Jumat, 08 November 2019

Hong Kong student who fell from parking deck during protests dies, sparking more demonstrations - Fox News

A Hong Kong student who fell and sustained head injuries during protests with police died on Friday, triggering impromptu demonstrations and vigils from pro-democracy activists, while also setting the stage for additional protests throughout the weekend.

Alex Chow, 22, a computer science undergraduate from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, fell from a ledge of a car park as police attempted to clear the area on Monday morning, according to the BBC.

The outlet reported he was attempting to flee the tear-gassed area.

HONG KONG LAWMAKER WITH PRO-BEIJING VIEWS STABBED BY 'FAKE SUPPORTER'

He was later found unconscious in a pool of blood inside the car park, according to Al Jazeera. Protesters believe the tear gas delayed medical personnel from attending to his injuries, the outlet reported.

Police said they used the tear gas to disperse protesters who had been hurling objects from the building. They denied any wrongdoing, saying their actions were justified.

Alex Chow of the Umbrella movement of Hong Kong listens to a journalist's question during an interview in London, Britain July 24, 2017. Picture taken July 24, 2017. REUTERS/Peter Nicholls - RC1238207240

Chow had been in a coma since Monday until medical personnel confirmed his death early on Friday, according to the hospital where he was being treated.

He allegedly died of cardiac arrest.

Students were seen gathering on the second floor of the car park. They were also seen on the campus piazza singing the song "Amazing Grace," while placing candles and flowers throughout the area to honor his memory.

"Light a candle, may there be light, may there be warmth, may you not lost in darkness, may you not wither in coldness," one woman wrote on Twitter.

MAN SUBDUED AFTER BITING OFF EAR OF PRO-DEMOCRACY POLITICIAN, STABBING FOUR IN HONG KONG MALL

It's believed that his death is expected to escalate the tensions between protesters and police in Hong Kong, according to the outlet. Joshua Wong, a pro-democracy campaigner, announced on Twitter that "the government must pay the price."

“Today we mourn the loss of a freedom fighter in Hong Kong," he said on Twitter. “We will not leave anyone behind – what we start together, we finish together. Given the losses suffered by Hong Kong society in the past month, the government must pay the price.”

On Friday afternoon, protesters were seen blocking roads and more vigils are planned for later in the evening, according to the BBC. A Starbucks near the school was raided by students who were reportedly grieving Chow's passing.

Students who marched on campus were heard shouting "Hindering rescuers is attempted murder!" according to the Hong Kong Free Press.

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Protests began in June over a shelved plan to allow extraditions to mainland China, but have morphed into a movement seeking other demands, including direct elections for Hong Kong's leaders, as well as an inquiry into police conduct. Many also believe China is slowly interfering with the freedoms guaranteed to Hong Kong when the British colony went back to Chinese control in 1997.

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2019-11-08 14:27:34Z
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Hong Kong student who fell from parking deck during protests dies, sparking more demonstrations - Fox News

The outlet reported he was attempting to flee the tear-gassed area.

HONG KONG LAWMAKER WITH PRO-BEIJING VIEWS STABBED BY 'FAKE SUPPORTER'

Police said they used the tear gas to disperse protesters who had been hurling objects from the building. They denied any wrongdoing, saying their actions were justified.

Chow had been in a coma since Monday until medical personnel confirmed his death early on Friday, according to the hospital where he was being treated.

He allegedly died of cardiac arrest.

"Light a candle, may there be light, may there be warmth, may you not lost in darkness, may you not wither in coldness," one woman wrote on Twitter.

MAN SUBDUED AFTER BITING OFF EAR OF PRO-DEMOCRACY POLITICIAN, STABBING FOUR IN HONG KONG MALL

Students who marched on campus were heard shouting "Hindering rescuers is attempted murder!" according to the Hong Kong Free Press.

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2019-11-08 14:14:29Z
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The mistake that toppled the Berlin Wall - Vox

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mn4VDwaV-oo

2019-11-08 13:00:05Z
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David Hasselhoff Is Still Big In Germany 30 Years After His Berlin Wall Show - NPR

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David Hasselhoff performs during a concert in Berlin on Oct. 3 — Germany Unity Day. In 1989, his song "Looking for Freedom" was the anthem to many Germans' newfound freedom. Frank Hoensch/Getty Images hide caption

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Frank Hoensch/Getty Images

Among pop culture's great mysteries: How exactly did David Hasselhoff become a rock 'n' roll God in Germany?

The 67-year-old star of decades-old television series Knight Rider and Baywatch doesn't skip a beat when asked the question.

