Tourist Muskan Mahuwakar pictured the Taj Mahal as a dazzling vision of symmetry and beauty but upon reaching the monument, she -- like thousands of other visitors -- was disappointed to find it covered in scaffolding, its once white marble now yellowing due to pollution.

Building restoration at India's most popular tourist attraction is now into its fourth year, with work yet to even begin on its imposing dome.

"It's disappointing not to get a perfect frame of this immaculate structure," Mahuwakar, a history student, told AFP on her first visit to the Taj, as nearby cleaners armed with colourful plastic buckets and large mops desperately tried to scrub some lustre back into the stained stone.

Other restoration teams scale the facade, blocking views to the ornate Islamic carvings engraved on its walls. The interruption to the serenity of visiting one of the seven modern wonders of the world.

"The repair has been going on for so long. Of course, old monuments need to be conserved, but we must find solutions that are quick and effective," Mahuwakar said, casting a dejected look at the scaffolding around.

Pollution and old age are taking their toll on the 17th century mausoleum, nestled on the south bank of the Yamuna river in Agra, but critics warn that even the options authorities are using to try to fix, may be exacerbating the problem.

Mudpacks have been applied in stages to draw out stains but critics say the process is as damaging as bleaching the fine stone.

Authorities reject this, but admit they are concerned about how to proceed with handling the fragile central dome.

There are fears this inevitable work risks damaging the unmistakable feature of the Taj and will put off tourists.

- 'Taj Mahal is Dying' -

Experts warn that iron scaffolding risks leaving irrevocable scars on the fine marble. But bamboo frames are inadequate for such heights, leaving few options for those charged with executing the daunting task.

"We have to clean the dome, but the challenge is how to erect the scaffolding," Bhuvan Vikrama, the government archeologist overseeing restoration efforts, told AFP.

"The structure is almost 400 years old, so we can't put any extra load on it. In righting the wrong, we should not wrong the right."

It remains unclear when work will begin or for how long the central dome will be encased in scaffolding.

Fodor's Travel, a publisher of tourism guidebooks, has advised readers to avoid the Taj until at least 2019 lest visitors be disappointed.

The number of local tourists is also being capped to 40,000 a day in a bid to reduce wear and tear on the monument to love, which was built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died giving birth in 1631.Currently daily visitor numbers average 10,000-15,000 but can be much higher at weekends, going up to around 70,000. According to government figures, nearly 6.5 million people -- mainly from India -- visited the historic complex in 2016.

Anyone wanting to see the main crypt, which houses marble graves inlaid with semi-precious stones, will also have to pay for a pricier ticket.

But critics warn that restoration is only half the solution, pointing to the industrial factories across the river that near continuously belch out noxious fumes, leaving the air thick with smog.

This toxic haze from this and from dung and garbage burning in and around Agra is responsible for discolouring the Taj, experts say.

Efforts to curb these pollutants, including banning motor vehicles within 500 metres of the building, have failed to clear up the air.

M C Mehta, a lawyer, said his battles in court to shift polluting industries -- including a huge crematorium -- had fallen on deaf ears.

"No one wants to take hard decisions," Mehta told AFP.

"The Taj used to be surrounded by lush greenery, but now there is nothing. Taj is in the last stage of cancer. It is dying, it is gasping for breath."

Source: AFP

If it were a conspiracy thriller it would be dismissed as far-fetched, but Tim Wardle's astonishing story of triplets separated at birth and reunited by pure chance is all too real.

His debut feature documentary "Three Identical Strangers," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday, introduces Bobby Shafran, Eddy Galland and David Kellman, who had no idea they were triplets until the age of 19.

But don't expect "The Parent Trap," for this altogether darker film shows how the trio's joyous reunion set in motion a chain of events that unearthed a conspiracy that went far beyond their own lives.

The amazing saga began in 1980 when Shafran enrolled at Sullivan County Community College, a two-hour drive north of New York, and was told he had a double called Eddy Galland, who had just quit.

Shafran tracked down Galland and, sure enough, they were stunned to find they looked exactly alike, and had the same birthday, interests, voices, mannerisms and even hands.

The chance reunion of twins separated at birth was enough to make the front pages of the local tabloids but the coverage unearthed a far more intriguing story.

Kellman was reading about the newly-acquainted brothers and realized he, too, looked exactly like them, shared their birthday and was also adopted.

The men hit it off immediately, moving in together, transferring to the same degree course in international marketing.

The public lapped up their inspiring story and they became celebrities in the Manhattan club scene, even making cameo appearances in Madonna's first major movie, "Desperately Seeking Susan."

- 'Complete surrealism' -

"The initial meeting was just complete surrealism. These things that were happening were just so unreal that they were almost dreamlike," Shafran told AFP.

