Archives for March 2021

Los Angeles park closed after protest to save homeless camp

LOS ANGELES (AP) — A newly installed fence surrounded a popular Los Angeles park Thursday after authorities moved in to evict residents of a large homeless encampment despite protests by the people who live there and their supporters.

Only a few tents and about a dozen people remained by evening along the grassy banks of Echo Park Lake, where tents had proliferated for months during the coronavirus pandemic, sparking concerns about trash, drugs and violence.

Residents argued that the complaints were overblown and the encampment offered a community setting for people without means who have nowhere else to live.

Police gave people until 10:30 p.m. Thursday to leave so that the city could perform what officials said were necessary repairs to the site. Those who leave have been offered temporary housing, and at least 166 people had already been sheltered, said Mitch O’Farrell, a city councilman whose district includes the park.

“We have had a very successful housing operation that began in January,” O’Farrell told reporters earlier Thursday. He said the city has contracted with the nonprofit Urban Alchemy to help homeless residents clean up their campsites and move.

A couple hundred demonstrators gathered peacefully Thursday evening outside O’Farrell’s nearby office with a large banner that said “services not sweeps.” Late Thursday night, police declared an unlawful assembly and began arresting those who refused to leave.

KTLA-TV reported that about two busloads of demonstrators were being arrested.

The gathering followed a confrontation late Wednesday night, when authorities showed up to install the fencing. Several hundred people, including advocates and homeless residents, faced off against a line of police wearing riot helmets. Protesters carried signs that said “dignity, not displacement” and “we need long term solutions.”

A police statement said there were verbal confrontations but that the protest was largely peaceful and demonstrators voluntarily departed. One person was arrested for failing to comply with an officer’s orders, and officers twice used force that was characterized as minor, police said.

The encampment had overtaken areas surrounding the lake, an oasis-like locale where locals and tourists normally stroll and picnic on the lake’s banks, which include a towering fountain and a view of the downtown skyline. The lake has been featured in many movies, including the Oscar-winning “Chinatown” in 1974.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority said its outreach workers had moved 44 people into housing on Monday and Tuesday, mostly into hotel rooms under the state-funded Project Roomkey program aimed at providing shelter for those most at risk during the coronavirus pandemic.

Antonia Ramirez, who said she has been homeless for 20 years, vowed to stay at her camp site at Echo Park Lake and risk being arrested. Ramirez, who said she has lived at parks in Los Angeles and in neighboring Orange County, said she moved in days earlier.

“I’m not leaving. I will be arrested, and I will spend my time in jail,” said Ramirez, 60.

Her fellow tent-dwelling residents argued the growing encampment had provided a secure place for homeless people during the public health crisis.

Valerie Zeller said she doesn’t want to accept assistance from the city because of shelter restrictions that include curfews.

“I care a lot about this park,” she told ABC 7. “I pick up trash every day for two hours at least.”

Zeller said she plans to move onto a nearby sidewalk.

Kelvin Martinez, an organizer with the advocacy group Street Watch LA, accused city officials of “bad faith communication.” He said requests for services during the past year were largely ignored until the sudden announcement that the park would be closed.

“The city’s strategy is to displace these people into dark corners, into hiding, under overpasses. As long as they’re not visible in a public place like a park,” Martinez said.

No timeline was provided for the closure, which O’Farrell’s office said was necessary to make “extensive repairs” to lighting and plumbing at the park and for general “public safety improvements.”

The encampment has been the site of drug overdoses, assaults and shootings, with four deaths in the park over the past year, according to a statement from O’Farrell’s office.

The location of the encampment in the fast-gentrifying Echo Park neighborhood gave it a high profile, but it was not unique for the metro Los Angeles area. Tents can be found throughout the city and region despite an array of state and local programs aimed at sheltering people and transitioning them to permanent housing.

A January 2020 count by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority reported that there were more than 66,400 homeless people living in Los Angeles County — by far the largest single concentration in the state.

That included more than 41,000 people within Los Angeles city limits. Both figures were up more than 12% from the previous year. The annual count was canceled for 2021 because of the pandemic.

Among the major legal actions on the issue is a federal court lawsuit filed by a group of business owners, residents and community leaders called the LA Alliance for Human Rights.

The lawsuit accuses the city and county of failing to comprehensively address the desperation that homeless people face — including hunger, crime, squalor and the coronavirus pandemic.

U.S. District Judge David Carter, who is overseeing the case, called parties to a hearing in a Skid Row parking lot last month and said that if politicians can’t provide solutions, he wants to explore what powers the court has to order and oversee remedies.

