BOORSEE

President Donald Trump’s border czar said Sunday that the administration’s current priority is to deport undocumented immigrants who are deemed to pose security threats to the U.S. But he stressed that illegal immigration in general won’t be tolerated. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports.
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New York — Critics lambasted it and audiences didn’t grade it much better. But despite the turbulence, Mel Gibson’s “Flight Risk” managed to open No. 1 at the box office with a modest $12 million, according to studio estimates Sunday. 

On a quiet weekend, even for the typically frigid movie-going month of January, the top spot went to the Lionsgate thriller starring Mark Wahlberg as a pilot flying an Air Marshal (Michelle Dockery) and fugitive (Topher Grace) across Alaska. But it wasn’t a particularly triumphant result for Gibson’s directorial follow-up to 2016’s “Hacksaw Ridge.” Reviews (21% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and audience scores (a “C” CinemaScore) were terrible. 

President Donald Trump recently named Gibson a “special ambassador” to Hollywood, along with Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone. 

Going into the weekend, Hollywood’s attention was more focused on the Sundance Film Festival and on Thursday’s Oscar nominations, which were twice postponed by the wildfires in the Los Angeles region. 

The weekend was also a small test as to whether the once more common Oscar “bump” that can sometimes follow nominations still exists. Most contenders have by now completed the bulk of their theatrical runs and are more likely to see an uptick on VOD or streaming. 

But the weekend’s most daring gambit was A24 pushing Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” a three–and-a-half-hour epic nominated for 10 Academy Awards, into wide release. Though some executives initially greeted “The Brutalist,” which is running with an intermission, as “un-distributable,” Corbet has said, A24 acquired the film out of the Venice Film Festival and it’s managed solid business, collecting $6 million in limited release. 

In wide release, it earned $2.9 million — a far from blockbuster sum but the best weekend yet for “The Brutalist.” 

The audience was downright miniscule for another best-picture nominee: RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys.” Innovatively shot almost entirely in first-person POV, the Amazon MGM Studios release gathered just $340,171 in 540 locations after expanding by 300 theaters. 

Coming off one of the lowest Martin Luther King Jr. weekends in years, no new releases made a major impact. 

Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence,” a well-reviewed horror film shot from the perspective of a ghost inside a suburban home, debuted with $3.4 million in 1,750 locations. The film, released by Neon and acquired out of last year’s Sundance, was made for just $2 million. 

The top spots otherwise went to holdovers. The Walt Disney Co.’s “Mufasa: The Lion King,” in its sixth weekend of release, scored $8.7 million to hold second place. After starting slowly, the Barry Jenkins-directed film has amassed $626.7 million globally. 

“One of Them Days,” the Keke Palmer and SZA-led comedy from Sony Pictures, held well in its second weekend, dropping just 32% with $8 million in ticket sales. In recent years, few comedies have found success on the big screen, but “One of Them Days” has proven an exception. 

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday. 

1. “Flight Risk,” $12 million. 

2. “Mufasa: The Lion King,” $8.7 million. 

3. “One of Them Days,” $8 million. 

4. “Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” $5.5 million. 

5. “Moana 2,” $4.3 million. 

6. “Presence,” $3.4 million. 

7. “Wolf Man,” $3.4 million. 

8. “A Complete Unknown,” $3.1 million. 

9. “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” $3 million. 

10. “The Brutalist,” $2.9 million. 
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Cairo — Tens of thousands of Palestinians waited, blocked on the road, to return to their homes in northern Gaza on Sunday, voicing frustration after Israel accused Hamas of breaching a ceasefire agreement and refused to open crossing points. 

A day after a second exchange of Israeli hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, the holdup underlined the risks hanging over the truce between the militant group and Israel, longtime adversaries in a series of Gaza wars. 

In central areas of Gaza, columns of people were waiting along the main roads leading north, some in vehicles and some on foot, witnesses said. 

“A sea of people is waiting for a signal to move back to Gaza City and the north, people are fed up and they want to go home,” said Tamer Al-Burai, a displaced person from Gaza City. “This is the deal that was signed, isn’t it?” 

“Many of those people have no idea whether their houses back home are still standing. But they want to go regardless, they want to put up the tents next to the rubble of their houses, they want to feel home,” he told Reuters via a chat app. 

On Sunday, witnesses said many people had slept overnight on the Salahuddin Road, the main thoroughfare running north to south and on the coastal road leading north, waiting to go past the Israeli military positions in the Netzarim corridor running across the center of the Gaza Strip. 

