Month: November 2019

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There is no fence or entrance fee to the Chavez Ravine Arboretum in Elysian Park. Think of it as an inviting park with a sweeping lawn, children’s play area, barbecue pits and picnic tables — and the shade of some of the oldest and most beautiful trees in Los Angeles. It’s the site of the city’s first arboretum, a place where horticulturists can learn what thrives in the city and what doesn’t.

As L.A. embarks on an ambitious plan to plant 90,000 trees in the next two years, the oldsters planted more than a century ago provide examples of what trees do best in our changing climate.

Must-see treesat the arboretum include the Queensland kauri pine from New Zealand, which towers over the neighboring silk floss trees. The only kauri pine in the state of California that’s taller is in the Huntington Botanical Gardens.

Lie down in the grass under one of the two enormous South American tipu trees and behold its massive, multilimbed canopy. The African cape chestnut that dates to the 19th century blooms with pink lily-shaped flowers in early summer. The bulging base of the ombu tree explains its nickname: “elephant-foot tree.” The umbrella-like canopy provides shelter for gauchos on the Argentine pampas.

Long Beach City College horticulture professor Jorge Ochoa says you won’t find specimen Eastern oaks as splendid as the bur oak, pin oak, white oak and northern red oak anywhere else in L.A. Other favorites: a gnarled cork oak, a stately cedar of Lebanon, an imposing dawn redwood that hails from China and many species of L.A.’s palms.

Directions: Go to the arboretum’s website and click on Google Map directions or map directions to Chavez Ravine Road, Los Angeles, 90012. You can also locate it with Google Map directions to the Grace E. Simons Lodge, named for the founder of the Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park.


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Lewis Hamilton had a suggestion for a Sebastian Vettel fan who claimed the German was better than him during a live Instagram session.

Hamilton left Singapour in an ebullient mood after his crushing win at Marina Bay, and flew straight back to Vienna early Monday morning along with Mercedes’  bosses Toro Wolff and Niki Lauda, and on board the latter’s private jet.

While waiting to get clearance for take-off, the championship leader indulged in a live Instagram session with his 4.8 million followers.

  • Bottas loses it as Ricciardo breaks wind!

During the live post, a Ferrari and Vettel devotee suggested his favourite driver was better and more accomplished than Hamilton. An assertion which the three-time world champion answered with a jibe of his own.

“One day you will see that that’s not the case,” said Ham.

“If you haven’t, then maybe you need to go to Specsavers.”

Enough said.

Gallery: The beautiful wives and girlfriends of F1 drivers

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter

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Rachel Malarich faces a pressing task: overseeing the planting of 90,000 trees over the next two years in Los Angeles, home to the largest urban forest in the United States. As the city’s first forest officer, the veteran arborist needs to boost the tree canopy by at least 50% in shade-starved low-income areas by 2028. “The goal is ambitious,” she said. “But through the collaboration of city departments, nonprofits and local communities, we can make it happen.”

Mayor Eric Garcetti, who appointed Malarich to the post in August, said at the kickoff of what’s called L.A.’s Green New Deal, which expands the city’s 2015 Sustainable City Plan: “Trees cool the air, produce oxygen and eat carbon dioxide. Planting trees is the simplest way to combat climate change.” Residents receive a bonus of free trees for their yards and neighborhood streets.

The question at the top of Malarich’s mind right now is which trees to plant in a time of rising temperatures. To find inspiration, she recently took a stroll into the past to visit the city’s first arboretum in Elysian Park, not far from City Hall.

“The arboretum is small, but it has some of the oldest, finest, first or only tree specimens of their kind in Los Angeles,” says L.A. Recreation and Parks tree surgeon supervisor Leon Boroditsky. “We’ve designated many of them as ‘heritage trees.’ ”

Malarich, a native of San Jose who graduated from Cal State Long Beach in 2005, spent over a decade with TreePeople. As its director of forestry for more than three years, she organized volunteer efforts to plant and care for trees in local communities.

Now she’ll do the same for L.A. on a grander scale. She visited the grove of the city’s older planted trees, which covers a few acres in Elysian Park, best known as the home of Dodger Stadium. More than a century ago, L.A.’s more affluent residents in the Horticultural Society of Southern California needed a place to show off their private collections of exotic trees. In 1893, they petitioned park commissioners and the City Council to secure 10 acres of land in the park and paid to pipe in water.

The Los Angeles Times endorsed the plan at the time. “There is no other park in the country which has such magnificent views, or possesses a climate where the most delicate plants will flourish all winter in the open air,” the newspaper announced on Aug. 22, 1893. Planting in what was called the Elysian Park Arboretum began in December.

“The founders planted [tree] species from different parts of the world to see what would flourish in L.A.’s. climate,” says Long Beach City College horticulture professor Jorge Ochoa. “Those that thrived were later planted on streets and in parks throughout the city.”

Malarich hopes to garner similar information from the current inventory she is supervising of every tree on L.A.’s streets and in all of its 464 parks. “It will give us data about what species we have and which are doing well. Hard data is necessary for us to succeed.”

