When Ukrainian security forces stormed Kiev’s central square on Dec. 11, the pop singer Ruslana was on stage and attempting to defuse the situation. “I kept a quiet confidence in myself, and I believe that my voice kept them calm,†she said recently. Ruslana, the 2004 winner of the EuroVision Song Contest, has been a constant presence at Independence Square, also known as Maidan, since demonstrators gathered there in late November to protest the government’s decision to postpone an economic agreement with the European Union. She is on stage every night from midnight until sunrise, keeping thousands of demonstrators upbeat and energized in freezing temperatures. Many protesters consider her to be one of the leaders of the movement, but she vehemently disagrees. “We said that one cannot lead Maidan, one can only join Maidan,†she said.
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Friday, December 20, 2013
EuroVision Star Becomes Voice of Protest
When Ukrainian security forces stormed Kiev’s central square on Dec. 11, the pop singer Ruslana was on stage and attempting to defuse the situation. “I kept a quiet confidence in myself, and I believe that my voice kept them calm,†she said recently. Ruslana, the 2004 winner of the EuroVision Song Contest, has been a constant presence at Independence Square, also known as Maidan, since demonstrators gathered there in late November to protest the government’s decision to postpone an economic agreement with the European Union. She is on stage every night from midnight until sunrise, keeping thousands of demonstrators upbeat and energized in freezing temperatures. Many protesters consider her to be one of the leaders of the movement, but she vehemently disagrees. “We said that one cannot lead Maidan, one can only join Maidan,†she said.
A Twitter Message About AIDS, Africa and Race
A message about race and AIDS in Africa posted on the Twitter account of a public relations executive at an Internet media giant caused an outcry on Twitter and the web on Friday.
The message, from the account of Justine Sacco, the communications director for InterActiveCorp, better known as IAC, read: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!â€
IAC is the corporate parent of more than three dozen companies, including Match.com, The Daily Beast and Dictionary.com. The company, based in New York City, also owns BlackPeopleMeet.com, a dating site for African-Americans.
“This is an outrageous, offensive comment that does not reflect the views and values of IAC,†the company said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the employee in question is unreachable on an international flight, but this is a very serious matter and we are taking appropriate action.â€
The message, posted from London (seemingly from a location near Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5), raised questions about whether Ms. Sacco’s account had been hacked by an unauthorized user.
However, it was not the first eyebrow-raising message posted on the account that appears to belong to Ms. Sacco. An hour earlier, a message from the account said: “Chili- cucumber sandwiches- bad teeth. Back in London!â€
Chili- cucumber sandwiches- bad teeth. Back in London!
â€" Justine Sacco (@JustineSacco) December 20, 2013
And in a message posted 12 hours before that, she seemed to fume about a fellow passenger:
And in February 2012, she seemed to reveal the explicit contents of a recent dream:
In a short biography on Twitter, Ms. Sacco says she works in corporate communications at IAC and is a “troublemaker on the side.†In January, she posted: “I can’t be fired for things I say while intoxicated right?â€
The message about AIDS on Friday was met with disbelief and outrage on Twitter and around the web, with some users calling Ms. Sacco a racist and predicting her resignation.
“This joke is so bad and so incredibly tasteless that it’s almost genius. Almost. But it’s not,†Alex Jurgen wrote on wwtdd.com, a blog that specializes in Internet media and gossip. “It’s just going to get this chick super fired.â€
He wrote, “See you at the baggage carousel, Justine.â€
But others rushed to Ms. Sacco’s defense, saying that it was likely just a joke and pointing to Africa’s AIDS crisis.
Ms. Sacco could not be reached for comment.
Student Protest Over Gay Vice Principal’s Forced Resignation Spreads
A student protest at Eastside Catholic High School in Sammamish, Wash., over the forced resignation of a vice principal because of his marriage to another man spread Friday as students from other Roman Catholic and public schools joined in.
After learning on Thursday that Mark Zmuda, the vice principal and the school’s swim coach, was stepping down because his same-sex marriage last August violated his contract with the school in suburban Seattle, more than 400 students at Eastside walked out of classes. They sat in the cafeteria and then the gym before returning to classes later in the afternoon.
