More than 150 alumni of China’s Shandong University have written an open letter, urging the school to ensure the personal safety and freedom of professor Sun Wenguang, who was apparently taken away by police during a live VOA interview nearly two weeks ago.

Wang Shujun, a co-signer of the open letter, told VOA that he was shocked about the incident, which he thought was outrageous, uncivilized and unconstitutional. He noted that the local authorities in Jinan, the capital of Shandong province, severely hurt China’s international image by treating the 84-year-old outspoken critic so rudely and recklessly.

“Even President Xi Jinping wouldn’t be happy if he learned what happened to the professor,” said Wang in a telephone interview with VOA Sunday.

Chinese authorities, including leaders of Shandong University, have kept silent about the incident involving professor Sun despite continuing inquiries from VOA and other international media.

The Trump administration has said it is concerned about the whereabouts of the retired Chinese university professor.

“We condemn China’s ongoing abuse of human rights, in particular, the suppression of the fundamental freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly, and the unlawful detention of activists, lawyers, journalists and civil-society leaders seeking to defend those freedoms,” a State Department spokesperson told VOA.

The official also said the State Department was grateful for the work of VOA reporters and other journalists in China who “have dedicated their lives and taken great risk to pursue this important work.”

Sun was being interviewed August 1 from his home in Jinan on the VOA Mandarin language television show Issues & Opinions.

He was answering questions about an open letter he’d written to Chinese President Xi Jinping, criticizing Chinese aid to Africa when there are so many living in poverty in China.

Sun told the host in Washington that police had entered his apartment and demanded he end the interview. Sun blamed Xi for sending the officers to break down his door.

“I am entitled to express my opinion. This is my freedom of speech,” were Sun’s last words before the line went dead.

Sun is an outspoken, longtime critic of Chinese authorities. He was arrested during the infamous Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and was sentenced to seven years in prison in 1978 for criticizing Mao Zedong, two years after Mao had died.

VOA Mandarin Service contributed to this report.

 
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s attorney said Sunday that his legal team will not allow special counsel Robert Mueller to question Trump about his firing last year of former FBI director James Comey.

Comey, at the time Trump ousted him in May 2017, was chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and heading the agency’s investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, leading to conjecture whether Trump obstructed justice in trying to thwart the Russia probe. Days after ousting Comey, Trump said he was thinking of “this Russia thing” when he decided to dismiss him. Mueller was soon appointed to take over the Russia probe.

“We’re not going to take any questions on Comey,” Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told CNN in an interview.

Giuliani, a former New York mayor, said that Trump, who often misstates facts, runs of the risk of being accused by Mueller’s investigators of committing perjury, a criminal offense for lying. He contended that “the purpose” of Mueller’s interview of Trump “is to create a perjury trap.”

Comey, in numerous interviews since his dismissal and in a best-selling book, contends that Trump, months before the president fired him, asked him in a White House meeting to “go easy” on investigating Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser. Trump had fired Flynn in the early days of his presidency for lying about his contacts with Russia’s then-ambassador to Washington, with Flynn subsequently pleading guilty to lying to FBI agents about his Russia contacts.

But Giuliani contended in the CNN interview that Trump and Comey “never discussed Michael Flynn,” and that if they had, the “go easy” comment “is hardly obstruction.”

Giuliani and other Trump lawyers have been negotiating for months with Mueller over terms of a possible interview of Trump, but no agreement has been reached.

There is no announced end to Mueller’s 15-month investigation, but Giuliani said he believes Mueller wants to conclude it in the next three weeks, roughly two months ahead of the nationwide November 6 congressional elections, so as to not influence voting.

Trump, in Sunday tweets from his golf resort in New Jersey, quoted supporters’ comments on his favorite Fox News shows deriding the Mueller investigation.

In one of the remarks, Trump cited Republican Congressman Darrell Issa of California as saying, “Seems like the Department of Justice [and FBI] had a program to keep Donald Trump from becoming President.”

Trump claimed, “If this had happened to the other side, everybody involved would be in jail. This is a Media coverup of the biggest story of our time.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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Hugo Kohl has been interested in art and design since he was a child. In college, he studied finance, but also took several jewelry-making classes to satisfy his curiosity about this form of art and the history behind it.

Upon his graduation, he started a career in financing, but after six weeks he quit to pursue his passion. Over the last 25 years, Kohl has developed his own style of vintage jewelry using the same techniques as industrial revolution artisans at the end of the 18th century.

Hugo Kohl’s Museum of American Jewelry Design and Manufacturing in Harrisonburg, Virginia, is the culmination of his dream, preserving history while doing business.

Art made the Industrial Revolution way

Part museum, part workshop and part showroom, visitors can buy handmade antique-style jewelry and watch the artist create them, using vintage machines. These machines were made before electricity and are literally man-powered as artisans use their physical strength to press the design on the metal.

In reproducing these old designs, Kohl has revived a centuries-old technique for jewelry-making, called die strike or die roll.