Malarich, Ochoa and Boroditsky all participated in the city’s tree-planting efforts during Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s Million Trees L.A. initiative between 2006 and 2013. The plan fell short of its ambitions, with just about 400,000 trees being planted. It was funded by grants, not taxpayer dollars, and focused on tree-poor areas in South L.A. and the northeast San Fernando Valley.

“Our goal is more realistic,” Malarich says. “Plus we have robust support from city and state funding and nonprofit grants.”

At the old arboretum, Boroditsky points out two graceful old trees, a Cape chestnut from South Africa and a Moreton Bay chestnut from Australia. “These specimens date back to the 19th century, and they’re still doing well,” he said.

Though spotty, records indicate the arboretum included more than 50 species of trees in the 1920s and that more trees — including a cork oak, a river birch and a small grove of California redwoods — were planted during the following few decades. In 1958, however, Dodger Stadium took a huge bite out of Elysian Park, and the city slashed through the arboretum to build Stadium Way. The six-lane road connected the 5 Freeway and the ballpark, but many arboretum trees were sacrificed.

In 1965 developers introduced plans for a convention center adjoining Dodger Stadium. Nearby residents created a grass-roots organization to fight it. The Citizens Committee to Save Elysian Park not only blocked the convention center but later won battles against a proposed airport, condominiums, oil wells and zip lines. Thanks to the group’s efforts, the arboretum, renamed the Chavez Ravine Arboretum, was declared Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument No. 48 in 1967.

Since then, the committee has continued to stave off development in the park and encourage the planting of more rare and unusual trees in the arboretum, in keeping with its founders’ intentions.

“The arboretum has roughly 135 different species now,” Boroditsky said. “This planting season we’re adding some new ones, including oaks from Arizona, Texas and Mexico that thrive in hotter climates.”

“Usually I look at trees in urban areas, where they must be pruned to accommodate overhead wires and they have to fight the sidewalk for space,” Malarich said. “It’s a pleasure to see trees here.” She cranes her neck to glimpse the top of perhaps the tallest tree in the arboretum, a Queensland kauri pine. “It makes you realize how immense and majestic these species can get when they have lots of space.”

At one point, she joined Boroditsky and Ochoa under a giant South American tipu tree with a broad, sweeping canopy. “You should see this beauty in the summer when it blossoms,” Ochoa said. “The ground under it looks like it’s covered with a golden blanket.”

Malarich sized up the tree. “It’s way too big for a street tree, but I’d love to see it planted in more parks,” she said. “Standing under a tree like this reminds you that living things this magnificent don’t happen overnight. It requires a long-term investment and commitment to nurture them so they can mature to this age.”


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Scott Sternberg’s Entireworld brand is popping up at downtown L.A.’s Million Dollar Theater for a three-week flurry of film, food, fashion and fun that kicks off with a free daylong marathon repeat screening of “Groundhog Day” on Dec. 7. Dubbed the Million Dollar Pop Up Shop, it’s cinephile Sternberg’s latest effort to generate buzz for the L.A.-based direct-to-consumer collection of affordable luxe wardrobe staples he launched a year and a half ago by switching up the traditional shopping experience.

The screening series continues the following weekend with a Dec. 14 “Spaceballs” + Matzo Balls event that pairs a showing of the Mel Brooks space spoof with bowls of matzo ball soup from Wexler’s Deli in the adjacent Grand Central Market (available for an additional fee) as well as ball-shaped candy from La Huerta, which is running the event’s candy concession. The final installment of the screening series, which takes place Dec. 21, is a double feature of “Rules of Attraction” and “Less Than Zero” with a Q-and-A with author Bret Easton Ellis in between. All screenings are open to the public, and tickets are available for purchase online through Eventbrite or in the Entireworld pop-up store next to the theater.

That 600-square-foot space will also be stocked with the entire range of Entireworld’s offerings including the men’s and women’s bestsellers (pleated pants and colorful sweatsuits, respectively), T-shirts, hoodies and underwear, giftable items like recycled cashmere beanies, mittens and striped socks. The pop-up will also stock an exclusive sunny yellow two-tone tote bag emblazoned with “Los” on one side and “Angeles” on the other.

There’s a charitable element as well: A portion of proceeds from screening ticket sales and Entireworld product sales from Black Friday through Christmas (online or at the pop-up) will go to benefit Los Angeles Mission as well as a one-for-one in-kind donation for every pair of socks sold during the same holiday shopping season.

A love of movies aside, what motivated Sternberg to wrap a downtown L.A. screening series around a three-week pop-up shop instead of decamp to a more traditional retail thoroughfare like Melrose Avenue? Several things, he says. “If we had a straight-on pop-up we’d probably do pretty good business because the foot traffic on Melrose is really good, [and] the [comparable sales] are all there so we know we’d make money. But there’s also value in making an impression on a customer that is so unique and deep and sticky. It’s the start of a relationship that’s exciting and multi-layered.”

Beyond that, by partnering with Street Food Cinema (which is handling the logistics of the screenings) and Grand Central Market (which owns the theater and will have an Entireworld mural and sandwich board ads displayed throughout the market), Sternberg’s wares will be exposed to an untapped customer base. “People who have never heard of us, who don’t care about Band of Outsiders or anything I did in the past, who have no context, are going to experience the brand or a screening,” Sternberg said.

