BURMA/MYANMAR

SPIRIT ANIMAL
Myanmar’s junta trumpets white elephant as sign of right to rule

The white elephant was born in Myanmar's Rakhine state in 2022, and its birth is being portrayed as fortuitous by the junta. 

PHOTO: AFP
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NAYPYITAW - Though it is a pariah on the world stage and battling fierce domestic opposition to its rule, Myanmar’s junta has found grounds for optimism – the birth of a rare albino elephant.

Since seizing power, the junta has crushed democracy protests, jailed ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi and been accused of committing war crimes in its bid to quell dissent.

But the birth of the elephant – more milky-grey than white – in western Rahkine state last year is being portrayed by junta-controlled media as fortuitous.


Ancient rulers regarded white elephants as extremely auspicious, and their appearance was taken as a symbol of righteous political power.

The pale pachyderm will feature on a special postage stamp released this week to mark the 75th anniversary of Myanmar’s independence from Britain, state media said on Tuesday.

A set of gold commemorative coins bearing the animal’s image is also already being cast for the occasion, another report said.

The tusker tot’s highest-profile engagement so far was a meeting with junta chief Min Aung Hlaing in October, when the senior general bestowed it a name at a televised ceremony.

“Rattha Nandaka” comes from the ancient Pali words for “country” and “happiness”.

To bolster the credentials of its newfound good omen, state media has insisted the beast has an almost impeccable pedigree.

According to the experts quoted, it possesses seven of the eight standard characteristics for an albino elephant, including “pearl-coloured eyes” and a “plantain branch-shaped back”.

The Powers of Nature

In Myanmar, where astrological charts are drawn at birth and fortune-tellers consulted for both daily and political decisions – the craze for white elephants goes back hundreds of years.

Traditional chronicles tell of kings in Thailand, Laos and Myanmar – then known as Burma – warring to capture the beasts from rivals.

The ruinous cost of keeping them in appropriately lavish style gave rise to the modern expression in which a “white elephant” is a useless, if beautiful, possession.

One creature inherited by a 19th century Burmese king was waited on by thirty servants and dressed in a “fine red cloth plentifully studded” with rubies and diamonds, according to a visiting British official.

The king, who had usurped his brother, “would gladly hail the capture of a real white elephant in his own day as an assent from the Powers of Nature to his own legitimate royalty,” the envoy added.

But the fortunes of the creatures are tied up with the ruler under whom they were captured.

Two elephants, once feted by a former junta, are now confined to a damp, out-of-the-way compound in commercial hub Yangon where they receive few visitors.

“Rattha Nandaka” will spend its days in a special compound for white elephants in military-built capital NaypyiTaw.

But with swathes of the country still ravaged by fighting and the junta widely reviled, his birth has been met with public scepticism and scorn.

“It seems like they forgot to put suncream on,” one social media user wrote about the baby elephant’s more grey than albino appearance.

“Now it’s black.”

Black or white, another wrote, the baby was “now a prisoner”. AFP

Junta’s biggest threat at bay amid widespread domestic resistance to its rule.

Suu Kyi is being held in a jail in Naypyitaw in solitary confinement, and the military insists she has received due process in an independent court.

Authorities typically release some prisoners to mark the day when Myanmar declared independence from British rule. However, it was not immediately clear if the military would free any political detainees this time.

The United States, the European Union and countries such as Britain and Canada have imposed sanctions on Myanmar’s military and individuals deemed to have helped the junta come to power.

In a further rebuke, the U.N. Security Council last month adopted its first resolution on Myanmar in 74 years, demanding an end to violence and for the junta to free all political detainees.

Referring to international pressure, Min Aung Hlaing hit out at what he said were “disruptions from countries and organizations who want to intervene in Myanmar’s internal affairs.”

Still, the junta has maintained some international support. The U.N. Security Council remains split over how to deal with the Myanmar crisis, with China and Russia arguing against strong action. They also both abstained from last month’s vote on the resolution, along with India.

Thailand also hosted regional talks last month to discuss the crisis, including rare international appearances by junta ministers, even as several key members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, vocal in their criticism of the junta, did not attend.

ASEAN is leading diplomatic peace efforts and Myanmar’s generals have been barred from the bloc’s high-profile gatherings for failing to honor promises to start talks with opponents linked to Suu Kyi’s ousted government.

 

Myanmar’s junta pardons more than 7,000 prisoners

The Independence Day amnesty includes a former National League for Democracy minister, authors and journalists.