“The things I’m talking about are being die struck and die rolled, which means a lot of pressure among two pieces of steel,” he explained. “When you die strike something or die roll something, typically it’s going to go last a couple of generations. A lot of times people will be in love with vintage jewelry for a number of reasons, one is the design. The process of die striking allows for tremendous detail. It’s very crisp, very clean.”

Stumbling across a treasure

Kohl creates these details using thousands of 3-D molds he collected over more than two decades. He acquired one collection in Providence, Rhode Island, which was the jewelry-making capital of the world at the start of the Industrial Revolution.

He says there is an interesting story behind this collection.

In 1993, while on tour of a vintage jewelry machinery warehouse, Kohl noticed workers cleaning up the debris of a nearby collapsed building.

“They were picking up the debris and throwing it in the back of a dump truck,” he said. “One of the things that they picked is that tiny little cabinet. It was going to the side of this dump truck, it breaks open and the contents literally fall at my feet. I picked them up and what they are is what this place is built around.”

Those items that were about to be sold as scrap metal were part of a collection of antique, hand-engraved jewelry molds that dated to the late 1800s and early 1900s.

James Madison University art professor Cole Welter says rescuing these pieces was Kohl’s first step toward reviving the art of vintage jewelry-making.

“You ask somebody who is your great-grandfather, your great-great-grandmother, you go back to just a short period of time. Here, somebody was your ancestor. These pieces are the ancestors of the American metalsmithing and silversmithing. And they bring to a very tangible way the processes, the technical skills that are involved and the meaning of what these pieces meant to people.”

Beyond aesthetic

Artist Kohl says his fascination with Industrial Revolution-age jewelry goes beyond its artistic beauty. This industry, he says, started a social shift in America.

Before the Industrial Age, only wealthy, elite people had the means to commission a goldsmith to handcraft a ring or brooch or other piece of jewelry. This was extremely expensive, not something that ordinary people could afford.

“Now that we stepped into the Industrial age, beside the technology, we have the middle class,” Kohl said. “So this is the first time that symbols can be mass-produced and people could have them. The wealthy people still had jewelry that was made in gold. This new class had things that were made in silver and clad metal, and poor people had the same art work in brass and copper.”

That’s also when the American cultural symbols were exported to the world.

“What these symbols are speaking to are very new ideas about American liberty and romantic love,” he said. “So we look at these things, we start seeing this uniquely American identity take shape. This was happening in Providence (Rhode Island). But Providence is not big enough as a marketplace to cover the cost of manufacturing, but Providence is a seaport and ships were going all over the world carrying these symbols.”

Secrets and stories

Professor Welter says he’s happy that Kohl is passing his passion and the secrets of his craft to people who visit his museum and workshop.

“I really enjoy the entire scope of what happens here,” he added. “It’s not just the preservation of the work, but it’s the recreation of the works and it’s the selling the works to the public. So they all become part of the culture again.”

And to customers like Sarah Brown, it’s nice to own part of the American heritage.

“When I come in, I love to be able to look and see the jewelry is made right here,” she said. “Hugo is often here. It feels very personal and the pieces, like I say, are unique and beautiful. They have a timelessness about them that just feels really good. It feels like they kind of tell a story.”

And Hugo Kohl enjoys bringing those stories to life.
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V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidad-born Nobel laureate whose celebrated writing and brittle, provocative personality drew admiration and revulsion in equal measures, died Saturday at his London home, his family said. He was 85.

 

His wife, Nadira Naipaul, said he was “a giant in all that he achieved and he died surrounded by those he loved having lived a life which was full of wonderful creativity and endeavor.”

 

Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.”

 

‘Barefoot colonial’ to knighthood

In an extraordinary career spanning half a century, the writer traveled as a self-described “barefoot colonial” from rural Trinidad to upper class England, picked up the most coveted literary awards and a knighthood, and was hailed as one of the greatest English writers of the 20th century.

 

Naipaul’s books explored colonialism and decolonization, exile and the struggles of the everyman in the developing world — themes that mirror his personal background and trajectory.

 

‘Great art, dreadful politics’

Although his writing was widely praised for its compassion toward the destitute and the displaced, Naipaul himself offended many with his arrogant behavior and jokes about former subjects of empire.

 

Among his widely quoted comments: He called India a “slave society,” quipped that Africa has no future, and explained that Indian women wear a colored dot on their foreheads to say “my head is empty.” He laughed off the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie as “an extreme form of literary criticism.”

The critic Terry Eagleton once said of Naipaul: “Great art, dreadful politics,” while Caribbean Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott complained that the author’s prose was tainted by his “repulsion towards Negroes.”

 

C. L. R. James, a fellow Trinidadian writer, put it differently: Naipaul’s views, he wrote, simply reflected “what the whites want to say but dare not.”

Born in Trinidad

 

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Vidia to those who knew him, was born Aug. 17, 1932 in Trinidad, a descendant of impoverished Indians shipped to the West Indies as bonded laborers.

