The sculpture shows two elderly people hugging each other in an embrace that defies age, immortalising a reunion 60 years after the end of World War II and descent of the iron curtain tore their love apart.

A new monument in Kiev unveiled this month preserves for future generations the extraordinary story of Ukrainian Mokryna Yurzuk and Italian Luigi Pedutto who were finally rewarded for never forgetting each other.

Mokryna and Luigi met for the first time in 1943 at a labour camp in Austria, where they had been imprisoned after being arrested and deported by Nazi forces in World War II.

Both of them were around 20 years old. Despite the language barrier, they fell in love, helping each other to endure the hardships of camp life in a ravaged Europe.

Mokryna and Luigi both worked in the sewing workshop and the young Italian from time to time tried to make something beautiful for his Ukrainian girlfriend on the side from his main job.

And during short rest periods, they held each other’s hands and walked in silence: she did not understand Italian and he knew only a few words in Russian.

In 1945, when Allied forces launched an operation to free the captives, Luigi, Mokryna and her young daughter Nadia escaped from the camp.

The Italian wanted to go to Ukraine with his girlfriend, but it was almost impossible for a foreigner to get into any of the republics of the Soviet Union at that time, as the iron curtain had come down on Europe.

After the war, both Mokryna and Luigi married other people and had families of their own in Ukraine and in Italy. But then both were widowed.

Some time later, Luigi Pedutto sent a letter to the Russian TV programme “Wait for Me”, which also airs in Ukraine, and specialises in seeking out missing relatives or people close to its viewers at their request.

The Italian was lucky: his beloved Mokryna was found in the Ukrainian backwater of a small village in Dnipropetrovsk region in central Ukraine.

It’s their reunion in the TV studio in 2004 almost six decades later that is depicted by sculptors in the monument in Kiev’s central Khreschatyi park.

Then, the highly-emotional Italian cried and thanked fate for giving him the chance to meet his darling once again. Since then, Luigi regularly comes to visit Mokryna, helping her around the house in the village.

Luigi visited Kiev to attend the unveiling of the statue that symbolises the love that they kept despite long years apart and post-war deprivation.

Dressed in the ceremonial uniform of the Italian Army and with a long feather in his hat, 90-year-old Luigi looked in very good shape, showing his emotion only when he removed the cloth from the newly installed monument.

“I want to wholeheartedly thank the people of Kiev, Ukrainians. I was overwhelmed with feelings,” the Italian veteran said.

“When I went to school and I was nine years old, my teacher said: ‘Boys, remember: for all the tough things you have to go through sooner or later you will be rewarded’.

“I feel that now I received a high reward for the life that I lived and what I went through.”

The monument of Mokryna and Luigi has been symbolically placed in front of the so-called “bridge of lovers”, which according to tradition is decorated with large and small padlocks as pledges of eternal love.

Kiev authorities unveiled the sculpture on the eve of the May 9 holiday when Ukraine, along with Russia and other ex-Soviet states, marks the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.

Mokryna Yurzuk could not attend the opening of the monument due to illness, explained Elena, one of her two granddaughters, who came instead.

“She wanted to, but could not. Our grandmother is tight-lipped, it was only not so long ago we learned the details of the story with Luigi.

“But, perhaps, it is thanks to this story that her life still goes on,” Elena said.

“She told me that she was in a camp in Austria, she had a friend from Italy, he helped her.

“Sometimes now she cannot remember what happened yesterday, but she remembers what took place many years ago.”

She added that Mokryna was not interested in celebrity, despite the interest in her story. “My grandmother does not like the agitation around her, she responds with great restraint to it all.”

Lots of people find a home on the National Geographic Channel, from tuna fishermen to Mormons with more than one wife and “preppers” stocking up their bunkers for the end of the world.

The popular cable and satellite TV channel traces its heritage to the 125-year-old magazine of the National Geographic Society, one of the world’s biggest non-profit scientific and educational organizations.

A scholarly journal at the outset, the magazine with its signature yellow-border cover now claims a global readership of 60 million with its domestic English and 36 foreign-language editions.

To the chagrin of purists, however, the National Geographic Channel — majority owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation — has a distinctly more popularist flavor.

One of its most-watched series is “Doomsday Preppers,” which introduced such colorful survivalists as Tom Perez, who’s so involved in preparing for an imminent terrorist attack that he hasn’t worked for 12 years.

“Wicked Tuna” hinges on the rivalry between rival fishing crews in Gloucester, Massachusetts whose livelihoods depend on catching tuna the hard way, with rod and reel. Its third season is in production.

