PARIS: The legendary French singer Charles Aznavour — who said last week that he dreamed of breathing his last on stage — has died aged 94, his spokeswoman told AFP Monday.
The songwriter, who had just returned from a concert tour of Japan last month, passed away in his home in Alpilles in southeastern France.
He had to cancel several shows last year after breaking his arm in a fall.
But as late as Friday the diminuitive singer told French television that though his Swedish-born wife wanted him to stop touring, he would happily die on stage.
“I always go forward,” said the performer who tried to write a song every day. “There is no backwards step with me.
“All I can do is live, and I live on stage. I am happy up there, and you can see that,” he added.
The singer had planned to go back on tour later this month, starting with a concert in Brussels on October 26.
Multilingual and a tireless traveler, Aznavour was named “Entertainer of the Century” by CNN in 1998 because of his immense global popularity.
In the English-speaking world he was often dubbed France’s Frank Sinatra, but unlike the American crooner, he wrote his own songs, often breaking taboos about marriage, homosexuality and men talking about their emotions.
Born Shahnour Varinag Aznavourian in Paris on May 22, 1924, to parents who had fled the genocide of ethnic Armenians as the Ottoman empire fell, Aznavour sold more than 180 million records in a career spanning eight decades and as many languages.
His family were heroes of the Resistance against the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, regularly risking death to hide Communist partisans in their tiny Paris apartment.
Aznavour got his big break after the war when he opened for the then rising French star Edith Piaf.
She took him to America as her manager and songwriter while he worked on his voice, and urged him to get a nose job — advice he at first resisted.
He had his first number one hit in 1956 with “Sur Ma Vie” (In My Life). That was followed by one of his biggest hits, “Je M’voyais Deja” (It Will Be My Day).
But it was his leading role in Francois Truffaut’s film “Shoot the Piano Player” in 1960 that catapulted Aznavour to international fame.
Buoyed by its success he took New York’s Carnegie Hall by storm in 1963 before touring the world and seeing his songs recorded by stars from Ray Charles to Liza Minnelli and Fred Astaire.
Former French prime minister Manuel Valls was among the first leaders to react to his death, praising “this son of Armenian immigrants who became one of the greatest and most beautiful symbols of French brilliance.
“Adieu and thank you,” he tweeted.
STOCKHOLM: Two researchers from the United States and Japan won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discoveries that help the body marshal its cellular troops to attack invading cancers. One cancer doctor said “an untold number of lives ... have been saved by the science that they pioneered.”
The 9-million-kronor ($1.01 million) prize will be shared by James Allison of the University of Texas and Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University.
Their parallel work concerned proteins that act as brakes on the body’s immune system. Their research led to drugs that release the brakes and constitute “a landmark in our fight against cancer,” said the Nobel Assembly of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, which selects winners of the annual prestigious award.
The discoveries by Allison, 70, and Honjo, 76, “absolutely paved the way for a new approach to cancer treatment,” Dr. Jedd Wolchok, chief of the melanoma and immunotherapeutics service at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, told The Associated Press.
He said the idea of blocking the brakes on immune system cells has led to drugs for the skin cancer melanoma, and cancers of the lung, head and neck, bladder, kidney, and liver. Just last week, such a drug was approved for treatment of another kind of skin cancer called squamous cell cancer, he said.
Wolchok said “an untold number of lives ... have been saved by the science that they pioneered.”
The approach to cancer treatment that was honored with this year’s Nobel was used for treating former US President Jimmy Carter, who was diagnosed in 2015 with melanoma, which had spread to his brain.
One of Carter’s treatments was a drug that blocked the immune-cell “brake” studied by Honjo. Carter announced in 2016 that he no longer needed treatment.
Although the concept of using the immune system against cancer arose in the 19th century, initial treatments based on the approach were only modestly effective.
“Everybody wanted to do chemotherapy and radiation. The immune system was neglected because there was no strong evidence it could be effective,” said Nadia Guerra, head of a cancer laboratory at Imperial College London.
Allison’s work, much of it done at the University of California-Berkley, changed that by proving the immune system could identify tumor cells and act against them.
“It’s like your body uses your own army to fight cancer,” she said.
Allison studied a known protein and developed the concept into a new treatment approach, while Honjo discovered a new protein that also operated as a brake on immune cells.
“I’m honored and humbled to receive this prestigious recognition,” Allison said in a statement released by the university’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where he is a professor.
