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BATTAMBANG, Cambodia (AP) — Between bites of spicy Cambodian curry and fried fish with rice, Angelina Jolie Pitt explains how this tiny country with a tumultuous past changed the course of her life.
She first visited Cambodia 16 years ago to portray "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider" — the gun-toting, bungee-jumping, supremely toned action hero that made her a star. Soon after, she adopted her first child from a Cambodian orphanage and returned again and again on humanitarian missions. Now, she's back for another movie but this time as a director, and the subject matter is a far cry from Lara Croft.
"First They Killed My Father," is based on a Khmer Rouge memoir written by survivor Loung Ung that recounts the 1970s Cambodian genocide from a child's perspective. The film, which she is directing and co-wrote with Ung for Netflix, is in Khmer, with an all-Cambodian cast and according to Jolie Pitt "the most important" movie of her career. During a break from filming, she talked to The Associated Press about how, more than ever, she feels a satisfying symbiosis between her life and work.
In person, Jolie Pitt is engaging and down-to-earth, dressed in a T-shirt and long black skirt, her hair pulled into a casual bun. She goes out of her way to play down her celebrity, hopping into the back of an SUV and squeezing into the middle seat beside a reporter for a short drive from the set to the crew's outdoor lunch tents. She is relaxed and articulate as the conversation veers from acting and directing, to history, humanitarian work, motherhood and her special relationship to Cambodia.
"When I first came to Cambodia, it changed me. It changed my perspective. I realized there was so much about history that I had not been taught in school, and so much about life that I needed to understand, and I was very humbled by it," said the 40-year-old Jolie Pitt, who grew up in Los Angeles where she felt "a real emptiness."
She was struck by the graciousness and warmth of Cambodian people, despite the tragedy that left an estimated 2 million people dead. While shooting Lara Croft in 2000, some scenes required sidestepping land mines, she said, which made her aware of the dangers refugees face in countries ravaged by war. "That trip triggered my realization of how little I knew and the beginning of my search for that knowledge."
It prompted her to contact the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to learn about the agency's work before joining as a goodwill ambassador in 2001. She was then given an expanded role as Special Envoy in 2012.
It was during an early trip back to Cambodia with the U.N. that Jolie had another epiphany — this time about motherhood.
"It's strange, I never wanted to have a baby. I never wanted to be pregnant. I never babysat. I never thought of myself as a mother," Jolie, now famously a mother of six, says with a laugh. But while playing with children at a Cambodian school, "it was suddenly very clear to me that my son was in the country, somewhere."
She adopted Maddox in 2002, and a year later opened a foundation in his name in northwestern Battambang province, which helps fund health care, education and conservation projects in rural Cambodia.
Maddox is now 14 and sporting what his mom calls "a blonde stripe" — a shaggy mohawk with the top dyed blonde. He joined her in Cambodia to help behind the scenes for the project that she sees as a unique merger of her film work and family with humanitarian interests.
"For me, this is the moment, where finally my life is kind of in line, and I feel I'm finally where I should be," Jolie Pitt said.
Her fondness for Cambodia is mutual, says the country's most celebrated filmmaker Rithy Panh, who says "First They Killed My Father" will be the first Hollywood epic filmed in Cambodia about the country's genocide — a sign that the government trusts her to respectfully revisit the horrors of the past.
"I don't think they authorized Hollywood to come here. They authorized Angelina Jolie. It's not the same. She is special. She has a special relationship with the Cambodian people. There is a mutual respect," said Panh, her co-producer.
"I wonder if she's not a reincarnated Cambodian," he laughed, then thought about it. "Maybe. Maybe in a previous life she was Cambodian."
She expects to return to hold the film's premiere in Cambodia at the end of the year, before its release on Netflix.
GENEVA (AP) — It may be necessary to use controversial methods like genetically modified mosquitoes to wipe out the insects that are now spreading Zika across the Americas, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.
The virus has been linked to a spike in babies born with abnormally small heads, or microcephaly, in Brazil and French Polynesia. WHO has declared Zika a global emergency even though there is no definitive proof it is causing the birth defects.
Next week, WHO chief Dr. Margaret Chan will travel to Brazil to discuss Zika and microcephaly with the country's health minister and other officials, spokeswoman Fadela Chaib said on Tuesday.
In a statement, WHO said its advisory group has recommended further field trials of genetically modified mosquitoes, following trials in the Cayman Islands to fight dengue, where sterile male mosquitoes were released to mate with wild females.
"Given the magnitude of the Zika crisis, WHO encourages affected countries...to boost the use of both old and new approaches to mosquito control as the most immediate line of defense," the agency said in a statement.
WHO said previous experiments in releasing sterile insects had been used by other U.N. agencies to control agricultural pests. The agency described the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that spread Zika — as well as other diseases including dengue and yellow fever — as an "aggressive" mosquito that uses "sneak attacks" to bite people, noting that the mosquito has shown "a remarkable ability to adapt."
