Villagers near Meiganga, a town in northern Cameroon, are protesting against Chinese gold miners for allegedly ruining their land. The villagers say they are poorer than before the Chinese arrived, with their farms and forests now destroyed.  

Area cattle ranchers and farmers say that if nothing is done to save them from Chinese miners, famine may strike their locality soon. 

Their spokesman, rancher Mamoudu Poro, 54, says the miners destroy farms and do not bother to cover holes and trenches they dig on roads and ranches before leaving. He says they want the Chinese to build the roads they destroyed and fill the trenches they dug, give them electricity and at least a school and a market before leaving. 

Until 2014, Meiganga and surrounding villages cultivated maize, beans and groundnuts and produced cattle for markets in Cameroon, Nigeria and the Central African Republic. 
 
Then, 300 new mining sites producing gold, zinc, nickel and other materials were discovered in the region.  Among the explorers were Chinese companies. 
 
More than a hundred of the companies’ miners work in and around Meiganga. They use tractors and equipment that clean stones and sift soil, allowing them to detect gold faster than locals who use manual tools.  Locals are paid about $2 per day to work at the Chinese mining sites. 
 
Cameroon’s minister of mines, Gabriel Dodo Ndoke, says the complaints of the villagers are legitimate. He says he has asked the companies to respect the terms of their contract with the government.  

Ndoke says the population suffers as a result of environmental degradation and does not benefit as expected because their mineral resources are exploited in a disorganized manner. He says he has given instructions to all exploitation companies to make sure they respect environmental laws and stop destroying farms and cattle ranches, which for now are the only sources of earnings for the people of the area. 
 
Officials with the China Mining Company in Meiganga declined to be interviewed about the allegations.  However, company official Hu Long said the firm has assisted communities by providing aid to hospitals and building or refurbishing schools when solicited.  He says the company also employs about 100 youths.  

This is not the first time Cameroonian villagers have protested against alleged exploitation by the Chinese.  In 2016, residents of eastern Cameroon had conflicts with small-scale Chinese gold miners who had been there for six years. The local miners said the Chinese had taken away their livelihoods and were not living up to promises to develop the area. 
 
Cameroon has not officially announced how much it gains from the mining business but says it contributes a significant amount to the country’s gross domestic product. 

Britain’s Princess Charlotte had plenty of support on her first day of school she was accompanied by older brother Prince George and her parents, Prince William and his wife Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge.

William said Friday their 4-year-old daughter was “very excited” on her first day at Thomas’s Battersea in London.

Charlotte seemed a bit hesitant as she entered the schoolyard for the first time holding the hand of her mother.

Six-year-old George has already been at the school for two years.

William told one of the head teachers: “First day. She’s very excited.”

Spain’s Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences says that Pedro Almodovar’s latest drama “Pain and Glory,” which was inspired by his own life story, will represent the country in the competition for this year’s Oscars.

The film starring Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz will compete with other global entries for a nomination as Best International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards. The Spanish Academy’s selection was announced Thursday.

“Pain and Glory” received broad acclaim at this year’s Cannes Film Festival in France, where Banderas won the Best Actor award for his portrayal of a film director in his decline who flirts with drugs and has to confront his own past.

In June, Almodovar won a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival.

A privately run prison in Mississippi says it has a new five-year contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The Natchez Democrat reported that the Adams County Correctional Center, operated by CoreCivic, says the contract will add 50 jobs, and provide the county with about 50 cents per inmate per day, which could boost county revenue by $400,000 a year.

Some of the people arrested in immigration raids at Mississippi chicken processing plants last month are being held in the prison outside Natchez.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons had said in May that it would not renew its contract for the 2,232-bed prison. Without a contract, more than 390 jobs were at risk of being lost.

“Ultimately, we were able to retain one of our largest employers as well as one of our largest taxpayers,” said Chandler Russ, who runs the Natchez Inc. economic development agency. “It is a huge win for us.”

Russ said the new contract calls for about 425 CoreCivic employees — 35 more jobs than were called for in the previous contract with the Bureau of Prisons. ICE also will create 25 to 30 new positions locally. Previously, the Bureau of Prisons had two to four employees, Russ said.

