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Javier E

Suburban Disequilibrium - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • , rich and poor neighborhoods like these house a growing proportion of Americans, up to 31 percent compared with 15 percent in 1970, according to a recent study by Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff. Meanwhile, iconic middle-income suburbs are shrinking in numbers and prospects.
  • another truth about suburban places: their tendency to sustain and reinforce inequality. Bradbury and Azusa have maintained their spots in the top and bottom tiers of the Los Angeles suburbs for decades. The sociologist John Logan described this “stratifying” feature long ago, noting that localities held on to social advantages and disadvantages over time. Patterns are established, and successive waves of pressure — fiscal, political, social — tend to keep things moving in the same direction.
  • Some of this is obvious. High property values support high-achieving schools, which in turn increase property values and personal wealth. Racial redlining holds property values down, limiting investment in schools and preventing families from building equity, disadvantages that pass to the next generation like a negative inheritance. The point is not simply that rich and poor people live in different places through a kind of class sorting in the marketplace. The places themselves help to create wealth and poverty. Because of this power of places to fix inequity over time, current patterns are likely to outlive their residents.
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  • Globalization helps drive these patterns to new extremes. Money flows into suburbs like San Marino and Palos Verdes, where Asian immigrants buy up expensive properties and generously donate their time and money to the local schools. Money flows out of poorer suburbs like South Gate, Bell and Huntington Park, all heavily Latino, where disposable income is tight and many families export remittances to a home country. New poverty builds upon old impoverishment. Infrastructure is stretched as renters crowd into dwellings that were modest to begin with. The toxic footprint of departed industries is left behind for new residents to contend with.
  • Many of Los Angeles’s middling suburbs have also slipped, especially those ravaged by plant closures since the 1980s. The southern section of blue-collar suburbs was hit especially hard. Here, suburbia transformed from comfortable communities housing unionized workers with well-paying jobs in local factories that gave them access to a middle-class lifestyle to fiscally strained communities housing immigrants working in low-paying, nonunion jobs.
  • Outer suburbs have fared little better. As home costs skyrocketed in recent decades, families chased “affordable” housing to the exurbs. They took on outsize mortgages and monster commutes, and they took with them congested roads, smog and sprawl. Compounding these strains, tax revenues lagged behind the cost of schools, roads, parks and libraries — the very infrastructure necessary to sustain middle-class life. This edifice came crashing down in the recession.
  • Policies to redress suburban inequality must focus not only on factors like income but also on tax equity across metro areas and regional planning that fairly distributes resources and responsibilities (like affordable housing). We should limit the mortgage-interest deduction for second homes and for values above the regional median. These steps would reduce distortions that inflate housing prices and concentrate wealth in what are already wealthy places.
draneka

South Korean Protesters Ask Their President to Leave - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • demanding the ouster of President Park Geun-hye
  • This weekend’s crowd was estimated to be as large as 1.3 million protesters
  • Park now has the worst-ever polling figures for the country's presidency, and opposition groups are working to have her impeached
abbykleman

Iconic California Sequoia 'tunnel tree' destroyed in storm - 0 views

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    A massive sequoia tree that was carved into a tunnel in the 1800s toppled to the ground during a winter storm in California on Sunday, according to Calaveras Big Trees State Park officials. The Sequoia tree, which was also referred to as the Pioneer Cabin Tree, was almost 100 feet tall and 22 feet in diameter, the park said.
abbykleman

As Scandal Roils South Korea, Fingers Point to Mixing of Politics and Business - 0 views

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    The court has never before ousted a president, though seven of the last eight have left office tainted by allegations of corruption. Whatever the court decides, the Park scandal has already put recurring collusion between big business and government in South Korea under intense scrutiny and could reshape the nation's flawed, young democracy.
Javier E