By RFA Burmese
2023.01.04

Family members greet prisoners being released from Insein Prison, Yangon on Jan. 4, 2023 RFA

Myanmar’s military rulers ordered the release of 7,012 inmates, including some political prisoners, in an Independence Day amnesty Wednesday.

Detainees held in prisons and police stations across the country had their sentences reduced in accordance with Section 401 of the Penal Code, according to junta news releases received by RFA.

Wednesday marks the 75th anniversary of the end of British colonial rule.

Lawyers, who wished to remain anonymous, told RFA some political prisoners had already returned to their homes early Wednesday, while families of others were still waiting outside prisons.

Minister of Religious Affairs under the National League for Democracy-led government, Thura Aung Ko, was released from Yangon’s Insein Prison Tuesday night. He had been serving a 12-year sentence for alleged corruption. Police officers and soldiers took him to his home in Yangon, his daughter wrote on her Facebook page.

The National League for Democracy won a landslide victory in 2020 elections but the NLD-led government was overthrown in a February, 2021 coup. The junta has arrested many party members along with the country’s ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who was sentenced to a total of 33 years in prison, and President Win Myint who faces 12 years behind bars.

There was no indication that Suu Kyi or Win Myint were included in the amnesty.

Author Than Myint Aung shortly after her release from Insein Prison, 

Yangon on Jan. 4, 2023. Credit: RFA

Writers freed

Among those released from Yangon’s Insein prison were authors Than Myint Aung and Htin Lin Oo, a Yangon lawyer, who didn’t want to be named for safety reasons, told RFA.

Than Myint Aung is a well-known fiction writer who also worked for many charities in Myanmar. She had been serving a three-year sentence for alleged incitement. Htin Lin Oo was also sentenced to three years in prison for sedition.

Poet Myo Tay Zar Maung, who had been sentenced to two years for sedition, was freed from Yamethin Prison north of Naypyidaw Wednesday.

Journalists Kyaw Zeya and Ah Hla Lay Thu Zar were also among those set to be freed as was Naing Ngan Lin, the social affairs minister for Yangon region under the NLD-led government.

In spite of the Independence Day amnesty, and one on National Day last November, the junta continues to target opposition politicians and real or alleged pro-democracy activists. More than 16,800 have arrested since the coup, according to Thailand-based monitoring group, the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma). Ahead of Wednesday’s amnesty, it said 13,375 political prisoners were still being held.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Written in English by Mike Firn.

San Antonio-area militia spins COVID conspiracy after collapse of Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin

This Is Texas Freedom Force, the extremist group spreading the claim, is the same one that recently staged an armed demonstration against a San Antonio drag show.

By Michael Karlis on Tue, Jan 3, 2023

Instagram / d.ham3

Buffalo Bill's safety Damar Hamlin, 24, (pictured above) collapsed on the field Monday night after making a tackle against Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins.A San Antonio-area militia group known for protesting drag shows and stirring up trouble at BLM demonstrations wasted no time spinning COVID-19 vaccine conspiracies about Monday's collapse of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin.

Less than an hour after Hamlin, 24, suffered cardiac arrest during the Bills game, This Is Texas Freedom Force (TITFF) posted an online poll suggesting that Hamlin's health issue — which the far-right group incorrectly diagnosed as fatal — was related to the COVID-19 vaccine.

"What are the odds the Covid vaccine played a role in the death of the Buffalo Bills player on the field?" TITFF posed in its tweet.

TITFF later corrected its original Tweet, following reports confirming that Hamlin hadn't died. However, as of Tuesday afternoon, the athlete remains in critical condition.

Twitter users blasted TITFF, saying the timing of its poll was inappropriate.

"It's despicable that you would post such a poll at this time," user @DonaldBRouseJr commented on the poll. "You might consider looking up the definition of "class" as you guys have none."

"This is a disgusting poll." You should be ashamed of yourself," user @OGBillyBaroo chimed in.

If TITFF's acronym sounds familiar, it may be because this is the same group that made headlines last month by staging an armed protest in front of a drag show at San Antonio's Aztec Theatre. The group claimed without proof that drag performances "groom" children so they can be more easily targeted by sexual predators.

The militia's tweet about the Bills player's collapse is likely alluding to conspiracy theories that falsely claim COVID-19 vaccines are causing people to drop dead. The allegation was circulated in Died Suddenly, a fringe "documentary" that's been debunked by academics and physicians.

It's still unclear what led to Hamlin's sudden heart attack. However, physicians including Dr. Brian Stutterer, a sports medicine expert at the Mayo Clinic, suspect a tackle during the game might have triggered a rare phenomenon known as Commotio Cordis.