Then there’s “Polygamy, USA” starring a breakaway Mormon sect that stays true to plural marriage; “Ultimate Survival: Alaska,” a deep-freeze test of wilderness wits; and many other so-called “docu-reality” series.

“Genuinely, it’s contemporary anthropology, and these are really significant subcultures,” said Hamish Mykura, the National Geographic Channel’s head of international content, based in London.

“There will always be some people who think that National Geographic should just be making programs about elephants and glaciers and Papua New Guinea,” he told AFP.

“But if you are going to make a TV channel that people want to watch and that is interesting and entertaining, your challenge is something much more important and significant than that.”

The bottom line is characters, added Mykura, a veteran of Britain’s BBC and Channel 4 television networks.

“In some ways it’s more interesting to tell the story of a person through their own experience and through their own words than to have a commentator you don’t see reading a narration and giving an opinion from behind the camera.”

For those loyal to old-school National Geographic values, some of whom may remember its first network TV special “Americans on Everest” in 1965, there’s gnawing sense of heresy.

It was those values, for instance, that saw the magazine a century ago publish the details of Hiram Bingham’s discovery of the Inca ruins of Machu Picchu in Peru.

“The National Geographic Magazine has always worked hard to stick to the facts,” said Alan Mairson, a former staff writer at the magazine whose Society Matters blog critiques what it calls the society’s “broken business model.”

“The channel is focused on entertainment,” he said. “The magazine is focused on education while it simultaneously tries to deliver riveting stories. The two approaches are fundamentally different.”

Wildlife documentary filmmaker Michael Parfit, a former contributor to the magazine, said the credibility of the National Geographic Society has been undermined by the Channel’s programming.

“A few (programs) seem relatively honest, so they approach documentary quality,” he said. “Many are simply semi-scripted entertainment with main characters who play themselves when given fictional situations.”

“The shows I find most offensive are presented as documentaries or character-driven series about specific subjects that have been fully debunked by science,” he said, citing “Chasing UFOs” as an example.

Mairson suspects the Murdoch factor is at play, given that News Corporation shuttered its Fox Reality Channel after it bought into the National Geographic Channel.

“What does Rupert Murdoch gain from operating under the National Geographic name? Trust. A sense of authenticity. A comfort level for viewers that was evidently lacking at the Fox Reality Channel,” he said.

For Dave Carraro, one of the stars of “Wicked Tuna,” the National Geographic Channel has done a good job in showing viewers “the highs and the lows” of his risky life on the open seas.

His colleague Dave Marciano also appreciates the extra income that comes with appearing on reality TV — a cushion for the time spent waiting for the fish to bite.

“They don’t show the 75 percent of the time when we sit up there, picking our noses,” he said. “You’ve got to invest a lot of time. That’s the biggest investment we make, waiting and waiting and waiting.”

Opera houses the world over are scrambling to pay tribute to Richard Wagner, the controversial German composer often referred to as Hitler’s favourite, who would have turned 200 this year.

More has purportedly already been written about Wagner than any other artist and composer in history, but publishers are churning out countless new biographies, critical studies and books.

Magazines and daily newspapers are bursting with reviews, interviews and articles, while a plethora of new and re-issued recordings jostle for attention.

In the run-up to this week’s bicentenary, all the world’s leading opera houses — including the Met in New York, Covent Garden in London, La Scala in Milan, the Bastille in Paris and Vienna State Opera — have unveiled new stagings of Wagner’s opus magnum, the 16-hour-long, four-opera “Ring” cycle.

In Germany, which boasts around 80 opera houses, even the most dyed-in-the-wool Wagnerian would struggle to keep track.

Among the more outlandish projects is a staging of “Rhinegold” on a barge on the river Rhine.

But for true Wagnerians, perhaps the main highlights of the year take place in Bayreuth, the small, sleepy town in Franconia where Wagner designed and built his Festspielhaus, and which remains the centre of the ardent cult around him.

The hallowed theatre with its incomparable acoustics usually only opens its doors for four weeks in the summer.

But on May 22, it will host Wagner’s 200th birthday concert, with German maestro Christian Thielemann conducting excerpts from his best-known operas.

Then the centrepiece of this year’s Bayreuth Festival, which begins on July 25, will be a hotly anticipated new production of the “Ring” by the deconstructivist and iconoclastic German theatre director, Frank Castorf.

As always with Wagner, the bicentenary celebrations are never far from controversy.

In Duesseldorf this month, a new staging of his “Tannhaeuser” ended in an eclat, when director Burkhard Kosminski set the composer’s story of the medieval knight-minstrel in the Nazi era and included a graphic portrayal of the gassing and execution of Jews.