How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”
  • concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
  • “they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”
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  • He calls these expansions of meaning “concept creep.”
  • critics may hold concept creep responsible for damaging cultural trends, he writes, “such as supposed cultures of fear, therapy, and victimhood, the shifts I present have some positive implications.”
  • How did a working-class mom get arrested, lose her fast food job, and temporarily lose custody of her 9-year-old for letting the child play alone at a nearby park?
  • The concept of abuse expanded too far.
  • Classically, psychological investigations recognized two forms of child abuse, physical and sexual, Haslam writes. In more recent decades, however, the concept of abuse has witnessed “horizontal creep” as new forms of abuse were recognized or studied. For example, “emotional abuse” was added as a new subtype of abuse. Neglect, traditionally a separate category, came to be seen as a type of abuse, too.
  • Meanwhile, the concept of abuse underwent “vertical creep.” That is, the behavior seen as qualifying for a given kind of abuse became steadily less extreme. Some now regard any spanking as physical abuse. Within psychology, “the boundary of neglect is indistinct,” Haslam writes. “As a consequence, the concept of neglect can become over-inclusive, identifying behavior as negligent that is substantially milder or more subtle than other forms of abuse. This is not to deny that some forms of neglect are profoundly damaging, merely to argue that the concept’s boundaries are sufficiently vague and elastic to encompass forms that are not severe.”
  • Concept creep is inevitable and vital if society is to make good use of new information. But why has the direction of concept creep, across so many different concepts, trended toward greater sensitivity to harm as opposed to lesser sensitivity?
  • Haslam endorses two theories
  • Before 9/11, the notion of torturing prisoners was verboten. After the Bush Administration’s torture was made public, popular debate focused on mythical “ticking time bomb” scenarios, in which a whole city would be obliterated but for torture. Now Donald Trump suggests that torture should be used more generally against terrorists. Torture is, as well, an instance in which people within the field of psychology pushed concept creep in the direction of less sensitivity to harm,
  • The other theory posits an ideological explanation. “Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed,” he writes “and its increased focus on negative phenomena—harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda.”
  • Jonathan Haidt, who believes it has gone too far, offers a fourth theory. “If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives,
  • there are many reasons to be concerned about excessive sensitivity to harm:
  • While Haslam and Haidt appear to have meaningfully different beliefs about why concept creep arose within academic psychology and spread throughout society, they were in sufficient agreement about its dangers to co-author a Guardian op-ed on the subject.
  • It focuses on how greater sensitivity to harm has affected college campuses.
  • “Of course young people need to be protected from some kinds of harm, but overprotection is harmful, too, for it causes fragility and hinders the development of resilience,” they wrote. “As Nasim Taleb pointed out in his book Antifragile, muscles need resistance to develop, bones need stress and shock to strengthen and the growing immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens in order to function. Similarly, he noted, children are by nature anti-fragile – they get stronger when they learn to recover from setbacks, failures and challenges to their cherished ideas.”
  • police officers fearing harm from dogs kill them by the hundreds or perhaps thousands every year in what the DOJ calls an epidemic.
  • After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration and many Americans grew increasingly sensitive to harms, real and imagined, from terrorism
  • Dick Cheney declared, “If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.” The invasion of Iraq was predicated, in part, on the idea that 9/11 “changed everything,”
  • One concerns the field of psychology and its incentives. “It could be argued that just as successful species increase their territory, invading and adapting to new habitats, successful concepts and disciplines also expand their range into new semantic niches,” he theorizes. “Concepts that successfully attract the attention of researchers and practitioners are more likely to be applied in new ways and new contexts than those that do not.”
  • Concept creep can be necessary or needless. It can align concepts more or less closely with underlying realities. It can change society for better or worse. Yet many who push for more sensitivy to harm seem unaware of how oversensitivty can do harm.
Javier E