Russ said that the prison pays roughly $2 million in taxes annually, including revenue for the school district.

Before Tuesday’s announcement, the prison was holding 600 adult ICE detainees under an amended contract with the Federal Bureau of Prisons that expired Friday, the CoreCivic news release said.

CoreCivic said it anticipates ICE will soon begin using additional space at the facility under the new contract.
 

Hong Kong’s embattled chief executive Carrie Lam may hope the withdrawal of a hated extradition bill will help the semi-autonomous Chinese city move forward from three months of major protests.

But if the initial reaction from activists, scholars and other Hong Kong residents is any indication, the protests may not go away any time soon, with protester demands having long ago expanded to include broader democratic reforms.

Lam on Wednesday announced the formal withdrawal of the extradition bill, a move she said was intended to “fully allay public concerns” after having earlier only suspended the proposal. But while the withdrawal essentially amounts to an admission that the extradition bill was a mistake, it seems few in Hong Kong see the move as a major concession.

“I haven’t heard anyone say they will stop protesting because of the withdrawal,” said Wilson Leung, who helped found the Hong Kong-based Progressive Lawyers Group. “Because a lot of the anger is now over police brutality and overreach.”

Months of protests, strikes

Since early June, Hong Kong has seen mass peaceful protests, widespread strikes, and occasional smaller groups of protesters who have clashed with police and attacked government symbols. The immediate cause of the protests was the extradition proposal. The legislation, if passed, would have allowed some criminal suspects to be sent to mainland China for trial.

Hong Kongers feared the bill would expose them to China’s politicized court system, where a trial virtually always results in a conviction.

But the protests underscored broader concerns about encroaching Communist Party influence in Hong Kong ahead of 2047, when a deal between China and Britain, Hong Kong’s former colonial power, is set to expire. Many feel Beijing’s “One Country, Two Systems” model, which allowed Hong Kong freedom of speech and the rule of law, has already hopelessly eroded.

By failing to make any major concessions at the outset, and instead responding violently to the protests, Hong Kong and Beijing authorities helped ensure the movement expanded and took on loftier goals, analysts say.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren has risen to second place in public opinion polls and is attracting large crowds as she campaigns for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in the 2020 election. VOA’s Brian Padden reports, even if Warren does not win the nomination, her detailed economic proposals could long-resonate in the presidential contest as a progressive blueprint for change likely to excite some voters while possibly alienating others.
 

Nearly three months of protests have rocked Hong Kong amid a harsh police crackdown, widespread arrests, and fears of suppression by Beijing.  On Wednesday, Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam announced plans to withdraw a controversial extradition bill that sparked the unrest, but pro-democracy activists are pressing for more. Mike O’Sullivan reports on how the current demonstrations are the latest in a long history of protest in the Chinese semi-autonomous region.
 

Tempers flared in Haiti’s parliament Tuesday as lawmakers resorted to pushing and shoving each other and swearing to vent frustrations over an act of vandalism that stunned the nation in the early hours of the morning. VOA’s Sandra Lemaire, Renan Toussaint and Matiado Vilme have more.

Bangkok ranked first in 2018 for the fourth straight year as the city with the most international visitors, according to an annual report by Mastercard released Wednesday. 
 
With almost 23 million international visitors last year, the Thai capital outpaced both Paris and London, which were second and third with just over 19 million visitors each.  
 
Other top cities in order were Dubai, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, New York, Istanbul, Tokyo and Antalya, Turkey. 
 
The report pointed to broad increases in international travel, with the total number of international visits up 76 percent since 2009. 
 
Nine of the top 10 cities saw increases in 2018 compared with the prior year. London was the exception, with a drop of 4 percent. 
 
Dubai topped the list as far as consumption, with travelers spending an average of $553 per day and visitors spending a total of nearly $31 billion. Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and Bangkok were second and third as far as spending. 
 
Established in 2011, the Global Destination Cities ranks 200 cities based on visitor arrivals and cross-border spending.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday lashed out at pressure on some countries — including his own — not to acquire missiles with nuclear warheads.

