THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2012
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NEWS OF THE WORLD
Female Afghani rapper gains attention
ASIA
Associated Press
ASSOCIATED PRESS
KABUL, Afghanistan — "Listen to my story! Listen to my pain and suffering!" Afghanistan's first female rapper Sosan Firooz pleads into her microphone.
With her first rap song, the outspoken 23-year-old singer is making history in her homeland where society frowns on women who take the stage. She is already shunned by some of her relatives.
She sings about repression of women, her hopes for a peaceful Afghanistan and the misery she says she experienced as a small child living in neighboring Iran. Her family fled there during the Afghan civil war of the 1990s and the hardline Taliban regime's rise to power in 1996. During her five-year stay there, she said the Iranians looked with disdain on Afghan refugees.
But for Firooz, the best way to express herself is through rap, a musical genre that is just starting to generate a following in Afghanistan.
"I remember while we were in Iran, we were called 'dirty Afghan's' and told to go to the back of the line at the bakery," Firooz, who also spent time as a refugee in Pakistan and returned
to Afghanistan with her family seven years ago, said to The Associated Press in an interview.
Most of all, Firooz uses her rap to express the pain and sorrow of her only two decades of life.
"When war started in our country, there were bullets, artillery, rockets. All our trees were burned down. The war forced us to leave our country," she raps. "We are hopeful for the future in our country. And we request that our neighboring countries leave us alone."
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Afghanistan's first female rapper Soan Firooz runs in a studio in Kabul, Afghanistan. In addition to rapping, Firooz acts in Afghanis opera operas.
EUROPE
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Natalya Pugacheva, member of Russia's folk group Buranovskiy Biabebushki, performs May 23 at the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest.
Russian singer's father found
ASSOCIATED PRESS
MOSCOW, Russia — To find her father's World War II grave, Natalya Pugachyova had to become a celebrity.
She is one of the Buranovskie Babushki, a group of singing grandmothers who ended up second at this year's Eurovision Song Contest with their cute tune sung in the Udmurt language, a distant relative of Finnish. As the oldest and smallest member of the group, the 76-year-old Pugachyova became a star of the pan-European contest, whose millions of devoted fans love its kitsch fun.
Her newfound fame helped her find the grave of her father, who disappeared while fighting the Nazis in 1942.
Nearly 27 million Soviet soldiers and civilians died in World War II, and tens of thousands are still listed as missing. War enthusiasts roam the forests and lands of western Russia in search of the remains of soldiers and their aluminum dog tags that identify them.
At a press conference she mentioned her father, Yakov Begeshev, who disappeared when she was 6 years old. The last letter they received from him came during a battle in the Voronezh region south of Moscow, which he described as being so fierce that he was unlikely to survive.
Nina Geryuheva of the Bailiffs Service in the musical group's native Russian region of Udmurtia said its volunteers set out to find Pugachyova's father. After a lot of
"To say she was surprised is to say the least," Geryusheva said by telephone.
phone calls and official requests, they were able to identify the mass grave where he was buried.
Russian state television showed Pugachyova's visit over the weekend to the village of Malaya Vereika in the Voronezh region, where she saw her father's name among those engraved on memorial walls at the mass grave.
"Even I sobbed," Pugachyova said. "So many years, so many winters, I didn't know."
Pugachyova brought a handful of soil from her mother's grave to mix with that of her father's, and took a handful back to do the same at her mother's grave. That way, her parents could be together.
SOUTH AMERICA
Van der Sloot claims fatherhood
ASSOCIATED PRESS
LIMA, Peru — A newspaper reported Monday that Joran van der Sloot, a Dutch man who is serving a 28-year-sentence for murdering a young Peruvian woman, says he is going to be a father.
His lawyer said the inmate does have a conjugal visitor, but he could not confirm she is pregnant.
The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf said van der Sloot, a suspect in the 2005 disappearance of American teenager Natalie Holloway, told the paper in a telephone call Saturday that "a test has proved" the pregnancy.
Van der Sloot's attorney, Maximo Altez, told The Associated Press that a woman named Leidy Figueroa UCeda "is registered as a conjugal visitor of Jonan. She is registered in the visitors books of the Piedras Gordas prison in Lima."
He denied, however, that he had told the newspaper he could confirm the pregnancy.
"I told them I didn't know anything in that respect," he said.
News media in Peru last year identified Figueroa as van der Sloot's girlfriend, and said they had conceived a son together, but she denied it.
De Telegraaf said van der Sloot told it that the woman uses birth control pills but apparently forgot to take one. He said she would not have an abortion due to her Roman Catholic faith. He said he didn't have DNA proof the child is his, but he believes it to be.