In 1971, 24 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier by becoming the first African-American baseball player, the Pittsburgh Pirates made history by fielding the first all minority team. As VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports, the Pirates continue to break ground for Major League Baseball, now by looking beyond borders to find new talent for America’s pastime.
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In Aleppo, Syria, even as Bashar al-Assad’s regime destroys the city and its inhabitants with barrel bombs and airstrikes, many civilians risk their lives to rescue the injured and pull the dead from the rubble. Since 2013, these volunteers from all walks of life have created the Syrian Civil Defense, known to the world as The White Helmets. 

In his documentary, Last Men in Aleppo, Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad delivers an unprecedented testimonial of their sacrifices and love for their besieged city. While bombs explode all around, White Helmets set off in their makeshift van, siren on, speeding to the latest site of destruction.

Khaled is the main character, and though by no means the only hero, one gets attached to his stoic persona. Khaled is calm, a rock of strength to his community, a loving father to his two lively children. 

We follow his gaze as he looks to the sky, eyeing the approaching bombers. Sometimes, they are Assad’s, other times, they are Russian. The locals can tell them apart easily. Every sighting portends new attacks and death. 

After the bombs drop

In the middle of a city in ruins, Khaled is one of the last men left in Aleppo to drag the injured and the dying from under tons of concrete.

They dig with shovels, with their hands, with everything they’ve got. One of the most emotionally draining scenes is the gentle pulling of an infant from under the debris. The White Helmets drag the child out, head first, through a sharp jagged hole of a collapsed building. The baby is bleeding and powdered with dust, but he’s alive. 

Other children are not that lucky. The camera focuses steadily as they are dragged out, while people scream, sob and rush to cradle the small, limp bodies.

Sundance award

Filmmaker Feras Fayyad won one of the top awards at the Sundance Film Festival for Last Men in Aleppo. But he does not take full credit. The recording of these scenes was the work of a group of cinematographers, The Aleppo Media Center, who followed the White Helmets day and night under relentless bombings. 

Fayyad said he wanted to call attention to the crimes against humanity committed in the city. He also wanted to show the world that these civilians who face death every day and live their lives in constant fear are no different than the rest of us.

“There are markets, houses with families, people who fight for common values,” he said. “No one is acting and the Syrians feel despondent. People did not choose this life. These people did not join ISIS. These people try to live,” he said.

Last Men in Aleppo focuses on those Syrians who chose to stay. Like Khaled.

He is very aware of the dangers his wife and children face daily. But he doesn’t want to run. He tells his friend Abu Yousef, another White Helmet, that refugees are treated inhumanely and fears that if he sends his kids away they could face a dire fate without him, and that he might never see them again. 

“This is my city. I was born and raised here. Should I leave it to some stranger? I will not leave,” he said.

Fayyad’s documentary is an indictment of crimes against humanity. But it is also about compassion and resilience. In the middle of destruction, people still find joy among friends and family.

Targeting civilians 

“This was one of the reasons that motivated me to make the story, the killings of civilians,” Fayyad said. “I started with the idea that the war brings out the worst in humans but also brings the best in humans.”

Fayyad started filming the siege of Aleppo in 2013. He said he was arrested and imprisoned twice and had to leave the city. He could not return because, “a huge number of people were being killed then by Russian bombings.” 

After that, he employed the help of others, such as The Aleppo Media Center, video journalists and citizen journalists, who under his instructions would pick up a camera and document life and death in Aleppo. Nowadays, he lives in exile. He would face death should he return to Syria.

“I have the feeling of anger for the Russians, of course. I have the feeling of anger for the regime killing the Syrians every day. Now I’m sitting here in the studio and there are bombings in places next to my family that is still living in Syria and I could lose my family any time,” he said. 

When asked if he was surprised by reports that Assad had gassed his own people, he said, “not at all.”

The film may be hard to watch but it must be watched. And though painful, it is also uplifting, depicting the altruism that cannot be smothered. 

While Last Men in Aleppo focuses on those Syrians who choose to stay in their war-torn country, it also helps us empathize with those who leave. During the filming of this documentary, Khaled, like countless others, was killed saving his neighbors.
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In Aleppo, Syria, while the Assad regime destroyed the city and its inhabitants, many civilians risked their lives to rescue the injured and pull the dead from the rubble. Since 2013, these volunteers have created the Syrian Civil Defense, known as The White Helmets. Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad delivers a testimonial of their sacrifices. VOA’s Penelope Poulou spoke with Fayyad.
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Donkey Kong, the iconic 1980s video game, has been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.

