Half a lifetime ago, I lived in Belgium. I have never seen something more shocking and yet, been totally unsurprised. https://t.co/E97MONGaiF
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) March 4, 2019
BREAKING: Prime Minister @theresa_may calls for @DerbyChrisW to be suspended from @UKLabour to show that @jeremycorbyn "actually wants to take action against racism".
— Jewish Telegraph (@JewishTelegraph) February 27, 2019
She also praised the work of @CST_UK, in response to a question from @JamesCleverly.#LabourAntisemitism #PMQs pic.twitter.com/nNTM6QeX8M
When the actor Jussie Smollett charged that two men shouting this is “MAGA country” had attacked him, also yelling racist and homophobic taunts, my fellow liberals were quick to blame the rise in such incidents on President Trump and his supporters who want to “Make American Great Again.”More.
Smollett was indicted by an Illinois grand jury on Feb. 20 for apparently faking the whole episode, but the larger trend is real: Hate crimes have spiked during the Trump era. And surely the president’s own bigoted rhetoric — Mexicans are rapists, Africans live in s—hole countries and so on — has something to do with that.
So why aren’t we also denouncing the culture of intolerance on America’s university campuses, where dissenting voices have faced physical attacks? And doesn’t our silence on that score make us partially responsible for the violence, just as Trump is complicit in hate crimes?
Consider the assault on a conservative activist last month at UC Berkeley, where he was displaying posters declaring “This is MAGA country” — which is what Smollett said his attackers shouted — and “Hate crime hoaxes hurt real victims.”
Two men accosted the conservative activist with expletives. One denounced him for “encouraging violence.” As if on cue, the second man then punched the activist in the face.
Noting that the incident took place on Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza, epicenter of the university’s Free Speech Movement in 1964, school officials were quick to denounce it. “We strongly condemn violence and harassment of any sort, for any reason,” they said in a statement. “Our commitment to freedom of expression and belief is unwavering.” Friday, they announced an arrest...
Someone has been killed within walking distance of 89% of L.A. County's high schools. In neighborhoods with high rates of homicide near public high schools, the impact can be devastating and costly for students, schools and communities. https://t.co/amxucXOyDJ— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) March 3, 2019
Jaleyah Collier had just said goodbye to Kevin Cleveland outside a doughnut shop a few blocks from Hawkins High School on a spring afternoon in 2017. Get home safe, she told him before walking away.Lots more. (The interactive graphics interfere with the scrolling function. Be sure to scroll using the right side-bar.)
Minutes later someone drove into an alley nearby, got out of the car and asked Kevin, 17, and two others about their gang affiliation. The gunman then sprayed them with at least 10 rounds, killing Kevin and injuring the others.
Jaleyah, then a high school sophomore, barely had time to grieve when a month later, her best friend, Alex Lomeli, 18, was shot and killed when someone tried to rob a market about a mile from the same high school, located at 60th and Hoover streets.
In the early hours of Mother’s Day 2018, two other teens Jaleyah was close to, Monyae Jackson and La’marrion Upchurch, were walking home with friends, when they were fatally shot near Dymally High School.
Each of Jaleyah’s friends was killed within walking distance of public high schools in Los Angeles.
“You don’t know when it’s going to be a person’s last day,” said Jaleyah, a senior at the Community Health Advocates School, one of three small schools on the Hawkins campus. “[Kevin] woke up not knowing.”
The impact of that violence can be devastating and costly. Campuses have begun incorporating the inevitability of trauma into their curricula, addressing stress reduction and how to settle differences without resorting to violence. Students suffer symptoms resembling post-traumatic stress disorder and psychiatric social workers are now a staple at many campuses. Because there is too little mental health funding to meet the need, teachers and staff are often on the front lines in identifying the warning signs of emotionally needy students.
One concern is practical: getting safely to and from school, avoiding not just bullets but gang flashpoints, street harassment, hit-and-runs and muggings. With limited district busing, some students opt for public transportation or other ride-sharing options. On their journeys, they sometimes pass candle- and flower-filled memorials to fallen friends.
Sixteen-year-old Carl Hull, a sophomore at Dymally High School, starts his walk to school each morning by turning into an alley to avoid gang members who live on his street. Once, when he was wearing a gray sweatshirt with the blue L.A. Dodgers logo, they stopped him and asked about his affiliation — he’s not involved in gangs, he told them. Another morning, a few days after hearing gunfire near his house, he found a 9-millimeter bullet shell. Each day, he said, is “like a guessing game.”
Decades of research suggest that the effects of exposure to violence on teenagers are wide-ranging, and can result in anxiety, depression, anger, absences and an inability to concentrate in class.
Even if students didn’t know the victims, they see reminders on social media, memorial posts and the T-shirts friends and family wear in trying to raise funds for a funeral.
Jaleyah woke up on Mother’s Day to find her Instagram feed filled with posts about the shooting of Monyae and La’marrion, she said.
Children in high-crime areas are “losing more people in their youth than most of us have lost when we get to 30 or 40,” said Ferroll Robins, executive director of the nonprofit organization Loved Ones Victims Services, which provides counseling for victims of violence and their families.
“I do worry about what is going to happen to them emotionally, mentally, how bad are they really being scarred?” Robins said. “And how much of those scars are going to play into their life later?”
Jaleyah, a bubbly and energetic 17-year-old, prides herself on her resilience but resents that this constant drumbeat of loss is her reality. In the days after a friend dies, she is unable to concentrate in class, she said. She goes to the funerals, some during the school week. She’s nervous walking to school, afraid a man with a hoodie pulled over his head might be hiding a gun, afraid to walk in alleys or on side streets. She feels a jolt whenever she sees her slain friends’ photos or someone mentions them, reminded each time that their lives had ended too early.
Jason Powell knows he can’t begin teaching his English and music classes at Dymally, at 88th and San Pedro streets, until the kids can address the latest violence in their lives. Over the last five years, 105 people have been killed within a mile of the campus, the highest number surrounding any public high school in the county. Ten of the victims were 18 or younger.