After unprecedented protests, the opera house pulled the production after just one performance.

But the incident goes to the heart of the controversy surrounding a composer who is reviled as much as he is revered.

“I hate Wagner, but I hate him on my knees,” the legendary Jewish maestro Leonard Bernstein once said of Wagner, succinctly summing up the deep ambivalence many people tend to harbour towards him.

Wagner was born in Leipzig on May 22, 1813 and died in Venice on February 13, 1883, long before the rise of Nazism.

But Hitler was an ardent admirer of his music, as well as a regular visitor to Bayreuth. And he became a close friend of the Wagner family, who affectionately called him “Uncle Wolf”.

Hitler claimed that it was one of Wagner’s early operas, about the Roman tribune “Rienzi”, which inspired him to begin thinking about a political career.

The Nazis made prodigious use of Wagner’s music in their propaganda films and rallies, so much so that the composer’s works are still banned for performance in Israel.

Music scholars, historians, musicians and conductors still fiercely debate the extent to which Wagner’s musical and artistic legacy is impregnated with anti-Semitism, misogyny and proto-Nazi ideas of racial purity.

In addition to his 13 completed operas, Wagner was a prolific writer and theorist, and among his most infamous publications is a virulently anti-Semitic pamphlet entitled “Judaism in Music”.

The bone of contention for his supporters and detractors alike is whether Wagner’s “Gesamtkunstwerk”, or total work of art, is innately apolitical, or whether he uses it to propagate his racist, anti-Semitic and nihilistic worldview.

In purely musical terms, Wagner’s achievements are undeniable.

His medieval love epic, “Tristan and Isolde” and his final stage work “Parsifal” broke the boundaries of tonality, influencing the work of a wealth of later composers including Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg.

Wagner’s use of the orchestra, with exotic new instruments specially designed to his own demands, was similarly revolutionary.

But critics, such as the composer’s great-grandson, Gottfried Wagner, said the man cannot and should not be separated from his art.

“There are terrific sides and dark sides” to Wagner, he told AFP in an interview.

Art lovers, collectors and gallerists will gather on Thursday for Hong Kong’s inaugural edition of Art Basel, sealing the city’s status as an international art hub and Asia’s leading art destination.

The four-day annual show is the world’s premier art fair and has until now only been held in Switzerland and the United States each year. More than 2,000 international artists and 245 leading art galleries will come together for the event to be held in the city’s waterfront convention centre.

“Art Basel really helps to affirm in people’s minds the status of Hong Kong as the art destination in Asia,” Art Basel Asia director Magnus Renfrew told AFP.

It replaces Art HK, Hong Kong’s former art fair which was set up in 2008 and recently taken over by the high-profile Swiss Art Basel franchise which has been showcasing modern and contemporary art since 1970.

“It really helps to take this from being a fair of regional significance to one of global significance,” says Renfrew, who also headed Art HK. “The quality of application this year was far greater than what we received previously, it’s getting more difficult to get in.”

Renfrew and his team are predicting huge growth potential in the Asian art scene and are expecting a greater presence from collectors from outside Asia.

“There’s clearly a huge potential in Asia, there are now more billionaires in Asia than there are in Europe,” says Renfrew, adding that 25 VIP relations managers have been deployed around the world to drive VIP traffic to the fair.

Better known as a fast-paced commercial hub which is home to global banks and designer brands, Hong Kong’s reputation as a thriving centre for art collectors has only been established in the last few years.

It has surged to third place in the global art auction market behind New York and London and Western galleries are falling over each other to open franchises in the former British colony.

The sudden boom in the international art presence in Hong Kong has come largely thanks to the explosion of personal wealth among mainland Chinese who are investing in art and a growing interest among collectors for different types of art aside from traditional works.

Since Art Basel acquired Art HK in 2011, 11 galleries have opened up in Hong Kong hoping to tap into the growing international art presence, Renfrew said.

“I think the cultural ecology of Hong Kong is really starting to come together,” he said.

Gagosian, White Cube, Acquavella, Lehmann Maupin and Pearl Lam are just some of the big-name galleries to have arrived in the city in the past two years, despite sky-high rents.

The local art scene is also buzzing with the government’s development of a massive art and culture district on the harbour in Kowloon where contemporary art museum “M+” is expected to boast a world-class art selection.

International art stars are launching shows at major galleries in the city to coincide with Art Basel and tap into the current cultural buzz.

