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Czech sculptor creates 3D-printed floating house

Innovations

Ceské Budejovice, Czech Republic |A Czech sculptor has teamed up with a group of architects to create a 3D-printed house prototype that could become a holiday home for the future.

The house is being printed from special concrete in the southern Czech city of Ceske Budejovice and is planned to float on the Vltava river in Prague in August.

"I dare say it's the first-ever floating 3D-printed building in the world," sculptor Michal Trpak, the mastermind behind the project, told AFP.

The design of the house, which can be printed in two days, was inspired by a single-celled creature known as a protozoa, he says.

As an added attraction, Trpak plans to turn the abode into a floating garden, with plants covering its roof and outside walls.

The simple 43-square metre (51.4 square yards) floor plan includes a living room with kitchen, a bedroom and bathroom.

"3D houses will adapt to the people or the countryside. The robot doesn't care about the shape of the curve," Trpak said to the hum of a mechanic hand with a nozzle patiently piling up layer after layer of concrete strips.

"The house is intended as a leisure-time house to stand in the countryside, ideally for a couple or a small family," added Trpak, who drew inspiration from 3D-printed housing projects in the Netherlands.

- 'Trial and error' -

To finance the project, dubbed the "Protozoan", its creators have teamed up with a Czech building society.

"This one is pretty expensive because it's a prototype and we needed many tests.... But the second generation should cost around three million (Czech) crowns (112,600 euros; $127,500) and the third generation may cost about half of that amount," Trpak said.

When the robot is done, the concrete bedroom and bathroom modules will be attached to a wooden core with large windows and completed with a wooden roof.

The house will then be transported to Prague, installed on a pontoon and displayed on the Vltava river in Prague's broader centre for two months.

"We didn't have a plot of land to place it on, and anyway, to do that, you need a building permit and that takes up to two years" to secure, said Trpak.

"But if you float it on a river, you only need consent from the navigation body, which is much faster."

Trpak said the construction had not been trouble-free as the concrete is sensitive to temperature changes.

"When it's very warm it hardens faster, when it's cold it hardens more slowly so now we're adding warm water from a boiler," he added as the weather changed for the worse.

"We keep researching and developing. It's a process of trial and error."

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Aiming big: Ivory Coast's 'Dallas' pitches for African following

Lifestyle

Abidjan, Ivory Coast | The stakes are big, and so are the egos.

Two clans, the Desvas and the Ahiteys, are fighting it out for control of the local cocoa industry... and boardroom thuggery, love, betrayal and guns are the tools of their trade.

"Cacao", an Ivorian TV soap that began airing on Monday, has ambitions as outsized as the shoulder pads that Joan Collins wore in "Dallas," the 1980s drama to which it is being likened.

In one of the most lavish investments in African programme-making, French producers Canal Plus have signed up a roster of stars and splashed out on big locations, convinced of a potential audience across the continent and beyond.

Whereas the Ewing oil family feuded over black gold in Texas, the rivals in this tale are in the imaginary town of Caodji, fighting over brown gold -- cacao, the raw material of cocoa, of which Ivory Coast is the world's biggest exporter.

"Two families are engaged in a merciless fight for control of the market and the farmers," says Ivorian-French director Alex Ogou, 40, who shot to prominence with a hit series, "Invisible", about Ivory Coast's street children.

The idea for the series comes from Ivorian producer Yolande Bogui, whose father once worked in the cacao industry -- a business as flinty and competitive as chocolate is sweet and pleasurable.

The show -- which once carried the punchy working title "Guns and Chocolate" -- hit the screens after 18 months in production that involved a thousand people.

Canal Plus on Monday broadcast the first two episodes for free, hoping to hook subscribers for the following 10, to be aired every Monday.

The company told AFP it did not have the ratings for the first episode -- but reaction on social media suggested it could have a hit on its hands.

"We've only had two episodes... and it's already the best Ivorian series ever," tweeted one fan, Inzho MotO-MotO.

- Big budget -

Filming took eight months, using 90 studio sets and outside locations ranging from Abidjan, Ivory Coast's economic hub, to the port of San Pedro and the deep bush, the heart of Ivory Coast's "Cacao Belt".

The 70-strong cast includes Ivorian stars Evelyne Ily, Naky Sy Savane, Serge Abessolo and former top model Fate Toure.