Last year alone, 20 people were killed within a mile — about one every 2½ weeks. Sometimes they are current or former students, including Monyae.
After the deaths of La’marrion and Monyae, Powell gathered his ninth-graders in circles during class and asked them how they deal with pain. The students were used to sharing because they have these circles often on subjects both mundane and serious.
The exercise was intended to develop positive coping and conflict resolution skills. One by one, the students took turns sharing stories of loss. Similar scenes played out at several area schools where students had known the boys who were killed.
When a friend dies, “they come in welled up with emotion, they’re crying and there’s no way they can concentrate on the lesson at hand, so whatever’s on the board as far as the lesson plan, that means nothing,” Powell said. “They need more immediate help.”
Jaleyah said that seeing the therapist on campus didn’t help her, but that participating in similar community circles at Hawkins taught her how to voice her anger and channel it into action. “They give us a chance to speak and feel free [in] what we have to say, without being afraid,” Jaleyah said.
Sometimes the loss is unrelenting. As Dymally was preparing for graduation just weeks after former student Monyae’s death, there was more tragic news: Campus aide James Lamont Taylor was killed at 8:30 a.m., walking on the street about a mile from the school.
The journey their children take just getting to school is a source of stress also for parents.
Carl’s mom worries about him getting robbed or shot on the way to Dymally, or hit by a car while crossing the street. Her older son, Brian Hull, was killed in 2016 crossing the street near her home. She and Carl have grown used to hearing gunshots from their apartment in Broadway-Manchester, less than a mile from the high school. She’s afraid that when he walks down the alley behind their home to get to school, he’ll get hurt.
“I have real bad, heavy anxiety,” Latanya Hull said. One afternoon in September, she began to worry when Carl didn’t get home at the usual time. His phone was broken, so she couldn’t reach him. She called the school. Carl was there, they said, in after-school tutoring...
Kelly Brook's Mark Hayman Photoshoot - https://t.co/YqSKlmjfr0 - pic.twitter.com/tv30UPNxka
— Taxi Driver (@TaxiDriverMovie) March 1, 2019
Grab a Copy Today @Fabulousmag pic.twitter.com/q6bYjnYDTa
— Kelly Brook (@IAMKELLYBROOK) February 24, 2019
Like the headline says: One year and counting. Check out a great package of stories about the Democratic race by @markzbarabak @hookjan @melmason @finneganLAT pic.twitter.com/aC980KV8Fa
— David Lauter (@DavidLauter) March 3, 2019
Biden and Beto, if they get into the 2020 race, embody totally different concepts of electability, of what it will take to beat Donald Trump https://t.co/Y8YWUzG7fO
— Janet Hook (@hookjan) March 1, 2019
Marcus Scott is looking for a Democratic presidential candidate who will be rude to Donald Trump. Kara LaMarche wants an upbeat, positive approach. Ben Dion wants a nominee with experience and gravitas. Linds Jakows has had it with older white men in power.
Those voters, like fellow Democrats across the country, seek very different things in the big and growing presidential candidate field. But they share one top priority: Picking a nominee who will beat President Trump in 2020.
A year from now, on March 3, 2020, candidates will be competing for primary votes in California and eight other states in the first day of multistate voting. By then, the candidates will have been tested in the four early voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, where Democrats already have a curbside seat for the parade of candidates campaigning there.
Between now and then, much of the debate seems certain to focus on the elusive quality labeled “electability.”
Parties always want to win, of course, but Democratic loathing of Trump has pushed finding a winner way up the priority scale this year, recent polls show. Democratic voters say they’d prefer a candidate who can beat Trump to one who agrees with their position on any particular issue.
Voters, however, have widely varying views about what electable means in 2020. To some, it is code for a safe, cautious choice — a centrist white male who presumably can speak to swing voters. To other Democrats, that’s a recipe for killing off excitement within the party’s young, diverse, progressive base, which needs to be mobilized to win in 2020.
The contrasting ideas about electability will come sharply into focus in the coming weeks if two late entrants to the 2020 race come off the sidelines. If former Rep. Beto O’Rourke jumps in, the 46-year-old Texan will represent a bid for generational change that could mobilize new voters in a way supporters compare to Barack Obama.
If Vice President Joe Biden runs, he will likely lean heavily on the case that his long experience makes the 76-year-old the party’s safest bet to win the White House.
“I believe he is the only person who could take on Trump and beat him,” said Dick Harpootlian, a South Carolina state senator and longtime Biden backer. “We’re going to need someone who can motivate the middle-of-the-road voter.”
Other Democrats believe the party must put up a candidate better equipped than the former vice president to speak to and harness the energy of the younger generation of voters that helped deliver victory to the party in the 2018 midterm elections.
“I truly believe this great nation is ready for change,” said Robyn Joppy, a business consultant who heard Biden speak at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day event in Washington, D.C. “I love him. But I think his time has come and gone.”
How many candidates will be in the field by the time actual voting starts is anybody’s guess. For now, 13 have joined the field or formed an exploratory committee. Half are senators — Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Kamala Harris of California, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
More candidates may soon get in the race, including former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper and Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, as well as Biden and O’Rourke.
The candidates are now pouring most of their effort into the four earliest-voting states. They face a daunting challenge when attention turns to California, because its large size gives a leg up to candidates who can afford television advertising.
Harris, Sanders and Biden, if he runs, could have an edge because they are already well known in the state. But because Democratic Party rules require all states to distribute their delegates proportionately, no candidate is likely to walk away with a lion’s share of California’s more than 400 convention delegates, the largest group from any state.
Most Democrats are highly confident of their ability to beat Trump in 2020, because of his low approval ratings and the high level of energy in their own ranks.
But a recent poll by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican firm, provides a warning against overconfidence on the part of Democrats. Nationally the poll found just 45% of respondents approved of the job Trump was doing. But he fared better — 50% approved of him — in 12 swing states important to his reelection (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin).
Some Democrats are skeptical about assessing candidates’ electability.
Gigi Hadid isn’t hot, despite all the media attention she gets, but at least she doesn’t look like this sharp edged dude that her sister looks like…Heh.