According to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, the arcade game quickly sold over 100,000 units in the United States alone, in addition to unknown quantities of home versions.

Donkey Kong was the creation of Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto, who was a relatively unknown employee when he came up with the idea in 1981.

The game centered around a hero who must jump barrels, climb ladders, smash fireballs and battle a monster ape in order to save his love.

The hero, originally called Jumpman, was a particularly popular aspect of the game and later morphed into Mario, a character featured in dozens of games today.

“His telltale outfit, bristling mustache, and joyous jumps made Mario an icon of popular culture,” the museum said in a news release.

Donkey Kong was joined by Halo: Combat Evolved and Street Fighter II, which were also given places in the museum’s permanent exhibit. Other games honored in the past include Sonic the Hedgehog, The Sims, Doom, Pong and World of Warcraft. Microsoft’s iconic solitaire was nominated, but did not win a spot.

Anyone can nominate games for consideration, but the final choice is made by journalists, academics and gaming experts.
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A multimillion-dollar development project outside Washington has been put on hold pending an archaeological investigation to determine if the project is being built on top of a historically significant century-old black cemetery. VOA’s Chris Simkins reports from Bethesda, Maryland, that a fight over the site has uncovered the history of a mostly forgotten African American community.
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Three young Ethiopian girls use their superpowers to stop harmful practices against girls in rural areas and to promote access to school. That is the story behind “Tibeb Girls,” a new animated series developed in Ethiopia.

“Tibeb Girls” is the first animated cartoon in which Ethiopian girls play not only the lead characters, but are also portrayed as superheroes. “Tibeb” means wisdom in Amharic.

“For me, it was very important to have girls who look like me and who look like my child to be on the screen playing very good role models,” said Bruktawit Tigabu, who created “Tibeb Girls.”

The animated cartoon breaks taboos by discussing things such as menstruation and, in the first episode, the lead characters save a girl from child marriage.

Bruktawit screens the show at schools and events around Ethiopia.

“Most of the issues we are raising are not well discussed in the community or in school or in the house,” she said. “So that is another inspiration to really break the taboo and give them a very entertaining, but also engaging way to talk about very serious subjects.”

The animated series is produced in Addis Ababa with a team of voice actors, artists and writers.

Representing and empowering girls is a big responsibility. Therefore the writers, such as Mahlet Haileyesus, put a lot of preparation into an episode.

“We try to include everybody, like the relevant stakeholders, government bureaus, specific target groups,” said Mahlet Haileyesus, one of the show’s writers. “And then once the synopsis is developed, we do prototyping, which means we go to the field and test it.”

“Tibeb Girls” is also published as a comic strip that Meaza Takele reads to her young children each night before they go to bed.

“When I ask my children why they love the cartoon, they say it’s because now they have a cartoon that is Ethiopian and where their own language is spoken,” she said.

Creator Bruktawit hopes to raise funds to further develop the TV show, as she tries to sell the first season to broadcasters in Ethiopia and other African countries where young girls face the same issues.
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Laura Poitras announces early in her Julian Assange documentary Risk: “This is not the film I thought I was making.”

“I thought I could ignore the contradictions,” the Oscar-winning Citizenfour filmmaker says in a voiceover. “I thought they were not part of the story. I was so wrong. They are becoming the story.”

Decoding “the story” when it comes to the WikiLeaks founder has never been easy. It’s evolving even now, just as Poitras’ six-years-in-the-making documentary — one made with rare access to an explosively controversial figure under ever-increasing international pressure — is hitting theaters. 

Following WikiLeaks publishing of a trove of CIA hacking documents in March, the Department of Justice is reportedly preparing to seek the arrest of Assange, who has been holed away in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for nearly five years to avoid extradition to Sweden. On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton blamed “Russian WikiLeaks” for swaying November’s election by publishing hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee. (Assange, responding Wednesday on Twitter, told Clinton to “Blame yourself.”)