Vehicles, trucks and rickshaws were overloaded with mattresses, food, and with the tents that used to shelter them for over a year in the central and southern areas of the enclave, and volunteers were distributing water and food. 

Under the agreement worked out with Egyptian and Qatari mediators and backed by the United States, Israel was meant to allow Palestinians displaced from the homes in the north to return to their homes. 

But Israel said that Hamas’ failure to hand over a list detailing which of the hostages scheduled for release is alive or to hand over Arbel Yehud, an Israeli woman taken hostage during the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 meant it had violated the agreement. 

As a result, checkpoints in the central Gaza Strip would not be opened to allow crossings into the northern Gaza Strip, it said in a statement. Hamas issued a statement accusing Israel of stalling and holding it responsible for the delay. 

‘Demolition site’ 

On Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump instructed the U.S. military to release 2,000-pound bombs that his predecessor, Joe Biden, had ordered to be withheld from delivery to Israel over concern about their impact on the civilian population of Gaza. 

He also called on Egypt and Jordan to take on more Palestinians from Gaza either temporarily or permanently, saying “we should just clear out the whole thing.” 

“It’s literally a demolition site, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there,” he told reporters after a call with Jordan’s King Abdullah. 

An official of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that runs Gaza, reacted with suspicion to the remarks, echoing longstanding Palestinian fears about being driven permanently from their homes. 

Palestinians “will not accept any offers or solutions, even if [such offers] appear to have good intentions under the guise of reconstruction, as announced in the proposals of U.S. President Trump,” Basem Naim, a member of the Hamas political bureau, told Reuters. 

Al-Awda Hospital officials said four people were wounded by Israeli fire, from soldiers apparently trying to prevent people coming too close. 

The Israeli military issued warnings to Palestinians not to approach its positions in Gaza and said soldiers had fired warning shots on several occasions but said “as of now, we are unaware of any harm caused to the suspects as a result of the shooting.” 

 
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WASHINGTON — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday threatened bounties on the heads of Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders, sharply escalating the tone as he said more Americans may be detained in the country than previously thought.

The threat comes days after the Afghan Taliban government and the United States swapped prisoners in one of the final acts of former U.S. President Joe Biden.

The new top U.S. diplomat issued the harsh warning via social media, in a rhetorical style strikingly similar to his boss, President Donald Trump.

“Just hearing the Taliban is holding more American hostages than has been reported,” Rubio wrote on X.

“If this is true, we will have to immediately place a VERY BIG bounty on their top leaders, maybe even bigger than the one we had on bin Laden,” he said, referring to the al-Qaida leader killed by U.S. forces in 2011.

Rubio did not describe who the other Americans may be, but there have long been accounts of missing Americans whose cases were not formally taken up by the U.S. government as wrongful detentions.

In the deal with the Biden administration, the Taliban freed the best-known American detained in Afghanistan, Ryan Corbett, who had been living with his family in the country and was seized in August 2022.

Also freed was William McKenty, an American about whom little information has been released.

The United States in turn freed Khan Mohammed, who was serving a life sentence in a California prison.

Mohammed was convicted of trafficking heroin and opium into the United States and was accused of seeking rockets to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The United States offered a bounty of $25 million for information leading to the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden shortly after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, with Congress later authorizing the secretary of state to offer up to $50 million.

No one is believed to have collected the bounty for bin Laden, who was killed in a U.S. raid in Pakistan.

Harder line on Taliban?

Trump is known for brandishing threats in his speeches and on social media. But he is also a critic of U.S. military interventions overseas and in his second inaugural address Monday said he aspired to be a “peacemaker.”

In his first term, the Trump administration broke a then-taboo and negotiated directly with the Taliban — with Trump even proposing a summit with the then-insurgents at the Camp David presidential retreat — as he brokered a deal to pull U.S. troops and end America’s longest war.

Biden carried out the agreement, with the Western-backed government swiftly collapsing and the Taliban retaking power in August 2021 just after U.S. troops left.

The scenes of chaos in Kabul brought strong criticism of Biden, especially when 13 American troops and scores of Afghans died in a suicide bombing at the city’s airport.

The Biden administration had low-level contacts with Taliban government representatives but made little headway.

Some members of Trump’s Republican Party criticized even the limited U.S. engagements with the Taliban government and especially the humanitarian assistance authorized by the Biden administration, which insisted the money was for urgent needs in the impoverished country and never routed through the Taliban.

