Xhosa sangomas in Mgwali village, Eastern Cape of South Africa performing a cultural dance.
A group of Gauteng traditional healers performed a ritual for former president Nelson Mandela on Wednesday, outside the Pretoria hospital where he has been treated for 47 days.
The healers burnt incense in a pot, knelt on the ground, sprinkled tobacco, sang and summoned the Madiba ancestors to heal Mandela.
Khubane Mashele, the chairwoman of the traditional healers’ interim council in Gauteng, asked the spirits of those who had passed during the struggle to help heal the anti-apartheid icon.
“We summon the great kings and soldiers of the struggle to help us in calling the ancestors of Mandela, and help him heal because we still need him,” Mashele said in xiTsonga during the ritual.
Earlier in the day, a group of traditional leaders from the North West arrived at the Medi-Clinic Heart Hospital to deliver messages of support and a bucket of flowers.
Kgosi Madoda Zibi, chairman of the house of North West traditional leaders, said they hoped to convey a message to the Mandela family.
“We have been mandated by the North West traditional leaders to come and express our well-wishes,” Zibi said.
“We just want to thank him for his contribution to the liberation of his country.”
Zibi and his delegation were told to place the flowers and a card at the wall outside the facility’s Celliers Street entrance, where messages of support had been left since Mandela was hospitalised on June 8 with a recurring lung infection. – Sapa
The SA National Defence Force refused to comment on Wednesday about allegations that its 18 Agusta A109 helicopters were grounded as there were no funds to operate them.
“My comment is very clear: we do not discuss operational matters and [the defence force’s] state of readiness,” said SANDF spokesman Siphiwe Dlamini.
According to Beeld newspaper, it was told by an anonymous source that the helicopters were occasionally enabled, but did not ascend.
In the long-term, this reportedly meant pilots could lose their competency skills and that the helicopters would fall into disuse.
Beeld reported that the SAAF’s 26 Gripen fighter aircraft, which were also bought in the multi-billion rand arms deal a few years ago, were also rarely used.
A senior SANDF officer reportedly told the newspaper the situation was grim.
Amid a 60 percent budget cut, it was considering selling the Gripens and not just the A109 helicopters, but all helicopter operations.
Military expert Helmoed Romer-Heitman reportedly said the SAAF was suffering from government’s indecision about what it expected from the army.
“An air force without fighter aircraft is a dead duck in Africa’s military context. An army without helicopters and transport aircraft is a dinosaur in a swamp,” he was quoted as saying.
“An army without attack and tactical transport helicopters is a lame duck. A navy without helicopters and maritime patrol planes is blind.” – Sapa
A bid to reconcile hardened enemies in Ivory Coast has all but broken down, according to participants and observers, and time is running out for a commission set up to heal the wounds of bitter strife.
More than two years after a political and military crisis that claimed at least 3,000 lives in the west African country in the wake of disputed elections, statements by rival sides reveal their deep differences.
Yet the word “reconciliation” is still on many lips in political circles. Supporters of President Alassane Ouattara make it an article of faith. So do members of the opposition Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) of former president Laurent Gbagbo, who triggered the crisis by refusing to accept defeat at the polls in November 2010.
In an early July tour of the cocoa-rich north, his electoral stronghold, Ouattara urged the FPI to “ask pardon of the victims” of the bloodshed, which lasted from December 2010 to April 2011 in a country already weakened by civil war and partition.
The FPI this week curtly rejected the call to “repent”. Many in the party still consider Gbagbo their champion, though he is detained by the International Criminal Court in The Hague facing charges of crimes against humanity. His supporters argue that Ouattara’s side was to blame for the post-electoral violence.
Created by Ouattara in September 2011, a national Dialogue, Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CDVR) with a two-year mandate has endeavoured to resolve differences and has joined in the debate.
“In what happened to Ivory Coast, the wrongs are shared,” said the commission chairman, former prime minister Charles Konan Banny, closing a forum last week on the “profound causes” of a decade of hostilities.