Speaking of Band of Outsiders, the label that established the designer as a fashion-world darling and earned him two awards from the Council of Fashion Designers of America before he departed in 2015, Sternberg says he learned something during the hammock of time between leaving that brand and launching Entireworld in April 2018.

“When I got out of that bubble there was this clear realization that while we were getting buzz and press after those shows, everybody else was too and the value of it wasn’t so great that I needed to start another brand that did fashion shows,” he said. “This ideas of creating buzz the old way — by doing fashion shows — was actually really easy and effective: you had a fashion show and everybody was in the room and boom it was good — you had buzz. [Now] there’s no space like that.”

So does Sternberg see this kind of experiential retail as the buzz-building alternative to the traditional fashion show format?

“Absolutely,” he replied. “It’s not just ‘I’m going to go shop and look through a rack,’ or ‘I’m going to sit there for 15 minutes and watch a slightly awkward presentation of models doing something,’ it’s a looser idea of how to experience the brand. And everybody’s looking for something to capture [on social media] to tell their friends about. People want to proselytize.”

Sternberg paused for a second and then added: ““But it’s not about getting people to post something [online],” he said, “It’s about doing something that’s so delightful and surprising that they can’t help but post it.”

In that respect, it seems you can hardly get much better than watching “Spaceballs” with a bunch of like-minded souls while slurping matzo ball soup and ingesting all manner of ball-shaped candy.

The Entireworld Million Dollar Pop Up Shop, 331 S. Broadway, store hours 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Dec. 7 to 22 and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. during Saturday screenings. Additional information, including screening times and ticket prices, can be found at entireworld.eventbrite.com.


The Boy Scouts of America has mortgaged one of the most spectacular properties it owns, the vast Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico, to help secure a line of credit as the financially strapped organization faces a growing wave of new sex-abuse lawsuits.

The BSA said Friday that it has no plans to sell the property, and that the land is being used as collateral to help meet financial needs that include rising insurance costs related to sex-abuse litigation.

However, the move dismayed a member of Philmont’s oversight committee, who says it violates agreements made when the land was donated in 1938. The BSA disputed that assertion.

Top BSA officials signed the document in March, but members of the Philmont Ranch Committee only recently learned of it, according to committee member Mark Stinnett.

In a memo to his fellow members, Stinnett, a Colorado-based lawyer, decried the financial maneuver and the lack of consultation with the committee

“I cannot begin to tell you how sorry I am to be the one to break this news to you,” Stinnett wrote. “The first point of the Scout Law is ‘A Scout is trustworthy.’ I am distressed beyond words at learning that our leaders apparently have not been.”

“But I am even more distressed to learn that Waite Phillips’ magnificent gift has now been put at risk,” Stinnett added.

Phillips was a successful oilman who used some of his fortune to develop a huge ranch in northeastern New Mexico. In 1938, and again in 1941, he donated two large tracts of the ranch to the Boy Scouts.

Since the first Boy Scout camp opened there in 1939, more than 1 million Scouts and other adventurers have camped and hiked on the property, which now covers more than 140,000 acres. One of its many trails leads to the 12,441-foot summit of Baldy Mountain.

In a statement provided to the Associated Press, the Boy Scouts said programming and operations at Philmont “continue uninterrupted, and we are committed to ensuring that the property will continue to serve and benefit the Scouting community for years to come. “

“In the face of rising insurance costs, it was necessary for the BSA to take some actions earlier this year to address our current financial situation,” the organization said. “This included identifying certain properties, including Philmont Scout Ranch, that could be used as collateral …. in order to keep in place an existing line of credit for insurance.”

Disclosure of the mortgage comes at a challenging time for the BSA, which for years has been entangled in costly litigation with plaintiffs who said they were abused by Scout leaders in their youth. Hundreds of new lawsuits loom after New York, New Jersey, Arizona and California enacted laws making it easier for victims of long-ago abuse to seek damages.

The BSA, headquartered in Irving, Texas, says it’s exploring “all available options” to maintain its programs and has not ruled out the possibility of filing for bankruptcy.

Seeking to ease some of the financial pressure, the BSA announced in October that the annual membership fee for its 2.2. million youth members will rise from $33 to $60, while the fee for adult volunteers will rise from $33 to $36. The news upset numerous local Scout leaders, who had already started registering youths for the coming year.

According to Stinnett, the BSA mortgaged its legal right and title to Philmont Scout Ranch to the J.P. Morgan Chase Bank to secure $446 million of debt incurred over the past decade.

Stinnett wrote that ranch committee member Julie Puckett — a granddaughter of Waite Phillips — had urged BSA officials in recent weeks to recognize Philmont as a restricted asset based on the understandings of all parties when Phillips donated the land.

“BSA management has instead stated its position that Philmont and its endowment are free and clear of restrictions and are thus theirs to take or encumber as they wish,” Stinnett wrote, depicting that stance as a “betrayal” of agreements made with the Phillips family.

The Boy Scouts disputed Stinnett’s assertion, saying nothing in the agreements with the Phillips family prevented the ranch from being used as collateral.

Last year, a wildfire ripped through the heart of the ranch. Campsites and several miles of trails were wiped out, leaving behind a scar that will take years and millions of dollars to restore.