Rubio on Friday froze nearly all U.S. aid around the world.

No country has officially recognized the Taliban government, which has imposed severe restrictions on women and girls under its ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam.

The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor on Thursday said he was seeking arrest warrants for senior Taliban leaders over the persecution of women. 
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In 2016, Herschel Hepler was browsing Google Images to practice his paleography — the study of historical writing systems — when he stumbled upon an eerily familiar photo that would lead to a groundbreaking discovery.

“I recognized it immediately and said, ‘That’s a manuscript in our collection,’” Hepler, a curator at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, recalls.

The museum had recently acquired the manuscript — a rare Jewish prayer book — believing it to be part of the famous Cairo Geniza, a trove of ancient Jewish documents uncovered in a Cairo synagogue in the late 19th century.

But the black and white picture in Tablet magazine described the manuscript as a “16th to 17th century Hebrew book of Psalms, said to be from the Bamiyan area” of central Afghanistan.

Stunned by the revelation, Hepler set out to verify it. Tracking down the author of the Tablet article, British historian and archaeologist Jonathan Lee, Hepler confirmed that Lee had in fact found the book in an Afghan warlord’s possession in 1998 and photographed the cover and two inside pages.

“Without Jonathan’s documentation from his trip to Bamiyan in 1998, we would still be assuming this is probably from the Cairo Geniza,” Hepler said.

But if Hepler was surprised to learn about the book’s origin in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, Lee was equally stunned when Hepler revealed that the manuscript had been carbon-dated to the 8th century.

“At that point, I realized that the discovery was of major importance,” Lee said via email.

Recognizing their combined expertise — Hepler in Hebrew manuscripts and Lee in Afghan history — the duo joined forces and invited in other experts.

Their yearslong research not only established the manuscript as the oldest-known Hebrew book but also unearthed evidence that Jews had lived in Afghanistan — and along the ancient Silk Roads — for longer than historians previously believed.

But the thrill of discovery was dampened by the realization that the manuscript had probably been smuggled out of war-torn Afghanistan and bought on the antiquities market.

At the time, the museum, founded by the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby arts and craft company, was still reeling from its acquisition of artifacts smuggled from Iraq and Egypt.

The museum faced a significant challenge: Before it could showcase it to the world, it needed to legitimize its ownership of the manuscript. This required years of delicate negotiations with New York’s small Afghan Jewish community and an Afghan government teetering on the brink of collapse. The stakes were high, and the path to secure the manuscript’s rightful place in the museum would prove be too complex and demanding.

Lee’s discovery

Lee, who has spent the better part of the last five decades researching and writing about Afghan history and archaeology, discovered the book by chance.

In April 1998, he was guiding a Japanese TV crew in Bamiyan and was on the lookout for a Bactrian language inscription and gold coins looted from an ancient Buddhist shrine.

At the time, the Bamiyan Valley, with its famed Buddha statues still standing, was controlled by a local Shiite insurgent group, while the Taliban ruled most of the rest of the country.

The anti-Taliban group’s leader, Karim Khalili, kept a collection of antiquities, among them the cache of gold coins Lee had been looking for. Lee photographed them.

“Then, his [Khalili’s] advisers brought in a miscellaneous collection of other antiquities that included the ALQ,” Lee said, using the acronym for the “Afghan Liturgical Quire,” the Hebrew book in the Bible Museum’s collection.

A local man affiliated with the Shiite insurgent group had found the book under a collapsed roof in a cave the prior year and given it to Khalili.

Unversed in Hebrew, Khalili apparently showed the book to other foreigners visiting Bamiyan, trying to figure out what it was.

“I was told it had been found in Bamiyan, but then everything is found in Bamiyan,” Lee said.

As Lee recalls, the pocket-size book looked remarkably well-preserved for its age.

“The cover was somewhat bent, damaged and watermarked, but the folios were relatively well-preserved, and most of the texts readable,” he said.

To Lee, that suggested the manuscript was “not that old.” He left Afghanistan and for years didn’t give it much thought.

How and when the manuscript left Afghanistan remains unknown.

The 1990s were a dark period for Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage. As armed groups fought over territory, their men — often directed by their commanders and guided by traffickers — plundered the country’s vast archaeological sites and ransacked its museums. Seventy percent of the national museum’s treasures vanished, according to one estimate, many ending up in private collections and some reputable institutions.