All these girls are a lot of fucking hype wit very little substance…they don’t offer the world shit and when I see them with their face injections all these years after they started…still probably under 25 years old…representing a dark time in modeling and spokesmodeling…I can’t help but wonder why they look like they are in their mid 40s…
Bamboo rafting in Jamaica! Our guide Henry was the coolest & serenaded us w/ Bob Marley. Unforgettable day 😌 #fbf— Victoria Justice (@VictoriaJustice) March 1, 2019
📸: @themadisongrace pic.twitter.com/TuDm1So65c
— Victoria Justice (@VictoriaJustice) February 28, 2019
26.— Victoria Justice (@VictoriaJustice) February 19, 2019
Thank you all for the b day wishes. Seriously, I sincerely appreciate it more than you know. All my love ♥️ pic.twitter.com/HG4IgrQw8t
In Central Valley towns, California’s bullet train isn’t an idea: ‘It’s people’s lives’ https://t.co/SIeEOsP90g pic.twitter.com/Vekgs3jrjB— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) March 2, 2019
When Annie Williams heard that California’s plan for high-speed rail had been scaled back to 119 miles through the Central Valley, her head jerked back.
“Merced to Bakersfield? The good Lord himself can’t make sense of that,” she said. “After all our tears and making peace?”
The recent debate surrounding California’s transit future has reverberated statewide. But here in the Central Valley, the upheaval — like the bullet train itself — is real. Houses have been boarded up, businesses moved, vineyards torn out, a highway realigned.
Giant concrete structures rise from orchards waiting to hold up tracks that now seem further from existence.
Fairmead, the community where Williams lives, is the likely place that will face the most immediate uncertainties. It is in the “Y,” the planned fork from which some trains were to hurtle south toward Los Angeles or north to Merced, and others were to veer west to the Bay Area.
There is no library or market or gas station here; only three buildings in the town of about 1,500, including the church, aren’t people’s homes. Sheds lean, grass grows through porch slats and rains leave deep puddles on dirt and gravel roads.
Williams, who gives her age as “upwards of 70,” said this is a place where people “work hard to have a place just to lay their heads and have been taking care of each other since nigh the beginning of time.”
An early proposed high-speed rail would have leveled a neighborhood, including Williams’ home. But that was before community organizers Vickie Ortiz and Barbara Nelson rallied their neighbors.
Their nonprofit organization, Friends of Fairmead, held so many meetings to lobby state representatives for a different route that the women started greeting the rail agency’s regional director with familiar hugs. After nearly a decade of negotiating, they felt they were a breath away from a route that would move the school, spare the church, preserve more houses and bring the town a much-needed community center.
Then in mid-January, Gov. Gavin Newsom laid out plans to pull back on high-speed rail in the face of massive cost overruns.
“I think the community center is gone,” the lawyer for Friends of Fairmead said.
Ortiz is angry about all the years she watched people worry and fret about where they would go.
“I don’t want to talk political because I don’t do it very well,” Ortiz said. “But you know, you had a governor that was pushing-pushing-pushing for the high-speed train, and we started getting used to the idea that we can’t stop a train but maybe we can use it to help the community. But then you get another governor and he says: ‘No, I don’t want to do that anymore.’ My mouth was just open with shock.”
Nelson, however, said she felt relief.
Each week, she visits an elderly neighbor in the hospital who asks her the latest about whether the project will take her house.
“I’m going to tell her, ‘Sister Hughes, your house is safe.’ And we’ll find some other way to get our community center.”
Traveling south from Fairmead on California Route 99, there’s a stretch of highway through Fresno that’s smooth and new. Five bridges were torn down and rebuilt in order to move the road about 100 feet to make room for rail. The California Department of Transportation project cost about $290 million.
Along the Kings River, near the little town of Laton, the signs of coming bullet train infrastructure include felled orchards and giant earthen berms. (Local independent truck drivers got weeks of work hauling dirt for the project.)
Next to the Van Eyk family’s walnut grove, where crops once grew, is now a stretch of excavated earth marked by “No Trespassing” signs.
Randy Van Eyk was born and raised on a dairy farm outside of nearby Hanford. His wife, Anne, grew up in rural Northern California. They lived in the city of Visalia for 10 years, saving for a place like this — a big house on a country road where they live with their 7-year old daughter, Maddie, a Labrador retriever named Snickers and a giant cat.
Randy planted walnuts instead of more lucrative almonds, because he was 45 years old when they moved in and almonds need replanting every 20 years. He didn’t want to work that hard at 65. Walnut trees should outlive him.
“We figured this was our last stop unless Maddie put us in a home someday,” Anne said.
The first sign that high-speed rail might change that was a giant white X painted on the road near their mailbox.
They found other Xs at other intersections and drew a diagonal line that went through their frontyard .
Anne cried — and, she said, she never cries.
Her husband told her not to worry, that it would never really happen. But work crews arrived, neighbors moved and cranes dropped off giant pipes. In the end, they were the only residents on their road that didn’t have to sell property to the state.
“We’ll have people over, even from around here, and they’ll look around and say: “That’s from high-speed rail? You mean it’s real?’ People think it’s just some idea, something to fight about on the radio, but it’s people’s lives,” Randy said.
The argument for a high-speed train crossing the state was that it would bridge California’s inequalities.
Central Valley cities and towns have some of the most concentrated poverty in the state. The political vision was that it would connect them to the wealth and opportunities of the coast and bring higher paying jobs. It would cut down on the air pollution that gets trapped in the hot, flat valley.
Randy Van Eyk was opposed to the project because he thought it would bring wealthy tech workers who would displace farms and rural life. He also thought politicians would start the project and never finish, leaving the debris in the Central Valley.
“You see all the destruction?” he said. “People lost their homes and businesses. And for what?”
He said he has flashes of anger, but then looks around and takes a deep breath...