PABLO, Mont. — 

Atty. Gen. William Barr announced a nationwide plan Friday to address the crisis of missing and slain indigenous people as concerns mount over the level of violence that community faces.

Barr announced the plan, known as the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Initiative, during a visit with tribal leaders and law enforcement officials on the Flathead Reservation in Montana.

Native American women experience some of the nation’s highest rates of homicide, sexual violence and domestic abuse. The National Institute of Justice estimates that 1.5 million Native American women have experienced violence in their lifetime, including many who are victims of sexual violence. On some reservations, federal studies have shown women are killed at a rate more than 10 times the national average.

The Justice Department’s new initiative would invest $1.5 million to hire specialized coordinators in 11 U.S. attorney’s offices across the country with significant Indian Country caseloads. The coordinators would be responsible for developing protocols for a better law enforcement response to missing-persons cases.

Montana’s coordinator, a former FBI agent, already has started in his position.

Tribal or local law enforcement officials would also be able to call on the FBI to help in some cases of missing indigenous persons. The FBI could then deploy some of its specialized teams, including investigators who focus on child abduction or evidence collection and special agents who can help do a quick analysis of digital evidence and social media accounts.

The Justice Department also committed to conducting an in-depth analysis of federal databases and its data collection practices to determine whether there are ways to improve the collection of information in missing-persons cases.

“This is not a panacea,” Barr told tribal council members of the Salish and Kootenai Confederated Tribes at an event where members presented him with a blue blanket before a traditional musical performance. “This is a step in the right direction, but we have a lot more work to do working together.”

Barr also said he spoke to President Trump about the initiative, which calls for some of the same things already in legislation pending in Congress.

On the nation’s largest Native American reservation, tribal members welcomed the extra resources and commitment to the issue but questioned how far the money would go given how widespread the problem is.

“This is stuff we’ve been advocating for, it’s just funding a slice of it,” said Amber Crotty, a lawmaker in the Navajo Nation.

Crotty pointed out that the hiring of 11 coordinators assigned to federal prosecutor offices nationally as outlined by Barr could have limited value in the Navajo Nation, which is part of three separate U.S. attorney jurisdictions in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.

She said tribes are looking to the federal government to fund advocates who can greet families of victims, relay information from law enforcement and provide training. She said tribal communities have resorted to organizing their own search parties and posting fliers in communities and on social media when someone goes missing because they sometimes get little or no response from law enforcement.

The extent of the problem of missing and killed Native American women is difficult to know given the dysfunction surrounding the issue.

An Associated Press investigation last year found that nobody knows precisely how many Native American women have gone missing or have been killed nationwide because many cases go unreported, others aren’t well documented, and no government database specifically tracks them.

A report released last year by the Urban Indian Health Institute said there were 5,712 cases of missing or slain indigenous girls in 2016, but only 116 of those cases were logged in a Justice Department database.

That study is limited in scope, however.

The report by the Seattle nonprofit group reflected data from 71 U.S. cities not on tribal land. Researchers said they expect their figures represent an undercount because some police departments in cities with substantial Native American populations — including Albuquerque, New Mexico and Billings, Mont. — didn’t respond to records requests or Native Americans were identified as belonging to another race.

Members of Congress asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office in May to review jurisdictional challenges, existing databases, federal policies, law enforcement staffing and notification systems and make recommendations for improvement. The office said Thursday the work is underway.

Bills in Congress seek to address the crisis, and half a dozen states have pledges to study the scope of it.

Meanwhile, activists have held rallies at state capitols, marched in the streets, put up memorials and billboards, bought television advertising and created exhibits with space for prayer offerings to draw attention to missing indigenous women.

The movement has featured women with a red handv print over their mouths, in what activists say is a symbol of the silencing of indigenous women.

Curtison Badonie with the New Mexico-based Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women said the Justice Department’s plan is a positive move in seeking justice for indigenous women and girls, and their grieving families and communities.

“Finally, they’re moving forward with this and they’re taking our existence seriously and are listening and knowing our sisters, our aunties, our grandmas, our nieces are important,” Badonie said. “They are sacred, they are human beings. We feel hopeful. We feel seen.”

But Badonie said: “We want to see that this continues, that this is not going to be just a one-time thing.”

Tribal police and investigators from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs generally serve as law enforcement on reservations, which are officially sovereign nations. But the FBI investigates certain offenses if the suspect, victim or both are Native American. If there’s ample evidence, the Justice Department prosecutes major felonies such as murder, kidnapping and rape if they happen on tribal lands.


HONG KONG — 

The campus of Hong Kong Polytechnic University looks like a bomb blast site covered in graffitied pro-democracy slogans.

Nearly every inch of ground is blanketed in broken glass, strewn bricks, water bottles, umbrellas, gloves, nails, clothing and chairs. Chemical smells and industrial odors hang in the air.

A crudely-built brick wall serving as a line of defense against police now stands half toppled. There are smashed windows in nearly every building, and water from flooded upper floors drips to a ground-floor library.

Rooms filled with medical supplies, helmets and gas masks hint at the hundreds of demonstrators that were on campus just a few days ago. The handful of demonstrators visible in the open dart from one area to another, all looking particularly busy and uninterested in talking to journalists.