With Uber, Less Reason to Own a Car - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • if Uber and its ride-sharing competitors succeed, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see many small and midsize cities become transportation nirvanas on the order of Manhattan — places where forgoing car ownership isn’t just an outré lifestyle choice, but the preferred way to live.
  • “In many cities and even suburbs, it’s becoming much easier to organize your life car-free or car-lite,” said David A. King, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University who studies technology and transportation. By car-lite, Dr. King means that instead of having one car for every driver, households can increasingly get by with owning just a single vehicle, thanks in part to tech-enabled services like Uber.
  • car-sharing services like Zipcar and bike-sharing services have already led to a significant net reduction of car ownership among users.
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  • though you may think of taxis as a competitor to subways and buses, several studies have found just the opposite.
  • The richest Americans do use taxis more often than middle-class Americans, but so do the poorest Americans, who rely heavily on taxis for trips that aren’t practical through public transportation — shopping trips that involve heavy parcels that wouldn’t be convenient to take on the bus, say, or a ride back home after a medical procedure.
  • Taxis and other car services are usually seen as the province of the rich, but that’s only partly true, studies show.
  • many taxi trips are “multimodal,” meaning that riders mix taxis with other forms of transportation. For instance, people from other boroughs might get to Manhattan by train, and then use cabs to return home late at night.
  • “The one-way travel of taxis allows people to use transit, share rides and otherwise travel without a car,” the researchers wrote. “In this way taxis act as a complement to these other modes and help discourage auto ownership and use.”
  • There’s only one problem with taxis: In most American cities, Dr. King found, there just aren’t enough of them. Taxi service is generally capped by regulation, and in many cities the number of taxis has not been increased substantially in decades
  • Ride-sharing services solve this problem in two ways. First, they substantially increase the supply of for-hire vehicles on the road, which puts downward pressure on prices. As critics say, Uber and other services do this by essentially evading regulations that cap taxis. This has led to intense skirmishes with regulators
  • But Uber has done more than increase the supply of cars in the taxi market. Thanks to technology, it has also improved their utility and efficiency. By monitoring ridership, Uber can smartly allocate cars in places of high demand, and by connecting with users’ phones, it has automated the paying process. When you’re done with an Uber ride, you just leave the car; there’s no fiddling with a credit card and no tipping. Even better, there’s no parking.
  • Compared with that kind of convenience, a car that you own — which you have to park, fill up, fix, insure, clean and pay for whether you use it or not — begins to seem like kind of a drag.
Emilio Ergueta

Turkish president's feud with press is rooted in a deeper, personal unease | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • Recep Tayyip Erdogan fears he may have misread electorate’s mood as polls show strong support for opposition parties
  • President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s long-running feud with Turkey’s feisty opposition media has descended into open warfare ahead of Sunday’s general election, amid claims that his ruling neo-Islamist Justice and Development party (AKP) is plotting to fix the results and shrill threats to lock up journalists and editors en masse.
  • But Erdogan’s livid fury with the press may be rooted in a deeper, personal unease
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  • Accustomed to winning easily, Erdogan has been thrown off-balance by opponents empowered by concerns over a slowing economy, unemployment, high-level corruption, the unresolved Kurdish question, and officialdom’s zero tolerance for dissent, as seen in the brutal suppression of the 2013 Gezi park street protests.
  • “If Erdogan cannot rig the elections, it seems the AKP will not be able to form a one-party government. This would mean the end of Erdogan’s sultanistic aspirations,” said Ihsan Yilmaz in a column headlined “Erdogan’s Jihad”.
  • “In a nutshell, it has turned out to be a simple choice between giving approval or not for all Erdogan now stands for: introducing to Turkey an arbitrary rule, disrespect for human dignity, rejection of supremacy of the rule of law, eradication of rights and freedoms, unaccountability and impunity, and construction of a new system in which there will be no separation of powers.”
julia rhodes

South Korea Proposes Resuming Reunions of War-Divided Families - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • South Korea’s president proposed Monday that the two Koreas improve their tense relations by resuming the reunions of families separated since the Korean War, a humanitarian program that seemed close to being renewed last year but was scuttled as negotiations soured.
  • President Park Geun-hye’s overture came five days after the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, urged that Seoul and Pyongyang create “a favorable climate for improved relations” in a New Year’s Day speech.
  • Ms. Park, a conservative, made two other conciliatory gestures toward the North, offering to increase humanitarian aid to the impoverished country and to let South Korean civic groups provide assistance to its farmers and ranchers. But she expressed skepticism about the prospect of meeting with Mr. Kim, whose government has until recently exhorted South Koreans to overthrow her “fascist dictatorship.”
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  • She also said it had become “impossible” to predict “what will happen to the North and what actions it will take” since the purge and execution last month of Mr. Kim’s uncle, Jang Song-thaek, who was long considered Mr. Kim’s mentor and the second-highest-ranking figure in his secretive government.
  • South Korea halted the flow of aid and investment to the North in 2008, demanding that Pyongyang give up its nuclear weapons. It also curtailed inter-Korean trade following the sinking of a South Korean naval ship in 2010, which Seoul says was caused by a North Korean torpedo attack.
  • After months of harsh rhetoric following the North’s nuclear test last February, North and South Korea reached an agreement last August to revive the reunions. But the North later ended the talks, blaming the South for refusing to resume an inter-Korean tourism program at the North’s Diamond Mountain resort, which had been highly lucrative for Pyongyang until it was shut down in 2008.
  • The Korean War, which began in 1950, was fought to a stalemate and an ultimate cease-fire in 1953. Since then, no exchanges of letters, telephone calls or emails have been allowed between North and South Koreans, and family reunions remain a highly emotional issue and an indicator of the state of relations on the peninsula.
  • Mr. Kim made similarly conciliatory comments toward the South during his New Year’s Day speech in 2013, but they were followed by a series of provocative acts, including its February nuclear test. Just last month, Pyongyang sent a letter to Ms. Park’s office threatening “strikes without warning.”
Javier E