Word of their sit-in spread on Facebook and Twitter, with the hashtag #saveMrZ2013, and students at other schools staged protests later on Thursday and Friday, including a protest outside the headquarters of the Archdiocese of Seattle.
“The Catholic teaching is to unconditionally love and support all members of a global community, people from all backgrounds, as Christ did in the Gospels,†Bradley Strode, 17, Eastside Catholic’s senior class president, said in an interview. “If Jesus were here, he would have been sitting in with us at Eastside Catholic because we are sticking up for what we believe in and not just abiding by institutional laws.â€
Mr. Strode said that Sister Mary Tracy, the school’s principal, addressed the students’ questions on Thursday at the sit-in and in her office. Mr. Zmuda also met with the students, telling them that he is gay and married and grateful for their support, as KIRO-TV reported with raw video of the speech. “The fact that you guys are all here for me means the world to me,†he said.
Mr. Zmuda and Sister Mary Tracy could not be reached for comment. But Michael Patterson, a lawyer for Eastside and the archdiocese, said that Mr. Zmuda, whom he described as an “exemplary administrator,†resigned voluntarily earlier this week.
Mr. Patterson said in an interview that another school employee had overhead Mr. Zmuda discussing his marriage and told administrators. Then, he said, Sister Mary Tracy consulted with officials from the archdiocese before meeting with Mr. Zmuda. During the meeting, Mr. Patterson said, Mr. Zmuda resigned because he acknowledged that his marriage was in conflict with his school contract, requiring adherence to the church’s teachings.
“He is a man of high integrity and he recognized that he signed a contract that clearly stated that he would follow the magisterium, the religious doctrine and principles of the Catholic Church,†Mr. Patterson said of Mr. Zmuda. “They are the dogmatic issues and policies that the Catholic Church has pronounced and expects you to live by, if you are going to be Catholic.â€
Mr. Strode and other students at Eastside Catholic and other schools have started a petition on Change.org asking for the reinstatement of Mr. Zmuda and for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to lead a change in church policy on same-sex marriage. By late Friday, the petition had more than 15,000 signatures.
Teachers expressed their support for the students. Mr. Patterson said that the school leadership valued freedom of expression and students were not penalized for expressing their views at the protest on Thursday. Classes were canceled Friday because of snow.
On Friday, students at the public school in Sammamish held a protest, and then students from both public and Catholic schools protested outside the archdiocese headquarters.
Students also showed support for their former swim coach at an Eastside Catholic swim meet.
Statement From Khodorkovsky in Berlin Answers Some Questions, but Not All
Khodorkovsky.ru Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at left, shaking hands with the former German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, at the airport in Berlin on Friday.Updated, 3:55 p.m. | Hours after his sudden release from prison on Friday, the Russian dissident Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky released a statement from Berlin, along with an image of himself being greeted at the airport by Hans-Dietrich Genscher, a former German foreign minister who helped arrange his travel, as my colleagues Steven Lee Myers and David M. Herszenhorn report.
Here is the complete English translation of the statement from Mr. Khodorkovsky, who was once Russia’s richest man, but was jailed on corruption charges after he appeared to break an agreement not to challenge the political power of President Vladimir V. Putin:
On Nov. 12, I asked the president of Russia to pardon me due to my family situation, and I am glad his decision was positive.
The issue of admission of guilt was not raised.
I would like to thank everyone who has been following the Yukos case all these years for the support you provided to me, my family and all those who were unjustly convicted and continue to be persecuted. I am very much looking forward to the minute when I will be able to hug my close ones and personally shake hands with all my friends and associates.
I am constantly thinking of those who continue to remain imprisoned.
My special thanks is to Mr. Hans-Dietrich Genscher for his personal participation in my fate.
First of all I am going to repay my debt to my parents, my wife and my children, and I am very much looking forward to meeting them.
I will welcome the opportunity to celebrate this upcoming holiday season with my family. I wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
The Russian president’s office confirmed that Mr. Putin had signed the pardon freeing Mr. Khodorkovsky on humanitarian grounds, said to be his mother’s illness, in a statement posted on official Kremlin websites.