Controversial British siblings Jake and Dinos Chapman — known as the Chapman brothers — will be opening an exhibition at White Cube Tuesday, their first exhibition in China.

Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami will launch a show at the French Galerie Perrotin on the same day.

Art Basel’s four main sections at the Hong Kong show will focus on significant works from the past 100 years, projects specially developed for the show and large-scale sculptural and installation pieces.

Selected emerging contemporary artists will also vie for a $25,000 prize.

The city’s Hanart TZ Gallery which showcases Chinese contemporary art will be exhibiting at the show and is hoping to push its own reputation beyond its regional fan base.

“With Art Basel, the promise is that the international is being brought to Hong Kong,” Johnson Chang, the gallery’s curatorial director, told AFP.

Chang is hoping the show will help his artists reach global collectors and spark “new interest, new business and new connections”.

Hong Kong has already made international art headlines this year with thousands of people flocking to see a giant rubber duck created by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman floating in the city’s famous Victoria Harbour.

It also hosted a major Andy Warhol exhibition which received more than 200,000 visitors during its three-month run.

Gays and lesbians demonstrated in Venezuela’s capital Saturday to push for an end to discrimination and for civil rights such as same-sex marriage.

“In some areas of the capital, two men cannot be seen holdings hands without security ushering them out,” said Cesar Sequera, who leads Diverse Venezuela, among marchers waving signs like “Say yes to inclusion.”

Sequera said the dozens taking part in the protest wanted to see the end of persecution of lesbians, gays and transsexuals in Venezuela — and were seeking the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Bills seeking more rights for gays and lesbians have been “blocked by the religious fundamentalism which holds sway in the National Assembly,” he said of the socialist government’s main legislative force in the legislature.

But gay marriage has not come before lawmakers in the South American nation.

Uruguay’s legislature voted last month to allow same-sex marriages nationwide, making it only the second Latin American country to do so.

Argentina approved gay marriage in 2010. Same-sex marriage has been permitted in Mexico City, but not the rest of the country, since 2009.

Denmark won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest in the Swedish city of Malmoe early Sunday with the song “Only Teardrops” by Emmelie de Forest.

Denmark, widely tipped to win the annual music competition, took the honours ahead of the 25 other finalists in a glittering ceremony watched by millions of viewers across Europe.

Americans by the droves plunked down cold cash Saturday for a chance at fulfilling their most feverish dream: winning the $600 million Powerball lottery jackpot.

Millions will be glued to their TV sets when the Powerball numbers are drawn in a live event broadcast just before 11:00 pm eastern time (0300 GMT Sunday). If there is no winner, the jackpot could rise to close to $1 billion by the next drawing on Wednesday.

The jackpot is “the largest in the 21-year history of the game,” the Iowa state lottery agency said in a statement.

Kim Chatman, a building security guard in Washington who plans to buy her lotto ticket after work, said “you’ve got to take your chance — that’s what it’s all about.”

The $2 tickets are sold at supermarkets, corner stores and gas stations in 42 states, the capital Washington and the US Virgin Islands.

In the midwestern state of Minnesota, tickets are even sold at fuel pumps and automatic teller machines.

“Strong sales across the country are the reason the prize is taking big jumps now,” the Iowa state lottery agency said — particularly after the May 15 drawing, when the jackpot stood at $363.9 million, and there was no winner.

Sales were also boosted after Powerball tickets became available in California starting in April.

The game is a choice of five numbers from a pool of 59, plus a Powerball number from a separate pool of 35.

Powerball — a shared jackpot coordinated by the Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL), a non-profit group formed by the participating state lotteries — cannot be played from outside the United States or outside the participating states.

The richest US jackpot of all time was $656 million, won in a Mega Millions drawing in March 2012 and split between three tickets in Illinois, Kansas and Maryland. Like all US lotteries, the winnings are subject to tax.

Back then, “there were big lines for three days” of customers buying tickets, said Rajendra Prasad Bhusal, who works at the Continental Wine and Liquor store in downtown Washington.

That’s when the tickets cost $1. “Now, people complain that the tickets cost too much,” he said.

In recent days, customers have streamed in to buy Powerball tickets, but the crowd is only a third of the numbers seen in March 2012, according to the liquor salesman.

The Powerball website says the odds of winning the jackpot are one in 175,223,510. For a comparison, the odds of getting struck by lighting in the United States is one in 280,000, according to the National Lightning Safety Institute.

The main Powerball website advised that “swinging a live chicken above your head while wishing for the future numbers does NOT work” to improve the chances of winning. “There is no improvement to be had by swinging a dead chicken,” it added.