Also on Wednesday, FBI director James Comey, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the FBI had “high confidence” Russia was behind the DNC hacking. Comey said WikiLeaks was publishing damaging “intelligence porn.” Assange responded Thursday on Twitter, accusing Comey of lying during his testimony.

‘Very complex picture’

Poitras, whose Citizenfour went behind the headlines to reveal NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, initially hoped that Risk would do something similar for Assange. She was making an intimate documentary about a brave visionary who risks everything in his crusade to make governments transparent. But, like many others who have been confounded by the WikiLeaks founder, Poitras underwent an evolution in her opinion of Assange. It’s a journey she documents in the film, running right up until now.

“The ambivalence and struggle, I share that. I did try to let the audience see a very complex picture. And I grapple with it,” Poitras said in an interview Tuesday. “For me, I absolutely support and defend their right to publish and I think that they have brought forward extraordinarily important information through their publishing. And I’m also disturbed by some of the things that are said in the film and I didn’t want to exclude those things. That’s not my job, to paint a simplistic portrait.”

Poitras first contacted Assange in 2010 after WikiLeaks published the Collateral Murder video, which showed a U.S. helicopter in Iraq shooting several men, including two Reuters journalists. Poitras, who became focused on making films about post-9/11 surveillance, was welcomed into Assange’s inner circle. Risk captures some of the inside drama behind many earth-shattering WikiLeaks publications; it opens with Assange trying to reach Clinton at the State Department ahead of the imminent leak of thousands of diplomatic cables.

It also shows Assange in a bracingly intimate, sometimes surreal way: getting his hair cut by his loyal followers; disguising himself before fleeing to Ecuador’s embassy; being interviewed by Lady Gaga. There are hints, too, of the accusations that have often followed him, like that he runs WikiLeaks like its own intelligence agency.

Early reaction to film

Poitras first premiered the film a year ago at the Cannes Film Festival, where it was received largely positively. But some questioned whether Poitras was too closely aligned with her subject. Variety wondered if it was a “glorified fan film.” The Guardian labeled it “an embedded report that sacrifices impartiality for access.”

“I never define myself as an activist. I define myself as a journalist and a filmmaker,” said Poitras. “There’s a long tradition of journalism that’s first-person perspective. I don’t think that journalism is by definition activism. I think it’s just stories that are told from a subjective point of view.”

But developments that followed that premiere led Poitras to recut her film. She added the voiceovers that question and occasionally distance herself from Assange. She updated the film to include the DNC leak and allegations of a Russian connection, and even late last month went back in to include Attorney General Jeff Sessions vow to make Assange’s arrest “a priority.”

Numerous alleged victims also came forward to accuse Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks insider and significant personality in the film, of sexual harassment and bullying. (Appelbaum has denied it.) Poitras added to the film her acknowledgement of a previous relationship with Appelbaum and said he was abusive to someone close to her after their relationship ended. A representative for Appelbaum didn’t respond to a request for comment about the film or abuse allegations.

Slate, however, still criticized the updated Risk as “what happens when a filmmaker gets too close to her subject.” Yet Risk also repeatedly shows questionable behavior by Assange. In one scene he calls the rape allegation in Sweden, which he has denied, “a thoroughly tawdry radical feminist political positioning thing.”

Assange calls film ‘a threat’

Poitras has shown him multiple cuts of the film. Before the Cannes screening, he texted her that he considers Risk “a threat” to him personally.

“There were pressuring demands that I remove scenes from the film — that I didn’t — that involved what he was talking about in terms of the Swedish case,” said Poitras. “I don’t think he has legitimate reason to [perceive the film as a threat].” 

Assange and WikiLeaks also did not respond to requests for comment.

Citizenfour came about while Poitras was working on Risk. She was contacted by Snowden, who said he wanted to leak NSA documents to her, and she put him in touch with reporter Glenn Greenwald and documented their clandestine meetings in a Hong Kong hotel room.

“I got pulled into the story in a way that I never anticipated. Being pulled into the story led to all different types of conflicts and shifting relationships that happened that are in the film,” said Poitras. “I’m part of the story now.”

She nearly abandoned the Assange project but, convinced of its value to history, eventually returned to it.

“This is a moment of shifting power dynamics and how the internet is impacting that, for better and for worse,” said Poitras. “We have a president now who communicates through Twitter. The film, I think, is trying to capture that historical moment.”
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The National Basketball Association opened its first training academy in Africa on Thursday in a push to expand its presence on the continent and prepare more African players to enter the league, its vice president for Africa said.