"It all started with a girl named Nikki," Hasselhoff said during a recent interview with NPR in Berlin, where he was on a concert tour of Germany.

It was 1985. Hasselhoff's agent told him that Nikki had won a contest in a magazine and her prize was lunch with Hasselhoff at his home in Southern California. He remembers groaning, not wanting to go through with it. "I said [to the agent], 'I'm going through my Ernest Hemingway period.' Knight Rider was canceled; I lost my marriage. I'm sitting here staring out the window going, 'What am I going to do next?' " he said.

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David Hasselhoff hovers in the cage of a hoisting crane above the Berlin Wall and sings "Looking for Freedom" on Dec. 31, 1989. Wöstmann/picture alliance via Getty Images hide caption

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Wöstmann/picture alliance via Getty Images

Darkening his Hemingway period were tepid U.S. sales of his debut rock album earlier that year. Hasselhoff needed a pick-me-up. So when Nikki ultimately came knocking, he reluctantly let her in. "And she went, 'Oh, it's very nice to meet you. Your album, Night Rocker, is No. 1 in my country,' " Hasselhoff recalled her saying. "I went, 'Where's your country?' And she said, 'Austria.' I said, 'Oh wow! Where is Austria?' "

Nikki showed him on a world map, and Hasselhoff went straight to work. He called the magazine that had given her the prize and asked it to suggest a concert promoter.

Within weeks, Hasselhoff was selling out concerts in Austria, and soon his album was topping the pop music charts in Germany and Switzerland too. But it was the title track of another Hasselhoff album, Looking for Freedom, a few years later that cemented his magnetic appeal to young Germans.

The song, which was based on an older German favorite, "Auf Der Strasse Nach Süden," begins with Hasselhoff crooning:

"One morning in June / some 20 years ago / I was born a rich man's son / I had everything / that money could buy / but freedom I had none."

The drums kick in and, with it, the chorus:

"I've been looking for freedom / I've been looking so long / I've been looking for freedom / still the search goes on."

The album was released in 1989, a pivotal year for the spread of democracy through Europe: In June of that year, Poland held its first free elections; in November, the Berlin Wall fell. Communist East Germany was about to crumble. Among Germans, Looking for Freedom was the anthem to their newfound freedom.

Hasselhoff's album went triple platinum in Europe. At the time, it seemed like everyone in Germany knew the title track.

"And I didn't know if they were singing it just for fun or whatever, but later on I found out that they were singing it, really singing it, like 'Amazing Grace,' " he recalled. "That was their song."

Soon after the Berlin Wall fell, Germany's Silvester Show — similar to The Dick Clark Show in the U.S. — invited Hasselhoff to sing "Looking for Freedom" on its 1989 New Year's Eve special, planned to be filmed inside a hotel. "I said, 'No. Only if I can sing on the Berlin Wall,' " Hasselhoff said.

He now admits this was a ridiculous request, but the German show agreed to it. On New Year's Eve of 1989, Hasselhoff sang his anthem for freedom while hoisted by a crane above the Berlin Wall to an estimated half a million Berliners.

"I grew up with the idea that he was responsible for breaking down the wall," remembers 36-year-old fan Thomas Erdmann.

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Thomas Erdmann (center) poses with friends before attending David Hasselhoff's concert in Berlin on Oct. 3. Erdmann spent hours constructing a replica of the jacket his boyhood hero wore while singing at the Berlin Wall in 1989. Erdmann, who was raised in East Berlin, believed that Hasselhoff was responsible for the fall of the wall. Rob Schmitz/NPR hide caption

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Rob Schmitz/NPR

Erdmann was 6 when the wall fell, too young to understand that his favorite TV star who drove a talking car was not responsible for the fall of communism in his country.

Thirty years later, on Oct. 3, German Unity Day, Erdmann was waiting to see his boyhood hero in concert at an arena in Berlin. He was dressed in a black leather jacket that had blinking lights sewn onto it — a replica of what Hasselhoff wore for his memorable 1989 New Year Eve's appearance in Berlin. Erdmann said he spent 10 hours sewing on the lights the night before. For him, Hasselhoff conjures up memories of growing up in East Berlin, a block away from a wall that separated him and his friends from the freedoms of the West. "I remember this one drain hole in the wall, and we used to look through that drain hole to see the West," Erdmann remembered.

At this show, freedom was no longer a fleeting vision through a drain hole. Instead, freedom was right in front of thousands of screaming fans, singing along to an assortment of covers of songs by bands like Whitesnake, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Neil Diamond while shouting "Freedom!" repeatedly during guitar solos.