The plum role of the evil Jean Ahitey -- already a buzz on Twitter -- is being played by Fargass Assande, who gained a wide following in Africa for the 2015 "L'Oeil du Cyclone" (The Eye of the Storm) by Burkina Faso's Sekou Traore.

Ahitey is a study in ruthlessness whose incongruous sayings ("Whoever accepts birds in his mango tree should not fear the sound of their wings") seem fast-tracked to become memes.

The exceptional budget -- the figures are secret -- was put to good use, Ogou said.

The writers "spent time in the places where it all happens, so that they could get a feel for it," he added.

The plotlines touch on trigger-sensitive issues -- the destruction of a sacred wood, deforestation generally, violence by middle-men who refuse to pay peasants the minimum price set by the state, corruption, weaselly traders...

- Universal themes -

One thing he learned, Ogou said, was that "wealth never trickles down to the farmers -- unscrupulous people exploit weakness or isolation in the bush."

"There are sharks in this business but the themes are the same that you see elsewhere, wherever natural resources attract predators," he said.

Such universality -- and family tensions and loyalties familiar to everyone -- should give "Cacao" a broad appeal, he hoped.

"A film is just a pretext for telling a story. It could be in Africa, in Sweden, at the North Pole or the South Pole -- at the end of the day, you are talking about human beings, feelings, emotions, ambitions, betrayal."

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The next stage: UK theatres adapt to social distancing

Lifestyle

London, United Kingdom |London's West End has traditionally drawn people from all over the world to see its shows but theatres have been forced to reinvent themselves because of the coronavirus outbreak.

Fifteen million tickets are sold each year for performances including top attractions such as "The Phantom of the Opera", "Les Miserables" and Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap", a play that has been performed since 1952.

But the pandemic brought the curtain down on venues in March, leaving theatres facing an uncertain future where continued social distancing measures threaten their existence.

Louis Hartshorn and Brian Hook, co-founders of Hartshorn-Hook Productions, are among the first to adapt to the new reality, announcing the reopening of an immersive adaptation of "The Great Gatsby" to open in October.

"The show will be reimagined as a masquerade ball," Hook told AFP.

Spectators are invited to wear masks, which they can integrate into their disguise, and gloves if they wish.

The audience will also be reduced to 90, down from 240 previously, and the schedule has been changed to allow for thorough clean-ups.

The good news is that tickets are "selling and people want to come back", added Hook.

But Hartshorn admitted that "we have to do extremely well in order to break even because the numbers are against us".

- Tourist trouble -

Another immediate challenge is the lack of tourists, with hotels, restaurants and museums closed until at least early July.

The introduction on June 8 of a 14-day quarantine for most travellers arriving in the country has also tempered hopes of a swift recovery.

"Around a third of attendees in London theatres are overseas tourists... and for the moment of course there is very little prospect of having overseas visitors," Julian Bird, head of the UK Theatre lobby group, told a recent parliamentary committee.

Up to 70 percent of theatres could go bankrupt by the end of the year, he warned.

- Immersive experiences -

The current crisis has left a £3 billion ($3.7 billion, 3.3 billion euro) hole in theatre revenues this year, a fall of more than 60 percent, according to a study by Oxford Economics for the Creative Industries Federation.

This estimate does not take into account the possible reluctance of the public to return when allowed, with the federation warning of 200,000 job cuts without government intervention.

To survive, some theatres are offering alternative products.

At London's Old Vic Theatre, actors Claire Foy and Matt Smith, stars of the hit TV series "The Crown", will perform the play "Lungs" without an audience, while keeping their distance.

Each performance will be filmed and broadcast live to the 1,000 people who purchased tickets at the usual prices of between £10 and £65, although all will enjoy the same view.

It's a bold gamble when many other theatres, such as the National Theatre in London, have posted free online performances of plays filmed before the pandemic.

Shows that involve audience participation could be the big winners, according to Brian Hook.

"We were already on a boom for immersive theatre before this crisis... I think now might be a very positive time for that," he said.

One Night Records will launch one such project in early October, taking ticket-holders on a journey through musical genres from the 1920s to the 1950s in a secret location called "Lockdown Town".

"Because the venue is so large and because immersive has this special gift -- which is territory, you know, space. That's why we're able to do it," One Night Records general manager Tim Wilson told AFP.

But he, too, has had to adapt, selling tickets in groups of four and transforming the free stroll into a linear route.

- Performance anxiety -

In the traditional world of theatre, social distancing measures are a real headache.