The academy is in Senegal, where a sports development program in partnership with the NBA has already produced professional players including Minnesota Timberwolves center-forward Gorgui Dieng.

“The goal of the NBA Academy Africa is to create a more direct path for young people who have talent so that their future is not determined by chance,” Amadou Gallo Fall told reporters in Senegal’s capital, Dakar.

The academy is part of a push to expand recruitment worldwide and follows three academies launched in China last year. Two more are slated to open in India and Australia.

The number of international players in the NBA has been increasing, with a record 113 on opening-night rosters for the 2016-17 season. But most are European, with only 14 from Africa.

Soccer more popular

Basketball has long been eclipsed by soccer on the continent. Even former basketball superstars such as Nigeria’s Hakeem Olajuwon did not learn to play the game until their late teens.

“If you could find a kid from Africa that can shoot the ball, that’s kind of special. Why? Because he doesn’t have the resources,” said academy technical director Roland Houston, as 20 lanky teenagers practiced at a training camp in the Senegalese city of Thies this week.

The NBA academy will build on the Sports for Education and Economic Development (SEED) Project, which has trained young players in Senegal since it was founded in 2002.

Twelve players will be selected to join the inaugural class. All will receive scholarships to the academy, which will also provide academic courses and mentoring.

“I see basketball as something that … has already taken me places. Basketball has made me meet people I never expected to meet, people I never wished I could even shake hands with,” said Timothy Ighoeffe, 17, one of the hopefuls from Nigeria.

The NBA is also counting on the move to help it reach new audiences in Africa, where it has slowly been building its brand. It held its first African exhibition game in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2015 and signed a major trans-African broadcast deal last year.
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Daddy Yankee feels streaming his music online has finally revealed a hidden reality about Latin artists’ popularity.

 

The reggaeton icon, who this week reached the No. 4 spot in Billboard’s Hot 100 with a new version of his and Luis Fonsi’s megahit “Despacito” featuring Justin Bieber, also saw it land on Spotify’s No. 12 global hits and No. 2 on its Viral 50 chart, above songs by Rihanna, Lady Gaga and Bieber.

 

“I really feel very blessed to see what has happened. It is incredible. ‘Despacito’ is a worldwide phenomenon,” Daddy Yankee told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “I think streaming has had a lot to do with us being in the same arena as any mainstream American artist and I think that we have an audience that is global. We simply couldn’t register it before with numbers.”

 

On YouTube, the song’s original video has more than 1.2 billion views since its January release. Daddy Yankee’s video of “Shaky Shaky” has more than 960 million views.

 

The singer said international platforms like Spotify and YouTube have helped to put things into perspective.

 

“It’s what I’ve been saying for years, long before this happened, that we are being heard globally,” he said. “It’s a good thing that we are appearing in these lists, but if we don’t, it doesn’t mean that we are not at the same level of popularity as any artist in the American lists because our streaming numbers are occasionally bigger than theirs.”

 

More than a decade after his best-selling album “Barrio fino,” and the single “Gasolina” that made him a global star, the Latin Grammy Award-winner is still one of the most influential and recognizable names in reggaeton.

 

“Throughout the years, Daddy Yankee has known how to decipher what is needed to make a hit, and he constantly achieves it. Last year he did it with ‘Shaky Shaky’ and with ‘Despacito’ he gives that extra push to a great song,” said Leila Cobo, Billboard’s executive director of content and programming for Latin music. “Yankee keeps himself updated on all the music trends, and is also a master when it comes to promotion and marketing, both traditional and digital.”

 

Success is something that Daddy Yankee attributes to his passion for music and to constantly looking for a bigger challenge.

 

“That’s what I do, is what amuses me, to always challenge myself and create a song that’s better than the last one,” he said.
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We’re holding court with the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending May 6, 2017.

All we can say is “wow” – yet another big song debuts in the Top Five this week.

In fact, we get two new tracks.

Number 5: Future “Mask Off”

Future makes his first career Top Five appearance, as “Mask Off” jumps two slots to fifth place. The Atlanta rapper launches his “Nobody Safe Tour” on May 4 in Memphis, and Kodak Black has been dropped from the lineup. He’s currently in jail for a probation violation. The lineup features a rotating roster including Migos, Tory Lanez, and Young Thug.