"Essentially what can happen is if you have a blunt trauma to the chest that occurs at exactly the right time in the cardiac electrical cycle, your heart can be sent into cardiac arrest," Stutterer said in a now-viral Youtube video.

Commotio Cordis is often associated with baseball and can happen when a player is struck in the chest by a pitch, the physician explained.

While rare, the phenomenon has occurred before in professional sports. During a Stanley Cup Playoff game in 1998, St. Louis Blues defenseman Chris Pronger collapsed after being hit in the chest with a puck. He was rushed to Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital and quickly recovered.

"This is not something that people should go speculate about vaccines or anything like that causing this cardiac arrest," Stutterer said in his video. "There was a clear contact to clear trauma, and I think a clear reason why, unfortunately, this happened for Hamlin."

Exclusive-World Bank seeks more funds to address climate change, other crises -document

By David Lawder
2023/01/03

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The World Bank is seeking to vastly expand its lending capacity to address climate change and other global crises and will negotiate with shareholders ahead of April meetings on proposals that include a capital increase and new lending tools, according to an "evolution roadmap" seen by Reuters on Monday.

The roadmap document - sent to shareholder governments - marks the start of a negotiation process to alter the bank's mission and financial resources and shift it away from a country- and project-specific lending model used since its creation at the end of World War Two.

The World Bank management aims to have specific proposals to change its mission, operating model and financial capacity ready for approval by the joint World Bank and International Monetary Fund Development Committee in October, according to the document.

A World Bank spokesman said that the document aimed to provide details on the scope, approach, and timetable for the evolution, with regular updates for shareholders and decisions later in the year.

The reform of multilateral development banks was a topic of fierce debate in recent months after developing countries faced mounting pressure from inflation, energy and food shortages fueled by Russia's war in Ukraine, slowing growth, mounting debt burdens and growing vulnerability to climate shocks.

The pressures laid bare the inadequacy of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's (IMF) structures - designed at the end of World War Two to focus on rebuilding peacetime economies - to deal with current global calamities.

AAA  RATING TO STAY

The development lender will explore options like a potential new capital increase, changes to its capital structure to unlock more lending and new financing tools such as guarantees for private sector loans and other ways to mobilize more private capital, according to the document.

But the World Bank Group (WBG) is not ready to bow to demands from some non-profit organizations to abandon its longstanding top-tier credit rating to boost lending, stating: "Management will explore all options that increase the capacity of the WBG whilst maintaining the AAA rating of the WBG entities."

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called for the World Bank and others to revamp their business models to boost lending and harness private capital to fund investments that more broadly benefit the world, such as helping middle-income countries transition away from coal power.

A U.S. Treasury spokesperson declined comment on the World Bank document.

A spokesperson for Britain's foreign office said the UK "strongly supports" the World Bank proposals to explore all options to further increase support to developing and emerging economies.

The bank said proposals under consideration include higher statutory lending limits, lower equity-to-loan requirements and the use of callable capital - money pledged but not paid in by member governments - for lending.

Development experts say this shift would greatly increase the amount of lending compared to the current capital structure, which only utilizes paid-in capital.

"The challenges the world is facing call for a massive step up in the international community's support," the bank said in the document. "For the WBG to continue to play a central role in development and climate finance, it will need a concerted effort by both shareholders and management to step up WBG financing capacity."

INADEQUATE FUNDING

The roadmap document cautions that a build-up of lending for climate change, health care, food security and other needs may require a capital increase to boost the capacity of the World Bank's middle-income lending arm, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).

IBRD's $13 billion capital increase in 2018 "was designed to be prepared for one mid-sized crisis a decade, and not multiple, overlapping crises" including the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the effects of accelerating climate change, the document said. IBRD's crisis buffers will likely be depleted by mid-2023, it said.

Another option, according to the roadmap, is for World Bank shareholder countries to step up periodic contributions to the lender's fund for the world's poorest countries, the International Development Association (IDA), which have declined in recent years despite increasing needs.

The roadmap also offers the option of creating a new concessional lending trust fund for middle-income countries that would focus on global public goods and be similar in structure to IDA, with regular funding replenishments that would be separate from the bank's capital structure.

"Such a fund may attract donor bilateral resources separate from shareholder budget lines supporting the WBG, and potentially include donors beyond shareholders," such as private foundations, the bank said.

But environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth said the proposal did not go far enough and World Bank shareholders needed to ensure the lender was not "part of the problem".

"A true evolutionary roadmap must commit to ending financing for fossil fuels, industrial animal agriculture, petrochemical infrastructure, corporate-friendly false solutions, and harmful activities in biodiverse areas," Luisa Abbott Galvao, Senior International Policy Campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said in an emailed statement.