With people having to remain two metres (six feet) apart, under current rules, the Royal Shakespeare Company said it can only accommodate 20 percent of its usual audience.

"With the furlough scheme changing in nature over the coming months and then coming to an end, that's a moment of extreme vulnerability," Catherine Mallyon, executive director of the Stratford-upon-Avon based company told AFP.

"And how would we do the performances with social distancing? 'Romeo and Juliet' two metres apart, it's quite hard to imagine," she said.

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Flying bubble makers could save world from starvation

Innovations

That's according to a study published in iScience by a Japanese scientist who successfully demonstrated that soap bubbles can be used to pollinate fruit-bearing plants -- seen as vital to keeping the world fed in the coming decades in the face of vanishing bee populations.

Eijiro Miyako, an associate professor at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in Nomi, told AFP he had been working on robotic pollinators for years, but was disheartened when the toy drones he used smashed into flowers, destroying them.

"It was too sad," he said.

The whimsical idea of trying bubbles came to Miyako when he was playing with his son in a park close to their home.

The scientist was inspired when one of the bubbles harmlessly burst on his three-year-old's face.

Miyako and co-author Xi Yang first used microscopes to confirm that soap bubbles could carry pollen grains.

Next, they tested five solutions available in shops, finding one called lauramidopropyl betaine -- used in cosmetic products to boost foam formation -- resulted in better growth of the tube that develops from pollen grains after they are deposited on flowers.

They also added calcium to support the germination process and found the optimum pH balance.

- Drones target flowers -

The pair loaded their solution into a bubble gun and released pollen-bearing bubbles into a pear orchard -- at a rate of about 2,000 grains per bubble -- finding that 95 percent of the targeted flowers bore fruit.

"It sounds somewhat like fantasy, but the... soap bubble allows effective pollination and assures that the quality of fruits is the same as with conventional hand pollination," said Miyako.

Hand pollination is a much more labor intensive process.

Finally, the researchers took their experiment to the skies -- loading a bubble gun onto a small drone programmed to fly on a predetermined route.

Since flowers were no longer in bloom, they targeted a group of fake lilies.

When flown from a height of two meters and at a velocity of two meters per second, the device hit the plastic plants at a 90 percent success rate.

Miyako said he was in talks with a company for future commercialization but more work was needed to improve the robot's precision, and to potentially add autonomous flower targeting.

The study is thought to be the first exploring the properties of soap bubbles as pollen carriers, and to then link the concept to autonomous drones.

The authors wrote they hoped it sparked a renewed interest in artificial pollination to address "the decline in pollinator insects, the heavy labor involved in artificial pollination, and the soaring costs of pollen grains."

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Must be glove: the Japan man obsessed with lost gloves

Weird World

Tokyo, Japan | Koji Ishii can't help himself: whenever he sees a lost glove on the streets of his hometown Tokyo, he just has to stop and document it.

For more than 15 years, the 39-year-old has photographed and meticulously recorded details about thousands of lone gloves on the streets of the Japanese capital and beyond.

It's a passion, but also, he says, something like a "curse."

"I live with the constant fear that there might be a glove right around the corner. I can only describe it as a curse," he told AFP.

He's not alone. Around the world a thriving subculture has popped up documenting lost gloves, with many social media accounts dedicated to them -- such as Instagram's Long Lost Gloves and Lost Glove Sightings.

Hollywood star Tom Hanks has delighted fans with his shots of lone accessories, recently even sharing an image of a sole hospital glove when announcing he'd contracted COVID-19.

However Ishii is the elder statesmen of lost glove photography.

His obsession began back in 2004 when he saw a yellow workman's glove dropped near his home and decided to take a photograph with his new flip-phone.

"I felt a shock like being struck by lightning," he said of the experience.

In the years since, he has photographed and recorded information about over 5,000 gloves -- everything from children's mittens to delicate lady's lace numbers.

He finds them trampled on streets, stuck in drains, hanging off traffic cones or even washed up on the beach.

Ishii, who works at a restaurant, doesn't touch the gloves. He simply photographs each one and records details about its location.

- 'Dynamic phenomena' -

The appeal, he says, lies in imagining how the glove got there and who once wore it.

"I imagine people who were here, somebody who used it for work or some other person who was very kind and picked it up from the ground," he said.

"They are no longer here but certainly they were weeks ago or months ago. This is what I enjoy."