Buying more tickets helps, “but the odds are still high and hitting the jackpot is still a question of fate,” it said.

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said in an interview published Saturday says it’s ok for women to cry at work, share emotions and be honest about their femininity.

Sandberg shot to global fame after her the publication of her best-selling book “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead” which talks about women’s career struggles and advises women to “lean in” to reach their potential.

It has drawn bouquets from admirers for articulating a new modern feminist vision and brickbats from critics who say her lofty position has made her out-of-touch with the gruelling personal cost of combining career and family.

In an interview with India’s Mint business daily, the 43-year-old admitted: “I cry at work,” adding women are not “one type of person Monday through Friday” and “then a different person in the nights and weekend.”

“I think we are all of us emotional beings and it’s okay for us to share that emotion at work,” said Facebook’s number two, who was named in Time magazine’s 2013 list as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Studies have shown women are more prone than men to cry at work because males are schooled not to cry in public and it can hurt their career progression.

Sandberg, who is married with two young children, said on the subject of her book “the messages of believing in yourself and sitting at the table, getting compensated fairly, those can happen at any point in your career.”

It is necessary to talk about gender-related issues honestly in the workplace, and a need for employers to say: “I am here to support you”, she added in the interview.

The question of whether women can “have it all” in terms of pursuing careers and raising families is “very problematic”, added Sandberg, who got $26.2 million in salary, bonus and shares last year from the US social networking giant.

Men never face such questions because society assumes they can have both professions and children, she said in the interview.

A huge percentage of women globally have both children and work full-time, but to do so they must get the “support they need at the workplace and at home,” Sandberg said.

Residents of a New York City apartment building are up in arms over an exhibition of candid photographs one of their neighbors took of them, without their knowledge or permission.

A gallery show — “The Neighbors” — of the pictures taken surreptitiously by American photographer Arne Svenson opened last week at the Julie Saul Gallery in lower Manhattan.

The images were taken by Svenson through the windows of his apartment building in lower Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, as he trained his lens on his on his unsuspecting neighbors.

They show Svenson’s neighbors, unawares, in various candid poses — bending, kneeling, carrying children.

A press release on the gallery’s website said Svenson was intrigued by the idea of capturing “the daily activities of his downtown Manhattan neighbors as seen through his windows into theirs.”

“He was intrigued not only by the implied stories within the frame of the glass but also by the play of light upon the subjects, the shadows, the framing of the structure,” the statement said, adding that he “doesn’t photograph anything salacious or demeaning” and is “careful not to reveal identities.”

“Svenson is not photographing the people as specific, identifiable individuals, more as representations of humankind, of us,” the Chelsea gallery said.

It called the photo series “social documentation in a very rarefied environment.”

But Svenson’s subjects strongly disagreed, saying that his picture-taking violated their privacy.

Some said they also resented that he snapped pictures of them with their young children, making the intrusion into their lives even worse.

“This is about kids. If he’s waiting there for hours with his camera, who knows what kind of footage he has. I can recognize items from my daughter’s bedroom,” one mother told the New York Post.

A gallery spokeswoman said that the pictures go for between $6,200 and $8,400, and that some of the images have already been sold.

Fourteen Muslim clerics from across the globe will visit the former Nazi German Auschwitz death camp in southern Poland next week as part of a Holocaust awareness and anti-genocide program, organisers said Friday.

“This is an opportunity for imams who are influential in their communities to look at the Holocaust first hand and to go to Auschwitz, to see what that kind of hatred led to,” Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich told AFP on Friday.

“It’s to make sure that civilisation doesn’t fail again.”

The visiting imams are from Bosnia, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, Nigeria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States.

They will also visit a new museum in the Polish capital Warsaw focusing on centuries of Jewish life before the Holocaust, John C. Taylor from the US State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom told AFP on Friday.

Meeting are also planned with local Catholic, Muslim and Jewish religious leaders.

“If we want the world to remember the horrors of the Holocaust so that neither genocide against the Jews, nor anyone else should ever happen again, then we have an obligation to have communal leaders understand what happened,” Schudrich said.

Muslim leaders last visited Auschwitz in 2011 as part of an inter-faith delegation including a hundred Jewish and Christian leaders from the Middle East, Africa and Europe.

More than one million people, mostly European Jews, perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau, operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland from 1940 until it was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27, 1945.

The site was one of six German death camps set up in occupied Poland, a country which was home to pre-war Europe’s largest Jewish community.

Among the camp’s other victims were tens of thousands of non-Jewish Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, gypsies, and anti-Nazi resistance fighters from across Europe.