"But then once we got together there was a joy that I had never experienced in my life and it lasted a really long time."

They opened a restaurant -- Triplets -- selling Eastern European fare and had a ball in the early days, but eventually tempers began to fray as arguments flared over work responsibilities.

Wardle uses a mix of reenactments and interviews with Shafran and Kellman, now 56, to deliver the first bombshell -- a disillusioned Shafran quitting the business.

Then the story takes a tragic turn as it is revealed that Galland had become increasingly depressed and unstable, eventually taking his own life at the age of 33.

The mystery around their infancy -- why they knew nothing about each other despite growing up within a 100-mile radius -- took another twist as journalist and writer Lawrence Wright made a stunning discovery.

The triplets, it turned out, were among a number of identical siblings split up as part of a dark "nature versus nurture" social experiment which began in 1960 and was led by psychoanalyst Peter Neubauer, head of The Child Development Center.

Neubauer's center merged in 1963 into the Jewish Board of Guardians, which would later merge with what would become the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services in Manhattan.

Visits by researchers throughout their childhoods were explained away as a "child development study," when in reality Neubauer was scrutinizing the brothers' personalities and relationships with their very diverse adoptive families.

"We really didn't understand just how egregiously these people behaved," said Kellman, who told AFP all six adoptive parents were angered that they too had been kept in the dark.

"As we got older, got married, became parents ourselves, we realized how impactful it was."

- 'Victims, not participants' -

Wardle, who came across the story while scouting for new documentary ideas and has spent five years on the film, describes the story as "one of most extraordinary" he'd ever heard.

"Right from the off they are very characterful, warm people but there was also a degree of mistrust, which I completely understand," he told AFP.

"When you hear the full depth of their story and what has happened to them it's quite understandable that they'd be a bit wary of people."

The Jewish Board finally agreed to give the surviving brothers access to 100,000 pages of heavily-redacted notes on their evaluations after filming was completed.

But these were far from a formal research paper and included no explanation as to what Neubauer was doing and why, or what his researchers had learned.

Kellman went on running the restaurant for another five years but with Shafran out of the picture and Eddy no longer alive, the venture lost its luster.

He went on to work as an insurance consultant while Shafran became an attorney.

No one has ever apologized to Shafran or Kellman, and the Jewish Board declined to take part in the documentary.

"The Jewish Board does not endorse the Neubauer Study," a spokeswoman told AFP.

She said the organization was "committed to providing identified Neubauer study participants access to their records in a timely and transparent manner."

It is not the kind of language that sits easily with the brothers, however.

"They refer to us as participants," says Kellman. "We weren't participants, we were victims."

Source: AFP

French feminist icon Simone de Beauvoir's "mad passion" for a lover 18 years her junior has been revealed in a letter published for the first time Sunday.

It also shows that she was never sexually satisfied by her partner, the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

The writer, who condemned marriage as an "obscene" institution which enslaved women in her classic book, "The Second Sex", wrote to the film-maker Claude Lanzmann in 1953 saying she would throw herself into his "arms and I will stay there forever. I am your wife forever."

The note is one of 112 love letters written to the only man de Beauvoir ever lived with, which has been bought by Yale University.

It reveals that Sartre -- who had many other lovers and always kept a separate apartment -- was never able to satisfy her physically in the same way.

"I loved him for sure," she wrote to Lanzmann, "but without it being returned -- our bodies were for nothing."

Nor did she find the same bliss in bed with the American novelist Nelson Algren, author of "The Man with the Golden Arm".

"I loved him because of the love he had for me, without any real intimacy and without ever giving to him from inside of myself," she added.

Lanzmann was 26 and Sartre's secretary when the pair met. De Beauvoir was 44.

The golden couple of French intellectual life had a famously open relationship, and enjoyed -- and endured -- a number of similar love triangles. 

- Feud with daughter -

Lanzmann, now 92, who went on to make the acclaimed Holocaust documentary "Shoah", told Le Monde newspaper that the full story of their love was only coming out because of a clash with Beauvoir's adopted daughter.

He accused Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir -- who under French law will hold the copyright to the letters on his death -- of trying to write him out of her mother's life.

Le Bon was de Beauvoir's last lover and companion and remains her literary executor.

Fearing that Le Bon wanted to "purely and simply eliminate me from the existence of Simone de Beauvoir", he sold the letters to Yale so that historians would have access to them.

Lanzmann said he never had any intention to make them public until he realised that Le Bon was going to "publish all de Beauvoir's letters except the correspondence between her and me."

He feared he would die and no one would know about the letters.

The film-maker has previously written of their "mad passion" in his memoir "The Patagonian Hare", but the existence of such a torrid correspondence was not known.