He has developed a sort of categorisation matrix, determining first what kind of glove it is -- a disposable medical glove? a children's mitten? -- then whether it is still where it was dropped or has been moved to a prominent spot by a kind bystander, and then describing the type of location.

On a recent expedition, he found a grey glove on the ground by a crosswalk.

"I'd say this is a light-duty/neglected/crossing type," he said as he crouched down to take a good look.

Closer inspection revealed it to be a mesh fabric ladies' glove, leading Ishii to extrapolate it was worn by a woman who removed it at the crossing to check her smartphone while she waited and didn't notice she had dropped it.

The coronavirus pandemic has led to many people wearing gloves outdoors for safety -- a bonanza for Ishii.

"In summer 2020, we may see as many lone gloves as in winter," he said.

As Ishii moved to another location, he pointed at a leather glove on a roadside fence.

"This is a fashion-warm/picked-up/fence type I found last week," he said.

When he saw it last week, he realised he had actually seen the same glove two months earlier -- at that time tucked into a binding on a pole several metres away.

"Lone gloves are a constantly changing, dynamic phenomena," he said, adding he often visits the same place multiple times to observe any changes, and once recorded the same glove in at least eight different but adjacent locations.

- 'Acts of kindness' -

After three weeks, it finally disappeared.

"Then I realised that not recording the location of a glove that has now gone means that I have missed an important piece," he said.

Since then he has returned to around 100 now-gloveless locations, often noticing changing scenery including demolished buildings or taller grass.

Ishii's fascination means he sometimes finds himself getting off a bus before his stop because he has spotted a glove.

But the interruptions are often a chance to see a glimpse of kindness in a massive metropolis whose residents are sometimes regarded as cold or distant, he said.

"There are people who cannot simply pass by somebody's tiny misfortune or tragedy, they cannot help picking it up," Ishii said.

"Even in Tokyo, even in this mega-city, we still have lots of such small acts of kindness."

Ishii's wife and daughter tolerate his obsession and sometimes share locations of gloves they have seen, but he is convinced there must be other like-minded people out there.

"There must be people around the world who have feelings for something that has parted with the other half," he said.

"I want to have a get-together with these people someday, I'd call it G7 or Glove Seven."

mis/sah/ric

Vera Lynn: the 'Forces' Sweetheart' of WWII Britain

The World

The singer, who died on Thursday aged 103, achieved superstar status as "the forces' sweetheart", boosting troop morale with a string of romantic and patriotic ballads.

From the battlefields of France, the Netherlands, Italy and North Africa to the Far East, whenever soldiers gathered around a radio set or gramophone, the smooth vocal tones of Vera Lynn were sure to be heard.

It is impossible to gauge whether the outcome of the war was swayed by songs like "There'll Always Be an England", "We'll Meet Again", "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover" and "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square".

But for countless men in uniform, the lyrics and the slim, wholesome young blonde woman who sang them seemed to offer a vision of what they were fighting for.

To modern ears, the words might sound corny but at a time when Britain stood proudly against the Nazis, their patriotic appeal was irresistible.

- Symbol of Britishness -

Vera Lynn epitomised an archetypical, essentially decent Britishness, practical and fair-minded -- notions which shone through the songs she sang.

Even her version of the German soldiers' favourite song, "Lili Marlene," managed to sound like a patriotic lament, a far cry from the darker sexual undercurrents implicit in the versions by Marlene Dietrich and Lale Andersen -- ironically both of them anti-Nazis who became the German forces' sweethearts.

Vera Lynn's most famous song remains "We'll Meet Again", recorded in 1939.

Its appeal to love and stoicism -- "Keep smiling through/Just like you always do/ Till the blue skies/Drive the black clouds far away" -- made it the perfect war-time anthem.

It contributed enormously to her popularity, even though the song itself came to be much parodied and derided in the post-war years.

But it found favour again this year when Queen Elizabeth II, in a rare public address to the nation, urged Britons to remain strong during the coronavirus lockdown.

"We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again," the monarch said.

- Child star -

Vera Lynn was born in London's East End on March 20, 1917 as Vera Margaret Welch.

She began singing in local clubs at age seven and joined a child dance troupe, Madame Harris' Kracker Cabaret Kids, at 11.

By 15, she was a teenage sensation as a vocalist with the Howard Baker Orchestra.