Number 4: Kendrick Lamar “DNA”

Kendrick Lamar is your Hot Shot Debut artist in fourth place with “DNA.” It’s one of 14 charting tracks from Kendrick’s “Damn” album, which this week becomes his third number one album here in the U.S. It does so by selling 603,000 album equivalent units. That gives Kendrick the best opening sales week of 2017…at least so far.

Number 3: Bruno Mars “That’s What I Like”

Bruno Mars slips a slot to third place with “That’s What I Like,” but never mind – he’s adding new dates to his world tour. His 24 K Magic Tour, currently trekking through the U.K. and Europe, will hit Australasia early in 2018. For the first time in four years, Bruno will visit Australia and New Zealand for nine dates, beginning next February 27 in Auckland.

 

 

Number 2: Ed Sheeran ” Shape of You”

Ed Sheeran’s reign at the top is over – or at least interrupted – as “Shape Of You” falls to second place.

Ed will briefly appear in the upcoming seventh season of “Game Of Thrones.” He says he filmed his scene last November, in which he sings a song for Arya Stark, played by Maisie Williams. Back in March, series co-creator David Benioff said they’ve been trying to make a Sheeran cameo happen for years, as a gift for super-fan Maisie.

Number 1: Kendrick Lamar “Humble”

If you’re a super-fan of Kendrick Lamar, then this is your lucky week: “Humble” jumps to number one on the Hot 100. 

Two years ago, he and Taylor Swift shared the top spot with “Bad Blood.”

Every one of the 14 songs from Kendrick’s “Damn” album appears in this week’s Hot 100. Kendrick is only the fifth artist to land that many songs in the chart at the same time. The Beatles did it first in 1964, followed by Drake, The Weeknd, and Justin Bieber.

Can Kendrick keep the momentum going? We’ll find out in seven days.
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What makes a country? What’s to stop you from planting a flag in your own front yard and declaring your home a sovereign nation? 

It seems like a ridiculous question, but it has merit. In the past 25 years, the world has recognized dozens of new countries, and mapmakers have been scrambling to keep up.

The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 created 15 new republics. Countries, it turns out, come and go. And on today’s maps, there are plenty of wannabe countries that are struggling for recognition. South Sudan, for instance, has only been a nation since 2011. Many others are lesser known, or completely unnoticed.

Lost lands in fiction and reality

British photographer and writer Nick Middleton is trying to change all that. His new book, The Atlas of Countries that Don’t Exist: A Compendium of Fifty Unrecognized and Largely Unnoticed States, explores the struggle of 50 of those places to become recognized countries.

He came up with the idea of profiling wannabe countries when he read the children’s classic The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe to his young daughter.

“The nub of the story hinges on there being a secret land at the back of the wardrobe in an old English country house,” he explained. “This appealed to my daughter and it also appealed to me.”

It was not in Narnia, but on the Isle of Man that Middleton discovered that countries which aren’t countries actually exist. 

“It’s an odd place because it’s not a part of the U.K. nor is it a part of the European Union,” he observed, “yet they use the British pound, they have passports that look very much like ours, and yet they have a great degree of autonomy. In fact, the Isle of Man has the world’s oldest continuously operating parliament, which goes back to the 8th century, if you believe it. So, it’s sort of a strange limbo land. It has a high degree of autonomy and yet it’s not a separate country.”

The atlas includes places that make headlines — like Northern Cyprus and Catalonia — and many others that don’t. Such places include Christiania, a communal self-governing society in Denmark; Forvik, a Shetland island created by an English yachtsman; and Seborga, a principality that declared independence from Italy after a referendum in 1995.

What they all lack is international recognition.

“Recognition is a critical issue most of these would-be wannabe nation states are desperate for, to the extent whereby some of them have set up their own parallel organizations to diplomatically recognize each other,” he pointed out. “So there is an Unrepresented United Nations, a UUN, with several dozen members. There is an Unrepresented Nations and People Organization, UNPO, with a similar number of members.”

Africa’s unnoticed countries

There are 54 countries on the African continent, plus the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, which chose to forgo independence from France with the other Comoros islands in 1975; Barotseland, a monarchy on the border between Zambia and Angola; Ogoniland, an indigenous Niger Delta kingdom; and Somaliland.