In de Beauvoir's letter from Amsterdam published by Le Monde, she writes, "My darling child, you are my first absolute love, the one that only happens once (in life) or maybe never. 

"I thought I would never say the words that now come naturally to me when I see you -- I adore you. I adore you with all my body and soul... You are my destiny, my eternity, my life."Lanzmann, who edited "Les Temps Modernes", the ground-breaking review de Beauvoir and Sartre founded after World War II, insisted that it wasn't a menage a trois. "We weren't a trio. I had a relationship of my own with Sartre."

It was a complicated one, however.

"Sartre fell totally in love with my sister Evelyne Rey when he saw her acting in (his play) 'No Exit'", the drama with his famous line "Hell is other people".

"Also on stage that night was my first wife Judith Magre," he added.

Le Bon de Beauvoir could not be contacted by AFP. Le Monde said she did not reply to their requests for an interview.

Lanzmann believes she holds his letters to de Beauvoir and that she made sure he was not invited to the unveiling of a plaque on the house where he lived with de Beauvoir for eight years. 

Agnes Poirier, author of "Left Bank", a new book about how "the ideas that shaped the modern world" were formed in the French capital during the tumult of the 1940s, said Lanzmann always maintained de Beauvoir was a "'grande amoureuse', a very passionate lover." 

"After the age of 40 de Beauvoir thought she was not desirable anymore but she had a second youth with him," Poirier said -- and she lived it "like a rebirth".

"They would work together in the mornings, then in the afternoons she would go and write with Sartre."

Just as with Sartre, it was an open relationship "but de Beauvoir took it badly when she discovered that Lanzmann had had an affair he didn't tell her about." 

The letters can now be consulted only by researchers at the Yale University library.

They're wide-eyed, brightly colored, and completely adorable. But can Japan's Olympic mascots bring in the cash, in a country where cuddly icons promote everything from regional tourism to local prisons?

Japan unveiled three sets of prospective mascots for the 2020 games last year. The winning duo will be announced in February, graduating into a landscape packed with cute and quirky characters.

Known locally as yuru-kyara or "laid-back characters", mascots can be major money spinners.

The pot-bellied, red-cheeked bear known as Kumamon -- created in 2010 to promote Japan's southern Kumamoto region -- raked in nearly 1 billion yen last year for local businesses selling branded products.

Mascots capitalise on a local love of all things adorable, including characters that have gained international fame like the perky-eared yellow Pokemon, and the demure Hello Kitty with her signature hair bow.

"Japan has a tradition of creating personalised characters out of nature -- mountains, rivers, animals and plants," said Sadashige Aoki, professor of advertisement theory at Hosei University. "It has a tradition of animism, a belief that every natural thing has a soul."

Now the hope is that the Tokyo Olympics mascots can serve as both ambassadors for Japan's expanding tourism industry, and a way to recoup some of the billions spent on staging the Games.

"It's a once-in-a-lifetime chance for Japan to promote its tradition, culture and how its society looks," said Aoki. "The question is how to make them globally popular, like Mickey Mouse."

In the past, Olympic mascots have been anything but a sure bet in terms of revenue.

Brazil netted $300 million in profits from licensing intellectual property from the 2016 Games, according to the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Merchandise featuring Rio's feline mascot Vinicius was the top-selling item.

But Wenlock and Mandeville, the widely mocked mascots of the 2012 London Games, proved far from Olympic gold. The one-eyed characters were dubbed "bizarre" and "creepy" by some, reportedly sending shares in their manufacturer down by more than a third.

Without the cute factor, mascots are unlikely to have much success, said Munehiko Harada, professor of sports business at Waseda University.

"It's important that mascots are popular among children," he told AFP.

But even if the mascots have mass appeal, they may not be long-term money-makers for Japan because of licensing issues.

"Olympic mascots in the past have been forgotten after the Games were over," said Harada. "But there is a chance they remain alive and remembered as a legacy of the Tokyo Olympics, depending on how they operate the business."

Tokyo 2020 owns the intellectual property rights to the mascots for now, but will have to transfer them to the IOC and the International Paralympics Committee after the Games.

"If I were head of the Tokyo 2020 organizing committee, I would demand the IOC loosen its control over rights," Harada said.

Without those rights, there will be no way to capitalise on the mascots after the Games, including developing back stories that drive ongoing interest.

There has been no indication so far that Japan intends to request rights to the mascots, with a spokeswoman for Tokyo 2020 confirming that it expects to relinquish them after the Games.

But the organizers say they are still expecting a substantial windfall from the mascots and other merchandise and licensing opportunities.