“Some (countries) have missiles with nuclear warheads in their hands but I shouldn’t have it. I do not accept this,” he said in a speech in the eastern city of Sivas. 

Turkey does not possess nuclear weapons and has been a party to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty since 1980. 

The Turkish leader’s remarks come amid burgeoning defense ties between Turkey and Russia in defiance of Ankara’s NATO ally the United States.

Washington has reacted to Turkey’s purchase of the S-400 by kicking the country off its F-35 fighter jet program.

The U.S. says Russia will be able to glean sensitive technical knowledge about the new fighter if it is operated alongside the S-400.

On Friday, Erdogan suggested Turkey could look to Russia for an alternative after its F-35 exclusion.

Ben Wagner worked three days a week for his congressional representative this summer in northern Virginia. 
 
A senior at the College of William and Mary this fall in Williamsburg, Virginia, Wagner was busy reaching out to constituents, answering phone calls and conducting research for U.S. Representative Jennifer Wexton, a Democrat. 
 
He said the experience helped define his future. 
 
“I realized that that’s what I want to do,” Wagner said. “Be on the Hill. Be a staffer. Run a campaign.” (The Hill refers to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.) 
 
And he couldn’t have done it without the people who provided him food, housing, transportation and health insurance: his parents. Wagner worked as an intern for free. 
 

“I really have to thank my parents,” he said. They knew that “taking this internship, whether or not it was unpaid, was something that I needed to do in order to advance my career to the next step.” 
 
Wagner was one of an estimated hundreds of thousands of unpaid interns in the U.S.   
 
But “it’s a huge privilege,” he said. 
 
Gaps in apprenticeships 
 
Internships can be traced to apprenticeships of the Middle Ages, where craftsmen trained unskilled labor in a trade. Currently, at least 60% of college graduates have completed an internship, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). 
 
And in 2014, 46.5% of internships were unpaid. 
 
Unpaid internships were protected by the U.S. Department of Labor in 2018 when it instituted the “primary beneficiary test,” which allows unpaid internships if the intern receives a greater benefit from the experience than the employer. 
 
An internship is the most important credential for entering the job market, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education study in 2012. Employers often value experience more than academics, such as a college major or grades.  
 
And it pays off after graduation. 
 
“Recent studies have indicated that students graduating with internship experiences, in general, are more likely than students without those experiences to find employment upon graduation,” wrote the NACE Journal in May 2017. 
 
“What we can notice is a lot of interns become these successful individuals,” said Guillermo Creamer, deputy director of Pay Our Interns, a nonprofit group that seeks more paid government internships.  
 
Creamer cited former intern Dennis Muilenburg, now chief executive officer of Boeing, U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic candidate for president. 
 
“An internship is a gateway to the workforce,” Creamer said. “That’s the way we have to look at it.” 
 
But, he added, the gateway is not accessible to everyone. 
 
Costs of an internship 
 
Unless interns are living at home, they must find a way to pay for housing, food and transportation. Top cities by population — New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington — offer the most internships, according to job-rating platform Glassdoor. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, these cities are among the most expensive in the country.
 

Erin Johansson, research director of Jobs With Justice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for workers’ rights, said she believes unpaid internships limit employment equality. 
 
While there is insufficient research on internships, said Philip Gardner, director of the Collegiate Employment Research Institute at Michigan State University, students who take unpaid internships are generally from lower-income families.  
 
“The majority of kids who take unpaid internships are middle or lower class” and tend to be the first membrers of their families to attend college. “They want to work for a [non-government organization] and in public service or social justice,” which typically pay less, Gardner said.  
 
Higher-income students from families with $120,000 annual income are more likely to be found in paid internships with for-profit companies. Because internships are often a chance for employers to test out future employees, and a pathway for interns to jobs and income after college, the higher-income students do better after graduation. 
 
“Jobs should be accessible to everybody,” said Johansson of Jobs With Justice, which pays its interns to avoid a “class system” that favors the privileged. 
 
Creamer said that he and Pay Our Interns co-founder Carlos Mark Vera — both first-generation Americans and first-generation college students — were motivated to start their campaign by what they saw as a lack of diversity when they were Capitol Hill interns, affectionately known as Hillterns. 
 