 

His father was an aspiring, self-taught novelist whose ambitions were killed by lack of opportunity; the son was determined to leave his homeland as soon as he could. In later years, he would repeatedly reject his birthplace as little more than a plantation.

 

“I was born there, yes,” he said of Trinidad to an interviewer in 1983. “I thought it was a great mistake.”

 

In 1950, Naipaul was awarded one of a few available government scholarships to study in England, and he left his family to begin his studies in English literature at University College, Oxford.

 

There he met his first wife, Patricia Hale, whom he married in 1955 without telling his family.

 

After graduation, Naipaul suffered a period of poverty and unemployment: he was asthmatic, starving and depending on his wife for income. Despite his Oxford education, he found himself surrounded by a hostile, xenophobic London.

 

“These people want to break my spirit. … They want me to know my place,” he wrote bitterly to his wife. 

 

Breakthrough novel

Naipaul eventually landed a radio job working for BBC World Service, where he discussed West Indian literature and found his footing as a writer. His breakthrough came in 1957 with his first published novel “The Mystic Masseur,” a humorous book about the lives of powerless people in a Trinidad ghetto. 

 

Naipaul caught the eye of book reviewers, and in 1959 he won the Somerset Maugham Award with the story collection “Miguel Street.” 

 

In 1961, Naipaul published “A House for Mr. Biswas,” which was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece. That novel, about how one man’s life was restricted by the limits of colonial society, was a tribute to Naipaul’s father. 

 

Traveling and writing

In the years that followed, Naipaul was to travel for extensive periods to pen journalistic essays and travel books. He flew three times to India, his ancestral home, to write about its culture and politics. He spent time in Buenos Aires, Argentina to write about its former First Lady Eva Peron, and went to Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia for books about Islam. 

 

Years before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, Naipaul devoted attention to Islamic radicalism. Naipaul’s nonfiction often provoked much anger, and many were offended by his views about Islam and India — Rushdie, for example, thought Naipaul was promoting Hindu nationalism. 

 

He also continued to publish award-winning novels. “The Mimic Men” won the W.H. Smith Award in 1967, and in 1971 “In a Free State,” a meditation on colonialism in Africa, was awarded the Booker Prize. Naipaul received a knighthood in 1990, and in 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

 

Stinging memoir

As his literary stature grew, so did his reputation as a difficult, irascible personality. Naipaul was a private man and did not have many friends, but his personal life entered the public domain when the American writer Paul Theroux, a one-time friend whose relationship with Naipaul turned sour, published a stinging memoir about Naipaul in 1998. 

 

“Sir Vidia’s Shadow” described Naipaul as a racist, sexist miser who threw terrifying tantrums and beat up women.

 

Naipaul ignored Theroux’s book, but he did authorize a candid biography that confirmed some of Theroux’s claims. The biography, published in 2008, devoted chapters to how Naipaul met and callously treated his mistress, an Anglo-Argentine woman who was married and about a decade younger than he was. It recalled Naipaul’s confession to The New Yorker that he bought sex and was a “great prostitute man,” and recorded Naipaul’s frank and disturbing comments on how that destroyed his wife, Hale, who died of breast cancer in 1996. 

 

“It could be said that I had killed her,” he told biographer Patrick French. “I feel a little bit that way.”

 

Two months after Hale died, Naipaul married his second wife, Pakistani newspaper columnist Nadira Khannum Alvi. Naipaul’s later books lost their playful humor, and some say much of their appeal. 

 

He spent much of his time living quietly in an isolated cottage in Wiltshire, in the English countryside.
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A new movie about racism, timed to open on the anniversary weekend of last year’s deadly white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, has been prefaced with a disclaimer in the college town where the march took place.

A sign posted at the Alamo Drafthouse in Charlottesville on Friday, the day of the movie’s opening, said “The final minutes of ‘BlacKkKlansman’ feature a powerful epilogue that could be disturbing or difficult to watch for many viewers in Charlottesville.”

The film includes footage from last year’s attack in Charlottesville when a vehicle drove into a group of counter-protesters on foot, throwing people into the air. One woman died in the attack and several more were seriously injured.

Filmmaker Spike Lee, whose career include a number of films that make pointed statements about race relations, has said he specifically planned to release his latest film on the Charlottesville anniversary.

An actor in the film, Topher Grace, said the first time he saw the film, at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, the Charlottesville footage came as a surprise. He told industry publication The Hollywood Reporter Friday, “I think the audience didn’t know at first that it was real-life footage and there was this kind of gasp.”

Actor John David Washington, 34, who plays an African-American man whose character infiltrates the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan, told The Hollywood Reporter that he questioned his mother about the current racial climate, compared to the height of the U.S. civil rights movement in the 1960s and early 1970s.

“I asked, ‘Do you think the times are worse then or now?” he said. “And she said, ‘Now.’”

BlacKkKlansman, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes, earned $3.6 million on its opening day Friday.
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