"Of the total revenues, $130 million is forecast to accrue from licensing" of mascots and other Olympic emblems, a Tokyo 2020 official told AFP. "While we have the target number, we aim to increase it."

The money is desperately needed, with officials drawing flak for the massive cost of the Games.

Japan has already slashed the Tokyo 2020 budget by $1.4 billion, but is under pressure to further reduce the $12.6-billion bill.

The country's children will decide which pair of characters will represent the Olympics. They are voting in schools across the country, with the results to be announced on Feb 28.

At one school in northern Tokyo, delegates proudly dropped the names of the winners of each class's vote into a ballot box.

There was little love there for category C: a fox wearing ancient beads and a slightly bemused-looking red raccoon. The pair failed to get a single vote.

Also left behind was category B: a hybrid of a lucky cat and a fox, and a blue lion-dog of the type seen guarding Japanese shrines. They managed just five votes.

The clear winner, with 14 votes, was category A's sleek, manga-inspired duo, with their pointy ears, oversized eyes and bold checkered uniforms.

"As soon as I saw pair A, I made my choice," said 10-year-old Taiki. "They're cool. They're far ahead, I think they will win."

 Paul Bocuse, one of the greatest French chefs of all time, died on Saturday aged 91 after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.

Vienna is marking 100 years since the death of a string of luminaries from its fin-de-siecle glory days with an avalanche of exhibitions of modernist art, design and architecture that still inspire and shock today.

Indigenous leaders from the Amazon who will meet Pope Francis in Peru on Friday will present him with a bow and arrow, a gift rich in symbolism for a vulnerable people clinging to a simple past, facing an uncertain future.

"We are a people who have been stripped of their original lands," summed up Cesar Jojaje Eriney, the 43-year-old head of the Ese Eja tribe.

Adjusting his crown of colorful parrot feathers and slipping on a necklace made from the teeth of jaguars and wild pigs, Cesar says he looks to the pope's visit "with hope" that it can spur the return of indigenous lands by the state.

"It's a unique window. A unique opportunity," he said.

His and other leaders' main concern is rampant illegal gold mining and logging that have devastated their ancestral lands.

His tiny settlement of 230 inhabitants, at Palma Real, is accessible only via a two-hour boat trip into the Amazon rainforest from the dusty river town of Puerto Maldonado, in Peru's wild southeast.

Children run barefoot through flocks of scattering chickens. Modernity has largely been kept at bay despite the gradual appearance of motorbikes, some mobile phones and the ubiquitous soccer jersey.

The 81-year-old head of the Roman Catholic Church will visit remote Puerto Maldonado for a meeting with 3,500 indigenous people from the Amazon basin on Friday.

For the Ese Eja, it's a big day. A total 187 people have signed up for the trip - almost the entire local community -- will be transported up the Amazon tributary Madre de Dios river on boats chartered by the Catholic Church.

- 'Kind old man' -

Eight boats were chartered for Palma Real and whole families settled in, loaded with luggage, food and water for the three days their stay is to last. Armed with a megaphone, Cesar shouted out instructions to those boarding the vessels.

But who is the pope for them? "They know he is the great bishop of all," said Martin Ramirez, sent by Catholic charity Caritas to oversee the transfer.

However, he said the Church had to send a delegation "to explain who the pope is and why this meeting is taking place."

"We call him Papachi, the kind daddy, the little old man," says Cesar. Other indigenous neighbors in the region refer to Francis as "Apaktone" - the old man.

On Friday, Cesar said he wants to give the pope a message: "Thank you for saving our lives" -- remembering that the Catholic Church protected the community in a volatile period of the 1940s when rubber prices soared and many indigenous people were killed.

"We were 25-30,000 people, today there are barely 600 of us left," he said, counting the two other Ese Eja Tribes in the area.

A second message is even starker: "That he saves our lives a second time, so that we won't disappear altogether," he said, denouncing the Peruvian state for appropriating more and more tribal lands.

- Gold panning threat -

Though the Ese Eja live a subsistence existence mainly through cultivating chestnuts, their lands sit atop vast reserves of gold, gas and oil that has made them irresistable to fortune hunters.

Gold panning is already a scourge in the area, creating huge craters of mud in the forest and spilling mercury, used to extract gold, into the water system.

"Yesterday they killed us by shooting at us, today they want to exterminate us by starving us," lamented Cesar, accusing the government of ceding to commercial interests drawn by Peru's gold-rush.

In addition to crafts made by local women, the community will offer Francis the gift of a bow and arrow "so he can defend us."

Nearby, Jacinto Savera Chatawa, a 70-year-old father of 12 children, was unmoved by all the excitement generated ahead of Francis' visit.

Evangelizers have long imposed their own rules on a people who lived differently to them, he said.

