Dec. 5

Varda by Agnès
In her final film, the beloved director looks back on her 60-year career. In French and English with English subtitles. (2:00) NR.

Dec. 6

The Aeronauts
Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne (“The Theory of Everything”) reunite as a daring balloon pilot and a meteorologist conducting high-altitude research in the 1860s. With Vincent Perez, Tom Courtenay. Written by Jack Thorne; story by Tom Harper, Thorne. Directed by Harper. (1:40) PG-13.

After Class
Campus controversy shadows a NYC professor as he spends a week reconnecting with his family. With Justin Long, Kate Berlant, Fran Drescher, Richard Schiff. Written and directed by Daniel Schechter. (1:33) NR.

Beyond the Law
A former cop seeks vengeance for his son’s murder. With Steven Seagal, DMX, Johnny Messner. Written by Chad Law, Johnny Martin Walters. Directed by James Cullen Bressack. (1:30) NR.

Broken Dreams
Documentary about two talented Jewish sisters in Poland during the Nazi occupation. Written and directed by Tomasz Magierski. In English and Polish with English subtitles. (1:10) NR.

Code 8
A young man with super powers joins a criminal syndicate to pay for his mother’s medical care. With Robbie Amell, Stephen Amell, Kari Matchett, Sung Kang. Written by Chris Paré. Directed by Jeff Chan. (1:38) NR.

Daniel Isn’t Real
A traumatized college student summons his dangerous imaginary friend from childhood. With Patrick Schwarzenegger, Miles Robbins, Sasha Lane, Mary Stuart Masterson. Written by Brian DeLeeuw, Adam Egypt Mortimer; based on the novel by DeLeeuw. Directed by Mortimer. (1:36) NR.

Downtown 81
Revival of 1981 film about the New Wave music scene in NYC. With Jean Michel Basquiat, Debbie Harry, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, James White and the Blacks. Written by Glenn O’Brien. Directed by Edo Bertoglio. (1:12) NR.

Grand Isle
A young man is charged with murder after seeking shelter with a twisted married couple during a hurricane. With Nicolas Cage, Kelsey Grammer, Luke Benward, KaDee Strickland. Written by Iver William Jallah, Rich Ronat. Directed by Stephen S. Campanelli. (1:37) NR.

I See You
A small town detective and his family are plagued by supernatural occurrences as he probes the disappearance of a young boy. With Helen Hunt, Jon Tenney, Judah Lewis, Owen Teague. Written by Devon Graye. Directed by Adam Randall. (1:36) NR.

In Fabric
A cursed dress brings misfortune to those who wear it. With Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Gwendoline Christie, Sidse Babett Knudsen. Written and directed by Peter Strickland. (1:58) R.

Knives and Skin
The disappearance of a teenage girl impacts the residents of a small Midwestern town in profound and unusual ways. With Marika Engelhardt, Audrey Francis, Tim Hopper. Written and directed by Jennifer Reeder. (1:51) NR.

Little Joe
A plant breeder brings a special flower with healing powers home to her son, unaware of its potential dangers. With Emily Beecham, Ben Whishaw, Kerry Fox. Written by Géraldine Bajard, Jessica Hausner. Directed by Hausner. (1:45) NR.

The Mandela Effect
A man begins to question reality when he realizes he can recall facts and events that others can’t. With Charlie Hofheimer, Aleksa Palladino, Robin Lord Taylor, Clarke Peters. Written by David Guy Levy, Steffen Schlachtenhaufen. Directed by Levy. (1:20) NR.

A Million Little Pieces
A young man battling addiction checks himself into rehab in this adaptation of James Frey’s controversial novel. With Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Billy Bob Thornton, Odessa Young, Giovanni Ribisi, Juliette Lewis, Charlie Hunnam, Ryan Hurst. Written by Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Sam Taylor-Johnson. Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson. (1:53) R.

Most Likely to Succeed
Documentary follows four high school seniors from disparate backgrounds over the next decade of their lives. Directed by Pamela Littky. (1:37) NR.

My Home India
Documentary on Kira Banasinska, the wife of Poland’s Consul General for India, who helped settle 5,000 Polish refugees in India during and after WWII. Directed by Anjali Bhushan. (0:45) NR.

A New Christmas
A aspiring filmmaker from Kenya helps a lonely med student in NYC rediscovers the joy of the holiday season. With Prashantt Guptha, Preeti Gupta, Grace Wacuka. Written by Travis Hodgkins. Directed by Dani Tenenbaum. (1:19) NR.

Playmobil: The Movie
A sister and brother join a British secret agent to help stop a global conspiracy in this computer-animated action comedy based on the kids’ toy line. With the voices of Daniel Radcliffe, Anya Taylor Joy, Meghan Trainor, Kenan Thompson, Adam Lambert, Jim Gaffigan. Written by Blaise Hemingway, Greg Erb, Jason Oremland; story by Lino DiSalvo. Directed by DiSalvo. (1:39) PG.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire
A painter and her subject, an unhappy bride-to-be, fall in love in 18th-century Brittany. With Adèle Haenel, Noémie Merlant, Valeria Golino. Written and directed by Céline Sciamma. In French and Italian with English subtitles. (2:01) R.

63 Up
The latest installment of Michael Apted’s “Up” documentary series that began with a cohort of British schoolchildren starting in 1964 and continued to check in with them every seven years. (3:00) NR.

Temblores
A husband and father from a conservative Christian family in Guatemala comes out as a gay man. With Juan Pablo Olyslager, Diane Bathen. Written and directed by Jayro Bustamante. In Spanish with English subtitles. (1:47) NR.

Trauma Center
A veteran cop tries to protect a hospitalized young woman from a pair of killers. With Bruce Willis, Nicky Whelan, Steven Guttenberg, Tito Ortiz. Written by Paul Da Silva. Directed by Matt Eskandari. (1:27) R.

The Wolf Hour
A former counterculture celebrity grows increasingly paranoid as she hunkers down in a stifling apartment in the Bronx in summer 1977. With Naomi Watts, Jennifer Ehle, Emory Cohen. Written and directed by Alistair Banks Griffin. (1:39) R.

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When Yanna McIntosh takes the stage Sunday for opening night at the Curran theater in San Francisco, she becomes the eighth black actress to play Hermione Granger in “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”

And, as was just announced, when “Harry Potter und das Verwunschene Kind” takes the stage this spring in Hamburg, Germany, Jillian Anthony will be the ninth.

The two-part theatrical event that won nine Olivier awards and six Tonys is premiering on the West Coast, launching its first non-English language production and coming to Toronto in fall 2020. And yet an important creative decision has for some reason grown into the hippogriff in the room: In “Cursed Child,” Hermione is black.

The play’s producers, Sonia Friedman Productions, declined to comment for this article, noting that the subject of Hermione’s race had been discussed at length when the play opened in London. But that was eight Hermiones ago. When asked to discuss the cultural significance of the casting decision in the era when diversity and inclusion have become priorities in theater, the producers rebuffed The Times’ attempts to speak with the show’s director, actors or anyone else in the production.

Avoiding the discussion, however, doesn’t stop fans from noticing. Some Potterheads’ heads practically exploded when they first learned that black actress Noma Dumezweni had been cast as Hermione in the original London production of “Cursed Child” in 2016. Many were elated to learn that they would finally see themselves reflected in the visage of arguably the smartest, bravest, most honorable heroine in modern literature. A smaller number of fans were incensed. Were they merely sticklers to Potter orthodoxy? Had they perceived the casting as political correctness? Or were they racists? All of the above? An online ruckus ensued.