“A driving motivation for scientists is simply to push the frontiers of knowledge. I didn’t set out to study cancer, but to understand the biology of T cells, these incredible cells that travel our bodies and work to protect us,” he said.
T cells are key immune system soldiers.
At news conference later Monday in Kyoto, Honjo said what makes him most delighted is when he hears from patients who have recovered from serious illnesses because of his research.
Honjo, an avid golf player, said a member of a golf club once walked up to him suddenly, thanking him for the discovery that treated his lung cancer.
“He told me, ‘Thanks to you I can play golf again.’ ...That was a blissful moment. A comment like that makes me happier than any prize,” he said.
The American Cancer Society’s chief medical officer says he and colleagues gave a celebratory toast to Allison at a party on Friday — days before the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Medicine — because they agreed this could be his year.
Dr. Otis W. Brawley, a close friend of Allison’s, said the Nobel committee usually waits about ten years to make sure a scientific discovery “sticks as being really important.”
He said Allison’s work a decade ago “really opened up immunotherapy” as a fifth pillar of cancer treatments, after surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and precision therapy.
“The discovery of Jim Allison led to the first drug that routinely caused patients with a metastatic disease — melanoma — to go into complete remission,” he said.
Allison’s and Honjo’s prize-winning work started in the 1990s and was part of significant advances in cancer immunotherapy. Such treatment is also called “checkpoint therapy,” a term that inspired the name of the Checkpoints, a musical group of cancer researchers in which Allison plays harmonica.
“In some patients, this therapy is remarkably effective,” Jeremy Berg, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals, told the AP. “The number of different types of cancers for which this approach to immunotherapy is being found to be effective in at least some patients continues to grow.”
Therapy developed from Honjo’s work led to long-term remission in patients with metastatic cancer that had been considered essentially untreatable, the Nobel Assembly said.
In other Nobel Prize announcements, the physics prize will be announced Tuesday, followed by chemistry on Wednesday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The economics laureate, which is not technically a Nobel but is given in honor of Alfred Nobel, the prizes’ founder, will be announced next Monday.
No Nobel Literature Prize is being given this year because the Swedish Academy, the body that choses the literature winner, has been in turmoil after sex abuse and financial scandal allegations. The academy hopes to award both the 2018 prize and the 2019 literature prize next year.
Nobel season opens without Literature Prize, sidelined by #MeToo scandalSwedish intellectuals form new literature prize in Nobel protest https://ift.tt/2NYVHHi October 01, 2018 at 11:40AM
DUBAI: If Sunday night’s glitter and gowns weren’t enough for you, we are taking a trip down memory lane with a rundown of Miss Lebanon’s previous winners.
Perla Helou
Helou won Miss Lebanon 2017 and then went to compete in the Miss World competition where she was ranked in the top 40 among the 118 contenders.
Sandy Tabet
Sany Tabet won Miss Lebanon 2016 and dedicated the rest of the year to raising awareness about autism.
Valerie Abou Chacra
Abou Chacra won Miss Lebanon 2015 and was the first Lebanese contestant to place in the top four of the Miss World competition, where she also scored the highest in the interview challenge.
Saly Greige
Greige won the title of Miss Lebanon 2014 and went on to compete in the Miss Universe and Miss World pageants.
Karen Ghrawi
Karen Ghrawi won Miss Lebanon 2013 and then pursued her passion for design. She is currently studying to be an interior designer.
Rina Shibany
Shibany won Miss Lebanon 2012 and was the first twin to win in the pageant’s history. Her twin sister Romy was the first runner-up, sparking headlines across the Arab world about Lebanon’s new it-girls.
DUBAI: There’s a new beauty queen on the throne in Beirut as university student Maya Reaidy was crowned Miss Lebanon 2018 in a glittering event on Sunday night.
The show, held at the Forum de Beyrouth, featured 30 candidates from different cities and regions of Lebanon.
Reaidy won out over Mira Toufaily, who was crowned first runner-up and won over viewers with her story of being brought up by SOS Lebanon, a non-profit organization that supports children who are deprived of parental care or are at risk of losing it. Other runners-up included Yara Abou Monsef, Vanessa Yazbeck and Tatiana Saroufim respectively.
The 22-year-old pharmacy student at the Lebanese American University was hand-picked by a judging panel comprised of George Kordahi, Nancy Ajram, former Miss Lebanon Nadine Njeim, actor Adel Karam, designer Nicolas Jebran and former Miss Universe Demi-Leigh Nel-Peters, among others.