In an essay for The New York Times published last month, Mr. Khodorkovsky revealed that his mother, who has struggled with cancer since the age of 45, “is now nearly 80 years old and again facing cancer and more surgeries.â€
As Julia Ioffe reported for The New Republic from Moscow, “In all of the excitement, there are scores of unanswered questions.†To begin with, neither of the statements explained the conditions of the amnesty. “To get a presidential pardon in Russia,†Ms. Ioffe noted, “you have to admit your guilt, which Khodorkovsky has insisted for years he would not do.†According to Mr. Khodorkovsky, “The issue of admission of guilt was not raised,†during what one account in the Russian press said were secret negotiations conducted at the remote prison colony that the dissident’s lawyers were not invited to attend.
Ms. Ioffe also explained that it was unclear why Mr. Khodorkovsky had struck a deal for freedom that left Platon Lebedev, his co-defendant “in jail as a sort of hostage for his good behavior.â€
The Agence France-Presse correspondent Maria Antonova noted that Mr. Khodorkovsky’s sudden dispatch to Germany, in “a special operation kept in secret from relatives and lawyers and looking more like exile or spy swap harking of the Soviet times,†raised still more questions. Mr. Khodorkovsky’s statement, she observed, “did not explain the reasons behind his quick dash to Germany, a country with which he has no special connection and where neither his friends or associates can be found.â€
Although the Russian authorities initially said that Mr. Khodorkovsky was sent to Germany to be with his mother, who has undergone cancer treatment there, journalists quickly discovered that she is currently not in Berlin, but at her home outside Moscow.
Aleksei Navalny, the anti-corruption blogger who now leads the opposition to Mr. Putin’s rule, noted on Twitter that another activist was sentenced to three years in jail on Friday just as Mr. Khodorkovsky’s release was dominating headlines, apparently confirming that what one observer called Russia’s “law of conservation of prisoners†remained a constant.
The activist sentenced on Friday, A.F.P. reported, was Evgeny Vitishko, a geologist who was accused of damaging a fence during research by an environmental group into the impact of construction for the Sochi Olympic Games. According to Mr. Vitishko’s environmental group, the fence was illegal, since it was built around the home of the regional governor in a public forest to conceal the unlicensed logging of protected species there.
Even Mr. Khodorkovsky’s son Pavel, who lives in New York, said he was taken by surprise by what looked like his father’s sudden deportation to Germany.
In an interview with BBC News in October, a decade after his father’s arrest, Pavel Khodorkovsky had explained that his father planned to leave Russia if he was released at the end of his prison term in August, 2014.
“What I do know for myself,†the younger Mr. Khodorkovsky said, “is that it’s going to be my first priority and my most important job to try and convince him to leave Russia, because I haven’t seen him for ten years, he has never seen my daughter. We need to reunite our family and the most important thing for me is to make sure nothing stands in the way of that.†Recalling a recent conversation with his father, the former oligarch’s son added, “He said, ‘I have a lot of debts that I need to pay to my family.’â€
Close observers of Russian-German relations noted that there was a third man seen in the background of the photograph showing Mr. Khodorkovsky and Mr. Genscher shaking hands on the tarmac of Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport.
That man appeared to be Alexander Rahr, a former member of Germany’s Council on Foreign Relations described earlier this year by Der Spiegel as a prominent advocate of closer relations with Russia.
Mr. Rahr, the author of an early biography of Russia’s president titled “The German in the Kremlin,†now advises the German-Russian Chamber of Commerce and a German energy company that is working with the Russian state oil firm Gazprom. He is also a member of the Valdai Club, a group of experts first brought together in 2004 by the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti for a series of discussion aimed at “fostering a global dialogue about Russia.†Mr. Putin, who recently dissolved RIA as part of a reorganization of state media to focus more on putting Russia in a positive light abroad, took part in the Valdai Club’s most recent meeting, in September.