Invoking the 1950s civil rights case Brown vs. Board of Education, Carter said there is strong precedence of the federal courts acting “after a long period of inaction by local government officials.”

___

Associated Press photojournalists Damian Dovarganes and Marcio Sanchez and AP writer John Antczak contributed to this report.

How two friends made art history buying a $70M digital work

It took a few minutes for Vignesh Sundaresan and Anand Venkateswaran to realize that they’d parted with $69.3 million for a digital artwork stored in a JPEG file, coincidentally securing their place in art history.

“We weren’t sure we won,” said Venkateswaran, describing the nerve-wracking final moments of the online auction for a collage of 5,000 images by the artist known as Beeple. “We kept refreshing the page.”

The March 11 auction at Christie’s in London immediately made Beeple’s artwork one of the most expensive pieces ever sold by living artists, joining a well-known swimming pool painting by David Hockney and an iconic stainless steel rabbit sculpture by Jeff Koons.

Venkateswaran said he and his friend and business partner, Sundaresan, both in their 30s, are still coming to terms with their landmark purchase. They’ve also had to cope with outside concerns that the transaction could have been a convoluted scheme to inflate the value of the pair’s investment portfolio.

That’s because Venkateswaran and Sundaresan have invested heavily in a new form of digital collectible with the unwieldy name of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Based on cryptocurrency technology known as the blockchain, these digital items function as exclusive certificates of authenticity, making it possible to turn easily copied digital files into unique collectibles — sometimes ones worth tens of millions of dollars.

The Beeple sale broke a record for the most expensive NFT ever sold and kick-started a global conversation about NFTs, their value and whether they are a lasting addition to the digital landscape. But the eye-popping sum involved drew global headlines and some suspicions that it could have been engineered for the publicity that drew more attention to NFTs, which could boost the value of the pair’s existing holdings.

The involvement of Christie’s, a centuries-old auction house, should be sufficient to reassure skeptics, Venkateswaran said in a call from his home in southern India. “I think the bigger problem here is that people thought this would be impossible.”

That’s certainly the case with Beeple himself, who in real life is a digital artist named Mike Winkelmann. “This whole NFT thing was not something I saw coming, at all,” he said. During the auction, the artist was in his living room near Charleston, South Carolina, surrounded by family and a video crew, and said it felt like a “bomb went off in the room” as the bids quickly rose. Another bidder and cryptocurrency entrepreneur, Justin Sun, lost in the final seconds after the bids exceeded his previously set maximum.

The NFT market was already taking off, with transactions last year quadrupling to $250 million, according to a report by NonFungible.com, a website that tracks the market. The Beeple sale turbocharged that growth and helped transform NFTs from niche tokens mainly appealing to cryptocurrency nerds to a new type of digital asset that’s drawn mainstream attention from the art world, the music industry, sports and speculators.

Not to be outdone, auction house rival Sotheby’s plans its own NFT sale, collaborating with the pseudonymous digital artist Pak in a sale next month.

Winkelmann began seeing the possibilities of NFTs for digital artists back in October when he tested the waters with an initial “drop” of his work. “People can actually own my art and collect it and, you know, pay good money,” he said in an interview this week.

It was after another sale late last year that he reached out to one of the losing bidders, Sundaresan, who uses the pseudonym Metakovan.

The art world was not a common talking point for Sundaresan and Venkateswaran when they first met in 2013 while working at The Hindu, a daily newspaper in Chennai, India. Sundaresan was a 20-something technology consultant; Venkateswaran was a journalist.

Both had humble upbringings. Sundaresan couldn’t afford a laptop when he was learning to code, so he’d walk around with a flash drive and borrow his friends’ laptops, Venkateswaran said.

But by 2020, Sundaresan, now living in Singapore, had made himself rich on a series of cryptocurrency ventures and investments. With Sundaresan’s money and Venkateswaran’s analytical eye, they began exploring NFTs with a new fund called Metapurse.

Sundaresan, who declined to be interviewed this week, created the persona Metakovan as a reference to his affection for virtual worlds known as the “metaverse.” The name means “King of Meta” in the Tamil language. Venkateswaran, who lives in Chennai with his wife and two kids, calls himself Twobadour. In a blog post last week the pair revealed their true identities and sought to dispel some of the mystery about their motivations.

“The point was to show Indians and people of color that they too could be patrons, that crypto was an equalizing power between the West and the Rest, and that the global south was rising,” they wrote.

It was in December that the Metapurse pair made their first big Beeple investment, buying 20 of his works for $2.2 million and gifting the artist with 2% of their new fund of NFT tokens, called B20s, that were designed to allow large groups of people to share ownership of an art piece.