In nearly six months of civil unrest in Hong Kong, what started partly as a bid to disrupt traffic at an adjacent tunnel that links Kowloon to Hong Kong Island descended into one of the fiercest battles between protesters and police.

The dozens of demonstrators thought to be left are increasingly hard to find — melting away into the labyrinth of hallways, classrooms and labs tucked into the dense 23-acre campus that has morphed into a fortress — six days after a police siege of the university.

Ken Woo, acting president of the student union, now presides over what feels like a ghost town. He has taken it upon himself to search for and counsel any remaining protesters on the campus.

“Many are hiding, more than you can imagine,” said Woo, 22, who suspects some have found refuge in the air-conditioning ducts. “The atmosphere is very dangerous and very weird.”

There was the one student who kept waving a knife and slashing furniture. Another had a habit of swallowing dozens of acetaminophen pills a day. At night, the eerie sounds of distant footsteps and banging prevent Woo from ever getting more than a few hours’ sleep.

“I think there are undercover police coming at night,” said Woo, a fourth-year civil engineering major.

Paranoia is rampant. Some remaining protesters accuse Woo, who has been talking to lawyers, journalists and school officials visiting Polytechnic, of being a government mole and refuse to meet with him, he said. Almost everyone he does speak to is hatching a plan to escape.

Woo’s main message to the outside world is this: There is a humanitarian crisis unfolding at his university.

He estimates there could be between 60 and 100 demonstrators left, all living in squalid conditions that could soon become a vector for disease. Toilets are getting filthier by the day. Dining areas are beginning to take on the rancid smell of rotting food.

“We’ve always had rats at Poly, but now there are so many more,” Woo said.

The Hong Kong government and police force say the solution is simple: Surrender peacefully to authorities and face charges of rioting, a crime that’s punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

Hundreds fled or turned themselves in during the last week, including 300 minors who had to register with police in lieu of arrest.

Police still guard the school’s perimeter, but show no outward signs of preparing a new assault, appearing content to wait until the remaining die-hards run out of food.

On Thursday night, a policeman on a loudspeaker taunted the protesters about their diminishing food supplies, saying they had to subsist on sliced bread for “elderly rubbish pickers” while police could get off work and enjoy “hot pot and cold beer.”

The defense of Polytechnic has been a costly campaign for Hong Kong’s protest movement that’s left many exhausted and searching for new ideas, including driving efforts underground to mimic guerrilla warfare.

Head-to-head confrontation is increasingly futile.

Thousands of demonstrators appeared outside the school Monday night to try and help free those inside the campus cut off by a police cordon the night before.

Barricaded protesters, many of whom were not Polytechnic students, lobbed Molotov cocktails at an armored police truck and used bows to shoot arrows, one of which penetrated an officer’s leg.

Riot police responded with an unprecedented show of force by firing 1,458 rounds of tear gas, 1,391 rubber bullets, 325 bean bag rounds and 265 sponge grenades. They also threatened to use live ammunition, briefly sparking fears of another Tiananmen massacre.

“We didn’t expect the police to surround us so quickly,” said one 23-year-old protester who fled the campus Tuesday and declined to provide her name for fear of being arrested. “We should have been more prepared. It was total chaos.”

Another escaped protester described scenes of panic Monday after the police assault. Protesters were preparing wills, sobbing and embracing one another and saying, “See you in 10 years,” a reference to the rioting penalty.

“People were hit with projectiles everywhere,” said the second protester, also 23, a recent Polytechnic graduate who also declined to disclose his name for fear of arrest. “I saw blood, bruises, people unable to walk. They were stepping over each other and falling on the glass from the broken Molotov cocktails and bleeding.”

He said he was filled with regret about the past week. It was noble for students to defend their campus from police. But barricading inside a building violated one of the protest movement’s key principles: be adaptable, or “be like water.”

“I feel so bad for my brothers and sisters still inside” Polytechnic, he said. “I have to respect their choice, but I don’t think they should stay.”

Some remaining protesters said it wasn’t by choice they were still there. They either feared falling into the hands of police and being beaten or hadn’t found a way to break out. Open manhole covers on campus showed the lengths some were willing to go in order to flee. Rumors spread that some protesters in the sewers were turned away by snakes.

“I’ve been here four or five days, I’ve lost track of time,” said Ken, a masked 20-year-old in a daze who was watching Japanese anime cartoons on a TV screen in the campus food court. “I want to go, but I can’t.”

Woo said he assumed the position of acting student union president by chance. The organization’s leader stepped down four months ago, leaving the job to him.

“I’m not even supposed to be here,” Woo said.

It’s a job he takes seriously, which is why he feels responsible for those remaining in Polytechnic — helping them locate volunteer lawyers on site or ensuring they have enough food and water. He’s prepared to stay for days, but admits it may only be a matter of time before he also attempts to leave. Though Woo knows he faces arrest, he denies he’s done anything that could be construed as rioting. His job is to be in the background, not on the front line protesting, he said.

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On a recent night, after making the rounds looking for holdouts, he approached a police checkpoint on an adjacent road. Separated by a fence, he tried to start small talk by asking an officer if he’d had his dinner yet. Woo hoped to connect with the policeman and glean what their strategy was.