The World Bank also said that the evolution of its mission to increase climate lending while maintaining good development outcomes will require additional staff and budget resources, which have declined 3% in real terms over the past 15 years.

(Reporting by David Lawder; additional reporting by David Milliken in London, additional writing by Karin Strohecker, editing by Grant McCool)

© Reuters

Bolivia farm region blocks borders, grain transport as protests lead to clashes

Reuters
January 03, 2023


By Adam Jourdan and Daniel Ramos

SANTA CRUZ/LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Protesters in Bolivia's farming region of Santa Cruz are blocking highways out of the province, threatening to snarl the domestic transport of grains and food, as anger simmers following the arrest of local governor Luis Camacho.

The region, a stronghold of the conservative opposition to socialist President Luis Arce, is in its sixth day of protests that have seen thousands of people take to the streets and nights of clashes with weaponized fireworks and cars burned.

On Tuesday hundreds of women marched to the city police headquarters in support of Camacho, demanding his release.

On the nearby streets were burnt-out vehicles, smoldering fires and blockades from the overnight clashes.

The protests, sparked by the Dec. 28 arrest of Camacho over an alleged coup in 2019, are deepening divides between lowland Santa Cruz and the highland, more indigenous political capital La Paz, which have long butted heads over politics and state funds.

Camacho was seized by special police forces, taken out of the province by helicopter and is now in a maximum security jail in the highland city El Alto. He denies all charges that relate to the divisive removal of former socialist leader Evo Morales in 2019.

Santa Cruz leaders pledge to fight until Camacho is released, picketing government buildings and stopping transport of grains. There are also calls for a federal system giving the city more autonomy and state funds.

"We have a mandate from our assembly that nothing leaves Santa Cruz and that is what we are going to do," said Rómulo Calvo, head of the powerful Pro Santa Cruz civic group.

Marcelo Cruz, President of the International Heavy Transport Association of Santa Cruz, said routes were being blocked so no trucks could leave the province.

"No grain, animal or supply from the factories should leave Santa Cruz for the rest of the country. The blocking points are being reinforced," he said.

"OUTLAW STATE"

Morales and allies - including current president Arce - say his ouster was a coup and have prosecuted opposition figures they blame for it. Jeanine Anez, who became interim president after his removal, was jailed for 10 years in 2022.

Human rights groups say the government is using a weak justice system to go after its opponents.

"We are no longer a state of law, we are an outlaw state," said Erwin Bazan, from the right-wing Creemos party, saying the charges against Camacho were politically motivated.

Others blame Camacho for tensions in 2019 which saw dozens killed in protests, including supporters of Morales.

"Let him go to jail for 30 years. We want justice," said Maria Laura, a supporter of the ruling Movement for Socialism (MAS) party.

Morales remains the party's leader though has at times clashed with new president Arce.

Paul Coca, a lawyer and analyst in La Paz, said the internal divisions in the ruling party were partly behind the arrest, with Arce trying to neutralize criticism from Morales.

"(Arce) had to confront his party leader or directly go against Luis Fernando Camacho. And he obviously chose to go all out against Camacho," he said.

The blockade could dent food supply to other parts of the country as well as exports and growth as Bolivia grapples with a large fiscal deficit and low reserves.

"Santa Cruz is the economic stronghold of Bolivia," said Gary Rodríguez, General Manager of the Bolivian Institute of Foreign Trade (IBCE).

The region is the main producer of soy, sugar cane, wheat, rice, corn, and livestock.

"All this great private productive effort is now in danger."

(Reporting by Adam Jourdan and Daniel Ramos; Additional reporting by Monica Machicao, Editing by Angus MacSwan)

Commentary: Antonin Scalia and the uncertain future of legal conservatism

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia waits for the beginning of the taping of "The Kalb Report" on April 17, 2014, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C..

 - Alex Wong/Getty Images North America/TNS

During her 2010 Senate confirmation hearings, centrist-liberal Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan famously allowed that “we are all originalists.” In a 2015 interview at Harvard Law School honoring her then-colleague Justice Antonin Scalia, Kagan proclaimed that “we are all textualists now.”

However, in a dissent opinion to the West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency decision, which gutted the Clean Air Act, Kagan wrote: “Some years ago, I remarked that we’re all textualists now. ... It seems I was wrong. The current Court is textualist only when being so suits it.”

What are we to make of Kagan’s change of heart about originalism and textualism? And what does her change of heart tell us about the future of the legal conservative movement?