The top prize is worth $500,000 and includes apartments, jewelry, multiple vehicles and various trips abroad. Reaidy will also represent Lebanon at the Miss Universe 2018 competition, which will be held in Thailand on Dec. 16, while the runner-up will represent the country at the Miss World 2018 pageant.
During the crowning ceremony, the Lebanese beauty took to the stage in a sky blue feathered dress designed by Jebran and clutched a huge bouquet of white flowers as she donned a sparkling crown created by jewelry designer Doumit Zoughaib.
Sunday night’s ceremony was hosted by Marcel Ghanem and Annabella Hilal and featured musical performances by US rapper French Montana, Lebanese-Canadian singer Massari and Lebanon’s very own Maya Diab.
After the show, Lebanese social media users took to Twitter in droves to draw comparisons between the latest winner and Georgina Rizk — the only Lebanese beauty queen to have won the title of Miss Universe in 1971.
“Let history repeat itself,” one user posted alongside a side-by-side shot of the two winners.
Lebanese beauty in Miss Universe Canada contestMeeting of the models: Top Brazilian beauty shares advice with rising Saudi star https://ift.tt/2NW7Tbq October 01, 2018 at 10:37AM
DUBAI: Self-taught artist Nima Nabavi recently unveiled his first-ever solo exhibition at Dubai’s The Third Line gallery and it’s a fascinating deep dive into the art of geometry.
Titled “1, 2, 3,” the exhibition is comprised of three series of art. Series 1, completed over the course of five months, features 16 black-and-white pieces in which a pattern of lines gradually becomes denser toward the center.
“With my geometry one of the things I like to do is take the smallest and most basic form, like a line that’s rigid, and try to create some sort of texture out of it by repeating it thousands of times,” the artist told Arab News.
“As you look at it in the very beginning, it’s open in the middle and as you move across this diamond of density starts shrinking until its dense in the middle. I wanted to show the possibility of movement, texture and gradient, but only use one color and one form — a line — to try to create that,” he added, noting that “some of the pieces have upwards of 13,000 lines in them.”
Series 2 marks a progression from the previous body with the introduction of color, according to a press release — eight different hues appear in each work in various sequences, resulting in polychromatic ripple effects. Meanwhile, Series 3 is a synthesis of the elements found in the previous two: Color, thickness, movement and size come together to replicate patterns found in living systems.
“I’ve always found peace — like all of us — in symmetry,” Nabavi said. “Everything in my life is messy, my brain is messy, so I’ve always really liked patterns.”
And he isn’t the only one, perfectly aligned boxes, sharp lines and neat symmetrical forms have fascinated many an artist and layman — you would be hard pressed to find someone who doesn’t take satisfaction from aesthetic order and perfection.
The Iran-born artist is keen to explore why people are so fascinated by such art forms.
“Why are we all drawn to symmetry and geometry?” he asked, “Why do we like these things that don’t actually exist – it’s not a picture of a sunrise or anything – it’s this conceptual, mathematical object.”
“1, 2, 3,” is on show at The Third Line in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue until Nov. 3, 2018.
Beirut Art Fair: For artists faced with the unfairAward winning British artist to design UK’s Stephen Hawking inspired pavilion at Dubai Expo 2020 https://ift.tt/2QkkKkw October 01, 2018 at 10:17AM
Syrian filmmaker Soudade Kaadan’s fiction debut, “The Day I Lost My Shadow,” explores the horrors of the internecine strife in her country, filtered through a simple story of a mother’s desire to give her son a hot meal.
Partly folklore and partly magic realism, based on the idea that those who lose their shadows lose their souls, the director weaves a disturbing narrative of disruption, disappointment and distress. She was rewarded with the Lion of the Future award for best debut feature at the Venice Film Festival this month.
Guiding us through some of the most tension-ridden situations imaginable, as the mother walks through forests, dodges sniper fire and hides from trigger-happy rebels fighting government forces, Kaadan conveys most profoundly how such bloody wars can rob people of their souls, if not their lives.
The first 15 minutes give a fair idea of what to expect. Sana (Sawsan Erchied), a pharmacist, rushes home from work, encountering hostile security agents and a funeral along the way, in a race against time to beat water rationing. She has to finish her laundry before the water runs out, and make a meal for her son, Khalil (Ahmad Morhaf Al-Ali). Unfortunately, not only is the power cut off, but the cooking gas runs out. Sana’s trials and tribulations begin to multiply after she leaves the relative safety of her home in search of a gas canister.