How will Netanyahu's legal woes affect U.S.-Israeli relations and peace efforts? https://t.co/xChELRpaGp— L.A. Times World (@latimesworld) March 2, 2019
Even as likely indictments hang over Benjamin Netanyahu and imperil his political career, the embattled Israeli prime minister is receiving the enthusiastic endorsement of his good buddy and leader of the free world, Donald J. Trump.
“He has been a great prime minister,” President Trump said in Hanoi on Thursday after a nuclear summit with North Korea as plans to charge Netanyahu in three felony corruption cases were about to be announced in Jerusalem. “He's done a great job as prime minister. He's tough, he's smart, he's strong.”
Since becoming president more than two years ago, Trump has been a loyal, unquestioning ally of Netanyahu and his right-wing Israeli government. He has taken numerous steps in favor of Israel and promised to look out for Netanyahu’s interests as his son-in-law and other administration officials seek a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Trump has called that long-elusive goal the “ultimate deal.” But Netanyahu’s political and legal predicament has added even more complexity to what was already a tortured, long-shot process.
Netanyahu, who has dominated Israeli politics for more than a decade, also faces a tough reelection bid. He is running for a fourth consecutive term as head of the government in voting that takes place in 40 days, on April 9.
The fate of Netanyahu and the still-secret U.S.-crafted peace plan are in many ways intertwined. How he fares in the final weeks of the election campaign, whether his party continues to hold on to its lead or slips substantially, is likely to influence whether he welcomes a peace plan or turns his back on any such effort to appeal to his hard-line, ultra-hawkish base, Israeli and American political analysts say.
Trump handed the project of writing a peace plan to son-in-law Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt, a former Trump Organization attorney named special envoy for the Middle East. The two this week ended a second tour through Persian Gulf states attempting to find support for their ideas, which some leaders in the region have rejected for appearing overly pro-Israeli, disregarding Palestinian demands.
Kushner said he would not make the plan public before the Israeli election. It could, however, be published in the postelection period, a frenzied time when, in Israel’s parliamentary system, political parties who have won seats make alliances in an attempt to form a government that selects the prime minister.
At that point, analysts said, Netanyahu could appeal to a broader group of politicians, insisting he was the best leader to make peace while not sacrificing Israel’s security or other interests.
“There is a devil’s theory that Kushner and company will try to do a rollout to help Bibi form a coalition,” said Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel who teaches Middle East policy at Princeton University, referring to Netanyahu by his nickname.
Or, if it would help Netanyahu more, Kushner “is likely to tiptoe back to Washington so he does not hurt Bibi,” Kurtzer said.
If Netanyahu loses in the election, there may be pressure for the Trump administration to delay releasing the peace plan to another date, if ever, because of the uncertainty and especially if a center-left government takes over, said Ilan Goldenberg, a Middle East expert at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank.
Yet if Netanyahu thinks his career depends on it, he could probably go harder right, Goldenberg and others said, which might render any peace plan dead on arrival because few governments and especially those in the Arab world would be willing to work with such a coalition.
Already, Netanyahu stunned many people in the U.S. and in Israel when he brought three extreme right-wing fringe parties into his coalition last week. One of the parties, Jewish Power, believes in Jewish supremacy and is led by disciples of Meir Kahane, the ultra-right-wing American-born rabbi who won a seat in the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, before he was banned from politics in 1988 for advancing a racist agenda. He was assassinated two years later.
No criticism was forthcoming, however, from the Trump administration. Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo said that “we’re not about to get involved” in a democratic country’s election. Those statements came four days before Trump’s endorsement of the “tough, smart, strong” Netanyahu.
Prior to being formally indicted, Netanyahu is allowed to challenge the charges against him, which involve bribery and other corruption aimed at promoting his image and helping him hold on to power. If indicted, Netanyahu could continue to campaign, but whether he could serve effectively as prime minister remains unclear.
Initial polling after Atty. Gen. Avichai Mandelblit announced his intention to indict Thursday was grim for Netanyahu and his Likud Party...
I didn’t say that they were putting themselves on a list for primaries.
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 1, 2019
I said that by Dems distinguishing themselves by breaking off on procedural MTR votes, they were inadvertently making a list of targets for the GOP and for progressive advocates on their pro-ICE vote.
#SayNoToWar pic.twitter.com/3sv7Takreb
— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) March 1, 2019
Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens took over #CPAC https://t.co/sR4AxmCQfZ
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 1, 2019
They’re young. She says that because they’re young. Not because they’re perfect Burkean conservatives. They’re young, they fight for America, and people like them promise us the future. #CPAC2019 🇺🇸 https://t.co/gVoy1u4pOa
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) March 1, 2019
Cool front-page photo of #PresidentTrump returning to the White House on Thursday. @LATimes #KAG #ThankYouTrump 👍🇺🇸🙏😎🤙 @steph93065 pic.twitter.com/JxRYfcSxk0— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) March 1, 2019
The collapse of President Trump’s summit with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un left confusion in its wake Thursday, with each side blaming the other and no clear path forward in the nuclear standoff.
As Trump flew home from Hanoi, site of the abbreviated gathering, a growing outcry erupted in the United States over Trump’s defense of Kim in the 2017 death of American college student Otto Warmbier, whose family said he suffered brutal torture while imprisoned in North Korea.
But despite the president returning empty-handed, Trump’s political allies praised what they called his acumen in walking away rather than accepting a bad deal, and some analysts cited early signs that North Korea still wanted to keep open the lines of communication.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the Senate floor to declare that Trump had made the right call.
“High-level diplomacy can carry high-level risks, but the president is to be commended for walking away when it became clear insufficient progress had been made on denuclearization,” McConnell said.
Trump cut short his summit with Kim earlier Thursday, rejecting the North Korean leader’s offer to dismantle a major nuclear complex in exchange for the removal of U.S.-led economic sanctions.
Trump said that the U.S. wanted more concessions from Kim and that talks would continue. But the president wouldn’t commit to holding a third summit after two high-profile meetings have failed to produce a concrete agreement on rolling back Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program.
“Sometimes you have to walk,” Trump said at a news conference in the Vietnamese capital before departing for Washington on Air Force One. “This was one of those times.”
