, picked Yellow Girl (Stand for Life) to cover and considers it a thank-you to an artiste often misperceived and wrongly vilified.
“The song just sometimes finds you at the right time. And that’s very much the case for this song and the tribute album,” Thao said. The song’s title alone drew her in: “I was embarrassed that I didn’t know more about her as a songwriter.”
She noted that the album’s recording coincided and pushes back against a climate of rising anti-Asian violence and rhetoric.
“I’ve experienced racism, but it wasn’t at the pitch and with the vitriol that was taking place at that time,” she said.
Gibbard said all the artists involved – whether on their own or with his suggestions – found a song they could relate to. “There was no kind of complaining about a lack of songs.
There’s just so many great ones,” he said. “It’s lovely to be pleasantly surprised when a secret Yoko Ono fan kind of comes out of the woodwork.”
Death Cab for Cutie naturally had first pick and took Ono’s Waiting for the Sunrise. Gibbard said the song felt right to record during the first big COVID-19 lockdown. “It just felt like that was the state we were all living in at that time: We’re all waiting for the sunrise.”
Gibbard has never met Ono but leaned on her son, Sean Lennon, as an intermediary for the project, saying it owes him “a debt of gratitude”. Lennon suggested the title and supplied the cover image.
Gibbard’s goal is just to get Ono’s music in front of people. “I do not have a saviour complex or anything around this record, you know?” he said, laughing. “This project was not conceived with the goal of being invited to Thanksgiving at the Dakota.”
“My hope is just that this leads music fans to a place where they get a little kind of adventurous – as adventurous as one can be when you can dial up anything that was ever recorded on your phone – and pull up Feeling the Space or pull up ‘Approximately Infinite Universe’ and give it a spin and see if they like it,” he added.