Environmentalists have previously criticized the genetically modified approach, saying it's impossible to know the long-term effects of wiping out an entire insect population.
Some experts agreed it might be worth using genetically modified mosquitoes given the speed of Zika's spread but were unsure of the eventual consequences.
"The way this is done wouldn't leave lots of mutant mosquitoes in the countryside," said Jimmy Whitworth, an infectious diseases expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He said the Zika mosquitoes are an imported species that were accidentally brought to the Americas hundreds of years ago and was optimistic their eradication wouldn't damage the environment.
However, he said such a move would be unprecedented and it would be impossible to know what the impact might be before the insects are released.
"You would hope that the ecology would just return to how it was before this mosquito arrived," he said. "But there's no way of knowing that for sure."
COLUMBIA, South Carolina (AP) — After his big win in the Iowa caucuses, Ted Cruz is one step closer to becoming the first Hispanic president in U.S. history. But that's not how he wants to be known.
Cruz, whose father was born in Cuba, admits that his Spanish-speaking skills are "lousy." He offers up only the occasional "muchisimas gracias" on the campaign trail.
His positions on immigration, including ending birthright citizenship and building a border wall, put him at odds with many Hispanic voters and advocacy groups. They accuse him of ignoring his heritage and issues that matter to many Latinos.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio shares some of the same conservative positions on immigration, some of which antagonize the Hispanic community — an ever-growing and increasingly powerful demographic in American elections.
For both of the young senators, their heritage has not defined their supporter base or their political philosophies. But Cruz in particular has risked alienating many Hispanics by surrounding himself with conservatives such as Iowa Rep. Steve King, Cruz's national campaign co-chairman, who has compared immigrants living in the country illegally to drug mules and livestock.
In appealing to conservatives in mostly white Iowa and New Hampshire, it wasn't necessary for Cruz or Rubio to appeal directly to Hispanic voters. But that could change quickly in Nevada on Feb. 23, where Latinos make up 28 percent of the population, although they made up only 5 percent of Republican voters in the 2012 caucuses.
Cruz's top strategist, Jason Johnson, says the Texas senator can win the general election by capturing just 30 percent of Hispanics — not much more than the 27 percent Mitt Romney got in his failed 2012 White House bid. Instead of luring more Hispanics to his side, Cruz is counting on bringing out millions of mostly white evangelical Christians and working class voters who sat out the past two elections.
"In the Democratic Party, you're the Hispanic guy, you're the African-American guy, you're whatever your little bloc is, you're pigeonholed and simply a quota representative," Cruz told The Associated Press in a November interview. "One of the reasons I'm a Republican is because we treat people as individuals. ... When I ran for Senate in Texas I didn't run as: 'Vote for the Hispanic guy.'"
Cruz said he ran for the Senate as the strongest conservative and "that's exactly how I'm running for president."
As a teenager in Cuba, his father Rafael Cruz joined an uprising against Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, during which time he was arrested and beaten. In 1957 — two years before Fidel Castro took power — the elder Cruz fled Cuba for the U.S., a story that Cruz often recounts on the campaign trail.
He told AP that nothing sums up why he ran for office more than his father's journey and fulfillment of the American dream.
"Being the son of an immigrant who has fled oppression makes you appreciate how precious and fragile our freedom is, and is integral to who I am," Cruz said. "But I think a great many of Hispanics in this country are tired of being stereotyped or taken for granted by the Democratic Party."
Cruz was born Rafael Edward Cruz in 1970. He spoke no Spanish at home and his parents spoke only English when around him.
Cruz described in his 2015 autobiography "A Time for Truth" how as a child he was known by the nickname Felito.
"The problem with that name was that it seemed to rhyme with every major corn chip on the market," Cruz wrote. "Fritos, Cheetos, Doritos and Tostitos — a fact that other young children were quite happy to point out."
Cruz changed his name to Ted when he was 13 — a move that infuriated his father. For about two years, his father, who now travels the country campaigning for him, refused to call him Ted.
By distancing himself from his cultural heritage, he's opening himself to criticism from the other Cuban-American in the race. Rubio and Cruz clashed over their Spanish-speaking skills in last weekend's GOP debate, with the fluent Rubio criticizing Cruz for not speaking Spanish. Cruz lashed back in heavily accented Spanish, a rare display of his limited knowledge of the language.
Alfonso Aguilar, president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles, said Cruz "doesn't fundamentally understand the Latino community." The Washington-based group of national conservative and Republican leaders has criticized both Cruz and Donald Trump for their opposition to legalizing people who are in the county illegally.
Cruz and Rubio "have turned their back on our community" and are catering to the anti-immigrant fringe of the Republican Party, said Dolores Huerta, a longtime civil rights activist.
"They really don't share the values of the Latino community even though they happen to be Latinos themselves," Huerta said. "We have to vote our values and for the people who are standing up for us. ... We can't vote for somebody just because they happen to be of Latino descent."