“There is a long history of illicit export of antiquities from the country that goes back for decades but ultimately back to colonial times,” said Cecilia Palombo, a University of Chicago professor who has researched the plunder of Afghan antiquities.

A leading researcher with extensive experience in Afghanistan said the manuscript was likely taken out of the country after the Taliban overran Bamiyan in late 1998. The researcher spoke on condition of anonymity.

Research by the Bible museum found that an unnamed Khalili deputy made multiple sales attempts in the United States and Europe between 1998 and 2001 before “apparently” offloading it to a private collector in London in fall 2001. The collector kept it for a decade or more before Hobby Lobby bought it in 2013 and donated it to the museum.

The office of Khalili, who later served as a vice president, declined a VOA interview request.

The Tablet article

Although Lee had found the book in Afghanistan, he didn’t know how significant it was. On returning to England, he showed his photographs to a Hebrew specialist, who thought it was from the 16th or 17th century.

Then, after a cache of ancient documents dubbed the “Afghan Geniza” surfaced on the international art market, Lee decided to publish his photograph, along with an article about Afghan Jewish history. Citing the book as an example of “Jewish material [turning up] occasionally” in Afghanistan, he wrote that the “whereabouts of this manuscript is now unknown.”

He would find out four years later. That’s when, “out of the blue,” Hepler contacted him via LinkedIn and told him the manuscript was not the Book of Psalms but a prayer book, comprising Sabbath prayers, poetry and a partial Haggadah, the Jewish text recited at the Passover seder.

The Green family bought the book from an Israeli antiquities dealer in 2013 during a buying spree of ancient artifacts. Some of these items were later returned after it was discovered they had been illegally taken out of Iraq and Egypt.

The Afghan Liturgical Quire came with a forged provenance of its own, tracing the manuscript to collectors in London in the 1950s, masking any ties to Afghanistan. With Lee’s documentation, the museum was able to correct its provenance.

The museum had initially thought the book was from the 9th century, but a second carbon-dating test performed in 2019 showed it dates to the 8th century, making it two centuries older than the previous oldest-known Hebrew book in the world.

The discovery electrified experts.

For Hebrew scholars, the discovery offered the earliest evidence of a bound Hebrew book.

For Afghanistan specialists, it highlighted “how significant this region was in respect of the history of the Middle East, Inner Asia and Northern India, and Afghanistan’s ancient connectivity with cultures and religious traditions,” Lee said.

Yet the realization that it had been smuggled out of Afghanistan cast a cloud over its legitimacy.

Afghan laws and the 1970 UNESCO Convention make it illegal to export cultural artifacts and heritage items without government approval.

To legitimize its custody of the manuscript, the museum adopted what it calls a “human rights-based approach” to cultural heritage.

Invoking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the museum argued that the Afghan people and Afghan Jews living in New York have a right to access the manuscript.

“One of the things this project is focused on is on access — so, access to the Afghan Jewish community, access to the people of Afghanistan,” Hepler said.

To get the backing of both stakeholders, the museum initiated discussions with officials of the former Afghan government and members of the Jewish community in New York.

These efforts culminated in the signing of a memorandum of understanding in 2021 with the Afghan embassy in Washington before the Taliban takeover, ensuring the document would be held in custodianship.

The Afghan ambassador at the time, Roya Rahmani, did not respond to a request for an interview. Another former Afghan ambassador wrote a letter of support for the project.

Jack Abraham, head of the Afghan Jewish Federation who was born in Afghanistan, said his group offered its full support for keeping the manuscript in the United States.

“I told [Hepler], ‘What you have in your hands is our heritage. It belongs to us. It could be any of our forefathers,’” Abraham said.

But some Afghans see it as equally part of their heritage.

“This is the property of Afghanistan and must be returned to Afghanistan,” a senior former government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Barnett Rubin, a leading Afghanistan scholar and an advisor on the ALQ project, said both communities can legitimately lay claim to the book.

“The museum wanted to have the approval of any one of the two main entities that might have a claim on it to their custody of it,” Rubin said.

With a custodianship agreement secured, the museum launched an exhibit in September, celebrating the project as an interfaith collaboration among Jews, Christians and Muslims.

A second exhibit is planned for New York starting this month.

While the Bible Museum technically owns the manuscript, Hepler said Afghanistan and the Afghan Jewish community “have a lot of agency in this custodianship.” To that end, the museum plans to provide one high-quality replica to the Jewish community and three to major cultural institutions in Afghanistan.
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