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Bulldozers Meet Historic Chinese Neighborhood

Posted by Borong Shop NEWS, SPORT 11:16 PM

BEIJING — Mao slept here. So, too, did the imperial eunuchs who found themselves unemployed after China’s last emperor was sent packing. For much of the last 700 years, however, the most prominent residents of the quarter just north of the Forbidden City have been a pair of massive brick towers whose drums and bells helped Beijing’s citizenry keep track of the hour.

These days, those who reside in the neighborhood known as Gulou are anxiously counting the days until construction crews begin turning its 32 charmingly decrepit acres into a polished tourist attraction called Beijing Time Cultural City.

Anchored by the ancient Drum and Bell Towers, the $73 million redevelopment will include courtyard homes for the rich, a “timekeeping” museum and an underground mall, presumably well stocked with Rolexes and Cartiers — or perhaps their more affordable counterfeit cousins.

Since the project was announced in January, historians have been sounding the alarm. So, too, have the expatriates who cherish the area’s old Beijing authenticity. “When they’re done, the place is going to look like Universal Studios,” said Robin Foo, a Brunei-born Chinese architect who has spent the last six years turning a local Yuan dynasty temple into a swank cafe and catering hall.

But the outrage is harder to find among the thousands of poor families who live in the ramshackle collection of gray brick houses topped with wavy roof tiles. “Tear the whole place down,” said Zhou Meihua, 72, who shares a 20-square-foot pair of rooms with three generations of family members. “If we get enough compensation, we’ll happily move out.”

Government officials tend to stoke such sentiments by failing to update old neighborhoods in a way that preserves their existing fabric.

Instead, they seize property in parts of the city they deem “unhygienic and unsafe,” rezone much of it as commercial property and sell it for huge profits. The concession to history often consists of a few new buildings with upturned eaves and garishly painted timber slapped on concrete facades.

Local officials often claim that the need to renew old areas requires their destruction, critics say. Over the past two months, a huge section of old homes just north of Gulou was bulldozed to make way for the construction of a nearby subway station.

“This is not about preserving a historic monument. It’s about saving a living, breathing community that has evolved organically over hundreds of years,” said Yao Yuan, a Peking University professor who specializes in urban planning.

For preservationists, the challenge is to convince local power brokers that there is still money to be made by modernizing old single-story homes, block by block, and then allowing some of the original residents — and their old Beijing ways — to remain. Keep the charm, they say, and the tourists and tax revenue will follow.

For He Shuzhong, a lawyer who runs the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center, that means bringing up his favorite analogy about a tattered Ming dynasty chair that would have immense value if spruced up.

One can easily toss away the chair and buy a plastic one, he tells poker-faced officials, but if it were repaired and cleaned, the Ming chair would be worth 10,000 plastic chairs. “It’s the same thing for these old neighborhoods,” Mr. He said, gesticulating with urgency. “They are our unique heritage that cannot be replaced.”

So far, such arguments have had limited impact on this redevelopment-crazed city. In recent years, two-thirds of Beijing’s 3,000 narrow lanes, known as hutongs, have been subsumed by mega-developments, many of them in neighborhoods that were officially designated preservation zones.

Government-affiliated builders either ignore the law or use words like “historic” and “restoration” to describe patently new construction. Critics say the most egregious example of this trend can be seen just south of Tiananmen Square, where the city’s most fabled shopping district, Qianmen, was replaced by a soulless but expensive facsimile of its former hurly-burly self.

“The renovation of Qianmen wasn’t about preserving history, but about creating a fake Hollywood version of it,” said Mr. Yao, the urban planning professor

Water Dispute Raises Tension Between India and Pakistanis

Posted by Borong Shop NEWS, SPORT 11:16 PM

BANDIPORE, Kashmir — In this high Himalayan valley on the Indian-controlled side of Kashmir, the latest battle line between India and Pakistan has been drawn.

Laborers who work long hours in Bandipore said the work is not merely a matter of electricity. National pride is at stake, they said.
This time it is not the ground underfoot, which has been disputed since the bloody partition of British India in 1947, but the water hurtling from mountain glaciers to parched farmers’ fields in Pakistan’s agricultural heartland.

Indian workers here are racing to build an expensive hydroelectric dam in a remote valley near here, one of several India plans to build over the next decade to feed its rapidly growing but power-starved economy.

In Pakistan, the project raises fears that India, its archrival and the upriver nation, would have the power to manipulate the water flowing to its agriculture industry — a quarter of its economy and employer of half its population. In May it filed a case with the international arbitration court to stop it.

Water has become a growing source of tension in many parts of the world between nations striving for growth. Several African countries are arguing over water rights to the Nile. Israel and Jordan have competing claims to the Jordan River. Across the Himalayas, China’s own dam projects have piqued India, a rival for regional, and even global, power.