At the time, J.K. Rowling was widely quoted as saying, “Noma was chosen because she was the best actress for the job.” But after Dumezweni, a two-time Olivier Award-winning actress, left the ensemble, all subsequent Hermiones who have been cast — from London to New York to Melbourne to San Francisco to Hamburg — have been black actors.

Early on, director John Tiffany said he wanted a diverse cast, “but that doesn’t mean I wanted Hermione to be black,” he told Scotland’s Daily Record. Half a dozen or so black Hermiones later, Tiffany was still speaking about diversity but avoiding a deeper discussion. Instead, he spoke in general terms, telling the Guardian in 2018, “I never want to drop what kind of quota of diversity we have got. I think it’s really important that we say: no, we need that number of non-white actors in this cast. But that’s not to say that I can’t do some mixing up.”

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, author of “The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination From Harry Potter to the Hunger Games,” said “this seems like a way to unofficially address concerns about diversity and inclusion in Harry Potter without officially responding to critiques.”

She speculated that the best way to protect the financial fortunes of the Potter franchise was simply not to discuss the race question publicly.

“The intellectual property is worth $25 billion, therefore it is in the best interest of all involved to keep the widest possible audience happy,” she said.

Hollywood — and Broadway — have a long, egregious track record of casting white actors as nonwhite characters. Filmdom is full of epic fails like Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi, Natalie Woods’ Maria, and let us not forget Laurence Olivier in blackface as Othello. Given the history, the recent revelation that Julia Roberts was once considered to play Harriet Tubman hardly registered as a surprise to some.

Has blackwashing become the new whitewashing? Some are happy to see the industry make amends by casting people of color to star as beloved characters in major productions. Critics, however, worry this presto-chango switcheroo is a mere bandage that masks the persistent lack of authentically diverse characters and stories making it to stage and screen.

Currently on Broadway, Glinda in “Wicked” is black. So is Anna in “Frozen” and Hermione in “Cursed Child.” Tiny Tim is black too: The new production of “A Christmas Carol” on Broadway was adapted by Jack Thorne, who wrote “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.” In “A Christmas Carol,” racial diversity has received less attention than disabled representation: At the insistence of Thorne, Dickens’ disabled character is played by a disabled actor.

On the big screen, Zoë Kravitz will play Catwoman, Lashana Lynch will be the new 007 (a twofer — black and female) and Halle Bailey will play Ariel in the live-action movie version of “The Little Mermaid.”

#NotMyAriel may have been trending for a time, but the backlash to Hermione’s race-bending was far more viral. This, despite Rowling’s support.

“Hermione can be a black woman with my absolute blessing and enthusiasm,” she tweeted in 2015, six months before the play opened. She went on to address the naysayers, tweeting: “Canon: brown eyes, frizzy hair and very clever. White skin was never specified. Rowling loves black Hermione.”

Her tweet received nearly 100,000 “likes,” including emotional outpourings like, “As a black girl who identified with Hermione soooo much growing up, thank you @jk_rowling. Twelve-year-old me is crying happy tears.”

There also were a plethora of “I’m not racist but …” comments. And the #NotMyHermione detectives delved deep into canon (official, original source, in fanspeak) to prove Hermione’s true pigmentation. Rowling’s Twitter feed was flooded with “evidence” from her own old drawings, as well as from photos of Book 3, Chapter 21, Page 293, which states “Hermione’s white face was sticking out from behind a tree.”

Valerie Frankel, who edited the book “Fan Phenomena: Harry Potter,” said she believes Rowling wrote Hermione to be white.

“Certainly, it would have been more inclusive to have all this in the original text, but it’s reasonable to speculate that if Rowling were writing this story today, knowing what a massive franchise it would become, she might make different choices,” Frankel said.

She added that children’s book authors often default to white characters “and then realize it’s kinder to young audiences to mix up the diversity in the next series. ‘Cursed Child’ therefore changed Hermione.”

Sherri Young, executive director of San Francisco’s African-American Shakespeare Company, points out that “anyone could play a clever outcast character with frizzy hair, but when a production chooses to hire a black actor consistently for that particular role, it means there is a message or purpose. So I would like to challenge people who have seen the play to discover if anything is added to the character by making the choice to specifically cast a black actress in the role.”

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Lest we forget, Hermione is a mudblood (mixed-race wizard), and Rowling conceived of a world where mudbloods were discriminated against. By the final book, mudbloods were rounded up, detained and interrogated by the government’s Muggle-Born Registration Commission. Compellingly, 19 years later, which is the time-frame of “Cursed Child,” the play’s grown-up Hermione is now the Minister of Magic — kind of like a black president.

Many have noted that the book series can be interpreted as an allegory about racism and white supremacy. “Cursed Child” is officially considered the eighth story in the Harry Potter series. Unofficially, black Hermione has long been a thing on the internet; Potter fan artists choose to remake the characters in their own image, and a black Hermione has been the most ubiquitous race-bent Potter character. Alanna Bennett wrote in Buzzfeed: “I was seeing Hermione’s subtext brought out into text … painting Hermione as a woman of color [is] an act of reclaiming her allegory at its roots.”

So it’s perplexing to many fans why Rowling — or anyone from the theatrical production — wouldn’t want to say: “Society has evolved, so can the wizarding world.” Instead, the lack of public comment feeds into the narrative of Rowling’s “virtue-signaling” (a conspicuous expression of moral values).

“There is nothing wrong with Hermione being played by a black actress,” wrote Sammy Kumar, an online Potter pundit. “But there is with JKR positing that the Hermione she wrote and envisioned was not white.”

Kumar wrote that the real problem is Rowling’s “blatant attempts to squeeze in diversity she never wrote and then shout it from the rooftops.” Kumar pointed out that Rowling’s black characters are described as black: Angelina Johnson is “a tall black girl with long, braided hair,” and Dean Thomas is a “black boy even taller than Ron.” Characters specifically described as black, Kumar said, are all minor players.

Sherri Young, executive director of San Francisco’s African-American Shakespeare Company

According to Dylan Marron’s “Every Single Word” video series, only 0.47% of all lines spoken in the eight Harry Potter films are said by people of color.

Even before Hermione was black, cynics were making fun of Rowling’s after-the-fact wokeness and accusing her of PC pandering. The righting of Rowling wrongs has long been a topic of discussion among her fan base. One fan posted online, “J.K Rowling’s the only author I know of that’s managed to fan-fiction her own work.”

There’s much snark lodged against the author, who communicates regularly with her fans on Twitter. After announcing that Dumbledore was gay, a spate of fake woke memes declared that “Snape was a single mother” and “the sorting hat was trans.” Or, more to the point: “J.K. Rowling confirms some characters in her books and movies are gay everywhere except in the books or the movies.”

The did-she-or-didn’t-she debate might have its most nuanced answer from Jenny Jules, the actress currently playing Hermione Granger on Broadway. She told Playbill: “I think in casting Noma Dumezweni, it was color-blind and color-conscious at the same time.” She said the director did choose the best actor, “but in doing that, he said, ‘I’m going to start this journey with this person who happens to be of this racial ethnicity, and I have to think about the future of this character.’” Jules said that by casting subsequent black actresses, “he was starting a revolution.”