While the film is effective at portraying the angst of a mother concerned about the son she has left alone at home and her desperation to get back to him, it is not visually compelling enough to draw us into the sheer magnitude of the tragedy. In addition, two supporting characters, Jalal (Samer Ismael) and Reem (Reham Al-Kassar), who choose to go with Sana, are sketchily written.
Overall, there is a sense of dissatisfaction over this depiction of a scenario as grave as what Kaadan sets out to present.
Film review: ‘Dear Son’ is a superb study of a failing familyFilm review: Fact meets fiction in ambitious drama ‘Yomeddine’ https://ift.tt/2xQ6lWt October 01, 2018 at 06:20AM
STOCKHOLM: The announcement on Monday of the Nobel Medicine Prize opens this year’s amputated awards season, with no Literature Prize for the first time in 70 years because of a #MeToo scandal.
Like every year, Nobel aficionados have speculated wildly about possible winners, given the number of worthy candidates in the fields of medicine, physics, chemistry, peace and economics.
The medicine prize committee at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute is the first to reveal its choice of laureates, on Monday at 11:30am.
But its announcement risks being at least partially eclipsed by a Stockholm court’s verdict around the same time against Frenchman Jean-Claude Arnault, charged with rape.
His close ties to the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Literature Prize, have caused a scandal and deep rift in the Academy, prompting it to postpone this year’s prize for a year.
It is the first time the prize has been postponed since William Faulkner’s 1949 honor was awarded in 1950.
Without the Literature Prize this year, the most highly-anticipated award will be that for peace, announced on Friday in Oslo.
But before that come the science prizes, traditionally dominated by men working at US institutions.
Swedish public radio SR tipped however the medicine prize could go to two women for the gene-editing technique known as the CRISPR-Cas9 DNA snipping tool, a type of genetic “scissors” used to cut out a mutated gene in a human embryo and replace it by a corrected version.
However, the discovery could be too early for a Nobel, with a recent study suggesting the technique may damage DNA more than previously thought. A legal dispute is also raging over who discovered the technique.
It has been claimed on the one hand by the French-American research duo of Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna, and on the other by Chinese-born American Feng Zhang.
Other research mentioned as Nobel-worthy include the cochlear implant, which can help deaf people to hear again, and gene sequencing, already honored with a chemistry Nobel in 1980 but a field whose vast progress has revolutionized medical, biological and evolutionary research since then.
Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet meanwhile cited research on opiates and pain relief, new blood vessel growth, and the creation of a giant gene and genome database as other possible award-winning fields.
The physics prize will follow on Tuesday.
SR suggested the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences could give the nod to research on zero-dimensional quantum dots — very small semiconductor particles that play a key role in data communications, light diodes, solar cells and medical imaging.
Svenska Dagbladet meanwhile said the discovery of the so-called “spin Hall effect” in semiconductors could be honored, or pioneering methods to determine the age, size and distance between galaxies.
Work on the mechanisms behind supercapacitators, a type of battery that can store large amounts of electricity, was also seen as a possibility.
The chemistry prize, to be announced on Wednesday, could meanwhile go to recurring favorite John Goodenough, a 96-year old electrochemist whose work led to the invention of rechargeable lithium ion battery present in cell phones, computers and electric cars, SR said.
For the Peace Prize, the only Nobel announced in Oslo, there are 329 candidates this year but their names are kept secret.
US President Donald Trump has been mentioned as a possibility for his efforts to bring peace to the Korean peninsula.
But Dan Smith, head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said he believed it would be “inappropriate” to honor Trump after he withdrew the US from international agreements on the climate and Iran’s nuclear program.
In addition, the only known Trump nomination submitted to the Nobel committee turned out to be a fake.
South Korean President Moon Jae-in has also been mentioned for his rapprochement efforts with North Korea.
But Smith said that would be “premature,” recalling the dashed hopes after Moon’s predecessor Kim Dae-jung won the prize in 2000.
Other names circulating include Congolese surgeon Denis Mukwege and Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, who both campaign against sexual violence, as well as the World Food Programme, the UN refugee agency UNHCR, organizations defending the media and Russian human rights champions.
The 2018 Nobel season wraps up on October 8 with the announcement of the economics prize.
This year, each Nobel comes with a nine-million kronor ($1.01 million) prize sum, to be shared if several laureates are honored in the same discipline.
Women take fall in Nobel scandal for man’s alleged misdeedsNobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul dies at 85 https://ift.tt/2DKXnzn October 01, 2018 at 06:20AM