“It’s up to all those who committed violations of human rights to acknowledge them and make an act of repentance,” he added, but the commission has less than three months to complete an enormous task.
Banny has indicated that he might ask for an extension of the commission’s mandate. “A time limit (is) not the best” of solutions, he told AFP, suggesting that two years are not enough for the work to be done.
Asked whether he would take up his post again if the mandate is prolonged, Banny evades the question. In political circles, many are speculating that the ex-premier might want to take up another challenge: the presidential election of 2015.
According to these observers, Banny may try to take control of his political party, the once all-powerful Democratic Party of Ivory Coast (PDCI), which has now become the main ally of Ouattara’s Rally of Republicans (RDR). The PDCI’s leading bodies are due for renewal in October.
‘A great national catharsis’
Now that the reconciliation commission is nearing the end of its mandate, politicians, diplomats, observers and non-governmental organisations are taking stock of its record, often with great severity.
“The CDVR is at a dead end,” says Rene Legre Hokou, the chairman of the Ivorian League of Human Rights, (LIDHO), arguing that the panel has kept a low profile and shown few concrete results.
The commission has for months promised public hearings across the country in which the “executioners” would directly confront their “victims”, but they have yet to begin. Many Ivorians eagerly await what Banny has termed a “great national catharsis”.
Under fire from its critics, some members of the panel complain of a lack of sufficient financial resources and also argue that their task is being complicated by political and legal interference.
In the most recent episode they cite, 84 people who were part of Gbagbo’s regime or close to it, including former first lady Simone Gbagbo, have been summoned before an assize court to answer for their suspected roles in the crisis of 2010-2011. However, the date for the hearing has not yet been set.
While for Ouattara, there can be no reconciliation without justice, Gbagbo supporters see the latest move by the judiciary as a new illustration of “conqueror’s justice”. Ivorian prosecutors have so far taken no steps to deal with serious crimes blamed on pro-Ouattara forces during the crisis.
Scant grounds exist for a resumption of talks between the government and the opposition FPI, which have been stalled for months. Yet such dialogue is essential to pave the way for the presidential election in two years’ time, with Ouattara already a candidate.
CDVR member Simeon Ahouana, the bishop of the central town of Bouake -long the stronghold of rebels involved in a 2002 coup bid against Gbagbo – has annnounced that he has “concerns” about the forthcoming poll.
LIDHO’s chairman Hokou is more blunt. In his eyes, if there is no progress in reconciliation by 2015, “we must fear that we’ll fall back into even worse violence”. – AFP
The ANC on Tuesday called on Cosas not to take the law into its own hands by castrating rapists.
“Our position is that we have law enforcement agencies in this country and anybody who commits crime must face the might of the law,” said African National Congress spokesman Keith Khoza.
“It is not the responsibility of Cosas to do that. We call on Cosas to recognise that there are law enforcement agencies. Where crime has been committed people must not take matters into their own hands,” he said.
Earlier, the Congress of SA Students (Cosas) threatened to castrate rapists.
“We are going to take the law into our hands… starting from cutting off private parts of those who rape our brothers and sisters, not to forget removing drug dealers in our communities because we know where they live,” said Cosas president Thlologelo Malaji.
“Our community members must stop living in fear and assist us to remove all the ills of society,” he said.
Malaji said Cosas had decided not to sit back and watch the future of the youth taken away by the “ills of society”.
“We call upon all stakeholders in the education sector… to take part and contribute in the struggle to improve the education of our country, ensuring that our students receive the best education,” he said.
Cosas would call mass meetings of parents, pupils, and others to discuss the state of education in the country.
“Core to these discussions… is the continuous disruptions of the culture of teaching and learning due to protests.”
Malaji said Cosas was also concerned about the number of schools, especially high schools, that did not have feeding schemes.
“If a child in a primary school has been depending on the feeding scheme, in high school their background is still the same. Where will that child get assistance if the feeding scheme is no longer there?” he asked.
He said the quality of the food being served in the feeding scheme was concerning.
Malaji said Cosas would also continue to oppose the publication of matric results in newspapers.