But the fight here is adding a new layer of volatility at a critical moment to one of the most fraught relationships anywhere, one between deeply distrustful, nuclear-armed nations who have already fought three wars.

The dispute threatens to upset delicate negotiations to renew peace talks, on hold since Pakistani militants killed at least 163 people in attacks in Mumbai, India, in November 2008. The United States has been particularly keen to ease tensions so that Pakistan can divert troops and matériel from its border with India to its frontier with Afghanistan to fight Taliban insurgents.

Anti-India nationalists and militant networks in Pakistan, already dangerously potent, have seized on the issue as a new source of rage to perpetuate 60 years of antagonism.

Jamaat-u-Dawa, the charity wing of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the Mumbai attacks, has retooled its public relations effort around the water dispute, where it was once focused almost entirely on land claims to Kashmir. Hafiz Saeed, Jamaat’s leader, now uses the dispute in his Friday sermons to whip up fresh hatreds.

With their populations rapidly expanding, water is critical to both nations. Pakistan contains the world’s largest contiguous irrigation system, water experts say. It has also become an increasingly fertile recruiting ground for militant groups, who play on a lack of opportunity and abundant anti-India sentiment. The rivers that traverse Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province and the heart of its agriculture industry, are the country’s lifeline, and the dispute over their use goes to the heart of its fears about its larger, stronger neighbor.

For India, the hydroprojects are vital to harnessing Himalayan water to fill in the serious energy shortfalls that crimp its economy. About 40 percent of India’s population is off the power grid, and lack of electricity has hampered industry. The Kishenganga project is a crucial part of India’s plans to close that gap.

The Indian project has been on the drawing board for decades, and it falls under a 50-year-old treaty that divides the Indus River and its tributaries between both countries. “The treaty worked well in the past, mostly because the Indians weren’t building anything,” said John Briscoe, an expert on South Asia’s water issues at Harvard University. “This is a completely different ballgame. Now there’s a whole battery of these hydroprojects.”

The treaty, the result of a decade of painstaking negotiation that ended in 1960, gave Pakistan 80 percent of the waters in the Indus River system, a ratio that nationalists in Pakistan often forget. India, the upriver nation, is permitted to use some of the water for farming, drinking and power generation, as long as it does not store too much.

While the Kishenganga dam is allowed under the treaty, the dispute is over how it should be built and the timely release of water. Pakistan contends that having the drainage at the very base of the dam will allow India to manipulate the water flow when it wants, for example, during a crucial period of a planting season.

“It makes Pakistan very vulnerable,” said a lawyer who has worked on past water cases for Pakistan. “You can’t just tell us, ‘Hey, you should trust us.’ We don’t. That’s why we have a treaty.”

In Los Angeles, Unsolved Killings Reflected Era

Posted by Borong Shop NEWS, SPORT 11:15 PM

LOS ANGELES — It was the most painful sort of ordinary.

At Mary Alexander’s home is a picture of her daughter, Alicia, who was 18 in 1988 when she was found dead in an alley.
One summer day in 1985, a woman turned up dead in a South Los Angeles alleyway. Almost exactly a year later, another woman with fatal bullet wounds was found, in another alley nearby. And so it went, for nearly 25 years — with a 13-year lull in which the killings seemed to stop — black women, many of whose struggles with drugs had worried or alienated their families, were found dead and discarded around the streets and alleyways of South Los Angeles.

Their killings went unsolved in part because of a lack of witnesses and evidence, but also because Los Angeles County — and particularly the beleaguered corridors south of the 10 Freeway — endured so many murders, some at the hands of other serial killers, it took a long time to confirm that 10 women and one man were killed by the “Grim Sleeper,” so called for his supposed killing hiatus.

“Bodies accumulated,” said Detective Clifford Shepard, who has worked for the Los Angeles Police Department for more than 25 years. “You just didn’t have any information back then. It was an insane time.”

Lonnie David Franklin Jr., a mechanic and auto thief who lived among the victims for all those years, was arrested this month after almost a quarter-century of brutality, linked to the killings through a sophisticated use of DNA analysis.

Most of the victims’ bodies were found within two miles of Mr. Franklin’s home in a fairly circumscribed section of South Los Angeles near the 110 and 105 Freeways. Some were dumped along quiet stretches of south Western Avenue, where single-story homes sit next to ramshackle motels, auto body shops and a park. Others lay in the alleys that cut through residential blocks on either side of Western’s commercial strip, an area dotted with fast food restaurants, liquor stores, and churches big and small.

In many ways, the case sums up the long and painful history of a neighborhood where drug crimes, gang violence and an uneasy relationship with the police combined to hinder the arrest of Mr. Franklin, and contributed to the demise of women whose footing in their community was so unsure, there were few left behind to rage for justice. Most were unaware until recently then that their loved one’s killer had taken other lives.