"We were civilized, and the natives had the right to three or four wives, but the priest forbade it," he said, a small black monkey lounging on his knee.

"Our God, it's Edosikiana," and not the Catholic god, said Jacinto, who wont' be going to Puerto Maldonado to see the pope on Friday.

"If it would be a God who came from the sky with wings that were two meters long, then maybe," he said, laughing with his family.

"But this guy's just a human."

Source: AFP

In a gesture of abiding friendship, or perhaps a subtle act of diplomatic trolling, French President Emmanuel Macron will offer to loan Britain the famed Bayeux Tapestry, depicting the French conquest of England, during his visit to the UK on Thursday.

The 40-year-old French leader likes to accompany his diplomacy with symbolic moves and gifts as he sets about trying to restore France's international prestige.

On a trip to Beijing, he offered the Chinese president a French stallion, while Russian leader Vladimir Putin was given a tour around an exhibition at the Versailles Palace last year that marked 300 years of Franco-Russian friendship.

In Britain on Thursday, Macron will offer to transport the 70-metre-long (230-foot) Bayeux Tapestry to Britain for the first time, in an unprecedented and technically difficult journey for the priceless thousand-year-old artwork.

"It will not be before 2020 because it's an extremely fragile cultural treasure which will be subject to major restoration work before being transported anywhere," an official in Macron's office said Wednesday.

The tapestry, which dates from around 1077, depicts the famed Battle of Hastings when William the Conqueror from France defeated English forces in southern England.

The story of the 1066 military defeat, in which the English King Harold famously died after taking a French arrow in the eye, is still taught to British school children and is a founding moment in the long and bloody history of Anglo-French rivalry.

"It is very significant that the Bayeux Tapestry is going to be coming to the UK and that people are going to be able to see this," British Prime Minister Theresa May said Wednesday.

- Gallic joke? -

Many historians and politicians on Monday welcomed the gesture as a friendly move that underlined the two countries' shared history and intermingled blood at a time when Britain is leaving the European Union.

"It's an absolutely fantastic opportunity for British people from around the country to come, I hope to the British Museum, and see it in all its glory," said Tom Tugendhat, chairman of a foreign affairs committee at the British parliament.

"This is a real demonstration on how diplomacy is done," he told BBC radio.

But other commentators wondered exactly what Macron was trying to say by focusing on an inglorious moment in British military history.

The Times newspaper published a cartoon showing Macron in Middle Ages military garb skewering British Prime Minister Theresa May: "Emmanuel The Conqueror: It's One In The Eye for Theresa Regina."

Writing on Twitter, broadcast journalist Robert Peston commented that "lending the UK a magnificent depiction of the last time this country was invaded and subjugated is a wonderful Gallic joke by Emmanuel Macron."

Jockeying over who would display the work was already underway, with the British Museum's director Hartwig Fischer saying he would be "delighted" to show the work.

Lawmakers representing the seaside town of Hastings, as well as the village of Battle, where the historic clash took place, are also hoping for the honour.

"I'm sure we will be looking very carefully to ensure the maximum number of people can take benefit from seeing this tapestry," May said.

- Argument over origins -

The loan might also reopen an unsettled argument about the creators of the tapestry, which has rarely moved from its home in a museum in Bayeux in France.

It was displayed in Paris in 1804 and again briefly at the Louvre Museum in 1945.

"There is a reasonable case that it could have been made in Canterbury" in southern England, British historian David Musgrove, who authored a book on the subject, told the BBC.

Other theories are that it was made in Bayeux itself or perhaps in an abbey in the Loire region of central France.

French historian Pierre Bouet said the tapestry should be seen by Britons as evidence of the role of France in the country's history.

The tapestry "is a reminder of the military exploit of the founder of the current royal dynasty," Bouet told AFP. "Even if he doesn't descend directly from him, Prince Charles is aware that he has the blood of William the Conqueror in his veins."

The British royal family still has the French words "Dieu Et Mon Droit" (God and my Right) on its coat of arms.

Macron will hold talks with May at Sandhurst, a British military academy outside London, on Thursday.

Source: AFP

Germany loaned Lithuania its long-lost declaration of independence on Wednesday as the Baltic nation prepares to mark one hundred years since it restored statehood after World War I.

The 1918 document, which was unearthed in a Berlin archive last year by a Lithuanian professor, will stay in the country for five years under a bilateral agreement.

"I want to thank our friend Germany which managed to preserve the document of great importance for us during turbulent times," Lithuania's President Dalia Grybauskaite said as she received the document during a ceremony in capital Vilnius.

"After a 100 years the Act of #Lithuania's Independence is finally back home!," she added in a tweet.