“As a students’ organisation, we still maintain that matric results should be a private matter between the matriculant and the department of education.” – Sapa
Police are looking for a truck carrying the highly toxic chemical, potassium cyanide, which was in a truck hijacked in Midrand.
Inhalation of the chemical could lead to death, said Lt-Col Katlego Mogale.
She said it was in a Krome Metal Chemicals truck which was hijacked in Midrand on Saturday, and she urged people with information about its whereabouts to contact the police.
Mogale said the chemical was toxic if swallowed or if it came into contact with the skin. It could skin and eye irritation, and burns. Even brief exposure to its gas was toxic or extremely irritating.
She said it targeted the central nervous system, eyes, kidneys, liver, lungs, skin and heart.
“Medical symptoms include extreme irritation of eyes and mucous membranes, including burning and tearing; respiratory failure, death,” she said.
Mogale said investigations were continuing. – Sapa
Bakkie with hunters similar to the one in the incident
A man died in a Pietersburg hospital, several days after he was accidentally shot in a freak hunting accident, Beeld reported on Tuesday.
Juan Pierre Kleingeld, 24, was driving a bakkie during a hunting expedition on Friday, transporting a group of his friends, some of whom were standing in the back.
A hunting rifle discharged, and the bullet hit Kleingeld in the head, the newspaper reported.
He was rushed to the Limpopo Mediclinic in a critical state. Kleingeld died on Monday.
Police spokeswoman Ronel Otto said it was not yet clear whether an existing charge of attempted murder being investigated by the police would be changed to one of murder. – Sapa
Pope Francis waving to supporters in the streets of Rio
Pope Francis wants to ignite the passion of Roman Catholics for their faith while on his first international trip, and the boisterous, sometimes frenzied welcome he got on his first day in Rio seemed to fill those hopes.
Returning to his home continent for the first time since becoming pontiff, Francis smiled broadly as thousands of people rushed his car Monday after it became stuck behind buses and taxis when his driver made a wrong turn on a main avenue in Rio’s center.
It was a nightmarish scene for security officials, but clearly a delight and another opportunity to connect for this pope, who was scheduled to take a day off Tuesday for rest and private meetings.
The ecstatic throngs forced his motorcade to repeatedly come to a standstill, weeks after violent protests against the government paralyzed parts of Brazil. Francis’ driver turned into the wrong side of a boulevard at one point, missing lanes that had been cleared. Other parts of the pope’s route to the city center weren’t lined with fencing, giving the throngs more chances to get close, with uniformed police nowhere in sight to act as crowd control.
The three dozen visible Vatican and Brazilian plainclothes security officials struggled to keep the crowds at bay. Francis not only looked calm but got even closer to the people. He rolled down his back-seat window, waved to the crowd and touched those who reached inside. He kissed a baby a woman handed to him.
“His secretary was afraid, but the pope was happy,” said the papal spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi.
The pope is here on a seven-day visit meant to fan the fervor of the faithful around the globe. That task has grown more challenging as Catholics stray, even in strongholds of the religion such as Brazil, yet it seemed to come easily to Francis even on the drive from the airport to an official opening ceremony.
After finally making it past crowds and blocked traffic, Francis switched to an open-air vehicle for a cruise along main streets past crowds of people who screamed wildly as he waved and smiled. He left his popemobile – the bulletproof one – in the Vatican garage so he could better connect with people during the church’s World Youth Day.
Vatican officials insisted they had no concern for the pope’s safety as his vehicles eased through the masses, but Lombardi acknowledged there might have been some “errors” that need correcting.
“This is something new, maybe also a lesson for the coming days,” Lombardi said.
Many in the crowd looked stunned to see the pope, with some standing still and others sobbing loudly.
“I can’t travel to Rome, but he came here to make my country better … and to deepen our faith,” Idaclea Rangel, a 73-year-old Catholic, said, choking through her tears after the pope passed by.