A Fast and Furious 'Macbeth' at Park Avenue Armory - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The actual playing area is modeled after the 19th-century deconsecrated church in Manchester, England, where I first saw this “Macbeth” (as part of the Manchester International Festival) last summer. Once again, there is a central aisle between tiers of benches that turn the audience into a cross between guilty churchgoers and prurient spectators at a bullfight. And once again, there is a chancel at one end, with an altar ablaze with devotional candles
  • But Mr. Oram has scaled up his original designs and, free of the constraints of working in an existing church, has shifted the emphasis from the ecclesiastic to the chthonic. Theatergoers herded into the Armory’s main hall (and herded they are, having been divided into seating groups with names of Scottish clans) walk a stone path toward an ominous, Stonehenge-like structure.
  • The production begins in medias res: a full-throttle battle fought in the aisle between the seating areas. The floor is dark dirt, soon to be moistened by rain and blood. And throughout the show, people will grab handfuls of it, flinging it in wide arcs, as if to further besmirch the always crepuscular skies.
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  • Seeing clearly, of course, isn’t easy in a world of endless night. And Mr. Austin’s lighting summons shadows pregnant with menace — all the characters keep looking over their shoulders to make sure they’re alone — and with dreams that take on flesh. Mr. Ashford uses his experience as a celebrated director of musicals to stunning, time-bending effect here, in sequences that include a funeral that turns into a coronation and a mesmerizing procession of royal apparitions.
Javier E

How Uber Is Changing Night Life in Los Angeles - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • “It became very clear to me that I could use Uber and have the kind of life I wanted,” he said. “I feel like I found a way to take the best parts of my New York lifestyle, and incorporate them in L.A.”
  • Mr. O’Connell is part of a growing contingent of urbanites who have made Ubering (it’s as much a verb as “Googling”) an indispensable part of their day and especially their night life. Untethered from their vehicles, Angelenos are suddenly free to drink, party and walk places.
  • Taxis here were often unreliable, he added, but ride shares are always just a swipe away.
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  • “Before Uber was a thing, I would rarely go to Hollywood,” said Drew Heitzler, an artist who lives in Venice, a potentially treacherous drive away. “The prospect of going to Hollywood on a weekend night, if I was invited to a party or an art event, it just wouldn’t happen. I would just stay home.”
  • If you’re going to go to a party, you either don’t drink or you Uber there and Uber back, and problem solved.”
  • “There’s a lot of New Yorkers here, and they’re saying it’s almost like New York.”
  • Once, only the privileged few, the studio bosses and pampered starlets, could afford to have a chauffeur and a waiting car to transport them around sprawling Los Angeles. Now anyone with a credit card can enjoy that freedom.
  • A night out in Los Angeles used to involve negotiating parking, beating traffic and picking a designated driver. Excursions from one end to the other — say, from the oceanfront city of Santa Monica to the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood on the eastern side — had to be planned and timed with military precision, lest they spiral into a three-hour commute. More often than not, they were simply avoided.
  • That is especially true of downtown Los Angeles, which is enjoying the double whammy of a recent cultural resurgence — partly bolstered by the Ace, which opened its hotel and performance space in a historic 1920s movie palace in January — and the car services that deliver once-reluctant visitors. Along with Santa Monica and West Hollywood, it is the area with the highest ridership, according to an Uber representative, though the company refused to release specific figures.
  • “Uber and Lyft have made it much more affordable, and encouraged people to venture out of their neighborhoods, and to explore.”
  • Grand Central Market, a food hall from 1917, has lately turned Smorgasburg-y; on weekends, preppily dressed crowds wait patiently for sandwiches from Eggslut. Outside, the street is blocked off for pedestrians, with cafe tables and umbrellas, and nearby is a linger-worthy bookstore and a retro barbershop with shuffleboard. Along Broadway, between discount stores and pupusa stands, are boutiques like OAK NYC and Acne Studios, the Swedish fashion label that opened a giant store there this fall.
  • “I find myself going down there a lot and taking friends that are coming to visit, because there’s so much cool stuff to do,” s
  • Ride sharing, some analysts say, has become a viable alternative to owning a car: between the cost of gas, insurance, garages and valet tips, it’s often more economical to get a lift in a professional’s Toyota than to drive solo in your own, and that’s without factoring in the mental cost of sitting in gridlock on Interstate 405.
  • A short ride through downtown in UberX, the company’s lower-priced service, introduced here last spring, can cost as little as $4, while parking lots charge $5 for 15 minutes.
  • In a nod to the city’s continued obsession with the status ride, the company recently implemented, in Los Angeles and Orange County only, UberPlus, with a fleet of BMWs and other luxury vehicles. Even with ride shares, what you pull up in matters.
jlessner