That was the precursor to March’s historic sale of Beeple’s “Everydays: the First 5000 Days,” a digital file combining works Beeple had created each day from May 2007 to the beginning of this year. Many of them are grotesque and cartoonish takes on what was happening in U.S. politics or pop culture. The works also follow Beeple’s rise from a little-known graphic designer to an internet personality with a big Instagram following and multimedia projects with pop stars like Nicki Minaj and Justin Bieber.

“If you look at each picture at face value, obviously not all of them are going to stand the test of time,” Venkateswaran said. “Not all 5,000 are masterpieces. That was never the argument. Not everything that Beeple puts out is gold. We don’t worship at his feet. That’s not what we were about. This is more about the combined narrative of what he represents.”

The purchase has shocked art and finance worlds, but in some ways was fairly conventional, said New York art lawyer Leila Amineddoleh.

“A lot of the art market is saying, ‘I own something unique, it’s scarce, I own it, look at me.’ This is not that different,” she said. “The whole value of an NFT is being able to say this is an original. You’re buying the bragging rights to say, ‘I own the token.’ But really, anyone can access the art.”

Amineddoleh said the blockchain technology that underpins NFTs and other cryptocurrency markets also provides a transparent ledger to record art transactions. But for skeptics of the largely unregulated world of cryptocurrency, the sale has invited added scrutiny.

Christie’s declined to comment on the details of the sale’s financial structure except to say that the total amount was paid in a cryptocurrency known as Ether, marking Christie’s first time accepting cryptocurrency as payment.

“There is obviously a money trail and Christie’s had a set of exchanges that they were willing to work with, that they vetted and approved,” Venkateswaran said. “And those are the exchanges that were used to make the payment. So Christie’s has all the information.”

Cryptocurrency exchanges can be prone to manipulative behavior, according to research co-authored by Friedhelm Victor of the Technical University of Berlin. But that typically involves investors who buy and sell the same assets repeatedly to create a fake sense of busy trading activity.

Such back-and-forth trading hasn’t yet become common with NFTs, in part because they typically carry higher fees, Victor said. “Crazy speculation is not unusual,” he said of the Beeple sale. “This is a really smart strategy to get some more attention to this whole space.”

That has most definitely happened. But Venkateswaran said the attention doesn’t mean he and Sundaresan are making a big profit off the tokens. “The math doesn’t add up,” he said.

—-

O’Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island and Chan reported from London.

US gives $15 million to Palestinians to deal with COVID-19

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The United States said Thursday it is giving $15 million to vulnerable Palestinian communities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic, a sharp reversal from the Trump administration which cut off almost all aid to the Palestinians.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield made the announcement at the U.N. Security Council’s monthly Mideast meeting, saying the money from the U.S. Agency for International Development will support Catholic Relief Services’ “COVID-19 response efforts in health care facilities and for vulnerable families in the West Bank and Gaza.”

In addition, she said, the funds will support emergency food aid to communities in need as a result of the pandemic.

“This urgent, necessary aid is one piece of our renewed commitment to the Palestinian people,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “The aid will help Palestinians in dire need, which will bring more stability and security to both Israelis and Palestinians alike.”

Under former U.S. President Donald Trump, the U.S. provided unprecedented support to Israel, recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv, breaking relations and slashing financial assistance for the Palestinians. The Trump administration also reversed course on the illegitimacy of Israeli settlements on land claimed by the Palestinians. It did restore about $1 million during the pandemic last year.

Soon after U.S. President Joe Biden was inaugurated on Jan. 20, his administration announced that it was restoring relations with the Palestinians and renewing aid to Palestinian refugees, a reversal of Trump’s cutoff and a key element of its new support for a two-state solution.

Thomas-Greenfield said the $15 million in aid is “consistent with our interests and our values, and it aligns with our efforts to stamp our the pandemic and food insecurity worldwide.”

Tor Wennesland, the U.N. Mideast envoy, told the Security Council that “COVID-19 continues to have a devastating effect on Palestinians.”

“In addition to the brutal impact on public health, the recurrent lockdowns, school closures, and reduction of commercial activity have severely undermined living conditions,” he said.

Last Sunday, the Palestinian Health Ministry began administering the first of 61,400 doses of coronavirus vaccines it received from the U.N. World Health Organization’s COVAX initiative to provide vaccines to developing countries. It was a boost to the West Bank where the Palestinian Authority had only secured 10,000 doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine and 2,000 shots from Israel for the roughly 3 million Palestinians living in the West Bank.