Less than 12 hours later, a North Korean official took the rare step of holding a news conference to tell reporters: Kim made a “realistic proposal,” and it was the U.S. that was obstinate in its demands.
In a Hanoi hotel lobby after midnight, Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho said North Korea had proposed dismantling its main nuclear complex and permanently halting all nuclear and long-range missile testing in exchange for a partial lifting of sanctions, but the U.S. was “not ready to accept our proposal.”
“Our principal stand will remain invariable and our proposal will never be changed,” he said.
“This proposal was the biggest denuclearization measure we can take at the present stage in relation to the current level of confidence between the DPRK and the United States,” Ri said, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
In response to Ri's comments, a senior U.S. official said early Friday that while the North Korean delegation did not seek the lifting of all sanctions, it wanted to remove enough to gut the "maximum pressure" campaign of squeezing the country’s economy. The relaxation of sanctions would have freed government funds for more weapons development, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in keeping with State Department rules for speaking about negotiations.
"So to give many, many billions of dollars in sanctions relief would in effect put us in a position of subsidizing the ongoing development of weapons of mass destruction in North Korea," the administration official told reporters traveling with Secretary of State Michael R. Pompeo. "Now, they didn’t ask us to do that, but that is effectively the choice that we were presented with. "
As Trump flew home via Alaska, where he briefly addressed troops during a refueling stop at Elmendorf Air Force Base, even some supporters expressed dismay over Trump’s about-face on Warmbier, the 22-year-old who was held for 17 months by North Korea and died shortly after being returned home in a vegetative state.
At the time, the president decried Pyongyang’s “cruel dictatorship,” and had the student’s parents, Fred and Cindy Warmbier, as guests at his 2018 State of the Union address...
It's Still Rock & Roll To Me
Billy Joel
9:16am
Hold Me Now
Thompson Twins
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Take Me Out
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Little Red Corvette
PRINCE
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Like A Stone
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Smells Like Teen Spirit
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Walk This Way
Run-D.M.C.
8:22am
Hold The Line
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Still Haven't Found What...
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In The Air Tonight
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7:43pm
Let's Dance
David Bowie
7:39pm
Whatever It Takes
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7:36pm
You Got Lucky
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7:32pm
If the looming 12-year deadline to confront climate change is missed, what purpose could life have in the face of an unavoidable, collective downfall? https://t.co/8kbWEf48b9— The New Republic (@newrepublic) February 25, 2019
In one of his early works, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche relayed an Ancient Greek legend about King Midas pursuing the satyr Silenus, a wise companion of the god Dionysus. When Midas finally captures Silenus, he asks him what “the best thing of all for men” is. “The very best thing for you is totally unreachable,” Silenus replies: “not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing.”Still more.
Raphael Samuel, a 27-year-old from Mumbai, offered an echo of this argument to the BBC this month. Samuel plans to sue his parents for bringing him into a world of suffering without his consent. “Why should I suffer? Why must I be stuck in traffic? Why must I work? Why must I face wars? Why must I feel pain or depression? Why should I do anything when I don’t want to? Many questions. One answer,” Samuel wrote on his Facebook page: “Someone had you for their ‘pleasure.’”
Once, such thoughts might have seemed far-fetched or even self-indulgent. Today, however, similar reasoning—known as “antinatalism—seems to be spreading as potential future parents contemplate bringing children into a world climate change is likely to devastate. “Why did you have me?” Samuel asked his parents as a child. If the bleak scenarios about the planet’s future come to fruition, will parents have a satisfying answer to such questions?
Once, such thoughts might have seemed far-fetched or even self-indulgent. Today, however, similar reasoning—known as “antinatalism—seems to be spreading as potential future parents contemplate bringing children into a world climate change is likely to devastate. “Why did you have me?” Samuel asked his parents as a child. If the bleak scenarios about the planet’s future come to fruition, will parents have a satisfying answer to such questions?
The basic antinatalist argument is simple, albeit easily misunderstood. As philosopher David Benatar argued in a 2006 antinatalist treatise, life is full of suffering and strife, the moments of pleasure and happiness few, transitory, and elusive, and ultimately it all ends in death. This is not the same as saying that life is not worth living, if you happen to be alive—for one thing, living and then facing death can involve its own physical and emotional pain. The argument is rather that it would have been better never to have been born in the first place. Some lives can indeed be rather satisfactory, even rewarding. But as a potential future parent, you are taking a risk on your child’s behalf, because, Benatar kindly reminds us, “there is a wide range of appalling fates that can befall any child that is brought into existence: starvation, rape, abuse, assault, serious mental illness, infectious disease, malignancy, paralysis.”
Which brings us to a risk unique to the twenty-first century: climate change. According to the 2018 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, humanity has only 12 years left to prevent global warming from reaching levels that would result in the poverty of millions and the greatest displacement of people in the history of humanity as they flee extreme drought and floods. Such events also tend to involve violent conflict. The political community’s tepid response to climate change so far, with world leaders like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsanaro refusing to acknowledge global warming as real, let alone as urgent, makes it hard to be optimistic. Given the very real possibility that life will be much worse for the next generation as a result of the global instability, some, recent trend pieces report, are thinking twice about becoming parents.
One might argue that, like Benatar’s catalogue of human suffering, this response is overly pessimistic. Hardship is nothing new. Life can be meaningful despite it, and sometimes even because of it. Strife gives you something to work towards, purpose; it’s what gives life meaning, not what makes it meaningless.
But if climate change causes wars to break out, would one still choose to birth children into a high likelihood of violent death? And if the looming 12-year deadline is missed, and further temperature increases become statistically inevitable, what purpose could life have in the face of an unavoidable, collective downfall? At least people living today still have the agency to change things. But bringing children into a decaying world, without even the opportunity to do something about it, seems a cruel fate to inflict on someone, especially your own child...
