News OF THE World

CZECH REPUBLIC

A Prague-based leatherwork company is putting Ukrainian refugees to work making body armor for volunteers fighting against the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Tlusty & Co. has joined forces with Post Bellum, a nongovernmental group, supplying Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces with bulletproof vests and other body armor.

CHILE

The Pablo Neruda Foundation, which runs a museum honoring Chile’s most famous poet, may be closing its doors for good.

The museum, which encompasses the Nobel laureate’s homes, has been shuttered since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, and now faces backlash after a feminist reassessment of his work — and his admission in a posthumously published memoir to raping a woman in Sri Lanka.

IRAQ

An art exhibit has opened in Baghdad, showcasing works that were stolen after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003.

The exhibit, which opened in March at the Ministry of Culture, features 100 landscapes, portraits and sculpture that went missing during the chaos that followed the US-led invasion to topple Saddam.

ARGENTINA

A trial to establish the truth surrounding a massacre of 500 indigenous people nearly a century ago opened in Argentina this week, with testimony from its lone survivor.

Rosa Grilo, more than 100 years old, survived the Napalpi massacre in July 1924 after her grandfather told her to hide, she said.

The trial aims to record the truth that the group was targeted after they protested work conditions on cotton plantations.

CAPE VERDE

Artist Nuno Duarte is repurposing discarded sneakers and helping to save the planet in Cape Verde’s capital, Praia City. The 20year-old entrepreneur who established “100 Cor” adds artistic flourishes, often in neon colors, to discarded shoes that he later posts on Instagram.

“I created the company to help end environmental devastation because so many shoes were ending up in the trash, and they can be repurposed,” he said.