Originalism and textualism are purportedly neutral methods of constitutional interpretation associated with the Federalist Society and the legal conservative movement that tell us judges must adhere to the original meaning of important laws at the time of their adoption. Originalism concerns itself with the original meaning of the Constitution. Textualism extends its reach to all statutes.

Legal conservatives distinguish originalist and textualist methods from the organic notions of a “living Constitution” associated with the “judicial activism” of liberal judges. The concept of a living Constitution operates from the premise that the Constitution was intended to evolve with changing circumstances and changing times.

On the surface of her remarks at Harvard, Kagan was simply paying homage to Scalia, without a doubt the leading theorist and practitioner of originalist and textualist methods. She was being gracious. But with Scalia, it was always a matter of unrequited love.

Scalia was astonishingly charismatic. This droll man, lionized by all while alive, was especially beloved for his swagger and humor. However, Scalia was often loath to return this love.

When he was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986, many assumed Scalia’s “likable personality” would naturally make him perfect in the important role as the court’s swing justice, managing diverse coalitions on challenging cases and gliding the docket forward. But Scalia could not have been less interested in this honored slot on the court. “The originalist has nothing to trade,” he said.

Indeed, Scalia will never be known for writing majority decisions. He actually wrote very few in the last 20 years of his time on the court, as he cultivated a reputation for withering dissents in which he made no concessions to anyone.

Scalia’s devotional Catholic spirit inflected his jurisprudence. But his brash, combative personality was from outside the folds of the church’s formal teachings. Quite simply, Scalia relished going it alone because it conformed to the darkest alleys of his faith. Scalia was by nature a hunter, only fully himself when stalking his prey.

Scalia claimed that his “living Constitution” opponents often voiced counter-majoritarian opinions, even when purporting to reflect the common values of their own time. But Scalia’s own dissents — on matters such as voting rights, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, free speech and religious freedom — were by definition counter-majoritarian, betraying moral and political preferences barely concealed by the threadbare language of the Constitution.

The complexities of Scalia’s personality allowed him to contain and, in some measure, resolve these tensions between legal reason and moral fervor. But even as the liberal Kagan honored Scalia’s originalist and textualist methods while he was living, her recent demurrals indicate that she believes conservatives have become less respectful of these methods since Scalia’s death nearly seven years ago.

Harvard constitutional law professor Adrian Vermeule, for one, has in recent years aided the cause of the authoritarian national conservative movement by promoting his own decidedly anti-originalist and morality-infused theory of “common good constitutionalism.” Taking cues in some respects from Donald Trump, Vermeule and other national conservatives have repudiated the constraining effects of originalism and textualism on behalf of a strong and active state that ensures “the ruler has the power needed to rule well” and that finds the law in the original moral meaning of the Constitution.

The Supreme Court itself has also moved into uncharted territory via the morally punishing natural-law philosophical perspectives of Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. They eschew the formally neutral aims of originalist and textualist methods for the substantive moral imperatives they understand to lie beneath the floorboards of the Constitution.

The conservative Federalist Society is smack dab in the middle of this tension between the fetish of the text and fetish of the state. Conflicts related to this turmoil will likely feed a struggle for the soul of the Republican Party heading into the 2024 presidential election. They already are undermining and threatening the Federalist Society’s allegedly central mission of upholding the integrity of the Constitution.

Scalia held these forces at bay. In his absence, emerging philosophical and ideological battles within the legal conservative movement suggest that originalism and textualism have not prevailed for so many decades as legal theories because they were intrinsically superior to other ways of interpreting the law.

Rather, they prevailed because they were attached to the cult of personality surrounding Scalia.

____

ABOUT THE WRITER

Peter Schwartz is a writer based in the Pacific Northwest. He has a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley, taught at the university level and founded an online legal news and data company. He publishes the Substack newsletter Wikidworld.

2023/01/03

© Chicago Tribune

Editorial: Why was the Buffalo blizzard death toll so high?

A snow plow makes its way along a clean Ridge Road in front of Our Lady Of Victory Basilica on Dec. 27, 2022, in Lackawanna, New York.

 - John Normile/Getty Images North America/TNS

When, in February 2021, the temperatures in parts of Texas dropped to the low teens, crashing the power infrastructure, officials were at a loss dealing with a problem that they simply hadn’t had before and people died as a result. The same was true later that year in the Pacific Northwest as temperatures hit 115 degrees, baking Oregon and Washington to the point that cables literally melted and roads buckled in a region where most homes don’t have A/C and people died as a result.

The same cannot be said for officials responsible for the safety of typically snowbound western New York, which was rocked by a blizzard that caused a staggering death toll of at least 39.