“Somalia as a country was independent in 1960,” Middleton said. “It was put together because ethnic Somalis lived in what was British Somaliland, and what was Italian Somaliland. They went together as Somalia until, sadly, the country started pulling to bits in a civil war. And in 1991, the north Somaliland broke away from the South. It’s been running its affairs very well ever since. It’s relatively peaceful, it’s stable. It has democratic elections, they have its own currency, their own police force, their own schools, yet no other country in the world would recognize it.”

Lakotah Sioux’s sad story

Four unrecognized countries in North America belong to indigenous people.

The Lakotah Sioux signed a treaty with the U.S. government in the 1860s, granting territory in the Black Hills to the Lakotah Sioux “in perpetuity.” But when gold was found in the Black Hills, as Middleton puts it, “all bets were off,” and fortune hunters poured into the territory. 

In the 1970s, a U.S. court ruled that the seizure of the Black Hills was unconstitutional and the U.S. government needed to pay the tribe compensation. The total was more than half a billion dollars now, but the Sioux wouldn’t take the money. They just want their land back. They’re still fighting that battle.

The independence dream

The author says that of all the countries he profiled, just one is likely to achieve international recognition as a nation: the island of Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark.

“It may happen in our lifetime,” Middleton said. “A year to look out for is the year 2021, because it’s the 300th anniversary of the beginning of the Danish colonial rule in Greenland.”

It is said that history belongs to the victors, but maybe it belongs to the mapmakers. Middleton says his book is an attempt to acknowledge some of those unnoticed, unofficial countries still working to make their mark on the world map.
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Major League Baseball is reviewing its security protocols in all 30 stadiums after Orioles outfielder Adam Jones complained of fans shouting racial slurs in Boston this week and other black players reacted by saying it’s a common reality.

League officials are starting by figuring out how individual clubs handle fan issues and complaints.

“We have reached out to all 30 clubs to assess what their in-ballpark announcement practices are regarding fan behavior,” MLB spokesman Pat Courtney said. “We are also reviewing text message and other fan security notification policies that are operating in the event there is an incident.”

Each stadium is different

All MLB teams have a mechanism for fans to alert security to issues, but individualized ballparks mean different protocols and practices in each stadium.

The Red Sox on Wednesday said another fan had been ejected from the previous game for using a racial slur toward another spectator.

“The offending individual was promptly ejected from the ballpark, and has since been notified they are no longer welcome at Fenway Park,” the team said.

The team turned the matter over to police.

“The Red Sox organization will not tolerate the use of racial slurs at Fenway Park, and we have apologized to those affected,” the team said. “There is no place for racial epithets at Fenway Park, in baseball, or in our society.”

Jones complained Monday night that he was racially abused, then a fan threw peanuts toward him in the dugout. Boston Red Sox officials apologized and said that only one of 34 fans kicked out of the game was ejected for using foul language toward a player, and it wasn’t clear whether that was toward Jones. Boston police said the peanuts hit a nearby police officer and Fenway security kicked out the man who threw them before he could be identified by authorities.

Commissioner Rob Manfred quickly condemned the incidents.

On Wednesday night, Jones was ejected in the fifth inning after striking out swinging against the Red Sox. He was upset about a late strike call during the at-bat.

Nothing new, black players say

Earlier this week, black players around the majors made it clear that what he experienced is an ongoing experience during road trips, varying by ballpark.

“Everybody knows what those cities are. It’s bad. You’ve got security guards there and people there and they just sit there and let it happen,” Braves outfielder Matt Kemp said. “That to me is just crazy.”

Kemp said the vitriol in some parks has become a talking point among the dwindling fraternity of black players.

According to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, the number of African-American or African-Canadian players dipped from 62 each of the previous four years to 58, or 7.7 percent, on MLB’s opening day active rosters.

Dusty Baker, the Nationals manager who played 19 seasons, said Jones’ complaints weren’t surprising because he’s been targeted with racial slurs in almost every city he played in.

“Minor leagues, big leagues … from L.A. to New York, it’s more apparent in some places than other places,” Baker said.

Adding security guards

Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia said he heard racial slurs from fans when he pitched for the Indians in Boston, but has never had a problem with New York, where security guards follow players out to the bullpen and maintain a visible presence.