“I just know that young women of color are coming into the theater, seeing me as Hermione … and are seeing me with my afro hairstyle, and it takes their breath away,” Jules added. “And they’re just going, ‘There I am, I’m represented in this story.‘ How amazing is that?”

SERIES

The Voice The top 10 perform. 8 p.m. NBC

All American Spencer (Daniel Ezra) can’t get excited about his football ranking and gets some guidance from Layla (Greta Onieogou) in this new episode. 8 p.m. The CW

The Great Christmas Light Fight Lifestyle expert Carter Oosterhouse and interior designer Taniya Nayak return as celebrity judges for a seventh season of this competition series, which launches with a two-hour premiere, which includes a stop in Fillmore. 8 p.m. ABC

9-1-1 Christmas is shaping up to be the most accident-prone time of the year as first responders help victims of holiday-themed mishaps. Peter Krause and Jennifer Love Hewitt star. 8 p.m. Fox

Prodigal Son Knowing that the “Junkyard Killer” was in cahoots with his father (Michael Sheen), Malcolm (Tom Payne) Malcolm decides to go against the FBI’s wishes and investigate the case in this new episode. Lou Diamond Phillips also stars. 9 p.m. Fox

Holiday Baking Championship Jesse Palmer teaches the bakers a lesson in repurposing holiday gifts in the first round, when they must turn panettone, the classic holiday Italian sweet bread, into an entirely new dessert. 9 p.m. Food Network

Wrap Battle In the first of two new episodes, wrappers get a special delivery direct from the North Pole, then compete to deliver the freshest vacation-themed gift basket concept they can. In the second they stay up all night to wrap gifts for the Marine Corps’ Toys for Tots holiday gift drive. 9 and 10 p.m. Freeform

His Dark Materials The alethiometer sends Lyra and Iorek (Dafne Keen, Joe Tandberg) on a new path that leads to a shocking but vital clue. 9 p.m. HBO

Making It This arts and crafts series launches a two-week sprint with new episodes airing tonight through Thursday this week, Monday and Tuesday next week and a two-hour finale next Wednesday. In the season premiere, hosts Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman welcome 10 new contestants for holiday-themed challenges. 10 p.m. NBC

The Good Doctor Dr. Murphy (Freddie Highmore) visits his father (Michael Trucco) on his deathbed and the family reunion reveals unexpected results in this new episode of the medical drama. Joanna Going also guest stars. 10 p.m. ABC

Christmas Cookie Challenge In this new episode, the cookie makers craft imaginative Christmas cards out of cookies. Ree Drummond, Gesine Prado and Aarti Sequeira judge the results. 10 p.m. Food Network

SPECIALS

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer A reindeer with an incandescent nose guides Santa’s sleigh through a bad storm on Christmas Eve in the holiday favorite based on the song by Johnny Marks. 8 p.m. CBS

Garth Brooks: The Road I’m On This new two-part documentary offers an intimate look into the country music superstar’s life as a musician and father. 9 p.m. A&E; concludes Tue.

TALK SHOWS

CBS This Morning (N) 7 a.m. KCBS

Today (N) 7 a.m. KNBC

KTLA Morning News (N) 7 a.m. KTLA

Good Morning America (N) 7 a.m. KABC

Good Day L.A. Patrick Schwarzenegger; actress-model Corinne Foxx; Top Property with Marla Tellez. (N) 7 a.m. KTTV

Live With Kelly and Ryan Scarlett Johansson (“Marriage Story”). (N) 9 a.m. KABC

The View Yvette Nicole Brown guest co-hosts; presidential candidate Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). (N) 10 a.m. KABC

Rachael Ray 10 a.m. KTTV

The Wendy Williams Show (N) 11 a.m. KTTV

The Talk (N) 1 p.m. KCBS

Tamron Hall 1 p.m. KABC

The Dr. Oz Show 1 p.m. KTTV

The Kelly Clarkson Show Nick Offerman; Kellie Pickler. 2 p.m. KNBC

Dr. Phil 3 p.m. KCBS

The Ellen DeGeneres Show Rob Lowe (“Holiday in the Wild”); Zara Larsson performs. (N) 3 p.m. KNBC

The Real (N) 3 p.m. KTTV

The Doctors 3 p.m. KCOP

Amanpour and Company (N) 11 p.m. KCET; 1 a.m. KLCS

The Daily Show With Trevor Noah (N) 11 p.m. Comedy Central

Conan Adam Scott. (N) 11 p.m. TBS

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon John Mulaney; model Karlie Kloss; Solange performs. 11:34 p.m. KNBC

The Late Show With Stephen Colbert 11:35 p.m. KCBS

Jimmy Kimmel Live! 11:35 p.m. KABC

The Late Late Show With James Corden 12:37 a.m. KCBS

Late Night With Seth Meyers 12:37 a.m. KNBC

Nightline (N) 12:37 a.m. KABC

A Little Late With Lilly Singh 1:38 a.m. KNBC

SPORTS

College basketball Miami visits Illinois, 4 p.m. ESPN2; Clemson visits Minnesota, 6 p.m. ESPN2

Football The Minnesota Vikings visit the Seattle Seahawks, 5 p.m. ESPN

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Hockey The Kings visit the Ducks, 7 p.m. Fox Sports Net, FS Prime

For more sports on TV, see the Sports section.

PUNO, Peru — 

In the beginning, there was a lake cradled in the mountains of a high plateau in the Andes. How it got here was simple: The universe cried, and its tears flooded the world. Mankind had disobeyed the gods, and the gods sent in pumas. Lake Titicaca — literally, pumas of stone — is proof, tragedy burnished into beauty.

Standing on a quay in Puno, a city on the lake’s western shore, my wife, Margie, and I stared at its cerulean expanse, an autumn sun reflecting off what has been called the eye of God. Not a breath of wind stirred the water, the Donald Duck and Goofy paddle boats imperturbable.

Our Peruvian itinerary had included Machu Picchu, but this morning vista surpassed the splendor of those ruins, whose images on calendars and coasters, snow globes and refrigerator magnets are burned so deeply in the mind that the reality seemed almost derivative.

There was no mistaking the originality of Lake Titicaca, straddling Peru and Bolivia.

It seemed less terrestrial than something borrowed from the sky, and on that morning it held the world in its grasp, its mirror-like stillness soon rolling in the wake of a water taxi.

Our destination was Luquina Chico, less than 90 minutes from Puno, where I — along with students and professors from Chapman University in Orange, where Margie teaches — would stay with local families for two nights.

The students, drawn by the lure of three units, were promised the opportunity to “explore the Peruvian leadership approach to community development,” but the lessons were greater than this.

The residents of Luquina, increasingly dependent on visitors like us, know that unregulated tourism — an easy temptation in a region as beautiful and undeveloped as this — can tear apart communities.

They are trying to develop a sustainable model that gives every household an opportunity to prosper and preserves the tranquility of the village. Finding that balance is not easy.

Although most travelers will not visit Peru as part of an education tour, what we saw and experienced — service learning — is available to anyone willing to pack, as we did, a pair of work gloves.

Lake Titicaca, an hour and a half by plane from the capital Lima, is a world apart in politics and culture. When we were here, in spring 2018, President Martín Vizcarra had just been sworn in (he went on to dissolve Congress this September), but the focus in Puno then was a football match between Peru and Croatia. Peru won.