After five failed attempts to escape ISIS slavery, this Yazidi woman tried one last time: The details in this story are so horrific they are hard to read, but thank you @leloveluck for telling her important story. https://t.co/Y67iaE9rVq pic.twitter.com/uPspM02LRF— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) February 25, 2019
AMUDA, Syria — The walk to freedom lasted 53 hours, and the little boy cried all the way. It wasn’t their first escape attempt — she’d tried five times before to flee the Islamic State — but they would be shot on the spot if the militants caught them now.More.
They passed corpses in the darkness, and when exhaustion overwhelmed them, they huddled together and slept on the dusty path. Faryal whispered reassurances to her 5-year-old son, telling him that his grandparents were waiting and that, after four years as prisoners of the Islamic State, they were finally going home. He wouldn’t believe her.
“He was terrified,” she said, recounting their escape this month. “I held his hand and we just kept walking.”
As members of Iraq’s Yazidi minority, a largely Kurdish-speaking religious group, the pair had escaped what the United Nations has called a genocide. Islamic State militants kidnapped thousands of Yazidis on a single day in August 2014, massacring the men and dumping them in mass graves, and forcing the women into sexual slavery.
During her captivity, Faryal said she had six different owners, at times being passed on when a fighter wanted a new sexual partner or simply to settle a debt. “Monsters who treated us like animals,” is how she described them.
The atrocities committed against the Yazidis had initially prompted the United States to launch airstrikes against the militants and begin a military campaign to roll back the Islamic State’s caliphate that now, four years later, could end within days. U.S.-backed forces have the last Islamic State holdouts surrounded in the eastern Syrian hamlet of Baghouz.
In photographs, taken by aid workers on the night of her escape, a male companion hides his face but Faryal looks straight out at the camera. Her hazel eyes are fixed in a quiet stare. Her son’s face is wet with tears, and he’s sobbing. “I can’t put into words how I was feeling at that moment,” she said. “All I could think was: ‘Please, take me away from here.’ ”
Faryal, 20, told her story last week in the northern Syrian town of Amuda after being transferred there by the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces that rescued them. Throughout the interview, she kept a watchful eye on Hoshyar, her son, pulling him close as he cried and then trying, without success, to make him laugh. Details of her account were corroborated by members of her family in northern Iraq and through a team of Yazidi activists that had communicated with her secretly for months before the escape in attempts to smuggle her to safety.
Young child brutalized
The day before Faryal’s life changed forever in 2014 had dawned like any other in the Iraqi village of Tel Banat. She puttered around the house looking after her infant son Hoshyar, she recalled. By midday, the sun was roasting, and although rumors had swirled for weeks that Islamic State forces were drawing closer, few in Tel Banat were aware of the coming storm.
The Islamist militants arrived at dusk.
“We couldn’t run fast enough,” Faryal remembered, describing how she and 10 members of her extended family had piled into a car and joined an epic exodus. Yazidi towns and villages around Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq emptied within hours as more than 100,000 people fled to higher ground. Faryal and her husband, Hashem, made it only a few miles before militants blocked their path.
Yazidis have long faced persecution from more powerful religious groups for their beliefs, in part because of a false but commonly-held impression that they worship the sun, or the devil. There are fewer than 1 million Yazidis worldwide, and according to the United Nations, the Islamic State had intended to entirely wipe out those within their reach.
Yazidi men and boys who had reached puberty were separated from the women and other children and often shot dead at roadsides. Women were bused to temporary holding sites and then sold to Islamic State fighters at slave markets.
Islamic State clerics had decided that having slaves was religiously sanctioned, institutionalizing sexual violence across their caliphate. Women have reported being tied to beds during daily assaults. They were sold from man to man. Gang rape was common.
Many women and girls committed suicide in the opening months of captivity, according to Yazidi rights groups. Others harmed themselves to appear less appealing to fighters who might consider buying them.
Faryal recalled that an Islamic State fighter who was Iraqi and called himself Abu Kattab was her worst abuser. Hoshyar was abused, too, Faryal said. Abu Kattab beat him so badly there were hand prints on his face. Another had forced the boy’s arm onto a hot plate.
“He was so small, but for some reason the fighters hated him,” Faryal said. “I could never explain to him why.”
As the boy sat beside his mother last week, his eyes moved slowly from side to side as if scanning the room for threats. His blond hair was cut in jagged chunks. He did not speak and he did not smile...
GREEN BOOK is the worst best picture Oscar winner in more than a decade. https://t.co/JpS2zTp2EJ— Justin Chang (@JustinCChang) February 25, 2019
“Green Book” is the worst best picture Oscar winner since “Crash,” and I don’t make the comparison lightly.More.
Like that 2005 movie, Peter Farrelly’s interracial buddy dramedy is insultingly glib and hucksterish, a self-satisfied crock masquerading as an olive branch. It reduces the long, barbaric and ongoing history of American racism to a problem, a formula, a dramatic equation that can be balanced and solved. “Green Book” is an embarrassment; the film industry’s unquestioning embrace of it is another.
The differences between the two movies are as telling as the similarities. “Crash,” a modern-day screamfest that racked up cross-cultural tensions by the minute, meant to leave you angry and wrung-out. Its Oscar triumph was a genuine shocker; it clearly had its fans, but for many its inferiority was self-evident.
“Green Book,” a slick crowd-pleaser set in the Deep South in 1962, strains to put you in a good mood. Its victory is appalling but far from shocking: From the moment it won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, the first of several key precursors it would pick up en route to Sunday’s Oscars ceremony, the movie was clearly a much more palatable brand of godawful.
In telling the story of the brilliant, erudite jazz pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), who is chauffeured on his Southern concert tour by a rough-edged Italian-American bouncer named Tony “Lip” Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen), “Green Book” serves up bald-faced clichés and stereotypes with a drollery that almost qualifies as disarming.
Mortensen and Ali, who won the Oscar for best supporting actor, are superb performers with smooth timing and undeniable chemistry. The movie wades into the muck and mire of white supremacy, cracks a few wince-worthy jokes, gasps in horror at a black man’s abuse and humiliation (all while maintaining a safe, tasteful distance from it), then digs up a nugget of uplift to send you home with, a little token of virtue to go with that smile on your face.
There is something about the anger and defensiveness provoked by this particular picture that makes reasonable disagreement unusually difficult.