She adopted her grandmother's maiden name Lynn as her stage name, making her first radio broadcast in 1935 with the Joe Loss Orchestra.

She worked with another of the great names of the pre-war period, Ambrose, whose clarinettist and tenor sax player, Harry Lewis, she was to marry.

The couple had one child, a daughter.

In war-time, Vera Lynn came into her own, hosting a BBC radio programme, "Sincerely Yours", appearing in a forces stage revue, and making three films.

She also toured Burma -- today's Myanmar and the site of major battles -- in 1944.

Lynn gave up singing after the war but was persuaded out of retirement in 1947 and began a whole new international career, with appearances in the United States in 1948.

She became the first British artiste to have a US number one with "Auf Wiedersehen, Sweetheart", her most successful record, in 1952.

- Retirement and nostalgia -

Vera Lynn's career foundered in the rock and roll era and she cut back on public appearances but she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1976.

For decades, she was a beloved figure at celebrations to mark the anniversaries of the June 6, 1944, D-Day landings in France or VE Day, the end of the war in Europe on May 8, 1945.

She made her last known public performance in 1995, singing outside Buckingham Palace at the golden jubilee celebrations for VE Day, but remained a vocal champion of military veterans.

In 2009, at the age of 92, she became the oldest living artist to make it to No 1 on the British album charts, with a greatest hits compilation outselling the Arctic Monkeys.

She published an autobiography the same year, "Some Sunny Day", and threw her support behind a website recording social history, "The Times of My Life".

Lynn was also a spokesman for children with cerebral palsy, founding a charity in 2001.

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Leonardo's 'quick eye' may be key to Mona Lisa's magnetism

Lifestyle

Paris, France |Scientists believe Leonardo da Vinci's super-fast eye may have helped him catch the enigmatic magic of Mona Lisa's smile.

This superhuman trait, which top tennis and baseball players may also share, allowed the Renaissance master to capture accurately minute, fleeting expressions and even birds and dragonflies in flight.

Art historians have long talked of Leonardo's "quick eye", but David S Thaler of Switzerland's University of Basel has tried to gauge it in a new study published Thursday alongside another paper showing how he gave his drawings and paintings uncanny emotional depth.

Professor Thaler's research turns on how Leonardo's eye was so keen he managed to spot that the front and back wings of a dragonfly are out of synch -- a discovery which took slow-motion photography to prove four centuries later.

The artist, who lived from 1452 to 1519, sketched how when a dragonfly's front wings are raised, the hind ones are lowered, something that was a blur to Thaler and to his colleagues when they tried to observe the difference themselves.

Thaler told AFP that this gift to see what few humans can may be the secret of Leonardo's most famous painting.

"Mona Lisa's smile is so enigmatic because it represents the moment of breaking into a smile. And Leonardo's quick eye captured that and held it," he said.

- Freeze frame -

"So often our memories are of a fixed image, not a movement. Leonardo and perhaps other artists had that ability to pick up the point of breaking into a smile" or emotion.

Thaler suspects the Japanese painter Hokusai -- best known for "The Great Wave of Kanagawa" -- had the same ability.

The Edo master (1760-1849) also picked up the difference in dragonfly wings, which led Thaler to wonder if "he saw (in) the same freeze-frame way as Leonardo".

Thaler applied "flicker fusion frequency" (FFF) -- similar to a film's frames per second — to try to judge Leonardo's extraordinary visual acuity in the study for the Rockefeller University in the US as a part of a wider Leonardo DNA Project looking at the Renaissance polymath.

Because of our slower FFF, we construct a single 3D image of the world by jamming together many partially in-focus images, he said.

Leonardo realised he could freeze the separate snapshots with which we construct our perception, Thaler believes.

Thaler told AFP that he was fascinated by the case of Ted Williams, an American baseball legend who claimed to have trained himself to see the seams of a baseball as it flew towards him.

"It is said that elite batters can see the seams" even when the baseball is rotating 30 to 50 times per second, Thaler said.

In Leonardo's case, Thaler estimated that to see the difference in batting dragonfly wings clearly, the artist would have to have an FFF range of 50 to 100 frames per second.

The average person's is between 20 to 40 per second.

Thaler told AFP it was not clear if the gift was genetic or if it could be learned.

- Da Vinci's 'evening' portraits -

The researcher also described in another paper how Leonardo used psychophysics -- much of which still remains a mystery today -- to communicate beauty and emotion.