Our guide was Edgar Frisancho, whose agency, Edgar Adventures, is one of a few companies in Puno that arranges tours of the lake. Frisancho was born in central Peru and moved here when he was 16 to escape the violence of Shining Path revolutionaries.

Thirty years later, he speaks easily about the region’s history and of traditional values shifting under economic pressures. Lake Titicaca, he said, “has seen more changes in the last 30 years than in the last 500 years.”

The conquistadors’ encounter with the Incas was violent and cruel, but what is occurring today is as dramatic and irrevocable.

It stems not just from environmental changes, the internet or even the building of roads, but from visitors like us and the villages that compete for our attention.

Floating world

Traveling once meant blending in to a foreign land, and the conspicuousness of a tour was something to disdain.

Disappearing into a culture and a country might be possible in cities where internationalism has planted its flag, but it comes at a cost in rural communities. That cost, according to Frisancho, is no greater than on the shores of Lake Titicaca, a world as delicate as it is beautiful.

Our first stop was Uros Titino, one of the lake’s famed floating islands, home of the Uros people who came here from the Amazon centuries ago and survived on these waters as scores of invaders passed over the land.

The water taxi pulled alongside a floating hayloft. The ground underfoot was soft, uneven and pliant. Seven families lived here, and we gathered in the warm sun to hear how they maintained the island, cutting and bundling totora reeds. Afterward, they laid out their colorful textiles and carvings for sale.

I climbed a ladder to a small platform, where I tried to imagine living here, this nexus of water, island and sky no bigger than a tennis court, so removed and yet imperiled by a far-away world.

When Frisancho visited these islands years ago, the Uros were self-sufficient. The birds and fish of the lake provided all they needed, but that has changed.

Lakes such as Titicaca, in the Altiplano, a high plateau in the Andes, get most of their water from rainfall, and they are evaporating as the Andes warm. Invasive species and overfishing also threaten the fragile ecosystems.

Diminishing resources have made living on the floating islands more difficult, but tourism has helped. Some Uros have moved their islands closer to Puno so travelers can reach them, and a neighboring island lists a reed hut on Airbnb.
At the end of our visit, we boarded a reed boat, and a young man gently sculled us across the water. His boat, he said through a translator, took two months to build. Beneath the bundled reeds were 3,500 plastic water bottles.

A boat made of reeds lasts nine months, he explained, but a boat made with water bottles will float for two years.

Balancing tradition with convenience makes for curious hybrids.

Luquina Chico

In early afternoon the water taxi pulled up to the concrete pier at Luquina Chico. A string of fishing boats, oars still in oarlocks, floated listlessly in the reeds.

The village, rising on the lake’s sloping shoreline, is a scattering of russet-colored homes, pathways, green lawns and fields of potatoes, fava beans and quinoa. Our host families greeted us in bowler hats, vests and embroidered jackets.

Luquina offers turismo vivencial ­— experiential tourism — of which home stays are a central feature. Margie and I were assigned to Fernando and Yrene Gutiérrez, whose home was just beyond the school and football pitch.

Our room was off a small courtyard. After settling in, we joined Yrene, who served us a lunch of quinoa soup with chicken, rice and potatoes.

If a trip into the Andes means falling back in time, we gladly fell.

The peace and quiet of Luquina, well outside the congestion of Lima, Cuzco and Puno, was unmatched. After our first night, we felt the pulse of a community whose habits and practices had seemingly never changed.

But we knew that the families of Luquina were trying to develop an economy that balanced modern necessities with tradition.

For years, they had watched water taxis on the way to Taquile Island, known for handicrafts, and wondered how they might divert those travelers. A tourist economy would mean money to replace thatched roofs with corrugated ones, buy school supplies, pave a well-trod path. The men and young people could stay home and not migrate offseason to the cities.

But the residents wanted to make sure all families profited equally.

With the help of Frisancho, who owns a home here, they adopted turismo vivencial, which is administered by the village council so each family would benefit. Because Fernando and Yrene opened their doors to us, another family would receive guests in the future.

The greatest threat to this practice, Friscancho said, are online booking services such as Expedia and Airbnb. They pit neighbor against neighbor, promoting competition inside a communal system, he said.

He cited two families that the government has assisted with internet connections and web design. These families, he said, have more clients and have built more rooms. “Soon they will have hotels,” he added.

To work

Early the next day, we broke out our work gloves and gathered on a patch of ground marked with plumb lines and trenches.

The village council wanted to build a restaurant so that families, whose homes are too far away for visitors to reach with suitcases and bags, could contribute by helping to fix meals and extend hospitality. That day we broke ground.

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The students, standing alongside the men and women of Luquina, organized into small groups. Some took up wheelbarrow duty. Others dug. Some hauled aggregate from the shoreline to the cement mixer. Others bent and cut rebar for columns and foundation.

“Extreme architecture,” said Frisancho, holding the hand-drawn architectural plans.

We grew winded from our exertions; Lake Titicaca lies at 12,500 feet. At noon we took a break for bananas, bread, baloney and cheese. Our labors had drawn us close to the men and women of Luquina, and we exchanged stories of our lives continents apart.

By late afternoon a breeze had kicked up, and the lake turned into a carpet of sequins. Tall thunderheads rose in the east over Bolivia.

“We are grateful of your support,” Luis Ascencio, the village judge, said at the end of the day. “On this beautiful afternoon, we feel very proud. The work you have done is very beautiful.”

Against a stormy sky, we climbed the hill to the school and, after an impromptu game of soccer with the children, the men and women dressed us in skirts, vests and bowlers and taught us to cashua, a traditional courting dance.

Ascencio played the quena, an Andean flute. Another man kept rhythm on a drum.

Reciprocity

When faced with intractable problems, the best wisdom, Frisancho told us, is to embrace ancient wisdom, best summed up in a word: ayni.

Ayni, he explained, is Quechua for reciprocity. “I give, and I receive. I help you. You help me. It is a circle of energy, the foundation of this culture, both cause and effect.”

As we had given to the community, the community had given to us. It was a lesson to take home to a divided world.

The next day we left Luquina and spent a day kayaking and hiking on Taquile Island and enjoying a lunch of fava beans and trout, sweet potatoes and bananas, baked underground.

On our return to Puno, the students commandeered the water taxi’s loudspeaker to play music from their phones. There was singing and dancing to ABBA and the Beach Boys, and we lifted glasses in a toast of Pisco de Italia, the regional brandy, to those pumas of stone.

If you go
THE BEST WAY TO PUNO, PERU

From LAX, LATAM, American and Avianca offer connecting service (change of planes) to Juliaca, Peru. Restricted round-trip airfare from $617, including taxes and fees. Shuttle buses are available for the hour-long trip to Puno.

HOMESTAYS

Homestays at Luquina Chico, Taquile Island and other destinations can be arranged through:

Edgar Adventures, (011) 51-51-353444

Kafer Viajes y Turismo, (011) 51-51-1352701

All Ways Travel, (011) 51-35-3979

Nayra Travel, (011) 51-51-364774

Who says there’s no such thing as a free trip? Megabus is giving away 200,000 free bus tickets on CyberMonday to routes around the U.S. Californians can snag a free ride between Los Angeles and San Francisco, Las Vegas, Oakland and San Jose. Travelers heading to the East Coast can pick up tickets between New York City and Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, D.C.

Free tickets will be available starting at 6 a.m. Pacific time on Cyber Monday (Dec. 2) and will continue until the freebies are gone. Book at us.megabus.com.