“He tried to persuade me to surrender,” Woo said. “He then asked if he needed to throw food over to my cockroach friends.

“I still don’t see any humanity in them.”


WELLINGTON, New Zealand — 

The Pacific people of Bougainville on Saturday began voting in a historic referendum to decide if they want to become the world’s newest nation by gaining independence from Papua New Guinea.

The referendum runs over two weeks and is a key part of a 2001 peace agreement that ended a brutal civil war in which at least 15,000 people died in the cluster of islands to the east of the Papua New Guinea mainland.

Experts believe the 250,000 people of Bougainville will vote overwhelmingly in favor of independence ahead of the other option, which is greater autonomy. But the vote will not be the final word.

The referendum is nonbinding, and a vote for independence would then need to be negotiated by leaders from both Bougainville and Papua New Guinea. The final say would then go to lawmakers in the Papua New Guinea Parliament.

Gianluca Rampolla, the United Nations resident coordinator in Papua New Guinea, said the world body has been working hard to ensure the vote is peaceful, transparent, inclusive and credible. He said there are 40 U.N. staffers on the ground and more than 100 international observers.

Rampolla said he thought it unlikely there would be violence during voting.

“They’ve been waiting 19 years for this historic moment,” he said. “I think they will be left with joy.”

Just over 200,000 people are eligible to vote in the referendum, with the results due to be announced in mid-December. Rampolla said the extended voting period of two weeks was due to the region’s rugged terrain.

“There are people coming on boats. There are people walking,” he said. “It’s the rainy season. There are rough seas. Flexibility is needed to adjust on the ground.”

John Momis, president of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, told reporters Friday the region stood on the verge of a new socioeconomic and political order.

“We are trailblazers forging a new path into the unknown with the sheer determination to face any challenge that comes our way,” he said. “We will face this together as one people and one voice to decide our ultimate political future.”

In his weekly column in the Post-Courier newspaper, Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape said complex discussions and negotiations would need to take place after the referendum before a political settlement could be reached.

The violence in Bougainville began in the late 1980s, triggered by conflict over an enormous opencast copper mine at Panguna. The mine was a huge export earner for Papua New Guinea, but many in Bougainville felt they got no benefit and resented the pollution and disruption to their traditional way of living.

The mine has remained shut since the conflict. Some believe it could provide a future revenue source for Bougainville should it become independent.

The civil war lasted for a decade before the peace agreement was signed. The other key aspects of the agreement were a weapons disposal plan and greater autonomy for the region ahead of Saturday’s vote.

Rampolla, the U.N. official, said the peace agreement had been one of the few in the world that had lasted so long. He said it could end as a success story if the referendum and subsequent negotiations resulted in an outcome that everybody could support.


When it comes to his behaviour on the race track, Max Verstappen takes no prisoners, believing the end justifies the means.

Admired for his speed and incredible ability, Verstappen has taken F1 by storm since he graduated to Red Bull Racing last season, winning his maiden Grand Prix victory in his first race with the Milton Keynes outfit.

But it hasn’t always been clear sailing as far as some of his colleagues have been concerned, some of which have protested the young charger’s on-track antics, with Sebastian Vettel his most vocal opponent.

But Verstappen makes no excuses, and rather takes a leaf out of the Michael Schumacher book of racing.

“They can call me what they want, ‘Mad Max’ or whatever,” the teenager told Germany’s Sport Bild.

“I say that on the track you have to be an assh*le. Look at Michael Schumacher! At the end of the day, a F1 driver needs to know how to win races and titles, not how to be a nice guy.”

  • Verstappen pressures Red Bull to deliver winning car

Verstappen admits it’s not about making friends, and that certainly applies to Vettel, his nemesis.

“I do not expect him to send me a Christmas card or invite me to his birthday,” says the Dutchman who says there’s a bigger rival to deal with, and one closer to home.

“Daniel (Ricciardo) is a bigger challenge for me,” Max insisted.

“When the two of them drove for the same team in 2014, Daniel was stronger.”

GALLERY: F1 drivers’ wives and girlfriends

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Century of Disaster

November 23, 2019 | News | No Comments

[The following passages are excerpted from Eduardo Galeano’s history of humanity, Mirrors (Nation Books).]

Stalin

He learned to write in the language of Georgia, his homeland, but in the seminary the monks made him speak Russian.

Years later in Moscow, his south Caucasus accent still gave him away.

So he decided to become more Russian than the Russians. Was not Napoleon, who hailed from Corsica, more French than the French? And was not Catherine the Great, who was German, more Russian than the Russians?

The Georgian, Iosif Dzhugashvili, chose a Russian name. He called himself Stalin, which means “steel.”

The man of steel expected his son to be made of steel too: from childhood, Stalin’s son Yakov was tempered in fire and ice and shaped by hammer blows.

It did not work. He was his mother’s child. At the age of 19, Yakov wanted no more of it, could bear no more.

He pulled the trigger.

The gunshot did not kill him.

He awoke in the hospital. At the foot of the bed, his father commented:

“You can’t even get that right.”

The Ages of Josephine

At nine years old, she works cleaning houses in St. Louis on the banks of the Mississippi.

At 10, she starts dancing for coins in the street. At 13, she marries.