Hasselhoff could not seem to get enough during his three-hour concert. "Thirty years of freedom!" he yelled to his fans after emerging from a hydraulic stage in the middle of the arena. "Hello, Berlin! Ich bin ein Berliner!" he said — meaning "I'm a Berliner," an echo of President John F. Kennedy's famous 1963 speech.

At times during the marathon performance, Hasselhoff appeared more excited about the 30thanniversary of the fall of the wall than the assembled Berliners themselves, who have moved on since then.

But in the end, The Hoff knows his audience. His last song of the encore was, predictably, "Looking for Freedom," and it brought all audience members to their feet, clapping and singing, happy that Hasselhoff was still there to remind them that, in the words of his song, "the search goes on."

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https://www.npr.org/2019/11/08/777155039/david-hasselhoff-is-still-big-in-germany-30-years-after-his-berlin-wall-show

2019-11-08 10:02:00Z
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Families mourn victims killed in Mexico, say it’s like ‘Afghanistan 100 miles from US border’ - Fox News

Outraged family members of the nine Americans killed in a drug cartel ambush in Mexico Monday reportedly urged the country's leaders to accept President Trump’s offer to help destroy the cartels as the first funerals were held Thursday.

“We’re living like we’re in Afghanistan, 100 miles from the U.S. border,” Rosa LeBaron, who lost cousins, nieces and nephews in the attack, said, according to Reuters.

Three women and six children were gunned down this week when members of the Juarez Cartel attacked their convoy of three SUVs in Northern Mexico about 70 miles south of Douglas, Ariz. The families were on their way to see relatives in the U.S.

Investigators said the families may have been mistaken for a rival gang.

“They are as bad or worse than ISIS. ISIS have an ideology,” LeBaron said of the cartels. “These sicarios (hitmen), why are they doing it? Out of greed and pure evil," Reuters reported.

MEXICO'S LOPEZ OBRADOR DOUBLES DOWN ON ‘HUGS, NOT BULLETS’ POLICY AMID MOUNTING CRITICISM

The nine victims were members of three dual-citizen families that lived in a Mormon community in the Sonora State.

On Tuesday, Trump tweeted that it was time for Mexico and the United States to “wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them off the face of the earth.”

MEXICAN MASSACRE SUSPECT ARRESTED AT BORDER NOT TIED TO ATTACK

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador thanked Trump but said Mexico would handle the cartels with "independence and sovereignty."

“It was lamentable, painful because children died, but do we want to resolve the problem the same way (as previous administrations)? By declaring war?” he said after the attacks. “We will not continue with the same and we will show that our proposal works, despite it not being easy. We are confident that we will achieve good results.”

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Since the attacks, López Obrador has doubled down on his government's non-violent policy of “hugs not bullets” that aims to stamp out the cartels by addressing symptoms like access to education, poverty and unemployment.

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2019-11-08 10:50:47Z
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Disney says Hong Kong protests could wipe out $275 million in theme park profit - CNN

Disney (DIS) reported strong earnings on Thursday, but flagged mounting losses at its theme park in Hong Kong, where protests have gripped the city for months and walloped its tourism industry.

If the current trends continue, operating income at Hong Kong Disneyland could fall by $275 million in Disney's current fiscal year, which ends in September 2020, the company's chief financial officer Christine McCarthy said during an earnings call.

Hong Kong's first recession in a decade could be even worse than feared

The local theme park was a drag on international business last quarter, when operating income at Hong Kong Disneyland fell $55 million, offsetting growth at parks in Paris and Shanghai. McCarthy warned profit could fall by $80 million in the current quarter.

As a whole, Disney's parks unit — which it breaks out in its earnings report as parks, experiences and products — brought in $1.4 billion in operating income for the fourth quarter, a 17% increase over the same time last year.

Disney's warning underscores the gloomy picture for Hong Kong's economy. Official data released last week confirmed what many had feared: The city has plunged into recession, after months of protests have forced shops to close, paralyzed public transportation and scared off tourists.

Visitors to Hong Kong plummeted 37% in the third quarter, according to the city's financial secretary. Hotels were on average only two-thirds full, a drop of 28% compared to the same period a year earlier.

With no immediate resolution to the city's political crisis in the cards, economists say Hong Kong's first recession in a decade could extend into the new year.

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https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/08/business/hong-kong-protests-disney/index.html

2019-11-08 09:45:00Z
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Germany Has Been Unified for 30 Years. Its Identity Still Is Not. - The New York Times

Germany Has Been Unified for 30 Years. Its Identity Still Is Not.

East Germans, bio-Germans, passport Germans: In an increasingly diverse country, the legacy of a divided history has left many feeling like strangers in their own land.