Jihadism Born in a Paris Park and Fueled in the Prison Yard - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The group of young Muslim men, some still teenagers, became known to the French authorities as the Buttes-Chaumont group after the police in 2005 broke up their pipeline for sending young French Muslims from their immigrant neighborhood to fight against American troops in Iraq. The arrests seemingly shattered the group, and some officials and experts were skeptical that members ever posed a threat to France.
  • But the shocking terror attacks last week in Paris have now made plain that the Buttes-Chaumont network produced some of Europe’s most militant jihadists, including Chérif Kouachi, one of the three terrorists whose three-day rampage left 17 people dead and who was killed by the police.
  • “They were considered the least dangerous,” Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East studies and specialist on French Islamic terror cells, said of the Buttes-Chaumont group. “And now you see them really at the forefront.”
gaglianoj

BBC News - Rifle from 1882 found leaning on tree in Nevada park - 0 views

  • It is unclear exactly how long the Winchester rifle had been left there, but it was long enough to leave the stock cracked and buried in dirt.
  • "But it probably is a story that could have happened to almost anyone living this sort of extraordinary existence out here in the Great Basin Desert".
  • The gun will be preserved in its current state and put on display at the park.
qkirkpatrick

24 SHOTS FIRED INTO BRONX CHURCH - Police Are Baffied but Think It May Have Been Done by Fascisti Sympathizers. BULLETS HIT THE ORGAN Damage Slight at Italian Edifice-- Patrolman Thought Shots Were Part of New Year Revel. - Article - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 24 SHOTS FIRED INTO BRONX CHURCH; Police Are Baffied but Think It May Have Been Done by Fascisti Sympathizers.
  • he firing of twenty-four shots through a window in the inside of the Bedford Park Italian Prerbyterian Church at 204th Street and Villa Avenue, the Bronx, early yesterday morning puzzled the police of the Bronx Park Station, who searched houses in the vicinity yesterday in an effort to obtain a clue.
  •  
    fascism comes to US. Headline from 1928.
maddieireland334

After Nuclear Test, China Resists Pressure to Curb North Korea - The New York Times - 0 views