The giveaway applies to one-way tickets, so you would need two to complete a round-trip journey (there’s no limit on the number of free tickets one person can get). If you want to spend $2 to $10, you can reserve a seat which comes equipped with free Wi-Fi, power outlets and free movies and TV shows.

Megabus, famous for advertising $1 fares, entered the U.S. market in 2006 in the Midwest and East and began West Coast operations a year later. It suspended West Coast routes during the 2008 recession and returned to service in the West in 2012. In April, L.A.-based private equity firm Variant Equity bought Coach USA, the parent company of Megabus’ operations in the U.S.

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Speaking as a lifelong aficionado of the tuna fish sandwich on rye, I was relieved to learn that Bumble Bee’s Nov. 21 bankruptcy filing wouldn’t mean the eradication of the brand from store shelves — it would merely come under new ownership.

Yet there’s much more to it than that. The bankruptcy filing is an outgrowth of a price-fixing case that makes tuna processing seem a lot wilder and more colorful on dry land than it is at sea.

In fact, judging from the federal allegations, the guilty pleas filed by all three major tuna processing companies and several of their executives, and other documents, a lot went on in this industry that wouldn’t be out of place in a Martin Scorsese movie.

Tuna executive Christopher Lischewski warns against price competition in canned tuna in 1999

There are secret meetings to plot criminal strategies, participants turning state’s evidence to cut a better plea deal than their co-conspirators, even the allegation of a sotto voce threat delivered with a brotherly hand on the shoulder of a would-be witness.

The three brands involved are household names: Bumble Bee, StarKist and Chicken of the Sea. The first two have pleaded guilty to criminal price-fixing, agreeing to fines of $25 million and $100 million, respectively. Chicken of the Sea has been awarded amnesty for blowing the whistle on the two others. (Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea are based in San Diego, StarKist in Pittsburgh.)

Bumble Bee was assessed the lower fine because it successfully pleaded to prosecutors that any higher figure would put it out of business.

As I’ve reported previously, the government’s price-fixing case began with routine antitrust scrutiny of a proposed $1.5-billion merger between Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea. The merger, announced in 2014, would have created a canned tuna giant commanding nearly half of the U.S. market, swamping StarKist, which at the time was the No.1 brand with 34.6%.

The Department of Justice turned thumbs down on the merger in 2015, but its announcement had an ominous tone. “The market is not functioning competitively today,” the agency said, “and further consolidation would only make things worse.” Reading between the lines, the department had found evidence of a price-fixing conspiracy.

Chicken of the Sea’s parent company, Thai Union Group, abandoned the merger and sang like a canary, knowing that under Justice Department protocols the first member of a conspiracy to turn on the others gets the sweet deal. Bumble Bee executives Walter Scott Cameron and Kenneth Worsham, and StarKist executive Stephen L. Hodge all subsequently pleaded guilty to federal price-fixing charges and agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors.

That leads us to what may be the last federal loose end: the criminal prosecution of former Bumble Bee Chief Executive Christopher Lischewski. Testimony in Lischewski’s trial wrapped up on Tuesday in federal court in San Francisco. Closing statements are scheduled for Monday, after which the case will go to the jury. Lischewski was a major prosecution target because he was one of the most respected and influential executives in the tuna canning industry, and also because, by the government’s reckoning, he was a mastermind of the scheme.

Lischewski’s defense boils down to two points. One is that what the government depicts as illegal price fixing is in fact perfectly legal marketing arrangements among major players in a single industry. The second is that even if something illegal was going on, it was done by underlings behind Lischewski’s back.

According to a report from the courtroom, Lischewski testified at trial that he was “shocked” when he heard that Worsham and Cameron had filed guilty pleas. He also denied Cameron’s testimony about a meeting in 2015 at which Cameron asked him about the progress of the Justice Department investigation and that Lischewski put his arm around Cameron’s shoulder and said he shouldn’t worry “as long as you and Kenny don’t [screw] it up.” Lischewski’s attorney didn’t respond to my request for comment.

Whatever role Lischewski may have played in the price-fixing scheme admitted by his own company and its two co-conspirators, the scheme seems to have arisen from the companies’ perception that they faced an existential threat. U.S. consumption of canned tuna had experienced a vertigo-inducing slide from 3.9 pounds per capita in 1989 to less than 3 pounds in 2000 (it would fall to just over 2 pounds by 2016) while consumption of other seafood such as shellfish was either stable or rising.

Experts haven’t been able to put their finger on the reason for the decline of canned tuna. Some point to fears of mercury contamination in fatty fish like tuna, others to public concerns about dolphin deaths resulting from tuna fishing techniques. But the culprit may simply have been the greater availability of fresh and fresh-frozen alternatives to canned fish.

Lischewski sounded an early warning at an industry conference in 1999, upbraiding industry leaders for a relentless battle for market share that had discounted prices by as much as 31%. “Rather than focus on innovation and growth,” he said, according to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of tuna wholesalers and distributors, “the three major brands have fought an ‘unwinnable’ war to steal shares from one another.” He estimated the profit loss at $200 million a year.

When the decline in consumption continued, Bumble Bee, StarKist and Chicken of the Sea took several steps to shore up profits. They shrank the size of their cans without a commensurate price reduction. The 7-ounce cans that were the standard as recently as the 1980s gave way to 6-ounce cans, and a couple of years ago to 5-ounce cans. In 2012 the three companies paid $3.3 million to settle accusations by three California counties that they had short-weighted their cans by filling them with more water and less meat than the labels indicated. They didn’t admit guilt.

In the charges filed against the companies in 2016 and 2017, the government asserted that they went further by actively conspiring to fix prices from late 2010 through 2013 at repeated meetings among high-level executives at industry conferences and meetings at a San Diego restaurant. Wholesalers, retailers and other plaintiffs who filed scores of civil lawsuits alleged the plot may have continued longer.

No one has put a number on how much the companies allegedly squeezed from consumers through colluding. U.S. canned tuna sales, however, come to more than $1.7 billion a year.

The government pointed to several joint marketing schemes that either predated or occurred during the criminal conspiracy. These included a joint decision in 2008 to downsize the cans to 5 ounces, a “Tuna the Wonderfish” promotional campaign resembling the dairy industry’s “Got Milk” ad campaign and an agreement between Bumble Bee and Chicken of the Sea to share each other’s packing facilities in Georgia and Santa Fe Springs.

Lischewski argued that these arrangements weren’t illegal in themselves. The government didn’t disagree, but asserted that they provided opportunities for the executives to build “a closer relationship that eventually led to discussions and agreements regarding pricing.”

Wholesalers and retailers say they sensed something strange about canned tuna prices even before the feds took action. Walmart, in a lawsuit filed in October 2016, observed that the supply of tuna had increased sharply over the years due to innovations in fishing technology while demand was falling. That should have driven canned tuna prices down, but instead they rose. From 2008 through 2014 — including the period that the government says the price-fixing scheme was in full cry — Chicken of the Sea’s parent company more than doubled its profit to $140 million from $61 million, Walmart pointed out.

The parent attributed the increase in part to “more rational U.S. market competition.” Walmart’s gloss: “The ‘more rational’ competition was not competition at all; it was collusion.” In early 2012, for instance, the three companies announced virtually identical price increases within days of one another.