“Too many individuals didn’t look like us,” Creamer, who like Vera is Hispanic, said about the congressional interns. “We wanted to challenge that.” 
 
“The majority of people who can’t take advantage of these opportunities are people who can’t afford them, and that tends to fall greatly in the minority community: in the Latino community, in the African American community. You’ve got individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds and they tend to be people of color,” he said. 
 
‘Different perspectives’ 
 
Johansson said this means businesses and organizations “really miss out on having people that, if they pay them, could be bringing different perspectives that aren’t often in our world.” 
 
Without those perspectives, she said, professionals often “don’t understand what average people go through in the working world.” 
 

“Many for-profit and government agencies, especially at the federal level, are misusing the unpaid internship,” wrote Gardner in 2010 in a report for Intern Bridge, a website that offers information for interns and strives to create and improve internships in the U.S. “It is hard to rationalize why some of the leading investment banks, broadcasting companies, movie production companies, and Congress have elevated the unpaid internship because of the coveted prestige for their positions. These sectors need to set a better example, especially Congress.” 
 
Last year, with the help of Creamer and Vera’s advocacy, they did. Congress allocated $14 million between the two chambers to pay Hillterns who work in Washington. Each member office is allotted $20,000 to pay interns in the House Paid Internship Program, according to a House Administration Committee aide.  
 
“No qualified candidate should have to turn down the opportunity to intern on Capitol Hill in order to make ends meet,” the aide wrote in an email. “In providing these funds, the House is making an important first step in breaking down the economic barrier to those seeking entry-level work on Capitol Hill. By expanding this opportunity for public service, it’s our hope that qualified candidates for these internships will now have opportunities they did not have before.” 

Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei accused U.S. authorities on Wednesday of attempting to break into its information systems and of trying to coerce its employees to gather information on the company. 
 
Huawei, which faces mounting American pressure including possible loss of access to U.S. technology over accusations the company is a security risk, said in a statement that Washington has used “unscrupulous means” in recent months to disrupt its business. 
 
American officials have given no evidence to support claims Huawei might aid Chinese spying, accusations the company denies. The United States, Australia, Japan and some other governments have imposed restrictions on use of Huawei technology.

Huawei Technologies Ltd. is the No. 2 global smartphone brand and the biggest maker of network gear for phone companies.

Export controls announced by the Trump administration in May would limit Huawei’s access to U.S. technology. Implementation has been postponed to mid-November.

Washington is lobbying European governments to exclude Huawei from next-generation telecom networks. Germany, France and Ireland say they have no plans to ban any supplier.

Huawei, headquartered in the southern city of Shenzhen, gave no evidence to support its accusations. A company spokesman said he had no additional details. 
 
The accusations were included in a statement about an unrelated patent dispute in the United States.

The White House in Washington and the American Embassy in Beijing didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Allegations

The statement said American authorities launched cyberattacks “to infiltrate Huawei’s intranet and internal information systems” but gave no indication what information they targeted or whether they succeeded.

Huawei also said FBI agents pressured its employees to collect information on the company.

The Reuters news agency cited a Huawei document it said reported eight employees, all mid- to high-level executives, including several U.S. citizens, were involved in the incidents. It said the latest occurred Aug. 28 when an employee informed Huawei the FBI asked the person to be an informant.

The company said U.S. authorities have disrupted Huawei’s business by delaying shipments, denying visas and unspecified intimidation.

China’s government has accused Washington of improperly using national security arguments to hurt Chinese commercial competitors.

“This kind of behavior is neither glorious nor moral,” a foreign ministry spokesman, Geng Shuang, said Wednesday. He called on Washington to “stop deliberately smearing” Chinese companies and to “provide a level playing field” for them.

Rescuers trying to reach drenched and stunned victims of Hurricane Dorian in the Bahamas fanned out across a blasted landscape of smashed and flooded homes Wednesday, while disaster relief organizations rushed to bring in food and medicine. The official death toll stood at seven but was certain to rise.

The full magnitude of the crisis in the islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama was still coming into focus, with rescue crews yet to reach some stricken areas.