  • But President Xi Jinping, in a private meeting with President Obama at Constantine Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia, warned against putting too much pressure on Kim Jong-un, the North’s young, volcanic leader.
  • Since coming to power in 2012, Mr. Xi has pushed the limits of Chinese foreign policy, challenging America’s influence in the Pacific and using China’s financial heft to win allies across the globe
  • After North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test last week, world leaders escalated pressure on Mr. Xi, whom many see as the best hope of reining in Mr. Kim. South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye, who has cultivated closer ties to Mr. Xi, called on China this week to match its disapproving words about the North’s nuclear ambitions with “necessary measures.”
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  • “If North Korea becomes an enemy state, it would have plenty of ways to harm China,” said Shi Yinhong, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing. “Beijing cannot afford to have North Korea become permanently hostile.”
  • Adding to the complications, Mr. Xi, 62, and Mr. Kim, believed to be 33, have a fraught relationship, say American, Chinese, and South Korean officials.
  • While the two leaders hail from revolutionary families, they have little else in common. Mr. Xi’s formative years were dominated by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Kim attended a Swiss boarding school and inherited the title of supreme leader before turning 30.
  • Mr. Xi has long recognized China’s sense of camaraderie with the North, which dates to their Korean War alliance in the 1950s. (Mao called the relationship “as close as lips and teeth.”)
  • But the two countries have followed starkly divergent paths. While China is now a sophisticated economy and a rising power, North Korea has become increasingly isolated, enfeebled and erratic, depending on China for most of its food and energy.
  • “The nuclear test will seriously damage the bilateral relationship,” Mr. Yang said. “Xi Jinping has been forced to be more assertive.”
  • While his predecessors welcomed North Korean leaders with the fanfare of Politburo meetings, Mr. Xi has kept a distance.
  • In an unusually public rebuke, Mr. Xi warned that no country should be able to throw the world into chaos for “selfish gain.” Later that year, he imposed sanctions, limiting shipments of materials used in weapons and cutting ties to some North Korean banks, though enforcement was lax.
  • Mr. Xi has made clear to the North that its future lies in economic reform, not military development, and that China will not accept a nuclear state, current and former Chinese and American officials said.
  • In a sign of his displeasure, Mr. Xi has cultivated better relations with Ms. Park, the South Korean president, traveling to Seoul for a state visit in 2014.
  • Jon M. Huntsman Jr., who served as the American ambassador to China from 2009 to 2011, said there was a generational divide among Chinese officials about how to deal with North Korea. “The older apparatchiks would defend the North Korean line,” he said. “The younger ones wanted this issue to go away. There’s no emotional connection, there’s no war being waged.”
  • In recent months, Mr. Xi extended several olive branches to Mr. Kim, concerned that the relationship had deteriorated to the point that Mr. Kim might lash out again, American and Chinese diplomats said.
  • At the parade in October, Mr. Kim stood next to Mr. Xi’s envoy, smiling and waving. He spoke of a “blood-tied friendship” and said that “bilateral ties are more than neighborliness,” according to coverage in the North Korean news media.
Javier E

A Closed Brooklyn Bridge and 40,000 Pounds of Deli Meat: New York Is That Crowded - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Just how crowded is New York City in the run-up to the ball drop?So crowded that 40,000 pounds of pastrami and beef were served in a week at Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side, where 3,000 to 4,000 visitors flocked each day, standing in lines that stretched three-plus blocks, the owner said.So crowded that skaters waited more than an hour to glide in Bryant Park.So crowded that a brief but unusual shutdown of the pedestrian and bike lanes across the Brooklyn Bridge was necessary on Saturday afternoon, after the police were called because of the dangerously large crowd.
  • Ms. Barge, 59, was hoping to bike over the span, something she did often when she lived in Park Slope. But, on Sunday, she was relegated to walking her bike, zigzagging around the crowds. Riding would have been a near-Herculean task with thousands of people filling both the pedestrian and the bike lanes.
anonymous

Chile creates law to protect its ocean habitat - BBC News - 0 views

  • Chile has created a new law protecting the waters along its 6,400km (4,000 mile) coastline.
  • The new legislation will increase the area of sea under Chilean state protection from 4.3% to 42.4 %, and protect marine life in around 1.4 million square kilometres of sea.
  • In September last year, Chile opened a huge marine park around Easter Island, which is home to species only found there.
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  • During her administration, Mrs Bachelet also signed a deal to create the largest network of natural parks in South America, in Patagonia, after a large private land donation
knudsenlu