At 15, once again. Of the first husband she retains not even a bad memory. Of the second, his last name, because she likes how it sounds.

At 17, Josephine Baker dances the Charleston on Broadway. At 18, she crosses the Atlantic and conquers Paris. The “Bronze Venus” performs in the nude, with no more clothing than a belt of bananas.

At 21, her outlandish combination of clown and femme fatale makes her the most popular and highest-paid performer in Europe.

At 24, she is the most photographed woman on the planet. Pablo Picasso, on his knees, paints her. To look like her, the pallid young damsels of Paris rub themselves with walnut cream, which darkens the skin.

At 30, she has problems in some hotels because she travels with a chimpanzee, a snake, a goat, two parrots, several fish, three cats, seven dogs, a cheetah named Chiquita who wears a diamond-studded collar, and a little pig named Albert, whom she bathes in Je Reviens perfume by Worth.

At 40, she receives the Legion of Honor for service to the French Resistance during the Nazi occupation.

At 41 and on her fourth husband, she adopts 12 children of many colors and many origins, whom she calls “my rainbow tribe.”

At 45, she returns to the United States. She insists that everyone, whites and blacks, sit together at her shows. If not, she will not perform. At 57, she shares the stage with Martin Luther King and speaks against racial discrimination before an immense crowd at the March on Washington.

At 68, she recovers from a calamitous bankruptcy and at the Bobino Theater in Paris she celebrates a half-century on the stage.

And she departs.

Photograph: Saddest Eye in the World

Princeton, New Jersey, May 1947.

Photographer Philippe Halsman asks him: “Do you think there will be peace?”

And while the shutter clicks, Albert Einstein says, or rather mutters: “No.”

People believe that Einstein got the Nobel Prize for his theory of relativity, that he was the originator of the saying “Everything is relative,” and that he was the inventor of the atom bomb.

The truth is they did not give him a Nobel for his theory of relativity and he never uttered those words. Neither did he invent the bomb, although Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not have been possible if he had not discovered what he did.

He knew all too well that his findings, born of a celebration of life, had been used to annihilate it.

Father of the Computer

Alan Turing was sneered at for not being a tough guy, a he-man with hair on his chest.

He whined, croaked, stuttered. He used an old necktie for a belt. He rarely slept and went without shaving for days. And he raced from one end of the city to the other all the while concocting complicated mathematical formulas in his mind.

Working for British intelligence, he helped shorten the Second World War by inventing a machine that cracked the impenetrable military codes used by Germany’s high command.

At that point he had already dreamed up a prototype for an electronic computer and had laid out the theoretical foundations of today’s information systems. Later on, he led the team that built the first computer to operate with integrated programs. He played interminable chess games with it and asked it questions that drove it nuts. He insisted that it write him love letters. The machine responded by emitting messages that were rather incoherent.

But it was flesh-and-blood Manchester police who arrested him in 1952 for gross indecency.

At the trial, Turing pled guilty to being a homosexual.

To stay out of jail, he agreed to undergo medical treatment to cure him of the affliction. The bombardment of drugs left him impotent. He grew breasts. He stayed indoors, no longer went to the university. He heard whispers, felt stares drilling into his back.

He had the habit of eating an apple before going to bed.

One night, he injected the apple with cyanide.

Red Emperor

I was in China three years after the failure of the Great Leap Forward. No one talked about it. It was a state secret.

I saw Mao paying homage to Mao. In Tiananmen Square, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, Mao presided over an immense parade led by an immense statue of Mao. The plaster Mao held his hand high, and the flesh-and-blood Mao answered the greeting. From an ocean of flowers and colored balloons, the crowd cheered both.

Mao was China and China was his shrine. Mao exhorted all to follow the example set by Lei Feng and Lei Feng exhorted all to follow the example set by Mao. Lei Feng, a young Communist apostle of dubious existence, spent his days consoling the sick, helping widows, and giving his food away to orphans. His nights he spent reading the complete works of Mao. When he slept, he dreamed of Mao, his guide for every step. Lei Feng had no girlfriend or boyfriend because he did not waste time on frivolities, and it never occurred to him that life could be contradictory or reality diverse.

Fidel

His enemies say he was an uncrowned king who confused unity with unanimity.

And in that his enemies are right.

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His enemies say that if Napoleon had a newspaper like Granma, no Frenchman would have learned of the disaster at Waterloo.

And in that his enemies are right.

His enemies say that he exercised power by talking a lot and listening little, because he was more used to hearing echoes than voices.

And in that his enemies are right.

But some things his enemies do not say: it was not to pose for the history books that he bared his breast to the invaders’ bullets,

he faced hurricanes as an equal, hurricane to hurricane,

he survived 637 attempts on his life,

his contagious energy was decisive in making a country out of a colony,

and it was not by Lucifer’s curse or God’s miracle that the new country managed to outlive 10 U.S. presidents, their napkins spread in their laps, ready to eat it with knife and fork.

And his enemies never mention that Cuba is one rare country that does not compete for the World Doormat Cup.

And they do not say that the revolution, punished for the crime of dignity, is what it managed to be and not what it wished to become. Nor do they say that the wall separating desire from reality grew ever higher and wider thanks to the imperial blockade, which suffocated a Cuban-style democracy, militarized society, and gave the bureaucracy, always ready with a problem for every solution, the alibis it needed to justify and perpetuate itself.