Photographs by

BERLIN — Abenaa Adomako remembers the night the Berlin Wall fell. Joyous and curious like so many of her fellow West Germans, she had gone to the city center to greet East Germans who were pouring across the border for a first taste of freedom.

“Welcome,” she beamed at a disoriented-looking couple in the crowd, offering them sparkling wine.

But they would not take it.

“They spat at me and called me names,” recalled Ms. Adomako, whose family has been in Germany since the 1890s. “They were the foreigners in my country. But to them, as a black woman, I was the foreigner.’’

Three decades later, as Germans mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Nov. 9, the question of what makes a German — who belongs and who does not — is as unsettled as ever.

The integration of East and West has in many ways been an unabashed success. Germany is an economic and political powerhouse, its reunification central to its dominant place in Europe.

But while unification fixed German borders for the first time in the country’s history, it did little to settle the neuralgic issue of German identity. Thirty years later, it seems, it has even exacerbated it.

Ethnic hatred and violence are on the rise. A far-right party thrives in the former East. Ms. Adomako says she is still afraid to go there. But she is not the only one who feels like a stranger in her own land.

Germany’s current effort to integrate more than a million asylum seekers welcomed by Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015 is just the most immediate challenge. It is compounded by past failures in a country that opened a regular path to citizenship for the children of immigrants only in 2000.

In the decades since the wall fell, Germany’s immigrant population has become the second largest in the world, behind the United States. One in four people now living in Germany has an immigrant background.

But that is not the story Germans have been telling themselves.

Two decades after the country stopped defining citizenship exclusively by ancestral bloodline, the far right and others have started distinguishing between “passport Germans” and “bio-Germans.”

The descendants of Turkish guest workers who arrived after World War II still struggle for acceptance. Jews, most of whom arrived from the former Soviet Union, are wary after a synagogue attack in the eastern city of Halle last month shocked the country that had made ‘‘Never Again’’ a pillar of its postwar identity.

Not least, many East Germans feel like second-class citizens after a reunification that Dr. Hans-Joachim Maaz, a psychoanalyst in the eastern city of Halle, calls a “cultural takeover.”

Dr. Hans-Joachim Maaz outside a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle where two people were killed in an attack last month.

Across the former Iron Curtain, a new eastern identity is taking root, undermining the joyful narrative that dominated the reunification story on past anniversaries.

“It’s an existential moment for the country,” said Yury Kharchenko, a Berlin-based artist who defiantly identifies as a German Jew despite — and because of — the armed guards outside his son’s nursery in Berlin. “Everyone is searching for their identity.”’

Overcoming the past, especially the Nazi ideology that gave rise to the Holocaust, has been a guiding precept of German identity since World War II. In West and East alike, the ambition was to create a different, better Germany.

The West resolved to become a model liberal democracy, atoning for Nazi crimes and subjugating national interests to those of a post-nationalist Europe.

The East defined itself in the tradition of communists who had resisted fascism, giving rise to a state doctrine of remembrance that effectively exculpated it from wartime atrocities.

Behind the wall, the East was frozen in time, a largely homogeneous white country where nationalism was allowed to live on.

“Under the lid of antifascism, the old nationalism partly survived,” said Volkhard Knigge, a historian and director of the memorial at the former Buchenwald concentration camp. “The lid came off in 1989.”

That is one reason nationalist populism thrives more openly in the former East. The other is that easterners have been rebelling against a western narrative that has disempowered them.

Dr. Maaz, like many of his patients, now identifies as East German, something he never did under Communism.

The West, he said, had misunderstood 1989. It had overlooked the role national identity played in the East’s peaceful revolution against Soviet rule.

“We marched, we defeated communism, but it all became a victory of the West,” he said.

“We were never given the power to tell our version of the story,” he added. “You can’t even say that you had a happy childhood without breaking a taboo.”

That eats away at people, he said.

The bitterness is all the greater as easterners were complicit in their own subjugation, he said. “The western prejudice was: We are better. The eastern prejudice was: We are not as good,” he said. “Now easterners are saying: We are different.”

The far-right Alternative for Germany has successfully tapped into that feeling, styling itself as an eastern identity party and fueling resentments — not least toward migrants, who they say threaten German identity.

More than nine in 10 migrants live in the former West. But it is in the former East that antimigrant sentiment is strongest. Dr. Maaz says that has less to do with immigration than mass emigration in the years following 1989.

Some regions lost two generations. “There is demographic anxiety and that has sharpened the sense of a threat to identity,” he said.