Vann R. Newkirk II: How to Kill a Revolution - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • oe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.
  • After the Voting Rights Act was passed, in 1965, the revolution’s center of gravity shifted north, along with the stragglers of the Great Migration—toward de facto as opposed to de jure racism. Baldwin’s frequent premonitions of unrest in the streets began to come true. In his 1966 essay, “A Report From Occupied Territory,” he discussed the “powder keg” of poverty, joblessness, and discrimination in urban ghettos and warned that it “may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.” King, by then, had sensed the same trouble brewing in the slums as Baldwin had. In his 1966 campaign against segregated housing in Chicago, which moved his strategy of nonviolent protest from the South to the North, he tried to wield his activism machine against the social and economic troubles that Baldwin described. He was repaid with violent counterprotests.
  • King spoke of a “white backlash”—a term he helped popularize—to his movement. But in retrospect, the strength of the reaction he predicted and endured often receives short shrift. The support of white moderates who recoiled at images of Negro children sprayed by hoses and attacked by dogs was instrumental in passing laws that ended legal segregation and protected voting rights.
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  • As moderates abandoned him, King also faced a resurgence of the more virulent elements of white supremacy. The Klan firebombed the Forrest County, Mississippi, NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer to death in January 1966, and Klan night riders were suspected in the murder of the activist Clarence Triggs in Bogalusa, Louisiana, later that year.
  • The Kerner Commission, established by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration to investigate the causes of the 1967 unrest, said plainly that racism was a major factor. Its 1968 report, authored by the commissioners, who were firmly rooted in mainstream racial politics, concluded, “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” But Gallup polls showed that a majority of Americans disbelieved that conclusion, and Johnson largely ignored the report in future policy making. The false tale of victory had sprung to life. White backlash and Johnson’s rift with civil-rights leaders who wanted to push further than he did slowed the White House’s efforts
  • y 1968, King had emerged from a series of trials with an understanding of the full breadth of white supremacy, and with no small despair at its depth. As he embarked on his Poor People’s Campaign, he braved dwindling funds, a loss of public support, and mounting desperation among the people on the margins of America. It became clear that King embodied the final seal of the eschaton—the urban apocalypse—that Baldwin had warned about.
  • In the immediate aftermath of King’s death, the intensity of the cataclysm became clear to all of black America. Three days after King’s murder, even as the fires across the country raged, Baldwin and King’s friend Nina Simone took to the stage at the Westbury Music Fair, on Long Island. The show had been scheduled long before, but now it had new meaning.
  • Even the ascendant Black Power movement, however, couldn’t withstand the might of the American status quo. In 1969, Chicago police and the FBI killed the Black Panther Party’s deputy chairman, Fred Hampton, dealing another blow to hopes for a visionary leader. The FBI’s continuing program of disruption, along with increasingly hostile public opinion among whites and the rise of “law and order” politics, had effectively destabilized the Black Power movement as a legitimate change-making force by 1970. Ever since, black activists have often been marginalized and widely discredited.
  • But Reagan did not mention the remarks he had made as the governor of California on the day of King’s funeral, when he had spoken of “a great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they’d break”—in effect, blaming King’s own campaign of civil disobedience for his assassination. Nor did Reagan mention that a majority of whites had felt the same way and that many of them had hated King. No mention, either, of the last three years of King’s life, other than his death.
  • How much has changed in the 40 years since that retrospective? Have politicians improved? If King were alive today, would he bask in the glow of achievement, or would he gird himself again to march?I pondered those questions on that January morning in Washington. Just a few days later, the manicured National Mall would be trampled by onlookers who’d come to see American democracy’s quadrennial spectacle, this time for a man who’d been endorsed by the Klan. And I considered one last question: Is this what victory looks like?
knudsenlu