And they do not say that in spite of all the sorrow, in spite of the external aggression and the internal high-handedness, this distressed and obstinate island has spawned the least unjust society in Latin America.

And his enemies do not say that this feat was the outcome of the sacrifice of its people, and also of the stubborn will and old-fashioned sense of honor of the knight who always fought on the side of the losers, like his famous colleague in the fields of Castile.

Ali

He was butterfly and bee. In the ring, he floated and stung.

In 1967, Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Clay, refused to put on a uniform.

“Got nothing against no Viet Cong,” he said. “Ain’t no Vietnamese ever called me nigger.”

They called him a traitor. They sentenced him to a five-year jail term, and barred him from boxing. They stripped him of his title as champion of the world.

The punishment became his trophy. By taking away his crown, they anointed him king.

Years later, a few college students asked him to recite something. And for them he improvised the shortest poem in world literature:

“Me, we.”

Walls

The Berlin Wall made the news every day. From morning till night we read, saw, heard: the Wall of Shame, the Wall of Infamy, the Iron Curtain…

In the end, a wall which deserved to fall fell. But other walls sprouted and continue sprouting across the world. Though they are much larger than the one in Berlin, we rarely hear of them.

Little is said about the wall the United States is building along the Mexican border, and less is said about the barbed-wire barriers surrounding the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on the African coast.

Practically nothing is said about the West Bank Wall, which perpetuates the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and will be 15 times longer than the Berlin Wall. And nothing, nothing at all, is said about the Morocco Wall, which perpetuates the seizure of the Saharan homeland by the kingdom of Morocco, and is 60 times the length of the Berlin Wall.

Why are some walls so loud and others mute?

Barbie Goes to War 

There are more than a billion Barbies. Only the Chinese outnumber them.

The most beloved woman on the planet would never let us down. In the war of good against evil, Barbie enlisted, saluted, and marched off to Iraq.

She arrived at the front wearing made-to-measure land, sea, and air uniforms reviewed and approved by the Pentagon.

Barbie is accustomed to changing professions, hairdos, and clothes. She has been a singer, an athlete, a paleontologist, an orthodontist, an astronaut, a firewoman, a ballerina, and who knows what else. Every new job entails a new look and a complete new wardrobe that every girl in the world is obliged to buy.

In February 2004, Barbie wanted to change boyfriends too. For nearly half a century she had been going steady with Ken, whose nose is the only protuberance on his body, when an Australian surfer seduced her and invited her to commit the sin of plastic.

Mattel, the manufacturer, announced an official separation.

It was a catastrophe. Sales plummeted. Barbie could change occupations and outfits, but she had no right to set a bad example.

Mattel announced an official reconciliation.

Lied-About Wars

Advertising campaigns, marketing schemes. The target is public opinion. Wars are sold the same way cars are, by lying.

In August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson accused the Vietnamese of attacking two U.S. warships in the Tonkin Gulf.

Then the president invaded Vietnam, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity skyrocketed. The Democrats in power and the Republicans out of power became a single party united against Communist aggression.

After the war had slaughtered Vietnamese in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Johnson’s secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, confessed that the Tonkin Gulf attack had never occurred.

The dead did not revive.

In March 2003, President George W. Bush accused Iraq of being on the verge of destroying the world with its weapons of mass destruction, “the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

Then the president invaded Iraq, sending planes and troops. He was acclaimed by journalists and by politicians, and his popularity skyrocketed. The Republicans in power and the Democrats out of power became a single party united against terrorist aggression.

After the war had slaughtered Iraqis in vast numbers, most of them women and children, Bush confessed that the weapons of mass destruction never existed. “The most lethal weapons ever devised” were his own speeches.

In the following elections, he won a second term.

In my childhood, my mother used to tell me that a lie has no feet. She was misinformed.

Riddle

They are the most important members of our family.

They are gluttons, devouring gas, oil, corn, sugarcane, and anything else that comes their way.

They own our time: bathing them, feeding and sheltering them, talking about them, and opening the way for them.

They reproduce faster than we do, and are 10 times as numerous as they were half a century ago.

They kill more people than do wars, but no one condemns the murders, least of all the newspapers and television channels that live off their advertisements.

They steal our streets. They steal our air. They laugh when they hear us say: “I drive.”

Lost and Found

The twentieth century, which was born proclaiming peace and justice, died bathed in blood. It passed on a world much more unjust than the one it inherited.

The twenty-first century, which also arrived heralding peace and justice, is following in its predecessor’s footsteps.

In my childhood, I was convinced that everything that went astray on earth ended up on the moon.

But the astronauts found no sign of dangerous dreams or broken promises or hopes betrayed.

If not on the moon, where might they be? Perhaps they were never misplaced.
Perhaps they are in hiding here on earth. Waiting.

Eduardo Galeano is one of Latin America’s most distinguished writers.  He is the author of Open Veins of Latin America, the Memory of Fire Trilogy, Mirrors, and many other works. His newest book, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History (Nation Books) is now out in paperback.He is the recipient of many international prizes, including the first Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom, the American Book Award, and the Casa de las Américas Prize.

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