Ms. Adomako, who grew up in West Germany, recalled the wave of antimigrant attacks in the years after the fall of the wall. She is still afraid to travel in the East, which remains largely white.

For the first part of her life, the West, too, had been overwhelmingly white. When she was born in the 1960s, she was the only black child in her West Berlin school.

By the time her daughter, Antonia, 20, finished high school last year, one in four of the students in her class were nonwhite.

But four generations after her great-grandfather came to Germany from Cameroon, then a German colony, Antonia still routinely gets asked: “Where are you from?”

“When I’m abroad, I feel German,” she said. “But when I’m in Germany, I don’t know.”

Ulrich Gerst, 36, a teacher in a multiethnic school who grew up in the wealthy southwest of Germany, tries hard to avoid asking that question.

In 2010, Mr. Gerst wrote a master’s thesis about how schools could help students develop their identity. He says he wants to see a Germany that celebrates hyphenated identities. Still, even he sometimes catches himself assuming women in head scarves are not German.

“These subconscious devices are still prevalent,’’ Mr. Gerst said.

For a long time, that discrimination was not merely subconscious, but structural.

Even as Germany became a major immigration country, no real path to citizenship was extended even to the children of immigrants born in the country.

After the fall of communism, the intrinsic racism of German citizenship law became impossible to ignore. Russian citizens with German ancestry who spoke no German were suddenly allowed passports, while second-generation Turks born and raised in Germany were not.

The change to the immigration law in 2000 opened parallel tracks to citizenship for those who were born in Germany or who had lived in the country for at least eight years.

As a child, Idil Baydar says she felt German. But that has changed. The 44-year-old daughter of a Turkish guest worker who arrived in the 1970s now describes herself as a “passport German foreigner.”

“The Germans have turned me into a migrant,” said Ms. Baydar, a comedian who has grown popular on YouTube by mocking Germany’s uneasy relationship with its largest immigrant group.

The final straw came last year when a verdict was reached in a series of 10 murders of mostly Turkish immigrants that had been blamed on other immigrants. In reality, they had been carried out over seven years by an underground neo-Nazi group shielded by Germany’s own intelligence service.

For many in Germany, the case became a byword for the failure of the postwar security apparatus to control far-right extremism. For Ms. Baydar, it took away the last shred of confidence that the country of her birth had her back.

Recently, she has been planning an “escape route,” possibly to Canada.

“My German friends tell me: ‘You’re overreacting,” she said. “I tell them: ‘If I had blue eyes and blond hair, I’d say the same.”

“And now they’re chasing foreigners on German streets,” she added, referring to far-right extremists attacking people who looked “foreign” in the eastern city of Chemnitz last year.

Chemnitz came to symbolize an emboldened far right. But it was not a singular event.

In June this year, a regional politician who had defended Germany’s refugee policy was shot dead on his front porch. Then in October, there was the attack in Halle on the synagogue, which narrowly escaped a massacre, though two were killed.

The Jewish community in Germany, which counts around 200,000 members, is nervous. As a Jew in Germany, said Mr. Kharchenko, the Berlin-based artist, “You’re inevitably asking yourself: Could it happen again?”

Understanding that it could is key to preventing it, said Mr. Knigge, the historian at the Buchenwald memorial. “That’s the most important lesson from German history,” he added.

The resurgence of pre-fascist ideology today worries him, he said. People crave a strong national identity, he noted, and the old West German recipe of deliberately tying it to humility — “being proud of not being proud” — has not satisfied that need.

It has also proved a difficult template for integrating newcomers. “We need to make the lessons of the Holocaust about human rights and the protection of minorities relevant to all minorities,” Mr. Knigge said.

Now, 30 years after the fall of Communism, Germany has another opportunity to try.

Ibrahim Kodaimi, a 52-year-old father of five, said he would never forget the smiling faces and hot food that greeted his family three years ago after their long, treacherous journey from Syria.

But his 20-year-old daughter Nahida said she felt excluded for wearing a head scarf.

And his 18-year-old son Omar said he had tried to make German friends in school, but had found them unresponsive. He said he spent time mostly with other immigrants during recess.

“It was like that,” Mr. Kodaimi interjected.

“It’s still like that,” Omar responded.

Even so, Omar is determined to make Germany accept him.

One of his proudest moments, he said, was when a German, after hearing him speak the language, asked if he had been born in Germany.

Adapting a phrase that Ms. Merkel used when the waves of migrants came to Germany, he said, “Ich schaffe das” — “I can do it.’’

John Eligon and Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.

Produced by Mona Boshnaq, Allison McCann and Gaia Tripoli.

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2019-11-08 09:36:17Z
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