The arrival of the document, which has been called the country's "birth certificate", launches year-long festivities including an Independence Day celebration on February 16 when EU leaders will travel to Vilnius to mark the 100th anniversary of the declaration.

Lithuania's Catholic Church has also given its faithful a special gift by allowing them to eat meat on the national holiday, which falls on a Friday during Lent when Christians must observe a period of fasting.

Lithuania ruled over one of medieval Europe's largest military empires, encompassing large territories of present-day Belarus, Ukraine, Poland and Russia, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

But by the late 1700s, the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were gradually partitioned between neighbouring empires.

Russia ruled Lithuanian territories until the empire's collapse during World War I.

Historians say that up to five copies of independence declarations could have been signed on February 16, 1918, when Lithuania was under German occupation, but all traces of other copies vanished.

During World War II, the Soviet Union occupied and annexed Lithuania, which became the first Soviet republic to declare independence in 1990.

The nation of 2.8 million joined EU and NATO in 2004. Lithuania has repeatedly warned its Western allies of Russia's imperial ambitions, notably after Moscow annexed Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in 2014.

source: AFP

The rugged men of northern Afghanistan raise their buzkashi horses to be warrior princes, ready for the savagery of polo with a headless carcass.

Mounts, like their riders, must be brave, strong and fast to compete in the traditional sport of buzkashi , which means “dragging the goat” in Persian.
The game involves ripping a 50-kilogramme carcass from the fray of horses and dropping it in the “circle of justice” traced on the ground in lime - after doing a lap of the field at a full gallop.

“Only one horse in a hundred stands a chance in buzkashi ,” says Haji Mohammad Sharif Salahi, the president of the buzkashi federation in Balkh province, whose family has owned horses for 100 years. “The stallions of General Dostum cost up to $70,000. Some of Marshal Fahim’s reach $100,000,” he says, referring to the Uzbek warlord living in exile in Turkey and the late Afghan vice president Mohammad Qasim Fahim.

“Everything depends on their strength and their resilience,” says Salahi, wearing a tawny karakul hat, as he rubs a ruby-ringed hand on the neck of an enormous chestnut measuring more than 18 hands (1.85 metres).

“They are trained to respect and behave calmly, but if you let go, this one eats the others.” Balkh has more than 150 buzkashi horse owners, some with more than 400 steeds. Dedicated events draw 500 horses but that figure can go up to 2,000 if it is a wedding celebration.

While buzkashi is the pride of the north, the game also has a strong following in Kabul, with weekly matches during the season drawing hundreds of spectators.

Whether their value is real or fantasy, the steep price for a buzkashi horse translates into respect for the owner because it symbolises wealth and power.

“All rich men must have a stable and riders,” says Haji Rais Moqim, as he sits astride a massive horse measuring 19 hands (1.90 metres).

The businessman, who is based in the provincial capital Mazar-i-Sharif and likes to listen to popular buzkashi tunes in his 4X4 vehicle, has 22 horses like his father before him.

At dawn he rides with his team of “sais” - grooms - to exercise the steeds, stirring up clouds of dust in the morning light.

“A horse is a member of the family. It is raised like a child at school. We care for it like a human,” the 52-year-old says.

Every horse has its own trainer who works with them daily and forms an intimate bond with them.

“Our horses come from Uzbekistan. It takes years to train them. They are ready around the age of seven and compete for 20 years or more,” says Mohammad Mousa, who has worked as a groom for Rais Moqim for 18 years. His boss has warned Mousa that he will let him go only when the stallion he is in charge of dies.

As the season approaches - starting in November or December and finishing at the end of March - the horses are forced to adopt a strict diet. After being rested and fattened to reach their maximum weight over the summer, the horses are made to “qantar”, or fast, so they lose fat and regain their fighting fitness.

In the autumn, two months before the start of the season, the grooms begin exercising their steeds for up to four hours at a time to strengthen their muscles, says Amir Khan, a groom for Salahi.

“After coming back I leave them for an hour on an empty stomach and then I serve them seven kilogrammes of barley, 10 beaten eggs with a glass of sesame oil and bananas and then the same again in the evening. We feed them well, they need energy for the buzkashi .”

The horses are brushed daily and showered every other day.

“Every breeder has his recipes and superstitions,” says French horseman Louis Meunier, who rode for a buzkashi team in Kabul from 2007 to 2009 while working for an NGO in the Afghan capital.

“Beliefs vary from one valley to another: here the chestnut is considered the most intelligent, there the black for being the fastest,” says Meunier from Jordan where he now lives. But he is dismayed at the new taste for huge horses , describing them as “beasts of war”.

He warns: The horse (is) becoming an object of speculation, a political tool to show strength.” Khan agrees. “These horses are demons, we know them, we are constantly in danger,” he adds.