“Right now there are just a lot of unknowns,” Parliament member Iram Lewis said in Grand Bahama in the wake of the most powerful hurricane on record ever to hit the country. “We need help.”

Dorian, meanwhile, pushed its way northward off the Florida shoreline with reduced but still-dangerous 105 mph (165 kph) winds on a projected course that could sideswipe Georgia and the Carolinas. An estimated 3 million people in the four states were warned to evacuate.

The storm mauled the Bahamas for over a day and a half with winds up to 185 mph (295 kph) and torrential rains, swamping neighborhoods in muddy brown floodwaters and destroying or severely damaging thousands of homes.

“We are in the midst of one of the greatest national crises in our country’s history,” said Prime Minister Hubert Minnis. He said he expects the number of dead to rise. 

National Security Minister Marvin Dames said rescue teams were fanning out across the northern Bahamas as the winds and rain subsided, with more than 600 police officers and marines in Grand Bahama and an additional 100 in Abaco.

“The devastation is unlike anything that we’ve ever seen before,” he said. “We’re beginning to get on the ground, get our people in the right places. We have a lot of work in the days and weeks and months ahead.”

Rescuers used jet skis, boats and even a bulldozer to reach children and adults trapped by the swirling waters, while the U.S. Coast Guard, Britain’s Royal Navy and relief organizations tried to get food and medicine to survivors and take the most desperate people to safety.

Five Coast Guard helicopters ran near-hourly flights to stricken Abaco, flying people to the main hospital in the capital, Nassau.

Health Minister Duane Sands said the government was airlifting 25 doctors, nurses and other health workers to Abaco and hoped to bring in mental health workers soon.

“The situation is under control in Abaco,” he said. “In Grand Bahama, today will tell the magnitude of the problem.”

Abaco and Grand Bahama islands, with a combined population of about 70,000, are known for their marinas, golf courses and all-inclusive resorts.

Red Cross spokesman Matthew Cochrane said Tuesday that more than 13,000 houses, or about 45% of the homes on Grand Bahama and Abaco, were believed to be severely damaged or destroyed. U.N. and Red Cross officials said tens of thousands of people will need food and clean drinking water.

“It’s total devastation. It’s decimated. Apocalyptic,” said Lia Head-Rigby, who helps run a hurricane relief group and flew over Abaco. “It’s not rebuilding something that was there; we have to start again.”

She said her representative on Abaco told her there were “a lot more dead.”

At 8 a.m. EDT Wednesday, Dorian was centered about 95 miles (144 kilometers) northeast of Daytona Beach, Florida, moving northwest at 8 mph (13 kph). Hurricane-force winds extended up to 60 miles (95 kilometers) from its center.

Dorian was expected to pass dangerously close to Georgia and perhaps strike South Carolina or North Carolina on Thursday or Friday with the potential for over a foot of rain in some spots. The National Hurricane Center warned that the storm is likely to cause storm surge and severe flooding even if the hurricane’s core does not blow ashore.

“Don’t tough it out. Get out,” said U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency official Carlos Castillo.

Across the Southeast, interstate highways leading away from beaches were turned into one-way evacuation routes. Walt Disney World and Universal closed their theme parks in Orlando. The Navy ordered ships at its huge base in Norfolk, Virginia, to head out to sea for safety, and warplanes at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Virginia, were being moved inland to Ohio.

Having seen storms swamp his home on the Georgia coast in 2016 and 2017, Joey Spalding of Tybee Island decided to empty his house and stay at a friend’s apartment nearby rather than take any chances with Dorian.

He packed a U-Haul truck with tables, chairs, a chest of drawers, tools — virtually all of his furnishings except for his mattress and a large TV — and planned to park it on higher ground. He also planned to shroud his house in plastic wrap up to shoulder height and pile sandbags in front of the doors.

“In this case, I don’t have to come into a house full of junk,” he said. “I’m learning a little as I go.”

A large explosion at a fireworks factory in northern India on Wednesday killed at least 16 people and caused the building to catch fire and collapse, officials said.

Police officer Mukhtiar Singh said 15 other people were injured in the blast in Batala, a town in Punjab state about 460 kilometers (285 miles) north of New Delhi.