“I didn’t know about other murders,” said Betty Lowe, the mother of Mary Lowe, the sixth victim. “When the detective was assigned to the case I called practically every day and every day they told me, ‘Nothing yet,’ so I thought it was never going to happen for us.”

While South Los Angeles remains one of the more troubled areas of the city, the arrest of Mr. Franklin also illuminates in many ways how far it has come, both through the vast reduction in violence and the evolution of law enforcement technology and tactics.

“The Grim Sleeper case spans all of that history of South L.A.,” said Joe Hicks, vice president of Community Advocates Inc., who grew up in South Los Angeles. “His activity began in a period of Los Angeles when things were dramatically different, and particularly in the neighborhoods where he operated, and it wasn’t unusual to find bodies in the alleys.

“But the way things have changed over the course of years, the ways the later victims were dealt with, the interaction between the police and community, the way that people in the neighborhood decided we are not going to tolerate” crime and violence among young people, he added. “You superimpose the Grim Sleeper on that, and it is very interesting.”

The 1980s and 1990s, when crack use was widespread, marked a time of intense violence in urban America. There were more than 800 people killed in Los Angeles every year but two from 1985 to 1995. By comparison, 314 people were killed here in 2009.

When the first victim, Debra Jackson, 29, turned up dead, the police were already trying to grapple with other killers who preyed on women, largely women who traded sex for drugs — known as strawberries — in South Los Angeles. A South Side Slayer task force, named for another suspected killer or killers of women, was assigned to unravel the murders.

A City Outsources Everything. Sky Doesn’t Fall.

Posted by Borong Shop RILEX 11:14 PM

MAYWOOD, Calif. — Not once, not twice, but three times in the last two weeks, Andrew Quezada says, he was stopped and questioned by the authorities here.

“I’m walking along at night carrying an overstuffed bag,” he said, describing two of the incidents. “I look suspicious. This shows the sheriff’s department is doing its job.”

Chalk up another Maywood resident who approves of this city’s unusual experience in municipal governing. City officials last month fired all of Maywood’s employees and outsourced their jobs.

While many communities are fearfully contemplating extensive cuts, Maywood says it is the first city in the nation in the current downturn to take an ax to everyone.

The school crossing guards were let go. Parking enforcement was contracted out, City Hall workers dismissed, street maintenance workers made redundant. The public safety duties of the Police Department were handed over to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

At first, people in this poor, long-troubled and heavily Hispanic city southeast of Los Angeles braced for anarchy.

Senior citizens were afraid they would be assaulted as they walked down the street. Parents worried the parks would be shut and their children would have nowhere to safely play. Landlords said their tenants had begun suggesting that without city-run services they would no longer feel obliged to pay rent.

The apocalypse never arrived. In fact, it seems this city was so bad at being a city that outsourcing — so far, at least — is being viewed as an act of municipal genius.

“We don’t want to be the model for other cities to lay off their employees,” said Magdalena Prado, a spokeswoman for the city who works on contract. “But our residents have been somewhat pleased.”

That includes Mayor Ana Rosa Rizo, who was gratified to see her husband get a parking ticket on July 1, hours after the Police Department had been disbanded. The ticket was issued by enforcement clerks for the neighboring city of Bell, which is being paid about $50,000 a month by Maywood to perform various services.

The reaction is all the more remarkable because this is not a feel-good city. City Council hearings run hot, council members face repeated recall efforts and city officials fight in public. “You single-handedly destroyed the city,” the city treasurer told the City Council at its most recent meeting.

Four years ago, in what was probably the high-water mark of acrimony in Maywood, a deputy city clerk was arrested and accused of soliciting a hit man to kill a city councilman. The deputy clerk, Hector Duarte, was concerned that his salary might be reduced or his job eliminated during a previous round of bad fiscal times; he was sentenced to a year in jail and six months of anger management counseling.

This time, the councilman, Felipe Aguirre, has received no threats and has seen remarkably little anger. “This is a very bad economy,” said Mr. Aguirre, who like the mayor and fellow council members receives a stipend from the city of $347 every two weeks. Even if city employees lose their benefits, he said, “very good workers are still going to hang around.”

Jose B. Garcia, an assistant city planner, will now be working on contract. “I still have a job,” he said. “In that sense, I can’t complain too much.”

Maywood, which covers slightly more than one square mile, is one of the most densely populated cities in the country. The official population of 30,000 is believed to considerably understate the actual total of about 50,000.

It has some of the ills that plague other cities. Property taxes, a primary source of revenue, have declined to $900,000 from $1.2 million in 2007. Sales taxes have also dropped. But Maywood’s biggest problem by far has been its police department.

Bulldozers Meet Historic Chinese Neighborhood

Water Dispute Raises Tension Between India and Pakistanis

In Los Angeles, Unsolved Killings Reflected Era

A City Outsources Everything. Sky Doesn’t Fall.

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