In its bankruptcy filing, Bumble Bee says that despite the indulgence of prosecutors, it’s still hobbled by the criminal fine (on which it still owes about $17 million) as well as the threat of damages in the civil lawsuits. In conjunction with the filing, it announced a takeover bid for about $930 million by FCF, a Taiwan fishing brokerage that provides Bumble Bee with almost all its high-quality albacore tuna and most of its light-meat tuna. (FCF is playing the role of a “stalking horse,” meaning that it could be outbid by another buyer.)

FCF’s offer would cover Bumble Bee’s assets, the $17 million owed to the government, and about $640 million in outstanding debt. Notably, it doesn’t provide for plaintiffs’ damages. Where that leaves the plaintiffs is unclear. “We intend to be active in the bankruptcy process to ensure that it is fair for all creditors,” Christopher Lebsock, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told me by email. He noted that the terms of the takeover deal would have given FCF preferential treatment over the other creditors, since Bumble Bee proposed paying FCF’s entire $51-million pre-bankrupcty claim. Bankruptcy Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein issued an order Tuesday rejecting that payment.

What’s most unclear is where the canned tuna business goes from here. The price-fixing scheme looks to have been exactly the wrong strategy, as the criminal fines and other fallout have made things only tougher for the participants.

Bumble Bee’s operating earnings, according to a statement filed in Bankruptcy Court by its chief financial officer, Kent McNeil, declined by 20% from 2015 to 2018 — a “negative trend” that placed the company at risk of defaulting on its loans. The decline in the company’s fortunes was plainly secular. Something was fishy in the tuna world, but the signs of rot ran even deeper.

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Maria Torres loves her job.

A surgical technologist at UCLA’s Santa Monica medical center, the 54-year-old mother of two makes sure operating rooms are sterile, protecting patients against wayward germs. She assists physicians as they repair hernias, operate on cataracts and fix injured knees. She comforts the fearful. She coaches medical students on how to scrub their hands.

And, after 13 years on the job, Torres makes a decent wage: $29.72 an hour plus benefits. “It’s amazing to work at such a prestigious place,” she says. “When I got hired there, I was so proud.”

So what was Torres doing on a November picket line, swinging a sign reading, “Inequality Hurts Patient Care,” and chanting, “Hey-hey, ho-ho, UC greed has got to go”?

The University of California is at war with its largest union, the 26,000-member Local 3299 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). November’s one-day strike, with picket lines at 10 UC campuses and five university hospitals across the state, was the sixth such angry walkout in the three years that the two sides have been fighting over a new contract.

The issue is outsourcing: the sprawling university system’s use of workers from temporary help agencies and staffing firms to fill low- and middle-wage service and healthcare jobs.

UC, the state’s third-largest employer, spends some $523 million a year on outside contracts for an estimated 10,000 parking attendants, security guards, custodians, cafeteria workers, groundskeepers and patient-care technicians among dozens of occupations normally represented by Local 3299.

“UC has accelerated the practice of replacing middle-class careers with less stable, lower-wage contract jobs,” says Local 3299 President Kathryn Lybarger, who rose through the ranks from a job as a UC Berkeley gardener. “This creates more poverty and less social mobility for thousands of California’s most vulnerable workers.”

To be sure, outsourcing has been common practice in corporate America for decades. Walmart warehouses are filled with temp workers. Contractors account for more than half of Google’s workforce. Amazon relies on independent contractors to deliver goods.

This “fissured workplace,” as some economists call it, is increasingly blamed for the nation’s growing divide between haves and have-nots.

University officials say contractors give them flexibility to meet complex hiring needs. It also saves money at a time when the UC complex, with a $37.2-billion annual budget, is trying to curb tuition hikes and expand the student body. Temp workers have traditionally been paid less than regular employees and lack the costly benefits that union members enjoy.

Should a public institution be held to stricter standards than for-profit companies?

Under pressure from elected officials, and from a union-led speaker boycott that caused the Democratic National Committee to yank its scheduled Dec. 19 presidential debate away from UCLA, the UC Board of Regents adopted new outsourcing guidelines last month. They require staffing firms to give workers pay and benefits equivalent to what university employees earn for the same job, a move that will cost UC an additional $108 million a year.

“We recognized that this was an area of some concern for our workers,” UC President Janet Napolitano said. “We are serious about having a contracting-out policy that protects our workers from displacement, that limits the use of outside labor.”

Yet the new five-page policy stops short of strict restraints, saying only that outsourcing should be used “sparingly.” So-called perma-temps who work for the university a year or more are not definitively offered employee status, as the union would like, but may “request to be converted,” with no guarantee.
Napolitano cites the need for “some limited flexibility where using outside or temporary workers is unavoidable.” Examples, she said, would be a sudden need for respiratory therapists following a wildfire, the closing of a lab requiring environmental expertise, or readying dorms for arriving students.

On the picket line, UC workers said contractor hiring far exceeds such circumstances.

“Nobody is safe,” Torres said. “I’m putting my daughter through college. I have a car payment. I have a mortgage. But UC can outsource anybody’s job. They bring in people who are paid less. A lot of us are afraid our jobs are in jeopardy.”

In her surgery center, she said, workers who sterilize instruments are mostly temps. “People leave their job for whatever reason, and instead of hiring a permanent employee, they hire a contractor. They bring them on for six or nine months, and then they extend them.”

Amanda Crawford, a 26-year-old phlebotomist and mother of a 5-year-old, was also on the picket line, wearing a T-shirt with the message, “END UC OUTSOURCING.” Hired to work at UCLA in February by PROCEL Nurses and Allied, a San Pedro agency, she said she was paid $20 an hour — less than the $27 an hour earned by employee phlebotomists.

“It made me feel devalued when I’m very good at what I do,” said Crawford, who had two years of experience at a Rancho Cucamonga hospital. Of about 30 phlebotomists at the Santa Monica facility, she said, five were contractors.

Staffing firms can terminate anyone who complains, she said, “so UCLA took advantage of us, gave us crazy schedules” and played favorites. Crawford, who is African American, filed a race discrimination case against her supervisor, who has been placed on leave pending an investigation. Now she works as a “per diem” UC employee, an interim status without benefits, paid $2 an hour less than full employees.

Picketing workers shrugged off the university regents’ new guidelines, saying UC has adopted policies in the past but individual campuses and hospitals routinely ignore them. The November strike was billed as an unfair-labor-practice walkout to protest 26 alleged violations of previous policies, including a university pledge to pay temps at least $15 an hour, as well as contractual obligations to notify the union when and why UC plans to outsource.

The union’s charges, filed with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board, which enforces collective bargaining laws, range across campuses. They involve custodians at UC Irvine, security guards at UC Merced, food service workers at UC Davis and UC San Diego, patient care technicians at UCLA Health and UC San Francisco Medical Center, and laundry and mail services at UC Berkeley.

In October, the board issued a formal complaint against UC, alleging that it “refused to meet and confer in good faith” with AFSCME over contracts with 24 outside agencies.

UC spokesman Andrew Gordon declined to address the allegations’ specifics, saying in an email, “We are currently reviewing the union’s complaints and will be responding in the due course.”

But AFSCME’s gripes mirror a 2017 report by the California state auditor, which found UC’s decentralized management meant it was unable to track “even the most basic contract information.” UC failed to justify displacing university employees with contract workers and repeatedly avoided competitive bidding on contracts, the audit found.