Yes, the blizzard dumped heavy snow on Buffalo, totaling about 4 feet and it came faster and harder than perhaps was expected. Still, 31 people dead in the city of Buffalo, with a population of about 280,000, would be equivalent to a death toll of 1,000 in New York City, a gigantic catastrophe that demands a thorough examination of what went wrong and who failed.

There’s no doubt some of the damage was done by Buffalonians simply disregarding emergency instructions — and let us make it clear here for anyone who thinks they know better about dangerous weather than seasoned emergency services personnel: you don’t — but there was also some element of official complacency.

It seems like government leaders figured they knew snow and cold weather, and reacted too slowly with road closures and travel bans, including Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz and Kathy Hochul, the first Buffalo native to be governor since Grover Cleveland. In this way, being too used to a certain type of storm can be as dangerous as being completely blindsided by it. Leaders around the country will have to learn that even relatively standard weather events can be unexpectedly devastating in a world with a rapidly changing global climate. The days of normal precautions won’t cut it for an abnormal reality.

2023/01/03
© New York Daily News

RIP

Barbara Walters’ life and times on Miami Beach. Was she ‘a poor little rich girl?’

Toby Canham/Getty Images North America/TNS


2023/01/03

MIAMI — Television journalist Barbara Walters was a member of the Miami Beach Senior High Class of 1947 before she made a number of subsequent Beach High stars and other famous people cry on camera.

Walters, the pioneering journalist who, in America’s bicentennial year 1976 made history as the first female news anchor with a $1 million salary, died last week at 93.

Much has been written about Walters’ storied career, the major world figures she interviewed from Fidel Castro to Richard Nixon, and the celebrities she made cry — from Oprah Winfrey to Ringo Starr — with her pointed questions.

Missing from some of the obituaries of the Boston-born broadcasting legend? Her upbringing in Miami Beach.

Walters lived in South Florida at various times as a little girl in the 1930s; as a high school student in the 1940s; and, at 25 in 1955, met the man who would become her first husband in Miami — children’s apparel businessman Robert Katz. Her parents Lou and Dena and her sister Jackie are buried in Miami.

Walters’ father Lou — a latter-day Ziegfeld — made his fortune running nightclubs, most notably Lou Walters’ Latin Quarter on Palm Island in Miami Beach, where, from 1939 to 1959, until it burned to the ground, he promoted shows that featured the stars of the day like Milton Berle, Sophie Tucker, Martha Raye and Sammy Davis Jr.

A park now sits on the grounds that once held the Latin Quarter on Palm Island.

From the Miami Herald archives, here is Walters on Walters — and others on Walters — and her life and times in Miami Beach.
Can you just cry?

In a 1970 interview with the Miami Herald, Walters remembered her early days in Miami Beach as a “poor little rich girl. The great big house. The chauffeur to drive me to school. I was very lonely.”

Walters at Beach High

Her childhood friend, then Judy Nelson, later famed Florida impresaria Judy Drucker, remembered her pal Walters as a 10th grader at Beach High who would come to The Latin Quarter on Palm Island after school to do her homework in the lobby — amid the showgirls and superstars.

“She wanted to be close to her father,” Drucker told the Herald in 1990. “I’d join her between acts. We were pals. We’d drink nothing but hot tea and eat turkey sandwiches. Her chauffeur would drive her home. She was a very lonely girl.”

She made her classmates at Beach High happy, however, when she arranged for them to hold a dance and to see a show at her father’s other nightclub, the Colonial Inn, which he owned in Hallandale, near Gulfstream Park, in 1944, before he reportedly sold it to mobster Meyer Lansky for $80,000 in June 1945, according to the Fort Lauderdale Daily News.

“I was the envy of the school,” Walters said in the 1970 Herald interview.
Walters’ dates in Miami Beach

Edward Klein, a Miami-Dade circuit court judge who died in 2017 at 89, briefly dated Walters when they were students at Beach High.

“I met her in the French Club. We weren’t sweethearts. We may have gone out two or three times,” Klein told the Miami Herald in 1990, when an unauthorized biography on the TV star named him. “We were all close to one another. It was a very nice group of kids. They were very happy times.”

Beach High baseball player Stanley Reich was reputedly another Beach beau who may have given Walters her first kiss, according to “Barbara Walters: An Unauthorized Biography” by writer Jerry Oppenheimer, the Herald reported in 1990.

“We dated, maybe six months,” Reich said at the time. “She was a lovely girl, very, very nice.”