He said Leonardo's mastery of the sfumato technique -- which subtly blurs the edges of images and creates a 3D effect -- allowed him to render lifelike expressions and gave an intimate gaze to his portraits.

He believes that Leonardo achieved selective soft focus in portraits by painting in overcast or evening light, where the eyes' pupils enlarge to let in more light but have a narrow plane of sharp focus.

The enlarged pupils of his sitters -- also a sign of affection or attraction -- were a mark of beauty in Renaissance portraits.

It appears to confirm what the artist himself wrote in his notebook: "In the evening and when the weather is dull, what softness and delicacy you may perceive in the faces of men and women..."

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Photos of stolen Van Gogh handed to Dutch art sleuth

Lifestyle

Amsterdam, Netherlands | A Dutch art detective revealed Thursday he has received two recent photographs of a Vincent Van Gogh painting stolen from a museum during the coronavirus lockdown.

Burglars snatched the 1884 painting "Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring", which is valued at up to six million euros ($6.6 million), from the Singer Laren Museum near Amsterdam on March 30.

Arthur Brand, dubbed the "Indiana Jones of the Art World" for tracing a series of high-profile lost artworks, said he was handed the photos a few days ago by a source he declined to identify.

The photographs, of which AFP was given two copies, show the painting, together with a front page of the New York Times newspaper of May 30 to prove when the photos were taken.

"After three months of intensive investigation, I was handed these pictures. This is the first 'proof of life' we have that the painting still exists," Brand said, adding that valuable pictures are often destroyed when the thieves realise they cannot be sold.

He added that the photos were "circulating in mafia circles".

In the photographs, a new scratch can be seen on the bottom of the painting, which Brand said he believed must have happened during the robbery.

The New York Times issue in the photographs of the painting featured an interview with Brand and Octave Durham, the notorious Dutch burglar who stole two paintings from Amsterdam's Van Gogh Museum in 2002.

It also showed a copy of Durham's 2018 book "Master Thief", placed on a black plastic background.

Asked about the authenticity of the painting shown in the photos, Brand said one of them shows the back of the artwork featuring the so-called provenance -- the history of ownership -- which serves almost as a type of fingerprint for the artwork.

"There is no doubt in my mind that this is the genuine article," he said.

- 'Great number of tips' -

Brand, who declined to divulge how he obtained the photos, said he believed there could be a number of reasons the art thieves decided to circulate them.

"It could simply be that they are trying to find a buyer in the criminal underworld," he added.

The photographs "could also be a plan to try and cast suspicion on Durham, because they used his book in the pictures," he said.

Durham however was in hospital in Amsterdam at the time of the latest heist "and has a rock-solid alibi", the detective said.

However, the reasons could be even more personal said Brand, who has recovered stolen art including a Picasso painting and "Hitler's Horses", life-sized bronze sculptures that once stood outside the Nazi leader's Berlin chancellery.

"Perhaps they want to make a deal with prosecutors, using the painting as leverage," the Amsterdam-based detective said.

"Or perhaps they just want to toy with me, because they know I am investigating the case, and that I took it personally when they stole a Van Gogh right from my back yard," he said.

Dutch police video images released shortly after the burglary showed a burglar smashing through a glass door at the museum in the middle of the night, before running out with the painting tucked under his right arm.

Police in their latest statement said "we have received a great number of tips in this case."

Asked if he had passed on the information to the Dutch police, Brand said "he was following the usual channels".

"Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring" comes from relatively early on in Van Gogh's career, before the prolific artist embarked on his trademark post-impressionist paintings such as "Sunflowers" and his vivid self-portraits.

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Batman and Kim Kardashian headed to Spotify podcasts

Real People

The deal announced Thursday follows a separate Spotify deal with Kim Kardashian West for a criminal justice podcast, as the Swedish platform continues to splurge on a raft of original content.

The multi-year deal with DC parent WarnerMedia for an "original slate of narrative scripted podcasts" will explore "new shows based on the vast universe of premier, iconic DC characters," the companies said in a statement.

It did not confirm which comic book characters would feature, or the cost of the deal, which will also include "new dramatic and comedic podcasts" based on other Warner Bros. titles.

But the deal comes as Spotify ramps up its podcast content, including a reported $100 million outlay last month on "The Joe Rogan Experience," the most downloaded podcast in the United States.

On Wednesday, it emerged Spotify had inked an exclusive deal with Kardashian West, the reality star turned criminal justice advocate.