It cited, for example, a food service contract that UC Davis amended 24 times without bidding it out, extending its term from seven to 19 years and upping its value from $71 million to $237 million.

“We’ve been raising these concerns for decades,” said Liz Perlman, Local 3299’s executive director. “Now the university has finally acknowledged it has a problem. But the devil is in the details. What UC says is different from what it does. The way to enforce it is through collective bargaining.”

In a statement responding to the November strike, UC noted that it has “reached agreements with seven other unions during protracted negotiations with AFSCME,” and suggested the impasse may be less about outsourcing than wages.

“Our latest proposal aligns with the compensation of other UC employees,” it said. “It would be unfair to provide AFSCME-represented workers more than double the raises of other UC employees, which is what the union is demanding.”

An AFSCME spokesman said its wage proposal is in line with other unions’ raises, and that a UC plan to hike healthcare premiums would offset gains.

In an interview, John Pérez, a former Assembly speaker who became chair of UC’s Board of Regents in July, said outsourcing “is the biggest issue” in the dispute. “A stable workforce brings greater efficiencies to the university. If we want folks to be loyal to the university, the university has to be loyal to them as well.”

Pérez, who once worked as a top official for the United Food and Commercial Workers, the nation’s largest grocery union, said he expects the regents’ new policy to be enforced through collective bargaining agreements and “dramatically” curtail contracted work.

“I have tremendous respect for what AFSCME does,” he said. “Anyone working over a year should be converted to direct employment. The union is reasonable to say, let’s make it real.”

But even if UC agrees to enshrine the new outsourcing policy in its union contracts, it may face a reckoning in the Legislature.

The California Constitution grants broad independence to UC, leaving policy decisions to the regents and limiting legislative oversight to a few narrow issues of finance and bidding procedures. Nonetheless, from 2015 to 2018, lawmakers passed four bills seeking to curb UC outsourcing.

They were fiercely opposed by university officials, and all four were vetoed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who called them “unreasonable interference into university management.”

In his last veto message, Brown noted that UC had taken steps to “improve transparency and reduce pay disparities.” But at the same time, he urged the regents to “promptly turn their attention to this matter,” noting that “there is more work to be done.”

This year, lawmakers seemed to have run out of patience. A proposed constitutional amendment, ACA 14, passed the Assembly in June, 57 to 12, guaranteeing UC temp workers pay and benefits equal to that of employees performing similar work and limiting contracted labor to a few exceptional circumstances.

“Time and time again, UC has said it will do something about outsourcing,” said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), the measure’s author. “We never found UC to be trustworthy on this issue. On any contract, UC can break its own policies, and it does.”

Gonzalez, a former San Diego labor leader, said the university has raised executive salaries “by exorbitant amounts. It’s the same kind of greed we see in business. But it is a constant race to the bottom for low-wage workers. Why are they creating jobs where people have to be on public assistance like food stamps or housing vouchers?”

UC has defended its administrative pay in the past, saying the university competes for talent with other world-class institutions. And although enforcement may be questioned, the university’s policy since 2017 has been to require contractors to be paid $15 an hour, higher than the statewide minimum.

In September, Gonzalez’s bill earned a majority of Senate votes — 23 to 12 — but failed to get the necessary two-thirds for a constitutional amendment.

She plans to pursue its passage next year, believing voters would approve it. “It will be so much more protective to codify,” she said. “UC must finally be required to do right by all their workers.”

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CHAMBERLAIN, S.D. — 

Nine members of an extended Idaho family died when their plane crashed in a South Dakota field as they were heading home after a hunting trip.

Travis Garza, president of the wellness company Kyani, said in a Facebook post Sunday that the crash near Chamberlain on Saturday afternoon killed brothers and founders Jim and Kirk Hansen. The crash also killed their father, Jim Hansen Sr.; Kirk Hansen’s children Stockton and Logan; his sons-in-law Kyle Taylor and Tyson Dennert; and Jim Hansen’s son Jake and grandson Houston.

Garza identified the injured as Kirk’s son Josh, and Jim’s son Matt and son-in-law Thomas Long. All three were hospitalized.

The Hansens were executives with Kyani, which markets nutritional, health and wellness products, as well as with petroleum products distributor Conrad & Bischoff and KJ’s Super Stores.

East Idaho News, which first identified the victims, reported that the party had been on a hunting trip to South Dakota, one of the nation’s top destinations for pheasants.

Brian Wood, owner of a funeral home in Idaho Falls, lamented the deaths on Facebook. He called the Hansens “pillars of our community” and wrote that they had offered many times over the years to help pay expenses for someone who might not be able to afford it.

“Our community has a dark cloud over it now,” Wood wrote. “They will never know the many lives they touched.”

Twelve people were aboard the Pilatus PC-12 bound for Idaho Falls when it crashed within a mile after takeoff in Chamberlain about 12:30 p.m. Saturday, National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Peter Knudson said.

Federal investigators — one from Washington and two from the Chicago area — probably would reach the crash site Monday, Knudson said. Local authorities were guarding the site Sunday.

Chamberlain and parts of South Dakota were under a winter storm warning Saturday and Brule County emergency manager Katheryn Benton said planes were unable to land at Chamberlain at the time of the crash.

Weather will be among several factors investigators will review, although no cause for the crash has been determined, Knudson said.

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Hundreds of flights were canceled and thousands delayed for travelers heading home after the Thanksgiving holiday as a deadly winter storm moved to the Northeast on Sunday, packing one last punch of snow and ice.

The National Weather Service predicted more than a foot of snow in swaths of upstate New York and New England, as well as ice accumulations in parts of Pennsylvania.

“We’ve got our shovels ready. We’ve got the snowblower ready. We’re prepared,” said Paul Newman of Wethersfield, Conn.

In New York, numerous schools announced closings and Gov. Andrew Cuomo advised non-essential state employees to stay home as the storm was forecast to bring snow, sleet, wind and rain through Monday.

State police had responded to more than 550 storm-related crashes across New York by 7 p.m. Sunday and Cuomo placed National Guard personnel on standby. Icy roads caused numerous crashes on Interstate 84 in Pennsylvania on Sunday and a section of Interstate 81 north of Binghamton was closed because of icy conditions for a while.

The same storm has been pummeling the U.S. for days as it moved cross country, dumping heavy snow from parts of California to the northern Midwest and inundating other areas with rain.

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It has been blamed for several deaths.

The bodies of a boy and a girl, both 5, were found in central Arizona after their vehicle was swept away Friday while crossing a swollen creek.

Two adults and four other children were rescued by helicopter, but a 6-year-old girl is still missing. Rescuers are combing the area of Tonto Basin, about 50 miles northeast of Phoenix, with helicopters, drones, boats and dogs.

“We want to bring her home safely to her family,” said Lt. Virgil Dodd of the Gila County Sheriff’s Office. “She needs to come home today, and we’re going to do that.”

Two boys, ages 5 and 8, died Saturday near Patton, Mo., when the vehicle they were riding in was swept off flooded roads.

A 48-year-old man died in a separate incident near Sedgewickville, Mo., and a storm-related death was reported in South Dakota.

Also in South Dakota, a small-engine plane carrying 12 people crashed shortly after takeoff Saturday afternoon, killing nine people and injuring three others. Federal aviation investigators are looking into whether snowy weather was a factor.

Major highways reopened Sunday in Wyoming and Colorado, a day after blizzard conditions clogged roads with snowdrifts.