“Reich gets credit in the book for giving Walters her first kiss — a brief, awkward peck in the moonlight on the sea wall behind Al Capone’s house,” the Herald reported in 1990. An infamous gangster, Capone had a home on Palm Island near The Latin Quarter.

According to Oppenheimer’s book, that kiss just sort of happened. “I don’t know exactly how that happened. Yes, we were walking, and she showed me Capone’s house. Kids weren’t into sex then. ... None of us really could relate to the Latin Quarter. We were too young. We would go to a movie, talk about what we wanted to do in life.”

On a visit to see her parents in 1955, Walters flew into Miami International Airport where she ran into casual acquaintance Bob Katz. They wed in June 1955 but the marriage was annulled by 1957. In her 2008 book, “Audition: A Memoir,” Walters wrote that they did not have enough in common.
Lou Walters on his daughter

In a 1962 Miami Herald story after his daughter had joined NBC’s “The Today Show,” and before his 1967 retirement, Lou Walters said Barbara already “makes more money than I do.”
Walters and the mobster

In a conversation with then Miami Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin at Coral Gables’ Biltmore Hotel, Walters was back near her old stomping grounds to promote her “Audition: A Memoir.” She shared some remembrances of her life in Miami Beach.

From that Miami Herald interview, published May 25, 2008:

Walters remembers her South Florida interludes as enjoyable but quite strange. One took place in the latter days of World War II, when the family lived on Hibiscus Island and she attended Ida M. Fisher Junior High in Miami Beach.

“The Army was in Miami Beach and the Navy in Miami,” she says. “As we sat in class we would hear the soldiers marching. We would see German prisoners of war in open trucks — there must have been a prison camp nearby.”

Odder still was an earlier stay on Palm Island, living in a house that her father leased in a package deal with the building across the street that he turned into the Latin Quarter nightclub.

“Along with the the building that was the Latin Quarter, came this pistachio-green mansion on the water right as you got off the causeway,” she remembers. “There was a woman who was the housekeeper who had been there before us. And there was a man named Bill Dwyer and his bodyguard-chauffeur. Supposedly he had the right to live there for a year. My father didn’t know much about him. But sure enough it turned out he did have that right. And so he stayed that winter.”

A good thing, perhaps, that the Walters family didn’t know much about its house guest. Big Bill Dwyer was a New York mobster who had used the fortune he made in bootlegging to go into the gambling business. A lonely 10-year-old Barbara (there were no other kids on Palm Island) became his regular afternoon companion at the racetrack.

“He used to take me to Tropical Park when I was very young, and he’d bet for me,” she says. “And somehow I always won. And other than that we never saw him. The house was so big — they stayed in one room, he and the chauffeur — that I barely saw them.

“When I think about it, it seems very strange. But at the time I was a kid, a little girl. What did I know?”

———

© Miami Herald

GOP removes metal detectors from House three days before Jan. 6 anniversary
Rodric Hurdle-Bradford
January 03, 2023

US Capitol Police stand near a metal detector outside chamber of the House of Representatives(AFP)

According to Axios, one of the first actions of the new Republican-controlled House of Representatives was to remove metal detectors outside of the House chambers.

The move comes just days before the upcoming second anniversary of the Jan. 6 attacks.

The removal of the metal detectors has been widely seen as a political move to unite the Republican party, as they grapple with internal infighting from voting for Speaker of the House to the nomination process for the 2024 Presidential election.

The designated spokesperson for the Republican party members on the House of Representatives Rules Committee has not responded to media inquires requesting a further explanation.

IN OTHER NEWS: Republican donors are enraged as GOP floor fight over McCarthy makes them look 'stupid'

Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert, a noted pro-gun enthusiast, said the move to remove the metal detectors helped turn the House back "into the peoples House."

CRIMINAL CRYPTO CAPITALI$M
Su Zhu Blames DCG For Conspiring With FTX and Causing Terra’s Fall

ByTobith Tom
January 4, 2023

Su Zhu blames DCG for conspiring with FTX to attack Terra.
The co-founder of 3AC explained that DCG could easily be restructured.
Zhu continued to accuse the DCG group of taking similar actions to FTX.

Another crypto drama forms as Su Zhu, the co-founder of the Three Arrows Capital (3AC), tweeted that Digital Currency Group (DCG) conspired with FTX to attack Terra. Zhu blamed DCG for taking “substantial losses” from 3AC’s bankruptcy.


Su Zhu expounded his views about how DCG could have easily restructured. The 3AC co-founder stated, “Instead they fabricated a left pocket right pocket callable promissory note that magically filled the hole. This is like a kid losing at poker and saying, ‘I am fine, my dad will pay you, let me keep playing,’ but if your dad is actually yourself.”