“It’s easier for us because we have our security guards,” Sabathia said. “Maybe teams should travel with security guards. That’s made a huge difference since I’ve been here.”

Kemp said he spoke to security officials about a week ago about how things were getting out of hand.

“I don’t know what kind of precautions or what they’re doing to get things under control but I hope something is going to get done,” he said. “Of course the racial slurs are out of line, and that’s big, but there’s a lot of other big things happening as far as people threatening other people’s families.”

Soccer a possible model

One solution could be to adopt the model used in some European soccer leagues, where clubs are held responsible for the actions of their fans. Soccer authorities have spent decades trying to eradicate racism from stadiums, with limited success. Sanctions were strengthened in 2013 after a high-profile incident in Italy saw Kevin-Prince Boateng lead his AC Milan team off a field after facing abuse from fans.

Parts of stadiums can be closed during matches after a first instance of abuse, while repeated abuse can result in fans being locked out of games completely.

Still, during a Serie A game in Italy on Sunday, Pescara player Sulley Muntari complained he was being racially abused by Cagliari supporters and the referee’s only action was to penalize Muntari for his protests and show him a second yellow card as he walked off the field, which amounted to a red card kicking him out of the game and his team’s next game. The league didn’t punish Cagliari because it said only 10 fans were hurling the abuse, despite a clear sliding scale of punishments for four years.

FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, has also given leagues the power to dock points or relegate teams for serious repeated racist incidents. Players also face a minimum 10-game ban in Europe if they racially abuse opponents.

But FIFA has been criticized for disbanding its anti-racism task force even as it prepares to take the World Cup in 2018 to Russia, where racism continues to blight matches.

Hall of Famer and Yankees senior adviser Reggie Jackson said improving security at ballparks might not be a magic wand.

“I don’t know how you control that,” he said. “You throw someone out of the stadium, you have them leave. And it would be interesting to see if fans really cheered.”
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In a dimly lit university auditorium in the Colombian capital, not far from where the country’s largest rebel group once launched bomb attacks, Julian Conrado sings to eager-eyed students about the pain of war.

“Instead of a rifle in my hands I’d like to carry a flower,” he croons, wearing wire-rimmed glasses and an olive green fedora that make him look more like a geeky dad than someone who spent over three decades as a guerrilla fighter in Latin America’s longest-running armed conflict.

“Call me the singer of unity,” Conrado told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “I like that.”

The setting is a new one for the man known as the “singer of the FARC,” the Spanish acronym for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, which last year reached a landmark peace agreement with the government to end a half century of fighting.

Rather than singing battle hymns to fellow rebels in the mountains, Conrado is now living in a demobilization camp and gradually venturing out for shows that have not only enthralled idealistic college kids but also drawn the ire of opponents who say he shouldn’t be performing at all.

“It’s unacceptable that FARC terrorists are giving concerts in Bogota without even having confessed their crimes or made reparations to their victims,” conservative lawmaker Daniel Palacios said.

Just a distraction

Conrado said such criticisms are a temporary distraction from a larger mission of transforming himself into a messenger of peace and forgiveness.

However the ballad he performs most these days is one he wrote in 1984 during a previous, failed peace attempt. He has been struggling to compose new material in the early days of the post-conflict era, wary that his frank, socially critical lyrics might cause more discord than his performances already have.

“I wrote a song but I don’t want to sing it,” Conrado said while driving through Bogota in an SUV with tinted windows. “I see the looks in people’s faces . and there is like a glow of peace.”

“But then I see other people .” he continued, his voice trailing off. “Hopefully, I am wrong.”

Born in a small city near Colombia’s Caribbean coast, Conrado, whose birth name is Guillermo Torres, learned to read by reading the lyrics to ballads known as “corridos.” From an early age he found himself drawn toward leftist causes, and he began organizing neighbors to improve access to water and electricity and incorporating politics into his music, drawing rebukes from officials and also death threats.

After narrowly escaping gunfire that he believes was aimed at him while exiting a building, Conrado decided to join the rebels in the mountains. Just shy of 30 years old, he had never fired a weapon.

His acoustic guitar was among the few belongings he took with him.