But 82-year-old Habibullah, a Kabul buzkashi rider wearing a sheepskin hat, sticks to his little grey nag and dismisses the beliefs about the ideal steed. He explains: “I do not care whether it’s black or white, a horse must first have courage.”

source: AFP

 Japan's sewerage industry has found a way to clean up its dirty and smelly image: elaborately designed and colourful manhole covers with 12,000 local varieties nationwide -- including, of course, a Hello Kitty design.

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Sunday visited a memorial to a Japanese diplomat who saved 6,000 European Jews from the Holocaust by issuing visas from war-torn Lithuania, in defiance of Tokyo.

Abe visited the two-storey building, now a museum, that housed the consulate where Chiune Sugihara worked in the Baltic state's second city Kaunas.

"The courageous humanitarian act of Mr Sugihara is highly appreciated by the whole world," Abe said, adding that the diplomat worked with "conviction and passion".

"I am really very proud of him as a Japanese."

Ahead of the visit on Saturday, he told reporters Sugihara's memory still provides guidance in a world "where rule of law and international order are being challenged in various forms".

The diplomat, who died in 1986 aged 86, is thought to have been among around 15 who issued visas for European Jews during World War II.

He is often called "Japan's Schindler" -- a reference to German industrialist Oskar Schindler who is credited with saving 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

"Sugihara needed a lot of courage to do what he has done, especially when we know that it was dangerous for him to defy the government's orders," the head of Lithuania's Jewish community, Faina Kukliansky, told AFP.

Lithuania's Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius described the visit as "emotional".

- 18-hour days -

Sugihara was appointed vice-consul in October 1939, one month after German and allied Soviet forces attacked and carved up neighbouring Poland.

Japan saw still-independent and neutral Lithuania, which harboured thousands of Polish refugees, as a perfect location for the polyglot Sugihara to collect intelligence about military developments in the region.

But when Moscow invaded the country crowds of Jewish refugees, mostly from occupied Poland, started lining up at the Japanese consulate seeking visas to flee.

Sugihara wasted no time in issuing visas, sometimes working 18 hours a day and evading strict instructions issued by Tokyo.

With visas in hand, Jews took a gruelling two-week railway trip across Russia to Vladivostok in the far east and then travelled by boat to Japan.

Many of them were later sent to the Shanghai Ghetto and stayed there until the end of the war.

Sugihara received Israel's "Righteous Among the Nations" title honouring people who saved Jews during the Holocaust in 1984.

Abe, who has been criticised for appearing to minimise Japan's own atrocities during the war, is on a six-day trip in the Baltics which will also take in Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania.

source: AFP

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free": The words on the Statue of Liberty have beckoned comers to the "Nation of Immigrants" for more than a century.

But not with President Donald Trump at the gate.

Unlike any US leader in decades, Trump has attacked immigration, slashed legal arrivals, called to expel millions of non-citizens, and invited only wealthy and educated foreigners -- with an evident preference for white Europeans.

On Thursday, Trump allegedly demanded to know why the US accepted people from "shithole" places like Haiti and Africa, and suggested the country should instead draw immigrants from Norway.

It's a sharp turn for a country that defines itself by its open door and its "melting pot" culture.

- Immigrants were 'threats' -

But historians say US history is pockmarked by immigration backlashes and a constant ambivalence by well-established Americans over whether they want to continue being an immigrant country.

"When you look at the whole history of the United States, one of the most striking aspects of it is the ways in which the debate over immigration has been racialized," said Julie Greene, a professor of history at the University of Maryland.

In 1790 the Naturalization Act aimed to keep blacks from becoming citizens; the Alien Act of 1798 targeted French; The Page Act of 1875 prohibited Asian labor migrants; and in 1924 a sweeping new immigration act took aim at southern and eastern Europeans, largely comprised of Catholics and Jews.

"There was tremendous anti-immigration sentiment throughout the 19th century. At different points in American history, different types of immigrants were considered threats to the United States," said Allan Lichtman, a political historian and professor at American University.

- Massive wave spurred backlash -

Before Trump, Warren Harding made anti-immigration the main plank in his successful 1920 presidential campaign.

Harding came to power after a 40-year boom in which about 22 million immigrants poured into the country, and Americans were worried that the latest wave of southern and eastern Europeans -- largely Jews and Catholics -- would introduce inferior "races" into the country and spearhead Bolshevism.

"Similar to Trump, he portrayed himself as an America-first president," Lichtman said.

The country wrestled with smaller waves over the subsequent decades.

During the depression of the 1930s, there was a backlash against the influx of Mexicans that the 1924 law had given rise to. After World War II came a movement to stem the arrival of refugees.

