IN THE NEWS...

Dozens of revelers at the Aquamarine Open Air Festival near Moscow were left partially blind after a laser light show burned their retinas, and members of Finland's Theater Totti debuted the world's first opera for the deaf. Performers conveyed the mood and tone of the nineteenth-century opera "The Hunt of King Charles" using sign language and body language, facial expressions, and two musicians. "I was afraid it would be a pitiful imitation of opera by the hearing," said Kaisa Alanne, the director of the Finnish Association of the Deaf, "but, oh, how wrong I was! It is as if a new form of art was born."