Singh said rescue work is continuing at the site.

Deepak Bhatia, a state government administrator, said the cause of the explosion was being investigated.

The building caught fire after the blast, he said.

Television images showed a brick-lined building that had completely collapsed from the force of the explosion.

Fireworks manufacturing is a big business in India, with firecrackers often used in festivals and weddings.

Many illegal factories produce firecrackers that are cheaper to buy than legally made fireworks.

French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe has unveiled measures to tackle domestic violence, following a spate of murders of women that have sparked public outrage. More than 100 women have been killed so far this year in France by their spouses, partners or ex-partners.  VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports domestic violence and murder of women is a worldwide problem, but many governments choose to ignore it. 

Farming them is much kinder to the environment than raising cattle or pigs. They require less land, less water, and emit fewer greenhouse gases. So far so good… that is, if eating gourmet dishes featuring a variety of creeply-crawlies (crawling insects) doesn’t bug you (cause distress).  If you are eating right now, you may want to put down your fork until after VOA’s Arash Arabasadi digs into the story.

Online cooking videos are an indispensable tool for at-home chefs, but using a mobile device in the kitchen can get messy. A New York University student has solved the problem by turning the traditional apron into a remote control for devices. Tina Trinh reports.

Vienna has held off Melbourne to retain the top spot on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index for 2019, further strengthening its reputation as the world’s most pleasant city, while the ‘gilets jaunes’ protests hurt Paris’ score.

The Austrian capital, which attracts tourists for its classical music scene and imperial history but also has abundant green spaces and excellent public services, last year ended Melbourne’s seven-year run at the top of the survey of 140 cities, helped by an improved security outlook across Europe.

Vienna and Melbourne have been neck and neck in the EIU survey for years, but the Austrian capital also regularly tops a larger ranking of cities by quality of life compiled by consulting firm Mercer.

The gap between the two cities – of 0.7 point out of 100, with Vienna scoring 99.1 – was unchanged in the 2019 ranking published on Wednesday, as were the cities in the top 10, though Sydney closed in on its old rival.

“Sydney has risen from fifth to third, thanks to an improvement in its culture and environment score, reflecting an increased focus on combating and mitigating the impacts of climate change, as outlined by the city’s ‘Sustainable Sydney 2030’ strategy,” the EIU said.

It poured cold water on Sydney’s prospects of overtaking Melbourne, however.

“With both cities already scoring very highly across all categories, there is only limited potential for Sydney to displace either Melbourne or Vienna at the top of the rankings. No other city in the top ten saw a change to its score.”

Japan’s Osaka was fourth, followed by three Canadian cities – Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto. Toronto was tied with Tokyo for seventh place. Copenhagen and Adelaide in South Australia rounded out the top 10.

The EIU’s index ranks cities by five headline criteria.

Stability and culture & environment are the two most important categories, weighted equally at 25% of the total. Healthcare and infrastructure are also matched at 20%, with education coming in last with a 10% weighting.

“Paris in France is the highest-ranked city to have seen a deterioration in its stability score, owing to the ongoing anti-government gilets jaunes protests that began in late 2018,” the EIU said of the French anti-government movement.

Paris slid six places to 25th, from 19th last year.

The culture and environment scores were reduced for many cities in poorer countries that are among the most exposed to the effects of climate change, including New Delhi and Cairo for their poor air quality.

Damascus in war-torn Syria remained the worst-ranked city, below Lagos in Nigeria and the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, which swapped places.

Set somewhere in rural eastern Europe towards the end of World War II, “The Painted Bird” is a sombre tale of a young boy trying to survive a harsh wilderness and the cruelty of strangers, and is described by one of its stars as “timeless.”

Based on a 1965 novel by Polish-born novelist Jerzy Kosinski, the 35mm black and white film, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, depicts a bleak world where being different is dangerous.

Sent by his persecuted parents to stay with an elderly woman in the desolate countryside of an unnamed country, the lead character, known simply as The Boy, soon finds himself alone when she dies and he sets off on foot to find safety elsewhere.

He wanders from village to village, where he meets and stays with different people – some of them superstitious and cruel, others accommodating and kind.