Road crews were able to reopen all of Interstate 25 and most of I-80 in Wyoming early Sunday after strong winds abated. Major interstates in Colorado were also reopened.

Still, authorities warned travelers to remain alert for slick conditions and blowing snow.

The city of Duluth, Minn., was blanketed with 21.7 inches of snow as of noon Sunday. City officials said streets were impassable and that residents should stay inside.

Farther south, precipitation arrived in the form of rain and thunderstorms.

As the storm shifted east, flight delays and cancellations continued to pile up. As of 7:30 p.m., there were more than 800 Sunday flights canceled in the U.S., compared with about 400 on Saturday, according to flight tracking site FlightAware. Nearly 6,000 U.S. flights were delayed.

Airports with the most canceled flights included San Francisco International Airport with 78 and Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey with 60, according to FlightAware. Wind and rain caused some arriving flights at San Francisco to be delayed an average of 4.5 hours.

There were also dozens of flight delays in Chicago and Minneapolis.

In Denver, 100 flights were canceled Saturday because of high winds.

Here are the stories you shouldn’t miss today:

TOP STORIES

Flying in the Face of Impeachment

As President Trump faces the prospect of becoming the third president to be impeached, he’s taken to Air Force One for an escape, of sorts. Last week, it was an unannounced 2½-hour Thanksgiving visit to the troops at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

Today, Trump is heading to London for a two-day summit with leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the 29-nation military alliance that has been one of his most frequent targets. The summit has a fairly limited agenda in part because allies are eager to avoid embarrassing conflicts.

Privately, Western leaders are concerned not only with Trump’s actions in Ukraine, the subject of the impeachment inquiry, but also with the larger question of whether he will further weaken the alliance created after World War II to counter the Soviet Union.

Trump is scheduled to return Wednesday night, hours after the Democratic-led House Judiciary Committee holds its first public hearing, in the next phase of the impeachment inquiry: weighing potential articles of impeachment. Trump’s legal team has declined to attend the first hearing, claiming a lack of “fundamental fairness.”

The Union Versus the Governor

The State Building and Construction Trades Council of California, which represents plumbers, electricians, ironworkers and other construction workers, has a beef with Gov. Gavin Newsom. The 450,000-member union is a major Democratic donor and one of the most influential players on housing issues in the state, but it’s less than pleased with Newsom’s stance on the bullet train and other major public works.

More Power to the State?

Fires. Blackouts. Bankruptcies. Is it time for a state power company in California? Loretta M. Lynch, former president of the California Public Utilities Commission, is calling for a public takeover of Pacific Gas & Electric and possibly other private utilities with the idea to create such an entity. That goes a step beyond what many public officials, including Newsom, have been willing to publicly consider. But could that idea grow in power?

For Whom the 405 Tolls

Gridlock on the 405 Freeway, especially around Thanksgiving, has become one of the more enduring images of L.A. Now, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is in the early stages of planning to charge tolls for use of the carpool lane along a key section of the freeway: the Sepulveda Pass, running between the Westside and San Fernando Valley. If approved, the toll lanes would open in 2027, just before L.A. hosts the 2028 Summer Olympics.

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OUR MUST-READS FROM THE WEEKEND

— No single agency keeps tabs on the number of deaths at psychiatric facilities in California, or elsewhere in the nation. A Times review identified nearly 100 preventable deaths over the last decade at California psychiatric facilities.

— The University of California, the state’s third-largest employer, spends some $523 million a year on outside contracts for an estimated 10,000 jobs normally represented by a union. Should a public institution be held to stricter standards than for-profit companies?

— The incredible story of Esther Takei, a 19-year-old Japanese American student who was selected as a test case for the resettlement of all detainees of Japanese descent in the U.S. in 1944.

— On Lake Titicaca in Peru, villagers are trying to develop a sustainable tourism model that gives every household an opportunity to prosper and preserves tranquility.

— Intermittent fasting for weight loss: What you need to know.

FROM THE ARCHIVES

On this date in 2015, a young married couple opened fire on a holiday party for San Bernardino County health workers, killing 14 people and injuring 24 in the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001. Authorities said the wife had posted a note on Facebook pledging allegiance to Islamic State shortly after the shooting. Later that day, police would chase the couple in a vehicle and engage in a shootout that killed the two. Remember the victims at the Inland Regional Center with these profiles and see how The Times covered the news in this timeline.

CALIFORNIA

— A rash of car burglaries has prompted calls for plugging a loophole in state law that allows some break-ins to go unpunished, but the Legislature has balked at prosecutors’ requests to make obtaining convictions easier.

— L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti’s latest appointee to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s board of commissioners is a top executive at a company that markets water and power and has a history of trying to make deals with government agencies in Southern California, including LADWP.

— Snow has blanketed Southern California mountains, causing traffic tie-ups and power outages. More cold weather, rain and snow are on the way this week.

— For the second time in a week, authorities say paramedics responded after passengers aboard a Norwegian Cruise Line ship docked at the Port of Los Angeles had fallen ill.

HOLLYWOOD AND THE ARTS

— “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is a great movie, columnist Mary McNamara writes. But, she argues, it misses the point of Mister Rogers.

— Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce explained to us how they prepared for the “papal smackdown” of the film “The Two Popes.”

— Shelley Morrison, an actress with a 50-year career who was best known for playing a memorable maid on “Will and Grace,” has died at 83.

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NATION-WORLD

— Mexican security forces on Sunday killed seven more members of a presumed cartel assault force that rolled into a town near the Texas border a day earlier and staged an hourlong attack, officials said, bringing the death toll to at least 20.

— New Orleans police say 11 people were shot on the edge of the city’s French Quarter early Sunday morning.

— A tribe in Washington state wants to resume whale hunting. Should it revive this tradition?

BUSINESS

— California’s electric vehicle sales are up. But will we reach the 5 million goal by 2030?

— Columnist Michael Hiltzik says this government price-fixing case makes the tuna industry sound like the Mafia.

SPORTS

— Quarterback Jared Goff’s monster passing day propelled the Rams to a blowout win over the Arizona Cardinals, while a costly pass interference call gave the Chargers a gut-wrenching loss against the Denver Broncos.

— The Lakers’ 10-game winning streak crumbled in a mistake-filled loss to the Dallas Mavericks.

— At the end of Sunday, amid conflicting reports about his fate, Clay Helton remained USC’s head football coach … for now.

OPINION

— How old is too old to be president? We are entering uncharted waters.

— L.A. County supervisors are trying to sneak a last-minute tax measure on the ballot. Yes, again.

WHAT OUR EDITORS ARE READING

— “It never goes away or stops, even when he’s not publicly attacking me”: Lisa Page, the former FBI lawyer and frequent Trump target, breaks her silence. (Daily Beast)

— In Malaysia, officials want to elevate the social status of durian with tastings and orchard tours, but focusing so intently on production of the pungent fruit has its costs. (South China Morning Post)

ONLY IN L.A.

For screen legends such as Charlie Chaplin, Louis B. Mayer and Marilyn Monroe, the Avalon Theater on Catalina Island was a destination for premieres and showcases. For Catalina longtimers, the 1,184-seat Art Deco movie palace was the setting for first dates, high school graduations and nights out with the kids. But even on an island with not much to do, the theater says it isn’t getting enough customers, and it plans to stop showing first-run movies by the end of this year. But many residents aren’t ready to accept the end of a 90-year tradition.

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