As many as 1 million young people from around the world are expected in Rio for the Catholic youth fest, a seemingly tailor-made event for the Argentine-born pope, who has proven enormously popular in his four months on the job. But the fervor of the crowds that regularly greet Francis in St. Peter’s Square was nothing compared with the raucous welcome in Rio.
Popes generally get a warm welcome in Latin America; even the more aloof Pope Benedict XVI received a hero’s welcome when he visited Mexico and Cuba in 2012. John Paul II frequently received rock star treatment, and during one 1996 visit to Venezuela, his motorcade was similarly mobbed when he stopped to greet well-wishers.
Outside Rio’s Guanabara government palace where the pope was officially welcomed, Alicia Velazquez, a 55-year-old arts teacher from Buenos Aires, waited to catch a glimpse of the man she knew well when he was archbishop of her hometown.
“It was so amazing when he was selected, we just couldn’t believe it. We cried and hugged one another,” Velazquez said. “I personally want to see if he’s still the same man as simple and humble whom we all knew. I have faith that he’s remained the same.”
Francis displayed that humility in greeting President Dilma Rousseff, saying he understood that to really know Brazilians, one must pass through their heart.
“So let me knock gently at this door,” Francis said in Portuguese at the official welcoming ceremony. “I have neither silver nor gold, but I bring with me the most precious thing given to me: Jesus Christ.”
On the plane trip to Rio, Francis had lamented that an entire generation of young people risked not knowing what it’s like to work thanks to an economic crisis that has seen youth unemployment skyrocket in many European countries while leaving the poor of the developing world behind.
“People get their dignity from work, they earn their bread,” he told reporters aboard the plane. “Young people in this moment are in crisis.”
Francis arrived at a tense time for Brazil, as the country reels from sometimes violent demonstrations that began last month as a protest against public transport price hikes and mushroomed into a wave of protests against government corruption, inefficiency and spending for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics.
Those protests continued after Francis’ arrival. Police and anti-government protesters clashed outside the government palace.
The government has spent about $52 million for Francis’ visit, but he does not appear to be a focus of protesters’ rage.
“We’ve got nothing against the pope. Nobody here is against him,” said Christopher Creindel, a 22-year-old art student and Rio native protesting outside the government palace. “This protest is against our politicians.”
Lombardi confirmed that a homemade explosive device was found Sunday by Brazilian authorities in a public toilet near the basilica at Aparecida, a Marian shrine that Francis is to visit Wednesday. Vatican security was informed of the device but didn’t think it was aimed at the pope, Lombardi said.
“There are no concerns for security. The concerns are that the enthusiasm is so great that it’s difficult to respond to so much enthusiasm for the pope. But there is no fear and no concern,” he told reporters.
Francis’ weeklong schedule underscores his commitment to make his pontificate focus on the poor. He will walk through one of Rio’s shantytowns, or favelas, and meet with juvenile offenders, an extension of his call for a more missionary church that goes to the peripheries to preach.
He will also pray at Aparecida, an indication of his strong Marian devotion that is shared in much of Latin America. And, in a rather incongruous matchup, he will preside over a procession re-enacting Christ’s crucifixion on the beach at Copacabana, ground zero of Rio’s Sin City.
Alex Augusto, a 22-year-old seminarian dressed in the bright green official T-shirt for pilgrims, said Monday that he and five friends made the journey from Brazil’s Sao Paulo state to “show that contrary to popular belief, the church isn’t only made up of older people, it’s full of young people. We want to show the real image of the church.” – AP
Nyanga, one of the famous black townships in Cape Town
A policeman was shot dead and another was wounded while on patrol in Nyanga, Western Cape police said on Tuesday.
The policeman was shot in the head by two men he and a partner stopped to search on Monday night, said Captain Frederick van Wyk. He died later in hospital.
The other policeman was wounded in the hand and shoulder in an exchange of fire with the two gunmen, who shot at them while they were getting out of their police car at the corner of Zwelitsha and Hlathe roads.
Two members of the public were also wounded in the crossfire and were taken to hospital, said Van Wyk.