Who Was Recy Taylor? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Recy Taylor died 10 days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up.
  • If we know that enslaved women were used for their productive and reproductive labor—if they were raped with impunity in the system of slavery—then what happened after Emancipation? Did those practices and the institutions that upheld those practices—the men and their sons and their cousins—end those practices just because of Emancipation?
  • So I started looking for cases, which were hard to find because marginalized people are hard to find in the archives. Their stories are not remembered, they’re not saved, and they’re not considered worthy of being archived so often. Those stories were hard to find, but the black press actually printed a lot of black women’s testimonies about sexual violence at the time.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Newkirk: Having met and spent time with her, what’s your sense of how Recy Taylor fought all this, and how she processed what happened to her? Did she see herself as an activist?McGuire: No. She was not an activist. After she was assaulted, she immediately told what happened. She told her father, her husband, the sheriff, and then she went home. And then the family was terrorized, and her house was firebombed.
  • If someone threatens to kill you in Alabama in 1944, that’s real. There’s no consequences for that. The threat is very real. Her speaking out was just incredibly brave. And when I asked her in 2009 why she spoke out—why did she say anything, wasn’t she scared?—and she looked me right in the eye and said ‘I just didn’t think that I deserved what they did to me.’ I just thought that she had an incredible sense of self-worth and dignity.
  • I was raised to believe, like too many people are today, that Rosa Parks was a tired old lady who tiptoed into history. Because she had an ‘emotional response’ to her exhaustion and it changed the world. But, in 1998 I was working on my master’s thesis, and I listened to an NPR story about Montgomery Bus Boycott veterans. The editor of The Montgomery Advertiser, Joe Azbell, was talking about the boycott and he said that Gertrude Perkins had never been mentioned in history, but she was the most important in the boycott. It took my breath away, and I didn’t know who that was.So I went looking in microfilm for the newspaper, and I found her story. She was a black woman who was kidnapped by the police in Montgomery and raped.
millerco

Time to Say It: Trump Is a Racist - The New York Times - 0 views

  • When it comes to President Trump and race, there is a predictable cycle. He makes a remark that seems racist, and people engage in an extended debate about whether he is personally racist. His critics say he is. His defenders argue for an interpretation in which race plays a secondary role
  • Donald Trump treats black people and Latinos differently than he treats white people.
  • that makes him a racist
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  • the definition of a racist — the textbook definition, as Paul Ryan might say — is someone who treats some people better than others because of their race. Trump fits that definition many times over:
  • Trump’s real-estate company was sued twice by the federal government in the 1970s for discouraging the renting of apartments to African-Americans and preferring white tenants, such as “Jews and executives.”
  • In 1989, Trump took out ads in New York newspapers urging the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a white woman in Central Park; he continued to argue that they were guilty as late as October 2016, more than 10 years after DNA evidence had exonerated them.
  • He spent years claiming that the nation’s first black president was born not in the United States but in Africa, an outright lie that Trump still has not acknowledged as such.
  • He began his 2016 presidential campaign by disparaging Mexican immigrants as criminals and “rapists.”
  • He has retweeted white nationalists without apology.
  • He frequently criticizes prominent African-Americans for being unpatriotic, ungrateful and disrespectful.
  • He called some of those who marched alongside white supremacists in Charlottesville last August “very fine people.”
runlai_jiang

In Sports Cars and Roller Coasters, Europe Zooms Ahead - WSJ - 0 views

  • A company in Liechtenstein built the world’s fastest roller coaster, part of a niche industry combining innovation with no economies of scale
  • ABU DHABI—The world’s fastest roller coaster, which can reach 149 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds, is at an amusement park called—what else?—Ferrari World, in Abu Dhabi.
  • The tiny alpine principality, sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria, is one of a handful of European countries that dominate the niche business of producing roller coasters.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • there are no scale economies,” said Claus Frimand, a Danish amusement-park expert at attractions consultants MR ProFun Management Group.
  • designing coasters “is a European tradition,
  • Europe has remained prosperous after years of financial crises and unemployment in part because of its dominance in any number of small but profitable businesses like roller coasters, which combine highly specialized engineering skills with a centuries-old tradition of innovation.
  • He noted that European coaster makers tap the same pool of engineers known for their “obsession with detail and precision” as German car makers.
  • Of the world’s 20 leading countries for engineering skills, 15 are in Europe, according to a study by London-based analysts at the Centre for Economic and Business Research.
  • Where we have a compelling advantage in Europe is cutting-edge stuff coming from companies you haven’t heard of,
  • global competition and shifting trends in Europe mean the advantage is “fragile,” he said.
  • Schwarzkopf and its main U.S. rival, Arrow Dynamics, chased orders and cut prices in heated pursuit of business that ultimately landed both in bankruptcy, industry veterans say. T
  • Such high-margin exports support thousands of production and design firms that demand large numbers of skilled employees and pay wages that manufacturers in few parts of the world can afford.
  • On a computer, you can simulate anything, but when it comes to production, it’s a question of how precisely you can bend the track,”
  • even though all outsource track fabrication to specialized metalworks. “You can come up with a nice design but if it has a rough ride, nobody will want to ride it,” he said.
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