Latest news with #Spanish-American
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Stillwater Veterans Memorial to undergo $200K expansion
The Stillwater Veterans Memorial committee is working on a $200,000 expansion that will add 500 pavers to the 1,500 engraved pavers already on site memorializing local veterans. 'It's not quite full, but we're planning this expansion now because, two years from now, we anticipate we will have filled up all the existing space,' said John Kraemer, the memorial committee's board chairman. The Stillwater City Council approved plans for the second phase of the expansion at the memorial, located at Third and Pine streets, earlier this year, and the committee is working to raise the necessary funds. The first expansion was done about 10 years ago, he said. The memorial, which includes a 53-foot steel spire and a Wall of Honor, is amid several parking lots across from the Washington County Historic Courthouse. The second phase of the expansion can be done because the city now has additional parking spaces available in an adjacent parking lot to the north of the site, Kraemer said. The Stillwater Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 2004, features a walkway from Pine Street that leads to a circular overlook area where the spire is located. The Wall of Honor includes the names of veterans from Stillwater area schools who died serving their country. The names date back to the Civil and Spanish-American wars. The memorial expansion will 'ensure an ongoing legacy of honor and respect for all who have served, are serving, and will serve,' said Kraemer, a retired financial planner from Stillwater and a Vietnam-era veteran of the Air National Guard's 148th Fighter Wing in Duluth. Plans also call for new walkways and additional landscaped areas, including shrubbery on both sides to separate the memorial site from the surrounding parking areas, he said. 'We're trying to make the memorial a little more intimate,' he said. 'We want to create a larger public space for gathering and contemplation.' The enhanced symmetry of the site will ensure all memorial pavers will have 'equal access,' he said. 'That's certainly our objective.' A fundraiser for the Stillwater Veterans Memorial will be held May 17 in downtown Stillwater. 'Dine Her, Dance Here' includes a full day of free music, including live bands and a DJ – all with a 1970s disco theme, said organizer Rachael Kozlowski. There also will be a white-line dining experience on the Chestnut Street Plaza near the Stillwater Lift Bridge; tickets are $129 per person. Former Lakeland contract employee given probation for theft from city St. Croix Valley Pottery Tour opens Friday at seven different studios AED installed at Stillwater field where teen nearly died during football practice Stillwater officials sign off on plans for new $400M Lakeview Hospital As temps climb in May, some local splash pads will open early (but not in St. Paul) The price of the dinner includes passed appetizers, salad, bread, dual entrée, dessert, two raffle tickets, two drink tickets and gratuity, Kozlowski said. Drinks from Lift Bridge Brewing, Domacin Wine Bar and Proper Bartender, will be served. Tickets for VIP tables that will seat eight people also are being sold; those include preferred seating, charcuterie board, two bottles of wine, plus an additional raffle ticket and drink ticket per guest. Reservations are encouraged as seating is limited; the reservation deadline is Sunday. For more information, look for 'Dine Here Dance Here' on Facebook.
Toronto Star
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Toronto Star
Martha Stewart raves about Toronto culinary scene on ‘The Kelly Clarkson Show'
The longtime television personality has been promoting her latest cooking show, 'Yes, Chef!' alongside co-host Spanish-American chef José Andrés, which premiered on Monday. The series was shot in Toronto and follows 12 chefs as they compete in high-stakes culinary challenges for a cash prize.
Yahoo
20-04-2025
- Yahoo
Surfer who died at NYC beach got caught in deadly jetty residents begged officials to remove for years
An award-winning filmmaker drowned at Jacob Riis Park in Queens last week after his surfboard apparently got tangled in a decrepit wooden jetty, a deadly obstruction residents have begged the federal government to remove for years. Sebastián Lasaosa Rogers, 35, of Crown Heights in Brooklyn, drowned on April 12 while surfing near the federally-owned park's eastern shoreline at Bay 1, police sources said. The area is a longtime hotspot for queer sunbathers that is now plagued by erosion rapidly washing away the beach. The dilapidated, 70-plus-year-old jetties in the area are routinely submerged under water at high tide, so it's unclear if Rogers was trying to navigate them or didn't see them. His lifeless body was pulled ashore by local beachgoers who spotted a surfboard 'tombstoning,' with half of it sticking upright out of the water. They unsuccessfully tried to revive Rogers. Riis Park has been the scene of at least three teen drownings when lifeguards weren't present during the past two years, including two who died last June at Bay 1, according to the Rockaway Times. Rockaways residents and a councilwoman representing nearby beachfront communities told The Post they've been trying to get the National Park Service or US Army Corps of Engineers to remove the jetties for years, but the pleas have fallen on deaf ears. Instead, they said they've been repeatedly told the issue needs further studying. 'These agencies have continued to drag their feet on this, and now we have a tragedy on our hands,' said Council Minority Leader Joann Ariola (R-Queens). 