In an interview with RIA Novosti during a Valdai Club meeting in 2011, Mr. Rahr said: “What do we expect from Russia? Of course, foremost, stability.†He added, “A country like Germany, from which I come, is very interested in economic partnership and strategic partnership, in an energy alliance with Russia, and our end goal is to build a joint free-trade zone, a joint economic cooperation zone, between the European Union and the Russian Federation.â€
He concluded: “I think that Europe is only stronger if the European Union and Russia find a common way how to build this common European house together.â€
Readers who want to know more about the background to Mr. Khodorkovsky’s dramatic transformation from oil magnate to jailed dissident can read an essay on his case published by the Russian-American writer Keith Gessen writer in the London Review of Books in 2010 or watch a documentary released the next year by the German filmmaker Cyril Tuschi, which is available for download.
Have You Been Through a School Lockdown? Tell Us About Your Experience
Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images In this photograph taken from a video by KCNC-TV, Arapahoe High students in Centennial, Colo., lined up to be checked by police officers at a track after the Dec. 13 shooting at the school.This month, when an 18-year-old student walked into Arapahoe High School in Colorado with a pump-action shotgun and began shooting, teachers and students and administrators knew almost immediately how to respond. Classroom doors slammed shut. Students huddled in the corners and stayed quiet. A resource officer inside the school sprang to action. Nearby, other schools locked down until they knew whether they, too, faced any threat.
For years, school districts in suburban Colorado and around the country have been performing lockdown drills in anticipation of just such a moment. Since the attacks at Columbine High School in 1999, active-gunman drills have become as much a part of a school’s emergency planning as tornado and fire drills once were.
Are you a parent, teacher or student who has experienced these emergency lockdowns first-hand, whether because of a real threat or a simple false alarm? What happened? How did students and teachers react? Did the planning pay off, or were there problems in the implementation?
Please post a comment below. I may follow up with you to hear more about your story. Or you can email me at jack.healy@nytimes.com.
Online Reaction to Uganda’s Antigay Legislation
Being gay in Uganda could mean life in prison.
That was one of the punishments for “aggravated homosexuality†contained in a law approved by the Ugandan Parliament on Friday, as my colleague Alan Cowell reported.
Reaction to the legislation, which must be approved by the country’s president, was swift online. Frank Mugisha, a Ugandan gay rights activist who has defined the gay-rights fight in his country as “the right to life itself,†shared his thoughts on his Twitter account, @frankmugisha, as well as updates from an account that monitors Uganda’s legislators.
An initial bill had proposed the death penalty in some cases, but it was replaced with a life behind bars. David Bahati, a lawmaker who has promoted the antigay legislation, said existing laws needed to be strengthened to prevent Western homosexuals from promoting it among young Ugandans.
The law’s supporters celebrated. Martin Ssempa, a pastor in Uganda who has posted on his Facebook page that he is fighting the “wrongdoings of the gays,†shared a photograph of himself with Mr. Bahati.
Gay Ugandans have been persecuted and killed, including Uganda’s most outspoken activist, David Kato, in 2011.
On Twitter, passage of the law became a focus of derision. There were also calls to boycotts.
New Vision of Uganda reported that the country’s prime minister had said there would be further consultations on the bill, which Parliament approved after rejecting a maximum term of 14 years in favor of the life term.
Neela Ghoshal, the senior Human Rights Watch researcher who focuses on gender identity, linked to an article that showed concerns the legislation could adversely impact the country’s response to HIV or AIDS.
The International HIV/AIDS Alliance said in a statement:
The Ugandan Parliament today passed a bill which would see any person alleged to be homosexual at risk of life imprisonment. Other clauses within the bill mean that the reputation of anyone working with the gay or lesbian population such as medical doctors working on HIV and AIDS and civil society leaders active in the field of sexual and reproductive health could be severely compromised.
The passing of the bill is likely to lead to even more HIV infections in marginalised populations, especially among men who have sex with men and transgender people. They will be prevented from having access to essential public health information, such as how to protect themselves from HIV and how to access life saving treatment and support services that are stigma-free. The Alliance calls on the HIV community to mobilise to express their opposition to the bill becoming law.
Follow Christine Hauser on Twitter @christineNYT.