The Boy, played by Petr Kotlar, endures brutal beatings and abuse and witnesses horrific violence carried out by civilians and soldiers – a man having his eye gouged out, a village ransacked, people shot and a woman kicked in the genitals.

“The questions about humankind, about God, what is the evil, what is the good in all of us, what does it mean that the light is visible only in the dark? That’s the principle of this movie,” director Vaclav Marhoul told Reuters in an interview.

The film, which is just short of three hours long, features very little dialogue. Marhoul, who also wrote the script, said he specifically chose a kind of Slavic Esperanto, a created language, for the villagers’ dialogue.

“I didn’t want the villagers (speaking) Ukrainian or Polish or Russian or something like that because those people (the villagers in the film) are really bad people,” he said. “I didn’t want some nation to be associated with that.”

Brutality and Compassion

In one key scene, one of The Boy’s hosts paints the wings of one of his captive birds and releases it into its flock, only for it to be attacked by the others.

“(The film) depicts Europe at a very dark time, but it’s a dark time that is not specific to that time, that is sort of existing today all over the world in many places,” actor Stellan Skarsgard said.

The “Mamma Mia!” and “Thor” actor plays a Nazi officer in the film, who is also one of the few to feel sympathy for The Boy. The latter also finds kindness in a priest and feels love for a young woman.

“During the most horrible times there are moments of compassion and we as humans, we can be monsters of brutality but we can also be very compassionate and we all have it all in us, if you’re not a psychopath,” Skarsgard said. “So we’re all capable of everything.”

The movie, nearly 11 years in the making, is one of 21 films competing for the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival.

“It happens to be set in the period just at the end of the Second World War, but it could be medieval, it could be 50 years in the future,” said actor Julian Sands, who plays one of the crueler people The Boy meets.

“It has more in common with Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ than a Holocaust movie, it has more in common with Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’ than a specific Second world War historical account. It’s timeless.”

VOA’s Masood Farivar contributed to this report.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the White House to restore the press credentials of Playboy correspondent Brian Karem, whose hard pass was suspended after he got into a shouting match with conservative radio host and former Trump adviser Sebastian Gorka in the Rose Garden following a social media summit in July.

U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras found that White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham’s rationale for revoking the pass was too vague.

“White House events appear to vary greatly in character,” Contreras wrote in his opinion. “Thus, without any contextual guideposts, ‘professionalism,’ standing alone, remains too murky to provide fair notice here.”

In a statement late Tuesday, Grisham said the White House “disagree[d] with the decision,” arguing it “essentially gives free reign to members of the press to engage in unprofessional, disruptive conduct at the White House.” She added that Karem “clearly breached well-understood norms of professional conduct.” 

Karem’s attorney, Ted Boutrous, told CNN he was pleased with the court’s decision.

“The White House’s suspension of his press credentials violated the First Amendment and due process and was a blatant attempt to chill vigorous reporting about the President,” Boutrous said.

White House Correspondents’ Association President Jonathan Karl said WHCA would continue “to advocate for the rights of our members and against actions by the government that would have a chilling effect on journalism protected by the First Amendment.”

While Justice Department lawyers representing the White House called Karem’s actions “clearly unacceptable” and defended the procedure used to pull Karem’s pass as “transparent, deliberate and careful,” the veteran reporter said he was singled out by the White House because of his critical coverage of the administration and blunt questioning of President Donald Trump.

“They just want to punish me,” Karem said in an interview with VOA. “They want to punish me because they don’t like what I write. I’ve written 100 and some odd articles since the beginning of this administration and asked some very pointed questions of the president. I don’t think he likes the pointed questions, and I don’t think he likes or his staff likes what I’ve written.”

This is the second time the White House has pulled an accredited reporter’s press pass and comes as Trump continues to denigrate critical media outlets as “Fake News” and “enemy of the people,” encouraging public distrust of the media.  

Last November, in a move unprecedented in the modern era, the White House lifted CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s media credentials just hours after he had a testy exchange with Trump at a White House press conference.

After CNN sued Trump, a federal judge reinstated Acosta’s pass, ruling that its suspension had violated Acosta’s right to due process.