“Several shots were fired and SA Police Service members returned fire as the suspects fled the scene on foot,” he said.
The men stole a service pistol from one of the policemen before fleeing.
An officer was shot in the head and died later in hospital.
No arrests had been made.
“This attack on police officers will not be tolerated and every endeavour will be made to bring those responsible to book,” Van Wyk said. – Sapa
The KwaZulu-Natal health department had paid the maintenance contract to keep two state-of-the-art cancer radiotherapy machines operational at Addington Hospital, in Durban.
Werner Bergere, the CEO of Tecmed, the company which installed the two Varian Rapid Arc Linear Accelerators, confirmed on Tuesday that the company received payment on Monday.
On Monday night, KwaZulu-Natal health spokesman Desmond Motha said the department had paid the contract.
The two machines stopped operating in January, after Tecmed refused to service them, claiming that it had not been paid since March 2012.
There is only one other machine of this kind in the country.
The machines in Durban were installed by Tecmed in 2010 after it was awarded a R120 million tender, which included a R33m maintenance contract over five years. The maintenance contract was later reduced to R26m.
By the time the machines stopped working, Addington’s oncology department, which receives patients from across the province, had cut its waiting time for treatment from eight months to two weeks.
The department claimed it suspended the contract because of corruption involved in the tender. Tecmed denied any wrongdoing.
The department filed two complaints with the police in May and July 2010, but no charges have been brought yet.
Patients from Addington have been transferred to the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Hospital, which has three radiotherapy machines.
Waiting times at the hospital have reportedly grown to between four and five months.
KwaZulu-Natal health MEC Sibongiseni Dhlomo said payments would be made on a month-to-month basis pending ongoing investigations
Dhlomo and health department head Dr Sibongile Zungu have denied putting patients’ lives at risk.
The SA Human Rights Commission said last week that it was investigating a complaint against the department, lodged by Addington’s oncology department’s former head Professor Amo Jordaan.
Jordan quit the post he had occupied since 1981 in anger at the department’s failure to pay the maintenance contract.
He previously said the machines reduced the amount time a patient received radiotherapy and were much more accurate in dealing with tumours. – Sapa
Indian police filed charges on Monday over a match-fixing scandal involving the late South African captain Hansie Cronje, 13 years after the revelations sent shockwaves thr
Hansie Cronjé
ough the cricketing world.
Police filed the charges in a New Delhi court against bookmakers and Cronje himself, who died in a plane crash in 2002, over allegations of fixing dating back to South Africa’s tour of India in 2000.
The charges are the first by Indian police over the scandal, which revealed the shady world of Indian bookmakers in cricket.
“There are six accused in this case, three of them are on bail while two are abroad,” Inspector Keshav Kumar told the court.
“The sixth is Hansie Cronje, who is dead,” said Kumar, the investigating officer in the case.
Cronje, once the darling of South African cricket, was banned from the sport for life after admitting taking bribes from bookies in exchange for providing match information and influencing games during the 2000 tour.
Cronje admitted to a South African commission investigating the scandal to taking thousands of dollars in bribes from bookies to underperform, although he denied match-fixing itself.
Delhi police have alleged that Cronje persuaded some of his teammates, including Herschelle Gibbs, to agree to underperform in a one-day match in 2000, including by making fewer runs than he might otherwise have tallied.
Gibbs and bowler Henry Williams were both banned from playing for six-months and fined by South African authorities over their admissions in the scandal.
The scandal broke when New Delhi police, working on an unrelated extortion case, tapped a telephone conversation between Cronje and one of the bookies, Sanjeev Chawla.
Chawla is believed to be living in the UK and Indian police hope to seek his extradition now that the charge sheet has been placed before the court.
“We will now request the court to grant approval to seek extradition of Chawla from the UK to India,” Additional Commissioner of Police (Crime), Ravindra Yadav, told AFP.
“The UK government does not allow extradition without the charge cheet. We are almost sure Chawla is in England,” he said.
Yadav said the case was one of “criminal conspiracy” and has only now been filed in court after police finally received in January this year voice samples from tapped phone conversations.