In rebel encampments and later in jail, he wrote folksy tunes in the “vallenato” style paired with cheerful accordions, flutes and acoustic guitar. His songs vary from lighthearted professions of love to darker themes decrying social inequality and paramilitary violence or paying homage to fallen guerrilla comrades.

“For our dead, not a minute of silence,” one goes. “A whole life of combat.”

A guitar and a gun

Conrado’s songs were played at rebel parties and shared through videos and CDs — the cheerful, seemingly out-of-place rebel playing guitar while his AK-47 leaned against a wall.

“If there is anyone who made music in the middle of the conflict, it’s him,” said spokesman Fabian Ramirez of the Bogota artist collective Independencia Records, which recently invited Conrado to perform. “And if there is a cultural reference of the FARC, it is him.”

Being a musician wasn’t always easy in the jungle. Three times Conrado was forced to abandon guitars while fleeing bombs or soldiers. But he was never more than a few days without a new one.

One of the two he uses today was delivered by guerrillas who traveled by canoe to find it. The other was given to him in a Venezuelan jail where he says he shared a cell with several bankers. He calls the first guitar the “the guerrilla” and the latter “the oligarch.”

“But ‘the oligarch’ sings revolutionary songs, too,” he said.

The U.S. State Department at one time offered a $2.5 million reward for information leading to Conrado’s arrest, identifying him as a member of the FARC’s top leadership and accusing him of helping set and implement its cocaine policies. Colombian authorities have investigated him on allegations of terrorism, forced displacement of civilians and recruiting minors.

Captured in Venezuela

For a time Conrado was believed to have been killed in a 2008 army attack, but he was captured in 2011 in Venezuela while reportedly living at a farm under an Ecuadorian alias. He remained behind bars until 2013, when he was released to travel to Cuba to participate in peace negotiations.

These days Conrado, now 62, lives beneath a plastic tarp at a demobilization camp near the northern coast. Independencia Records invited him and two other former guerrillas to perform at a peace concert, arguing it was time for Colombians in cities far removed from the armed conflict to hear “the other side.”

“They are coming to sing, not to shoot,” Ramirez said. “And we believe that if they have their hands busy playing a guitar, painting a picture, writing a poem or acting in a play, they will never have to return to war.”

Conrado also gave talks and small performances that were mostly unannounced in an attempt to keep a low profile. But at the National University, he packed an auditorium with several hundred students who sang along to songs that for years were considered taboo — best listened to only in private or with like-minded friends.

“The FARC were part of the insurgency,” said Lorena Parra, a 21-year-old political administration student. “Now that we are in a more open environment. It’s the perfect opportunity to discover that ‘other’ who was in the mountains.”
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Alec Baldwin welcomes the chance to share the screen with President Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live.

“I think if he came it would be a great show,” Baldwin said in an interview Wednesday. “I think it would be better for everybody. It’s always fun to defuse some of the tensions and unpleasantness of all this because we are mocking him — by no means with more frequency or more maliciousness, if you will, than other people.”

But he will have to wait. The actor, whose Trump impersonations became a staple this season and helped propel SNL to its best ratings in years, said the president recently turned down an invitation to appear on the NBC show.

“We invited him to come when I hosted recently, but he refused to come, which is fine,” Baldwin said. “I’m hoping SNL was the one thing he chose to ignore so he could actually do his job.”

Trump has repeatedly bashed SNL and Baldwin’s impersonations on Twitter, but the actor said his performance is driven by Trump’s words and actions.

“Trump himself is responsible for nearly all of the content,” he said. “Trump is the head writer at SNL. Nearly everything, every consonant and every vowel, is something that Trump himself has rendered in some way. So I think Trump is even more frustrated because he has only himself to blame for that.”

He also praised ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, who on Monday night detailed how his son was born last month with a heart defect and required surgery. Kimmel’s tearful monologue included a plea for all families to have access to lifesaving medical care.

“Good for him to get real about that,” said Baldwin, who’s a father of four. “I’d love to see this country turn in a direction where it makes things easier for moms and dads.”

Baldwin said he has reached out to Kimmel, who was his co-star in the animated film The Boss Baby.

“I can’t imagine any time in your life when you buckle down more and kind of batten down the hatches more than when you’re going through that with your wife,” Baldwin said. “That’s just mind-blowing. Mind-blowing. And I hope everything is great for his son.”
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