The show will investigate the case of Kevin Keith, a convicted mass murderer who maintains his innocence for the 1994 deaths of three people including a four-year-old child, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Keith's death sentence was commuted to life in prison by Ohio's governor in 2010 due to unanswered questions in his case.

Several dozen former judges, lawyers and prosecutors believe he may have been wrongly convicted and had called for his execution to be halted.

Spotify confirmed the deal with Kardashian West to AFP, but declined to offer any further details.

For a little over a year, Spotify has slowly been moving into the podcast world.

In early 2019, it bought the podcasting company Gimlet Studios for around $230 million, as well as the production interface Anchor for more than $100 million.

And in February, Spotify acquired The Ringer, a sports and entertainment production studio, for between $141 million and $195 million, depending on several variables.

amz/bgs

Argentina's pandemic-hit events business reinvents itself online

Business

Buenos Aires, Argentina |Argentina's strict coronavirus lockdown has forced hundreds of party venues into bankruptcy since it came into force in March, but many owners are successfully remodelling their businesses to embrace the virtual realities of the pandemic's new normal.

Lionel Mariani, owner of four venues in Buenos Aires that cater for birthday parties and weddings, faced closure once the social distancing measures hit.

But he converted his biggest venue into a fruit and vegetable warehouse, and his 20 employees -- formerly entertainers or sound engineers -- now deliver home orders.

"I don't think you can go back to partying as before," says Mariani.

"We will be one of the last events businesses standing, if we return. And what would a birthday be like? We would have to wrap every kid in plastic. As long as there's no vaccine, there'll be no parties."

In his children's party event room in the Caballito neighborhood, vegetable boxes are now stacked next to a mothballed mechanical bull and inflatable castle.

- 'Bankruptcies' -

Argentina's lockdown is stricter in Buenos Aires and its sprawling suburbs than anywhere else, as the metropolitan area accounts for 85 percent of the country's more than 25,000 cases.

President Alberto Fernandez has allowed some businesses to reopen, but social gatherings and shows are still prohibited.

Despite millions of dollars doled out in state aid, the pandemic has pushed to the limit an economy that has been in recession since 2018.

Almost a million people work in the events sector in Argentina, according to an owners' association -- even more when related businesses like florists and entertainers are taken into account.

"There are bankruptcies," lamented Silvia Amarante, president of owners' association.

"While we are waiting for the pandemic to pass, many businesses will fall away, we won't be back until 2021," she said.

- Virtual magic -

Some event entertainers are embracing the new and taking their birthday party performances online.

From his house in Buenos Aires, Gustavo Pintos welcomes guests on his computer, greets the party's birthday boy and begins his routine as "Kaphu the Magician."

This evening his audience is 400 kilometers (250 miles) away, in the port city of Mar del Plata.

"It's not the same as having the audience present," says the magician, who has been plying his trade for 25 years.

"At first I was resisting, but now I'm doing three shows a day, a horizon of work has opened up that was unimaginable before!"

Actress and children's entertainer Any Gonzalez has taken the same view and started a new niche business.

"Now I have no limits," said Gonzalez, who was recently hired to do story shows with her puppet Lupe by people in other countries.

"I'm working a lot more than before," she says. "Families want to banish the drama and celebrate anyway."

Her services are tailored to different budgets, ranging from a brief virtual greeting to a story with puppets or a full hour of animation.

Gabriel Valino has been performing as Pirucho the Clown for 25 years. He misses the contact with laughing audiences but now performs 30 virtual shows per month.

"I know that celebrations in salons will not return, because even without the coronavirus, this way is cheaper for families who are going to be left without a peso," he says.

- 'Feather boas for adults' -

Online "adult" birthday parties are also booming, according to Natasha Szuka, who provides "pole-dancing" classes for women and sessions called "strip-dance-chair".

In a room in her home transformed by disco lighting and mirrors, Szuka contorts herself around a silver pole and encourages her clientele to mimic her movements.

"We send the client a box with a feather boa and a hat for the performance," she said as she prepared for a virtual show.

"This alternative is here to stay, now anyone is just a click away from celebrating."

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The Foreign Post is the newspaper of the International Community in the Philippines, published for foreign residents, Internationally-oriented Filipinos, and visitors to the country. It is written and edited to inform, to entertain, occasionally to educate, to provide a forum for international thinkers.