I can tell I’ve already annoyed some of you, though if you take more offense at what I’ve written than you do at “Green Book,” there may not be much more to say. Differences in taste are nothing new, but there is something about the anger and defensiveness provoked by this particular picture that makes reasonable disagreement unusually difficult. Maybe “Green Book” really is the movie of the year after all — not the best movie, but the one that best captures the polarization that arises whenever the conversation shifts toward matters of race, privilege and the all-important question of who gets to tell whose story.
I’ll concede this much to “Green Book’s” admirers: They understandably love this movie’s sturdy craft, its feel-good storytelling and its charmingly synched lead performances. They appreciate its ostensibly hard-hitting portrait of the segregated South (as noted by U.S. Rep. John R. Lewis, who presented a montage to the film on Oscar night) and find its plea for mutual understanding both laudable and heartwarming. I know I speak for some of the movie’s detractors when I say I find that plea both dishonest and dispiritingly retrograde, a shopworn ideal of racial reconciliation propped up by a story that unfolds almost entirely from a white protagonist’s incurious perspective.
“Green Book” has been most often compared not to “Crash” but to an older, more genteel best picture winner, 1989’s “Driving Miss Daisy,” another movie that attempted to bridge the racial divide through the story of a driver and his employer in the American South. “Driving Miss Daisy” was adapted from Alfred Uhry’s play; “Green Book” was co-written by Nick Vallelonga (with Brian Currie and Farrelly), drawn from the stories he heard from his father, Tony. The truth of those stories has been called into question by many, including Shirley’s family, which wasn’t consulted during production and which dismissed the movie as “a symphony of lies.”
Historical accuracy is, of course, just one criterion by which to judge a narrative drawn from real events, and a movie could theoretically play fast and loose with the facts and still arrive at a place of compelling emotional truth. Distortions and omissions can be interesting in what they reveal about a filmmaker’s intentions, and “Green Book,” whether you like it or not, does not have a particularly high regard for your intelligence. In its one-sided presentation and its presumptuous filtering of Shirley’s perspective through Vallelonga’s, the movie reeks of bad faith and cluelessly embodies the white-supremacist attitudes it’s ostensibly decrying.
That cluelessness has been well-documented. Earlier this season, Vanity Fair critic K. Austin Collins pointed out the gall of a white filmmaker blithely psychoanalyzing a black man’s alienation from his own blackness (especially when it takes the form of jokes about Aretha Franklin and fried chicken). Vulture’s Mark Harris aptly described “Green Book” as “a but also movie, a both sides movie” that draws a false equivalency between Vallelonga’s vulgar bigotry and Shirley’s emotional aloofness, forcing both characters — not just the racist white dude — to learn something about themselves and each other.
It’s a tactic, Harris noted, whose echoes can even be found in a terrific older movie (and best picture winner) like “In the Heat of the Night,” and it exists mainly to reassure any audience that might be uncomfortable with a black man gaining the moral high ground.
You would hope that in 2019 — even in a 1962-set movie — such strategic pandering would be a thing of the past. But in “Green Book,” we should be especially nauseated by how crudely the deck is stacked against Don Shirley from the get-go. A more honest, complex and tough-minded movie might have run the risk of actually becoming Shirley’s story, of letting the much more interesting of these two characters slip into the metaphorical driver’s seat. (The fact that Ali was pushed as a supporting actor to Mortensen’s lead campaign is telling in all the wrong ways.) But there isn’t a single scene that feels authentically like the character’s own, that speaks to Shirley’s experience and no one else’s.
His intelligence and elegant diction is continually Otherized. (Vallelonga’s intellectual inferiority is mocked as well, but the picture’s sympathies couldn’t be more clearly on his side.) The movie makes little attempt to parse or appreciate his musical gifts critically; Shirley’s artistic brilliance, much like his alcoholism or his homosexuality, is deemed interesting only insofar as it changes Vallelonga’s opinion of him...
I haven’t watched a single best picture nominated film in theaters, and I only watched #Roma because it was on #Netflix — and I’m usually a huge film fanatic. 🤷♂️ #Oscars #AcademyAwards
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) February 24, 2019
Look you guys, it's simple. It was one of the worst years for movies in history.
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) February 25, 2019
Down Under
Men At Work
10:36pm
Highway Tune
Greta Van Fleet
10:33pm
Walk This Way
Run-D.M.C.
10:24pm
Surrender
Cheap Trick
10:20pm
Cherry Bomb
Runaways
10:18pm
Cherry Bomb
Weezer
10:14pm
Undone (The Sweater Song)
Weezer
10:14pm
Panama
Van Halen
10:10pm
I Melt With You
Modern English
10:06pm
Been Caught Stealing
Jane's Addiction
10:03pm
Life In The Fast Lane
Eagles
9:52pm
OMG, the storm system moving through California is so cold that there could be a dusting of snow in the Santa Monica Mountains and the Hollywood Hills: https://t.co/yk5bblc9aa— Laura J. Nelson 🦅 (@laura_nelson) February 21, 2019
Xavier Bias walked out of the Whole Foods Market in Pasadena and saw another woman looking to the ground puzzled at the white stuff covering the sidewalk.More.
The woman wasn’t sure exactly what she was looking at. But Bias, who is originally from the East Coast, quickly set her straight.
It was snow.
“People didn’t know what it was,” Bias said. “I was like, no, this is snow.”
It was that kind of day in some parts of Southern California, where snow dropped at extremely low elevation levels, creating a winter wonderland for a short while. Snow fell in Malibu, Pasadena, West Hollywood, Northridge, San Bernardino, Thousand Oaks and other unexpected places.
Snow level hit the 1,000-foot mark, bringing tiny bits of the white stuff into neighborhoods that had not seen snow in decades. But the show was fleeting, lasting in most cases a few minutes before the sun melted anything that had hit the ground.
By Thursday evening, the storms were moving east, with officials saying the snow elevation level had dropped to 800 feet in Orange County. Snow plows were clearing Ortega Highway between Lake Elsinore and San Juan Capistrano.