“This is criminal conspiracy. People went to the ground to watch the games thinking they would be played in the true spirit. They did not know the outcome was fixed. That’s why we have filed the charges,” he said.
Police named the accused as bookmakers and gamblers Rajesh Kalra, Krishan Kumar and Sunil Dara — who are all on bail — and Chawla and Manmohan Khattar who are overseas.
Cronje died in June 2002 when a light plane in which he was travelling crashed in bad weather in South Africa.
Monday’s action came after Delhi police chief Neeraj Kumar told local media that he planned to file charges in the Cronje case and a separate Indian Premier League spot-fixing scandal, before the end of the month.
Kumar told the Hindustan Times newspaper on Saturday that he was working on tying up “some loose ends” before his retirement at the end of July, including in both cases.
The Indian Premier League (IPL) was rocked by allegations of spot-fixing in May this year, with some 29 people arrested including three Indian players. The cricketers, who have denied wrongdoing, are accused of deliberately bowling badly in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars from bookies.
Betting on sports is illegal in India except at horse races, but major betting syndicates have been in operation for many years. – AFP
Food stamps are paying for trans-Atlantic takeout — with New Yorkers using taxpayer-funded benefits to ship food to relatives in Jamaica, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Welfare recipients are buying groceries with their Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and packing them in giant barrels for the trip overseas, The Post found.
The practice is so common that hundreds of 45- to 55-gallon cardboard and plastic barrels line the walls of supermarkets in almost every Caribbean corner of the city.
The feds say the moveable feasts go against the intent of the $86 billion welfare program for impoverished Americans.
A spokeswoman for the US Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service said welfare benefits are reserved for households that buy and prepare food together. She said states should intervene if people are caught shipping nonperishables abroad.
Michael Tanner, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, called it just another example of welfare abuse.
“I don’t want food-stamp police to see what people do with their rice and beans, but it’s wrong,” Tanner told The Post. “The purpose of this program is to help Americans who don’t have enough to eat. This is not intended as a form of foreign aid.”
The United States spent $522.7 million on foreign aid to the Caribbean last fiscal year, government data show.
“I don’t want food-stamp police to see what people do with their rice and beans, but it’s wrong,” Tanner told The Post. “The purpose of this program is to help Americans who don’t have enough to eat. This is not intended as a form of foreign aid.”
The United States spent $522.7 million on foreign aid to the Caribbean last fiscal year, government data show.
Still, New Yorkers say they ship the food because staples available in the States are superior and less costly than what their families can get abroad.
“Everybody does it,” said a worker at an Associated Supermarket in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn. “They pay for it any way they can. A lot of people pay with EBT.”
Customers pay cash for the barrels, usually about $40, and typically ship them filled with $500 to $2,000 worth of rice, beans, pasta, canned milk and sausages.
Workers at the Pioneer Supermarket on Parkside Avenue and the Key Food on Flatbush Avenue confirmed the practice.
They said food-stamp recipients typically take home their barrels and fill them gradually over time with food bought with EBT cards.
When the tubs are full, the welfare users call a shipping company to pick them up and send them to the Caribbean for about $70. The shipments take about three weeks.
Last week, a woman stuffed dozens of boxes of macaroni and evaporated milk into a barrel headed for her family in Kingston, Jamaica. She said she didn’t have welfare benefits and bought the food herself.
“This is all worth more than $2,000,” she said. “I’ve been shopping since last December. You can help somebody else, someone who doesn’t live in this country.”
A man helping her pack the barrel said: “We’re poor here, and they’re poor. But what we can get here is like luxury to them.” – NY Post
Music streaming companies now account for 70 percent of all music bought in Sweden, home of Spotify, the world leader in the field, official industry figures revealed on Sunday.
The Swedish Recording Industry Association (GLF) said physical sales of music now stood at just 25 percent, confirming the march of digital music in the pioneering country.
The remaining five percent of consumers downloaded music to own on a hard drive.