By contrast, Gaza, which has been under Israeli-Egyptian blockade since Hamas took control of the area in 2007, had received more than 80,000 vaccines, mostly Russian, from a rival of President Mahmoud Abbas based in the United Arab Emirates.

U.N. officials and human rights groups have said Israel is an occupying power with a responsibility for vaccinating the Palestinian population. Israel says that under interim peace accords, it has no such responsibility. But in recent weeks, it has inoculated over 100,000 Palestinian laborers in the West Bank who have permits to work inside Israel and its West Bank settlements.

Wennesland said the U.N. and its partners will continue to support Palestinian vaccination efforts, expressed appreciation for Israel’s essential role in deliveries, and urged support for the Palestinian COVID-19 response.

U.S. envoy Thomas-Greenfield announced the $15 million contribution as Israel awaits the final results from Tuesday’s fourth parliamentary elections in two years. It was widely seen as a referendum on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fitness to rule while under indictment. His prospects for victory moved out of reach Thursday as the complete vote count showed Netanyahu and his right-wing allies falling short of a parliamentary majority. His opponents also did not assemble a majority of the 120-seat Knesset.

The U.S. announcement Thursday also follows a virtual meeting Tuesday of the so-called Quartet of Mideast mediators – the U.S., U.N., Russia and the European Union – to discuss relaunching their long-stalled effort to get Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate a two-state solution to their decades-old conflict.

A brief statement from the four Mideast mediators, known as the Quartet, said envoys discussed returning “to meaningful negotiations that will lead to a two-state solution, including tangible steps to advance freedom, security and prosperity for Palestinians and Israelis, which is important in its own right.”

There have been no substantive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians since 2014, and the two sides are fiercely divided over the core issues of the conflict.

Thomas-Greenfield made no mention of a Quartet meeting but reiterated Biden’s support for a two-state solution and said “the United States looks forward to continuing its work with Israel, the Palestinians, and the international community to achieve a long-sought peace in the Middle East.”

California to expand vaccine eligibility to anyone over 16

SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — California will start vaccinating anyone 16 and over against the coronavirus starting in three weeks, expanding eligibility to the shots along with a host of other states as a long-awaited boost in vaccine supplies is in sight.

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that the nation’s most populous state would start vaccinating anyone 50 and over in a week and the population more broadly — except those under 16, for whom vaccines have not yet been authorized — on April 15.

The decision comes as California, which was initially slow to roll out the vaccines but has ramped up inoculations in recent weeks, expects to receive 2.5 million doses a week in the first half of the month and more than 3 million a week in the second, a big jump from the roughly 1.8 million doses a week currently.

“In just a few weeks, there’ll be no rules, no limitations, as it relates to the ability to get a vaccine administered,” Newsom said at a news conference in Orange County. “This state is going to come roaring back.”

The move comes as some California counties have veered away from the state’s eligibility criteria by opening up the shots for people with a broader range of medical conditions than those required in most places, and in some cases, at younger ages. It also comes as governors across the country have expanded eligibility for the vaccine as supplies have increased. Earlier this month, Alaska opened eligibility to any resident over 16. Florida said Thursday it will open eligibility to anyone 18 and over on April 5, while Texas will start inoculating all adults next week.

President Joe Biden’s administration wants all states to make every adult eligible for the vaccine by May 1.

Even with the expansion, it will take several months for willing Californians to be vaccinated, state officials said.

Some county officials were eager to vaccinate more people while others said they were concerned there wouldn’t be enough doses to keep up with rising demand. In Southern California’s Riverside County, more appointments have been available recently due to the boost in vaccine supplies. The county opened up 30,000 appointments this week, far more than previously weeks when slots hovered in the low 20,000s, said Jose Arballo, a spokesman for the county’s health agency.

“Any time we can vaccinate more people, that’s a good thing,” Arballo said. “We believe we’ll have the supply needed to handle any increase in eligibility.”

But while Kern County health officials welcomed the expansion, they also urged residents who qualify now to sign up for their shots “as we are unsure what the availability of vaccination appointments will look like once these additional eligibility groups are opened.” Santa Clara County Health Officer Dr. Marty Fenstersheib said his county has been told it will get 58,000 doses next week, but the state will begin allowing about 400,000 more people between the ages of 50 and 64 in the county to sign up, in addition to the current backlog.

“That 58,000 doses doesn’t go very far. We have the capacity to administer over 200,000 doses,” he said. “We don’t have the vaccine and we are concerned, beginning next week when we add that additional 400,000.”