The 3AC co-founder continued to accuse the DCG group of taking similar actions to FTX. Su Zhu explained that DCG proceeds to misdirect the people by using various methods to “attack” 3AC and prevented anyone from asking the hard question which is “how did genesis fill the hole.”

Furthermore, Su Zhu criticized the actions of DCG, claiming:

DCG value is 0, criminal fraud, FTX creditors also have a case for fraudulent conveyance on Alameda returns of capital to Genesis.

The 3AC co-founder then reminded the crypto community about the close relationship between Barry Silbert, the CEO of DCG, and Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the fallen FTX.

Ending the Twitter thread, the 3AC co-founder mentioned that creditors might push Genesis to the brink of bankruptcy. Moreover, Zhu predicted that the creditors would expect Silbert to back the cashouts, which is the easy way, instead of waiting for a department of Justice’s (DoJ) criminal case with restitution punishments.

‘His explanations sounded childish’ Man behind Banksy mural theft in Ukraine could face 12 years in prison

2:36 pm, January 3, 2023
Source: Meduza


The wall in Hostomel from which Banksy’s graffiti was cut. December 3, 2022
Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP / Scanpix / LETA

In November, after much speculation, the British street artist Banksy confirmed that he had painted seven murals in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale war, including in war-torn locations such as the village of Borodyanka and the city of Irpin. Less than a month later, thieves were spotted cutting one of Banksy’s works from the side of a damaged building in Hostomel, a city outside Kyiv. Now, the man who allegedly led the plot to steal the graffiti is facing 12 years in prison, though he claims he only ever wanted to use the art to help the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Police in the Kyiv region have brought charges against a man they say organized the theft of one of seven pieces of graffiti created in Ukraine by the British street artist Banksy. The stolen mural, which was painted on the side of a bombed-out building in Hostomel, depicts a woman in a gas mask.

The man stands accused of committing theft on a particularly large scale or by an organized group — a crime punishable by up to 12 years in prison under Ukrainian law.

Police noted that a group of people from Kyiv and Cherkasy on December 2 dismantled the portion of the wall that contained the mural and tried to transport it “with the help of wooden boards and polyethylene.” The plot was thwarted, and the offenders were arrested, “thanks to concerned citizens.”

The case was initially categorized as one of “willful destruction or damage of property.” After the graffiti was examined by experts and determined to be worth approximately $245,000, however, the charges were raised.

The Ukrainian outlet Grati spoke with the mastermind behind the theft, 32-year-old mathematician and green activist Sergey Dovgiy. He claimed he saw the graffiti in early November, and that he decided to save it and sell it at auction to support Ukraine’s Armed Forces after learning that the building was slated for demolition.

“I would have written to Sotheby’s. Because they’ve been selling Banksy’s works for many years,” Dovgiy said. “If they had said, ‘Who are you?’ then I would have written to some smaller auction.”

Dovgiy sought advice on how to remove the graffiti from the building from Alexander Duvinsky, a sculptor from Cherkasy. Duvinsky told journalists that he never doubted Dovgiy’s integrity, and that he didn’t consider that the plan might be illegal.

In addition to selling the art, Dovgiy planned to make a documentary film about the entire process and had already recruited multiple camera operators to that end. “I was thinking of apologizing to Banksy in the film. And saying that if it weren’t for the war, I wouldn’t have done anything like this. Because I’m 32, and for some reason, I’ve never done anything like this before. Then [I would show] what we’d done, and I’d say that our video is a tribute to what he had done in Ukraine,” said the ringleader.

Whatever the case, Dovgiy failed to notify both Hostomel authorities and the city's residents of his plans. In addition, by the time he made his attempt to steal the graffiti, the city’s administration had already declared the mural a part of Hostomel’s cultural heritage and decided to embed it in the wall of the building that will replace the demolished one.

Hostomel residents who witnessed the attempted theft on December 2 told journalists that Dovgiy’s explanations to police “looked a bit childish.”

“He said that street art belongs to everybody and that anybody can take it down,” said a local resident named Anna Shavkun. “I told him, ‘It’s not like you’ve come to a wasteland where nobody lives. And you’re not the only admirer of Banksy who would want to come and get it. Even if you really did have good intentions, then please — go to City Hall, raise the question [with them], and they’ll decide, but the way you did it isn’t how things are done. Just coming and cutting it out — what is that?”

Dovgiy plans to plead not guilty and to fight the charges. However, he said that he has agreed to apologize to Hostomel residents: “I can understand their emotional response to this event. But I had 100-percent reliable information that the building’s demolition would begin in December.