GLF said the percentage of streamed music, where songs are downloaded but not kept permanently on computers, had risen from 57 percent in 2012.
Sales of music overall grew by 12 percent in the first half of this year and have been increasing steadily since 2008, while not reaching the heights seen at the beginning of the last decade.
“The strong growth seen in 2012 continued in 2013, and the Swedish consumer’s preference for streaming is clearer than ever,” said Ludvig Werner, director in Sweden of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. – AFP
Renting apartments to Blacks is strictly forbidden
“Renting apartments to Africans is strictly forbidden”. This message hangs in several building lobbies in Casablanca, Morocco. Some landlords have been enforcing this rule, even though it is completely illegal. Our Observer, a student from the Ivory Coast, experienced this discrimination firsthand a few months ago.
Several photos of these posters, written in both French and Arabic, have been circulating on social networks over the past few days. According to our Observers, the photos were taken in buildings in the residential Farah Essalam neighbourhood in the Oulfa area, where many students from sub-Saharan Africa live. Similar posters have also been reported in other parts of town.
While Morocco is located in northern Africa, many Moroccans don’t consider themselves “Africans”, a term they generally use to refer to sub-Saharan Africans.
“Discrimination against Africans has been firmly rooted here. Not all relationships with Moroccans are this confrontational, but life is definitely more unpleasant if you’re black. Personally, I’ve had stones thrown at me on the street several times, sometimes even fruit, depending on the person’s mood,” says a student from the Ivory Coast. – France24
Analysts are predicting that R.I.P.D, starring Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds, will become the fourth big film in as many weeks to underperform. Hollywood is facing a summer crisis after an unprecedented series of films with budgets of more than $100 million flopped at the box office.
The costliest failure so far has been The Lone Ranger, starring Johnny Depp, which cost $250 million (£165 million) to make, and had a huge marketing budget. It was savaged by critics as a “bloated, unfunny, sometimes downright bizarre train wreck” amid a “summer of garbage blockbusters.”
Disney may have to write off up to $150 million losses on the movie, which was largely ignored by cinemagoers despite being released over the July 4 holiday weekend. It took in just $29 million that weekend in North America, losing out heavily to the animated comedy Despicable Me 2.
White House Down, starring Jamie Foxx and Channing Tatum, took just $25 million on the June 28 weekend, while Pacific Rim, a story of alien monsters, while praised by many critics, still brought in only $38 million over the July 11 weekend. More people went to see the Adam Sandler comedy Grown Ups 2.
R.I.P.D, a $130 million science fiction film about police officers fighting villains in the afterlife, is predicted to take in only around $20 million this weekend.
To be considered successful, blockbusters aim to take in about half their budget over the first weekend.
The movie is being released at the same time as Red 2, a tale of retired hitmen starring Bruce Willis and Dame Helen Mirren, which is expected to split the audience.
The series of big budget disappointments has come just a month after Steven Spielberg warned that Hollywood was facing a “meltdown” because of its over-reliance on blockbusters.
Speaking at the University of Southern California in June, Spielberg predicted “an implosion where three or four, or maybe even a half dozen, mega-budget movies are going to go crashing into the ground.”
Analysts said the failures were partly a result of competing studios trying to release too many big movies at the same time. There are more than 20 films with a budget of more than $100 million being released this summer, six more than last year.
The studios have ploughed resources in to so-called “tent pole” films, which are accompanied by costly marketing, and are expected to make large profits. But, to do so, they all need to arrive in cinemas over the summer months.
Until late June, Hollywood had been on course for a record summer, following the success of early hits including Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness. and Fast & Furious 6.
However, as fatigue set in with audiences the movie industry entered what has been labelled the “dud zone,” in which big releases have fared less impressively than lower budget productions. A slew of expensive films remain to be released in late July and August.
One exasperated studio head told The Hollywood Reporter: “You had too many $100 million-plus movies, not to mention $200 million-plus movies, jammed on top of each other. There isn’t enough play time, and the result has been more movies that wipe out.” – The Daily Telegraph
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