An unusually chilly storm system that originated in Alberta, Canada, was lingering over Nevada and had already blanketed Las Vegas with snow early Thursday. Before daybreak, snow was falling in parts of the Southland, dusting Palmdale and the Lucerne Valley. By the early afternoon, it was snowing across Southern California and winter weather had forced the closure of the 5 Freeway through the Grapevine.
“This is probably the coldest storm system I’ve seen in my time in California,” said David Sweet, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. “We’ve had cold mornings and freeze conditions, but I don’t remember seeing anything quite this cold.”
Forecasters predict that up to 6 inches of powder could fall in the eastern San Gabriel Mountains. Sweet said snow could fall in the Santa Monica Mountains and even some sections of the Hollywood Hills.
By around noon, the predictions were proving to be true.
“We’re seeing a little bit of everything out there,” said Eric Boldt, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
After seeing the confusion on social media and as residents began calling in to the weather service, Boldt took it upon himself to clear things up.
“Correct, that is snow! Lots of confusion today,” he posted on the National Weather Service’s Twitter account.
He explained that if the precipitation bounces off the ground, then it contains ice, which would make it hail or sleet. If it floats, it’s snow. In many areas, residents reported seeing small slushy balls, which Boldt said is graupel, snowflakes slightly melted and bunched together...
The U.S. Air Force Is Buying New F-15s After All: The F-15X will complement the F-22 and F-35 in tomorrow's aerial battlefields: #USAirForce #Boeing 🇺🇸👍 https://t.co/JbS1Rhl3Dv
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) February 21, 2019
David and Louise Turpin, a couple accused of torturing, starving and keeping their 13 children captive in their Perris home, have pleaded guilty to 14 felony counts, including one count of torture. https://t.co/ACMb80XF2P
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) February 22, 2019
The Turpin siblings were tortured and abused by their parents for years in ways so extreme, prosecutors said, it appeared to have caused malnutrition, cognitive impairment and nerve damage in some of them.
Since being freed last year from a Perris home, the 13 siblings have had to rebuild their lives.
All that time, they have also had to contend with the prospect of a trial — of being called to testify and having to relive, in front of their parents and the public, the horrific treatment they suffered, said Jack Osborn, an attorney who represents the adult children.
“The issue of their parents’ trial has always been weighing heavy with them,” Osborn said.
So the siblings were relieved to learn earlier this month that their parents, David and Louise Turpin, had each agreed to plead guilty to 14 felony charges, ending the prospect of a trial, Osborn said.
The Turpins entered those pleas Friday during a short hearing in Riverside County Superior Court. They are expected to be sentenced in April to 25 years to life in prison, Riverside County Dist. Atty. Mike Hestrin said.
The charges include one count of torture, four of false imprisonment, six of cruelty to adult dependents and three of willful child cruelty.
Hestrin told the siblings, now ages 3 to 30, about the plea agreement during a meeting this month at his Riverside offices.
“It was a very good day for them to be all together,” Hestrin said, recalling the meeting during a news conference Friday.
The story of the abuse the Turpin children suffered made headlines around the world and left their neighbors struggling to understand how the cruelty could have gone unnoticed for so long.
Prosecutors have said the couple subjected their children to abuse and neglect for years, dating back to when the family lived in Texas in the 1990s and continuing after they moved to California several years ago.
It was brought to an end by the brave act of their then-17-year-old daughter who, early one morning in January 2018, summoned the courage to climb out a window and call 911 to ask for help.
The girl told a dispatcher that her little sisters were chained up, that they would wake up crying at night, and that they wanted her to “call somebody and tell them.”
When deputies entered the Turpin home on Muir Woods Road, they discovered a nightmarish scene, including two young girls who had been chained to their bed for weeks.
The chains were punishment for stealing candy, investigators were later told.
Twelve of the 13 siblings were so frail and malnourished that deputies at first assumed they were all minors; they later learned that seven were adults. The youngest child, a toddler, appeared to have been spared the lack of food, prosecutors said.
Deputies arrested the couple, and shortly after, Riverside County prosecutors filed dozens of charges against them related to allegations of abuse, captivity and torture of the children. Additional charges of child abuse were later filed against both parents, along with a charge of felony assault against Louise Turpin and a perjury count against David Turpin.
In June, Riverside County Superior Court Judge Bernard Schwartz ordered the couple to stand trial after finding sufficient evidence to support 49 of 50 charges.
The Turpins initially pleaded not guilty to all charges last year.
Prosecutors had been gathering evidence and preparing for trial, but after continued conversations with the defense, Hestrin said the Turpins opted for a plea agreement.
“This is among the worst, most aggravated child abuse cases that I have ever seen or been involved in in my career as a prosecutor,” he said.
Hestrin said he had hoped to spare the children any further trauma that might come with a trial...
As Amy Klobuchar joins the 2020 U.S. presidential race, former aides say she was not just demanding but often dehumanizing, the steward of a work environment colored by volatility and distrust https://t.co/65VushRbKX
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 22, 2019
This reporting by @mattfleg and @melbournecoal is based on interviews with more than 2 dozen former Klobuchar staff members and internal emails https://t.co/65VushRbKX pic.twitter.com/uqty2kNLIo
— The New York Times (@nytimes) February 22, 2019
This is part of our coverage examining the leadership, judgment and professional conduct of candidates. We recently wrote about the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign and complaints by female and black staffers, Joe Biden’s paid speeches and Kamala Harris’s actions as a prosecutor.
— Patrick Healy (@patrickhealynyt) February 22, 2019
Of the 6 senators running, Klobuchar has the highest turnover rate in staff. We reached out to aides from over the years to talk about her as a boss. This follows other reporting about her policy views on Medicare for all and her decision to run as a heartland candidate.
— Patrick Healy (@patrickhealynyt) February 22, 2019
— Patrick Healy (@patrickhealynyt) February 22, 2019
— Patrick Healy (@patrickhealynyt) February 22, 2019
— Patrick Healy (@patrickhealynyt) February 22, 2019