In 1965 the quota system which favored northern Europeans was eliminated. Authorities sought to encourage the arrival of people with skills and educations and also to allow more family reunification -- what Trump has labeled "chain migration".

As a result, legal immigration soared to one million people a year, a large percentage of them Asian, while illegal immigration from Mexico leapt.

In 1986 President Ronald Reagan offered amnesty to 3.2 million illegal immigrants, but that failed to stem illegal border crossers.

Four years later, President George HW Bush took aim at the lopsided arrivals from Asia with the Green Card lottery, which aimed at diversifying arrivals across the globe.

- Economic upheaval, terror attacks -

But by the 2000s anti-immigration sentiment arose anew. It had multiple roots.

The September 11, 2001 and subsequent attacks that have focused fears on Muslims, whose presence surged with the lottery system, was one.

Another was the deep change in the structure of the economy, which disrupted communities around the country.

A third was demographic change that left white people a minority in an increasing number of communities around the country.

"Very rapid growth in immigration does sometimes lead to pushback," said Andrew Selee, president of the Migration Policy Institute.

"We are at a point where America's becoming a more diverse society in ways that many Americans are not accustomed to."

With illegal immigrants reaching 12 million, mostly from Mexico and Central America, both presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama tried to stem the flow while attempting to give many a legal path to citizenship.

Yet neither, point out historians, made immigration a political issue like Trump did to win election in 2016.

 A Basquiat masterpiece, bought by a Japanese billionaire for a record $110.5 million, will make its museum debut this month, going on display in the artist's home borough of Brooklyn.

Jean-Michel Basquiat's 1982 "Untitled" has been virtually unseen in public and never previously been exhibited in a museum. It depicts a skull-like head in oil-stick, acrylic and spray paint, and was bought at Sotheby's last May by Yusaku Maezawa.

The $110.5 million price tag set a new auction record for Basquiat and a record for the work of any US artist at auction.

"My wish to share this masterpiece with as many people as possible begins in Basquiat's home town of Brooklyn," Maezawa wrote on his Instagram account Thursday.

Basquiat was born in Brooklyn to Haitian and Puerto Rican parents. He died 30 years ago, in 1988, of an overdose aged just 27 after a fleeting eight-year career.

He enjoys a stratospheric following, his work snapped up by celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Jay-Z, but experts say his legacy has been largely confined to popular culture while museums have been accused of downplaying his stature.

The subject of much of Basquiat's work, ordeals endured by blacks in America, has found renewed resonance in the wake of nationwide US protests since 2014 about the shootings of unarmed black men by police.

The Brooklyn Museum said "Untitled" would be on view from January 26 to March 11. It will then go on a world tour, before being housed eventually in a museum that Maezawa is building in his home town of Chiba, Japan, the museum added.

"I am thrilled to be sending Basquiat's masterpiece home to Brooklyn," said the 42-year-old Japanese entrepreneur in a statement released by the museum.

"It is my hope that through the exhibition and extensive programming accompanying it, the young people of the borough will be inspired by their local hero, just as he has inspired so many of us around the world."

An aspiring rock star as a teen, Maezawa founded Start Today in 1998, which operates Japan's largest online fashion mall, ZOZOTOWN. Today, he is the 14th richest person in Japan with a fortune of $3 billion, according to Forbes.

Leonardo da Vinci's reputed "Salvator Mundi" sold for $450.3 million at Christie's last November, becoming the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction.

source: AFP

The ruins of two buildings used to supervise mines in ancient Egypt more than 4,400 years ago have been discovered in the south, the antiquities ministry said on Thursday.

The find was made by a US-Egyptian mission in the Tal Edfu area north of the city of Aswan.

One building was from the era of the pharaoh Djedkare Isesi of the fifth dynasty which ruled Egypt more than 4,400 years ago, the ministry said.

The other was constructed during the sixth dynasty which ruled between 2,323 BC and 2,135 BC.

"The complex consists of two massive buildings containing many rooms and it is yet to be fully examined," the antiquities ministry's Ayman Ashmawy told AFP.

"These buildings were used as administrative buildings for the mining teams which would head to the eastern desert to search for gold, copper and precious stones."

The mission found a large number of seals "used to seal everything that would enter and leave storage", in addition to correspondence between officials and the pharaoh, he said.

According to historians, Djedkare Isesi's era was known for its expeditions to extract raw materials, especially copper, from south Sinai.

Separately near Aswan, an Egyptian team found a limestone funerary plate 40 centimetres (nearly 16 inches) tall and 27 centimetres (10.5 inches) wide, Ashmawy said.

It was found in the temple of Kom Ombo where a 25-centimetre-tall sandstone statue of a person squatting and two statues of the god Horus were also discovered.

Source: AFP