'We should not have to wait for a disaster to strike before changes are made.' 'The reality is that these jetties are killing people,' said an avid surfer and longtime resident of Neponsit, which borders Riis' Bay 1. Rogers would routinely come to Rockaway to surf over the past decade and 'had a deep love and appreciation of the ocean,' recalled his friend and fellow surfer Chris Westcott on Facebook. 'Sebastian was a talented cinematographer, human rights activist, and total sweetheart who put everyone around him at ease with his presence,' he said. 'I remember the way his eyes lit up in and around the water.' Rogers' films include the 2021 documentary 'The Art of Making It,' which follows a group of rising artists and won an Audience Award at the SXSW festival. The Spanish-American cinematographer recently directed 'Freeing Juanita,' a documentary that premiered in December and follows a Guatemalan family's thousand-mile journey to Mexico to help free a loved one unjustly imprisoned for a crime she didn't commit. Both Ariola and members of the Neponsit Property Owners Association said the park service has its priorities backwards considering the agency allowed the city to site a notorious 'tent city' housing 2,000 migrants from November 2023 through January at nearby Floyd Bennet Field in Brooklyn — despite the federal parkland being in a high-risk flood zone. Riis' beaches, which stretch over a mile along the west side of the Rockaway peninsula, have been plagued by growing sand erosion over the past decade that have contributed to dangerous swimming conditions. In 2023, the Army Corps dumped 360,000 cubic yards of sand on the beach to help replenish it, but most of it washed away within six months — exposing deteriorating wooden groins, rockwork, and other structures. The erosion created enough unsafe conditions for the NPS to restrict public access last summer along Bays 1 to 5 on the park's east end near Neponsit. The Neponsit Property Owners Association says it prefers Bay 1 remain shuttered — at least this upcoming beach season — to avoid more tragedies. The NPS did not return messages, and Rogers' family could not be reached for comment.
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Surfer who drowned at Jacob Riis beach in Queens was promising documentary filmmaker
A drowning surfer who died after being carried out of the ocean by good Samaritans at Queens' Jacob Riis Park was a rising documentary filmmaker whose first feature is about to have its US premiere. Sebastián Lasaosa Rogers, 35, was pulled out of the ocean about 12:40 p.m. Saturday and rushed by medics from the Rockaways to Coney Island Hospital, where he died. Rogers' debut feature-length documentary, 'Freeing Juanita', premiered at the DocsMX Film Festival in Mexico City in December and opens on June 4 as part of the New Jersey Film Festival. The film follows a couple from Guatemala who travel 1,000 miles to northern Mexico to try and free their niece Juanita, who has been detained for seven years after confessing to a crime she didn't commit in a language she doesn't speak. HIs drowning left friends reeling. His wife and family declined to speak to a reporter. 'It's incredibly sad news as Sebastian was such a kind soul and warm-hearted human,' one friend, Chris Westcott, said in a Facebook post, adding that Rogers had apparently gotten caught on a submerged wooden jetty. 'I've known Sebastian for the last 10 years, as he came out to visit and surf with me in Rockaway periodically,' Westcott wrote. 'Sebastian was a talented cinematographer, human rights activist, and total sweetheart who put everyone around him at ease with his presence.' The Spanish-American documentary filmmaker and cinematographer graduated magna cum laude from Vanderbilt University with a Bachelors degree in anthropology and film in 2013 and lived in Crown Heights. Rogers got his professional start in Nashville, making videos to support workers' rights, including the Fight for $15 movement, according to his website. According to the website of arts organization Art21, where Rogers was a contributor, his work has been featured at SXSW and many other festivals and published by The New York Times and PBS. He also loved to surf. 'Sebastian had that deep love and appreciation of the ocean,' Westcott said on Facebook. 'I remember the way his eyes lit up in and around the water.' Rockaway is known as the surfing mecca of New York City, where wave-chasers brave the elements throughout the year in wetsuits to get their fix. The Queens beach is the only place in the city where surfing is legal, according to the city Parks Department, with the sport allowed in three sections of the water. Jacob Riis Park's beach is managed separately by the National Park Service. When Rogers disappeared underwater, two bystanders rushed to his aid after noticing his board in the water sticking up in the air, according to Rockaway resident Robert Conti, 58. Robert Conti's son, 18-year-old son Owen Conti , a city Parks Department summer lifeguard in the Rockaways, and his friend who is a former lifeguard were able to get Rogers out of the water and provided CPR. The elder Conti was alerted to the emergency by his son and raced to the beach. 'What they saw from the shoreline was the board sticking straight up in the air and the board wouldn't do that unless it was hung up,' Robert Conti said. 'I got there probably a few minutes after they started the CPR and they rolled him over a couple of times on his side and there was a lot of fluid coming out of his mouth. It was upsetting to see.' A city Medical Examiner autopsy determined Rogers died from drowning.