California so far has administered more than 15 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine. Initially, more affluent residents who could afford to spend hours scouring complicated web portals were snagging more appointment slots, prompting public health officials to take measures aimed at getting more of the doses to underserved communities where the virus has hit the hardest.

In recent weeks, the state of 40 million people has seen coronavirus infections plummet following a winter surge. That has paved the way for more businesses to reopen and more schools to bring back in-person instruction, and state public health officials have said more activity can resume as vaccinations continue to rise in the poorest communities.

Newsom said Thursday the state will continue to target underserved communities by working with labor groups to reach essential workers and letting health providers target vaccinations by ZIP code.

Since California opened eligibility earlier this month to people with developmental disabilities and those with serious health conditions such as cancer, some residents said they’ve seen people without those conditions get in line for a shot, too, knowing that vaccination sites are operating on an “honor system” and won’t require medical documentation.

Dr. Louise Aronson, a leading geriatrician at University of California, San Francisco and member of the governor’s vaccine drafting guidelines committee, said in a recent interview that she knows of too many people who have received the vaccine who don’t qualify. She said she has heard of people claiming eligible occupations at pharmacies that don’t verify and of a worker at a vaccination site in the East San Francisco Bay Area holding back doses for friends.

Part of the problem has been the lack of uniformity between counties, which makes people believe the standards are arbitrary, she said. Some counties have already allowed residents 50 and up to get shots while San Diego County has expanded the range of qualifying conditions to include moderate to severe asthma and being overweight.

“There are a whole lot of cheaters, and this is just my anecdotal experience,” Aronson said.

Eyal Oren, associate professor of epidemiology at San Diego State University, said there have been many changes in the vaccination system as supplies have increased and he believes the doses are finally there to expand eligibility.

“We’re in this race of trying to get more people immunity,” he said.

___

Associated Press writers Janie Har, Juliet Williams and Jocelyn Gecker in San Francisco contributed to this report.

McIlroy outlines new coaching arrangement with Cowen

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Rory McIlroy is turning to noted English swing coach Pete Cowen to shore up issues at the top of his swing without any kind of an overhaul, and he hopes to pick up other “little nuggets” that can only help.

McIlroy spoke for the first time Thursday about his decision to bring Cowen into his stable, adding that longtime coach Michael Bannon will still be involved.

One reason for the change is travel. McIlroy said he hasn’t been able to see his coach from Northern Ireland as frequently since the COVID-19 pandemic and continuity has been lacking.

“Every time we saw each other it was almost like we were trying to do too much,” McIlroy said. “Where I think Pete is out on tour enough to sort of give me maybe feels that I can play with and then stuff that I can work on the range.

“As everyone knows, it’s so hard to go out on the golf course and think so much about your golf swing,” he said. “You need to be able to let that go and just be able to play shots. But if you have a couple little feels in there, it can help, and that’s sort of the reason that I’ve went down this road.”

McIlroy has not won since the HSBC Champions in Shanghai in the fall of 2019, though he was playing as well as anyone up until the pandemic shut down golf. Since the return in June, he has had only six top 10s in 20 starts worldwide as his world ranking has gone from No. 1 to No. 11.

The Dell Technologies Match Play is his final event before he goes to the Masters with another shot at completing the career Grand Slam. McIlroy stayed alive at Austin Country Club with a 4-and-3 win over Lanto Griffin. He would need to win Friday and have Griffin beat Ian Poulter for any chance of advancing to the weekend.

But this is more about the long haul.

McIlroy emphasized that he is not starting anything new with Cowen, whom he has known since he was 13.

“He’s seen me grow up swinging the golf club,” McIlroy said. “With what I’m struggling with in my swing at the minute, I think his coaching philosophy puts an emphasis on that in terms of getting structure in the right arm and getting that supported at the top, and I just felt like he maybe had some ideas and had maybe a little more knowledge on that part of the golf swing than what I currently had.”

McIlroy said Cowen also is renowned for his work on the short game.

“I think just picking up those little nuggets from him is only going to help in the long run,” he said.

McIlroy said the relationship and the agreement he has with Bannon is “still the same.”

McIlroy dug himself a hole at the Match Play with a 6-and-5 loss to Poulter in the opening round, his worst loss in this event in 10 years. He went through 11 bags of balls on the practice range after his loss.

“It’s a very difficult game at times, and I feel like it’s testing me a little more than it has done in the last few years,” McIlroy said. “I feel the only way to get through it is to put your head down and work on the right things. … There’s going to be some good days, there’s going to be some bad, but I feel like I’m on the right path.”

Archives for March 2021

Footer