The Guardian
20-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Let's be clear – the US never had moral supremacy. With Trump, it's not even pretending any more
Donald Trump's attempt to seize Ukraine's natural resources is another morbid symptom of the decline of US power. This may seem counterintuitive. Demanding half of all the revenues – not simply profit – flowing from Ukraine's minerals, oil, gas and infrastructure, worth a staggering £400bn, sounds like the behaviour of a bully defined by swagger and brawn. It has rightly been described as reducing Ukraine to the status of an economic colony of the US. But it epitomises the total discarding of one of the three central pillars of US hegemony. The first was military supremacy. This was shattered by the calamities of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, which associated the US military with atrocities, violent chaos and humiliating strategic defeat. The proxy war of Ukraine can now be added to that list. The second was economic supremacy, which remains, but which was severely weakened by the 2008 financial crash and the longstanding failure of the US model to deliver a sustained rise in real wages. And the third – the remnants of which Trump is scattering to the four winds – was moral supremacy. This was always a fiction, but an important means of legitimising US dominance. It is now ash. The US always defined itself as a land of freedom, in contrast to the tyrannies of the Old World, even though it enslaved 89% of its Black population just two lifetimes ago. When the US dabbled with European-style colonialism after the Spanish-American war, annexing the Philippines, members of the US elite founded the American Anti-Imperialist League, warning that the US government sought to 'extinguish the spirit of 1776' and 'change the republic into an empire'. It proved an aberration, and the US sought more indirect means of control. When President Woodrow Wilson brought his nation into the first world war on the side of the allies in 1917, he denounced imperial Germany for abandoning the 'humane practices of civilised nations' with its indiscriminate sinkings by submarines. 'The world must be made safe for democracy,' he declared, concluding: 'A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations.' When President Franklin Roosevelt similarly entered the second world war, he spoke loftily of 'democracy's fight against world conquest'. At the outset of the cold war, President Harry Truman warned that the world's people 'may surrender to the false security offered so temptingly by totalitarian regimes unless we can prove the superiority of democracy'. Indeed, the US and the Soviet Union presented their grand conflict, however misleadingly, as a clash of two universalist philosophies, both of which promised the liberation of all humanity: 'freedom and democracy' on the one hand, and the end of capitalism and colonialism in favour of equality on the other. Ronald Reagan was a rightwing Republican, and yet he proclaimed that the US only fought wars 'to defend freedom and democracy', that it was 'a force for peace, not conquest' and 'could have achieved world domination, but that was contrary to the character of our people'. Yes, all of this was founded in deceit. Claims of democracy were fatally compromised by the longstanding restriction of the rights of African Americans in the south, who had to win their rights through arduous struggle. Abroad, the US was guilty of innumerable horrors. In the 1960s and 70s, the US intervened to prop up South Vietnam's brutal military dictatorship, and carpet-bombed south-east Asia. In Cambodia alone, US bombing may have killed up to 500,000 civilians: one such campaign was named Operation Freedom Deal, underlining the Orwellian use of language to justify murderous domination. In Latin America, the US helped instigate brutal military coups – 'I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,' said Henry Kissinger of Chile – and maintain vicious dictatorships, such as the Argentine junta. In the Middle East, the pact with the Saudi tyrants, and the arming of Saddam Hussein, before the ruinous invasion of Iraq underlined US cynicism, and perennial support for Israel's subjugation of the Palestinians exposed US hypocrisy. That was before the US facilitated genocide, leaving its moral claims buried under rubble. Yet note Trump's open support for ethnic cleansing in Gaza and his suggestion that the US should take the land in aid of naked avarice, his shameless desire to reduce Ukraine to a colony, even his clearly heartfelt desire to annex Canada. This is simply unapologetic brute force and greed, with no pretence to any majestic moral cause. This leaves the western right with something of a problem. There was a rightwing jamboree in east London this week, grandly named the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. The Daily Mail, with its usual reserve, summarised the speech of the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, like so: 'It's time to get off our knees and start fighting for Western values.' What exactly are those 'values', now the lead western state – led by a man Badenoch considers a political ally – has shed its old pretences? The US no longer bothers to dress up its ruthless perceived self-interest in the garbs of high-minded principles. This is a major strategic mistake. These mythical moral claims helped win consent or at least acquiescence from the US public for the global projection of power: Hollywood's presentation of the US as 'the good guys' taps into a self-perception that is important for many Americans. These claims also beguiled significant numbers of people around the globe, offering up natural allies for the US in each continent. That is all dead now. And so all we are left with is a floundering superpower with depleted military prowess, a broken economic model, a crisis-ridden democracy and an openly thuggish demeanour. The fall of US power is anything but dignified. Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist
