Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 55
December 19, 2014
Playing Ball With Cuba
As Carl Bialik’s chart shows, Cuban baseball players are on the rise here in the US, and now with the thaw in US/Cuba relations, many are wondering about the implications for their shared national pastime:
Baseball has long been the most popular sport in Cuba and the island has long been a hotbed of baseball talent. Cubans have been playing professional baseball in the United States for nearly 150 years and even the embargo hasn’t stopped star Cuban players like Aroldis Chapman of the Cincinnati Reds and Jose Abreu of the Chicago White Sox from coming to the U.S. to play in the major leagues. But the embargo has meant that players who come to the United States have had to defect and suffer all sorts of risks to escape out of the country—including falling prey to smuggling rings.
But reforming the current, broken system will be complicated:
Fixing the smuggling problem, or at least mitigating it in some way, would likely require fully normalizing relations not just between the two governments, but between each nation’s baseball leagues as well. That first requires major policy changes between the American and Cuban governments. And even if that happens, Major League Baseball and Cuba’s government-run baseball federation would need to set up a system that allows Cuban players to transition from their league to the Majors in a way that is advantageous to both.
Ricky Doyle has the same concern:
[While] hundreds of professional-level Cuban players could become more readily available to MLB teams[, don’t] expect a free-for-all featuring open free agency, though. A more likely scenario would be the implementation of a new system that would allow Cuban players to make the jump to MLB while also ensuring that Cuba is properly compensated for what ultimately could be an exodus of talent. The system could be similar to how MLB clubs currently obtain players from Japan and Mexico.
Meanwhile, Buster Olney examines the possibility of an MLB franchise ending up in Cuba:
Cuban nationals who have defected describe a rabid appetite for baseball in their homeland, and you do wonder if many years from now — say, 25 years or so, depending on how the economy of the country evolves — if Havana might be a natural spot for expansion.
“While having an MLB team in Havana is a fascinating idea, it’s hard to imagine it happening within the next 15 or 20 years,” [agent and Cuban baseball expert Joe] Kehoskie wrote. “Even if Cuba were to become a capitalist country and then do everything it could to welcome foreign investment, it would likely take decades for the Havana area to build up enough wealth to support an MLB team. Adjusted for PPP (Purchasing Power Parity), Cuba’s per capita GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is currently estimated to be only one-third to one-fifth of that of the United States. In terms of the Caribbean region, Cuba is substantially less wealthy than Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Panama, none of which are remotely considered ready to support an MLB team.”
Dan Rosenheck considers how Cuba might look to benefit, as well:
To be sure, the government would salivate over the prospect of tax revenue from MLB contracts so large they can be measured in percentage points of Cuba’s GDP. Moreover, a rapprochement would in theory offer the SN [Serie Nacional, the Cuban baseball league], whose season is centred around winter months when MLB teams do not play, the opportunity to welcome back prominent defectors.
However, MLB has wielded an increasingly heavy hand with other Latin winter leagues, prohibiting high-priced players from participating or strictly limiting their usage to minimise the risks of injury and fatigue. If Cuba maintains its rule that players be available for the full SN season in order to approve contracts with foreign teams—a policy that would sharply reduce their value to MLB clubs—the best Cubans might still choose to follow the money and defect. That would exacerbate the devastation that defections have already wrought on the once-vaunted SN: in order to continue offering fans a quality product, it recently split its season into two halves, and lets the best teams draft players from the worst ones (which then disband) at midseason.
It will probably take years of fraught negotiations to devise a system for Cubans to play in America without defecting that satisfies MLB as well as the governments of both countries[.]
Sounds Vichy
My project for the holidays is clearly going to have to be reading as much as possible by and about Éric Zemmour, author of a bestselling French book about that nation’s decline, which we covered earlier this week. Elisabeth Zerofsky has more on Le Suicide Français and its significance:
Once Zemmour has identified the source of the rot at the center of everything, it is easy for him to unpack each successive social and legal development that whittled away at France’s glory. The legalization of abortion was a “collective suicide,” because the demographic heft of the French children who were never to be born amounted to “lost power, gone forever more.” The emergence of “triumphant homosexuality” is tied to “the decisive evolution of capitalism,” because Western capitalism has an insatiable need for consumerism, and “the homosexual universe, especially the male one, embodies the temple of unbridled pleasure, sexuality without restraint, hedonism without limit.” The sexual revolution led to a “feminine Bovaryism that is sanctified as a supreme value in relations between the sexes.” The normalization of divorce revealed the “paradoxical destiny of feminists to accomplish the dream of absolute irresponsibility, for which they railed against generations of predatory males.”
Zemmour goes on and on:
the rise in delinquency in the nineteen-eighties and nineties came mostly from “immigrant families that France had welcomed,” and has been so twisted around by the left that “gangs of traffickers, thieves, and rapists are sanctified, eternal victims of a neocolonial and racist order. What we call delinquency, they call victims; what we call victims, they call guilty parties.” And, of course, once de Gaulle was gone, France was faced with the choice of “bowing down before the American empire or drowning itself in Europe.”
The runaway sales of Zemmour’s book mirror the astonishing rise, over the past year, of Marine Le Pen, who is the president of the far-right National Front Party. The National Front’s first-place win in the European Parliament elections last May brought it out of the shadows—where it had hovered as a fringe movement since Le Pen’s father founded it, in 1972—and gave it the imprimatur of legitimacy. France’s two main political parties are in shambles. The right-leaning Union for a Popular Movement, immobilized by scandal and infighting, has just reinstated as its leader Nicolas Sarkozy, who was voted out of office as President of France in 2012. The left-leaning Socialist Party’s major problem is François Hollande, the most unpopular French President of the modern era, who has presided over a contentious split in his Party over the question of whether France’s economic troubles call for a move to the right.
What neither New Yorker piece mentions is that Zemmour is Jewish. Specifically, of Algerian-Jewish origin. I point this out not to conspiracy-theorize (as, I realize as I type, the phrase “… is Jewish” comes across, without context), but as a Jew myself, and – more relevant – as someone whose doctoral study focused on French-Jewish history and literature. I was especially surprised to see Zemmour’s Jewishness absent from Stille’s article, which delves deep into the connections between Zemmour’s writings and those of self-proclaimed anti-Semites of earlier eras. Stille also mentions Max Nordau, but refers to this major Zionist leader only as a Paris-dwelling Hungarian who wrote about decadence in the late 19th century.
It seems implausible to me that the New Yorker omitted Zemmour’s background out of ignorance, so this must have been an editorial decision. Perhaps – and I might be projecting – the trouble was that examining the relationship between Jewish identity and French nostalgist conservatism (not to mention the legacy of the Crémieux Decree) would simply take too long, because it’s so fascinating. Or maybe it’s that an American publication is projecting American ideas of Other-ness onto France – making Zemmour just another white guy. At any rate, while as a rule I think leaving out an author’s ancestry is fine, if someone stands accused of writing in the tradition of “authors like Édouard Drumont,” France’s most famous anti-Semite, it does seem relevant that the author in question is Jewish. What it all means, however, I’ll wait to weigh in on until after having, at the very least, read the book.
Why Not Open Up To Cuba? Ctd
Raul Castro has also released 53 political prisoners from Cuban prisons: http://t.co/9bs34pj9zs #CubaPolicy pic.twitter.com/AYfOntZT9x
— Slate (@Slate) December 17, 2014
Perhaps the most persuasive argument from skeptics of Obama’s historic opening with Cuba is that he didn’t extract enough concessions on democratization from the Castro regime. That’s the reason why Yoani Sánchez isn’t celebrating just yet:
What we have yet to hear is a public timeline that commits the Cuban government to a series of gestures in support of democratization and respect for differences. We must take advantage of these announcements to extract a public promise from the government, which must include, at a minimum four consensus points that civil society has been developing in recent months: The release of all political prisoners and prisoners of conscience; the end of political repression; the ratification of the United Nations covenants on Civil, Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the consequent adjustment of domestic laws; and the recognition of Cuban civil society within and outside the island.
Extracting these commitments would begin the dismantling of totalitarianism. As long as steps of this magnitude are not taken, many of us will continue to believe that the day we have longed for is still far off. So, we will keep the flags tucked away, keep the corks in the bottles, and continue to press for the final coming of D-Day.
Morrissey wonders why Obama didn’t demand more reforms:
It’s true that our 52-year embargo has failed to do anything to deflect the Castros from their oppression. The price signals from the American embargo may not have had the impact we hoped, but changing policies sends a signal, too. In this case, the signal seems to be weakness, or at least indifference to the regime’s continued oppression. We didn’t get very much out of this except our own people out and a handful of dissidents momentarily let out of prison. For that kind of shift, we should have demanded more reform from Cuba. Instead, we got an embassy and a likely return of Cuban cigars to American tobacco shops. With that in mind, small wonder most Republican contenders to replace Obama reacted negatively.
Chuck Lane expresses similar sentiments:
The one thing [Raúl Castro] does have is a clear goal, keeping himself and Cuba’s Communist elite in power, and a time-tested approach for doing so: permitting the minimum economic and political liberalization consistent with total control, and nothing more.
Greater engagement with the United States does indeed pose risks to the regime, not the least of which is that incoming tourists and businessmen will start to erode a pervasive system of social and political control. But Cuba’s authorities have years of experience manipulating foreign investors from Latin America, Canada and Europe, and with controlling Cubans’ interactions with foreign visitors, who tend to be more interested in exploiting the local population than liberating it.
Continetti, brimming with unreconstructed neocon absolutism, takes that criticism to the next level, calling Obama “a dictator’s best friend”:
The China option—foreign direct investment from America—is Raul and Fidel’s only play to sustain power over the society they have impoverished. And Obama says yes, yes to everything: an embassy, an ambassador, diplomatic relations, travel and exchange, status among nations, removal from the list of state sponsors of terror, and a serious opportunity to lessen the embargo that has kept the dictators caged for decades. In return, the Castro brothers give up … well, what? Alan Gross, a political prisoner and persecuted religious minority who shouldn’t have been imprisoned in the first place? A second man who has been in captivity for decades? Thin gruel. …
This isn’t giving away the store. This is giving away the shopping mall, town center, enterprise zone. And it is entirely in character with President Obama’s foreign policy.
But Drezner pushes back hard on this line of criticism:
[A]nyone who tells you that the sanctions just needed more a little time to work is flat-out delusional. After more than a half-century, they were never going to work.
By switching course, the United States reaps a few benefits. First, the odds of orderly liberalization and democratization in Cuba have increased. Not by a lot — maybe from 2 percent to 10 percent. But that’s still an improvement. Even if full-blown regime transition doesn’t happen, economic liberalization does make a society somewhat more free. Today’s Post editorial points to Vietnam as the worst-case outcome for the Cuba policy. But Vietnam now has a considerably more liberal climate than before the US opening, so I don’t think that’s the best example.
Moisés Naím offers another obvious counterpoint – i.e., that political reform doesn’t always happen by proclamation, and that the Castros may have a hard time maintaining their vice-grip on a more open economy and society:
Cuba is unlikely to embark on a political opening any time soon, unless the current regime suddenly implodes. Cuba’s dictatorship has proven very resilient to political pressures, and systematically and brutally clamps down on dissidents. The government will surely try to maintain its chokehold on the population; at times, the repression may even become harsher as the need to reassert the regime’s power mounts.
But in the long run, it will be hard for the Castro regime to maintain a tightly controlled political system if it allows more freedom of communication, travel, commerce, and investment. It’s easier to keep a lid on politics when a country is closed, hungry, and isolated than when it’s more open to the world.
In the aftermath of the agreement, the Cuban government will no longer be able to blame the island’s bankruptcy on U.S. policies. Throughout Latin America, the embargo has been perceived as a relic of heavy-handed U.S. intervention in the region. But that symbol is now fading for critics of the United States.
Email Of The Day
A reader writes:
I live in the very small town of Pendleton, SC, which means I see Lindsey Graham on the reg. We both frequently go to 1826, a tiny little restaurant in the center of town (it was built in 1826 – clever, no?) I am a stand-up comedian. My dad was my comedic mentor from the get, even though he was a special agent with the IRS and therefore his stand-up was constrained to toasts and such … the man is a brilliant comic. We are all loud, very, very loud Irish Catholics, with zero ability to whisper.
The first time I saw Butters in town, he was seated very close to me in the Pendleton Cafe and I didn’t yet know he lived in town. I said, in a very loud voice in that very loud restaurant, “That man looks like Lindsey Graham. That IS Lindsey Graham. Oh, my gosh! They put so much make-up on him on TV!” I turned to my dining companions, all of whom stared at me with their mouths wide open. I said, in the same voice, “Did I say that in a normal voice?” And then I realized Butters was sort of cringing, and I was mortified. MORTIFIED.
Cue five years later.
Dinner at 1826 with my parents. My dad is a cheery sort, and oblivious of a lot of things. He watches the evening news and takes it as gospel, votes Republican, etc. (Benedict had a very negative impact on my parents political thinking, FYI.) Lindsey Graham comes in and my dad’s just real, real excited to see somebody from the TV and he’s all, “Senator Graham! Here are some of your constituents!” Lindsey glad hands around, then sits down.
This restaurant is TINY. I mean to say, TINY. Ten tables, tops. Now, I no longer have any recollection of how we got to this point in conversation – it’s like alien abduction, I suffer missing time. I just know my memory kicks in with my dad, in his very loud normal voice, saying, “Of course Lindsey Graham is gay.” To which I say, “Dad, shut up.” But for some reason, my dad misinterprets the shut up and says, “Everybody knows Lindsey Graham’s gay!” And I’m like, SHUUUUT UUUUP! As I’m saying shut up, I’m meaning shut up, Lindsey Graham is five feet behind you and is listening, but my dad hears something else, and says, “Carrie, just because a man is homosexual does not in any way affect his performance as a senator or anything else!” And I’m like, “I AGREE WITH THAT, PLEASE SHUT UP.” But no, my dad is on the warpath, there to defend Lindsey Graham’s sexual orientation against all attackers, completely oblivious to the fact that literally every single person – including Lindsey Graham – can hear him in this tiny restaurant.
My mom just sat with her face in her hands the entire time.
But it’s progress, right? Defending a possibly gay man in public life … in South Carolina.
December 18, 2014
The Best Of The Dish Today
We missed a BOTDT last night because of a Dish holiday reunion with current and former staffers at Arts and Crafts Beer Parlor, near where we hold staff meetings. Before the drunken revelry, we snapped a rare photo of the whole staff together (except Alice, who joined us at the bar):
Update from a reader:
Love the staff photo. Can you please let us know who’s who? It’s nice to put a face to the name that we see all too rarely. Thanks for all your work and contributing so much to so many.
Left to right, that’s Phoebe (Dishtern), Jonah (international editor), Matt (literary editor), “some clapped out old bear“, me (editor, in charge of email), Patrick (editor, in charge of RSS), Jessie (editor, in charge of weekend), Chas (managing editor, aka Special Teams), and Tracy (associate editor, Jill of all trades).
Andrew, now officially the most frequented guest on the Colbert Report, is attending the series finale tonight, so be sure to tune in. Update: behind-the-scenes look from Mark Cuban:
Wow. So talented. So lucky to be part of this night !
A video posted by Mark Cuban (@mcuban) on Dec 12, 2014 at 5:24pm PST
For a dose of nostalgia, check out Andrew’s first appearance on the show back in 2006. And for an even bigger dose, don’t miss this new supercut of Colbert over the years.
The most popular posts today were Will’s “On The Right Not To Be “Triggered” and “Obama Just Ruined Cuba!” His followup to that Cuba post is here. Will also responded to a dissenting reader over his semi-defense of dynasty, spied on the “Elf on the Shelf” Christmas trend, and absorbed the American public’s acceptance of torture.
Michelle, meanwhile, confronted in two parts the caving of Sony Pictures to the terrorist threat over The Interview. She also discussed the discussion of rape, touched on the cycle of outrage stoked by Twitter, took before and after looks at the end of the Serial podcast, and penned an appreciation for Penelope Fitzgerald.
Phoebe also chipped in with her thoughts on white privilege. Don’t miss this epic MHB of Germans playing head-pong, and be sure to contribute to our new Losing Your Faith In Santa thread, which is a much lighter counterpart to our popular and continued thread on rape.
We’ve updated many recent posts with your emails – read them all here. You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @dishfeed. 17 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here (you purchase one today and have it auto-delivered on Christmas Day). Dish t-shirts are for sale here and our new mugs here.
See you in the morning.
The Simpsons, Eternal
Marking the show’s 25th birthday yesterday, Todd VanDerWerff pens an appreciation:
Yes, the show repeats itself a fair amount, but it would be hard for it not to. And, yes, the show has sort of lost a point-of-view character, as its writers have aged past first the Simpson kids and then even the Simpson parents. Many stories in its later years tend to be along the lines of “Can you believe things are this way?!” and have the tone of a particularly perturbed anecdote in the “Life in These United States” feature in Reader’s Digest. All of these things mean it’s hard for the program to create classic episodes week in and week out now.
But what the [recent Simpsons] marathon underlined for me, more than anything, is that the series has attempted to stay true to its characters, and that it still takes chances, especially in its visuals. Both of these things are immensely important to its longevity, and the fact that it remains a pretty reliable form of entertainment from week to week. Seeing all of the episodes one after the other made the continuum that much more apparent: the show started great, became absolutely brilliant, then declined back to just great, before taking a few seasons to find a plateau of better than average.
Listening For The Voice Of God
In an interview about his new book, A Mess of Help: From the Crucified Soul of Rock’n’Roll, David Zahl notices that many of the artists he profiles – who range from ABBA to Morrissey to Axl Rose – “point to some sense of strength being found in weakness, of inspiration being bound up with suffering rather than apart from it.” Still, he’s wary of the didactic approach Christians too often bring to their cultural commentary:
That phrase “Christian approach” often implies that religious people should approach things with trepidation and/or suspicion, and measure them against the standard of our religion. There seems to be an agenda, sometimes an unspoken or unconscious one, that culture is valuable only insofar as we can harness it in some way. But I’m convinced that, to quote someone I admire, “any goodness, beauty, truthfulness, or enlivening candor we have the wit to discern is something for which we have God to thank.” That is, that it’s already been harnessed. So this isn’t a Christian “take” on secular music, at least as I see it. The artists I wrote about are the ones that have spoken and continue to speak to me rather than vice versa; I talk more about what I’ve learned from them than how their work filters through a religious framework. I gave myself plenty of room to explore, though, so who knows (“preacher brain” is not the easiest thing to shut off). Again from the introduction:
“It wasn’t that I set out to write about the intersection of Christianity and culture; it was simply that music was the most honest language available to me—the lingua franca of my inner life, my immediate vocabulary for understanding what was happening to me. In fact, so immersed in it was I, that to avoid pop culture would have been to embrace precisely the kind of phoniness that permeates so much religious ‘engagement’ with it these days.”
Why Not Open Up To Cuba?
Aaron Blake flags one argument that won’t get much traction – that Cuba is a genuine national security threat:
Despite Cuba’s proximity to the United States (about 90 miles from Florida) and its alliance with other antagonistic countries like North Korea and Russia, Americans have grown progressively less and less concerned that the island country actually poses a threat to the United States. A CNN/Opinion Research poll earlier this year, in fact, showed that just 5 percent of people viewed Cuba as a “very serious threat” and 21 percent said it was a “moderately serious threat.” Another 72 percent said it wasn’t a threat at all or “just a slight threat.” Back in 1983, two-thirds of Americans viewed Cuba as at least a “moderately serious threat,” but that numbers has fallen steadily since then.
Zack Beauchamp notes that another favorite talking point of anti-Cuba hardliners – calling the country a state sponsor of terrorism – is a bit outdated:
The US government designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism in 1982, which imposed financial penalties on the Cuban government. At the time, the US accused Cuba of supporting the Spanish Basque terrorist group ETA and the FARC militants in Colombia. Though the US continues to label Cuba a terrorism sponsor, that’s just transparently untrue. According to the State Department‘s most recent annual review of terrorism worldwide, “there was no indication that the Cuban government provided weapons or paramilitary training to terrorist groups.”
“Cuba’s ties to ETA have become more distant, and that about eight of the two dozen ETA members in Cuba were relocated with the cooperation of the Spanish government,” the report reads. And “throughout 2013, the Government of Cuba supported and hosted negotiations between the FARC and the Government of Colombia aimed at brokering a peace agreement between the two.” That doesn’t sound much like a state sponsor of terrorism.
In fact, FARC announced a unilateral ceasefire yesterday, possibly (though not necessarily) pointing the way to peace in Colombia. Richard McColl wonders whether these two events were connected:
How much influence Cuba had in the decision taken by the FARC is up for speculation since Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has been making conciliatory overtures in his statements to the press in recent weeks. Now the question in Colombia, is, will a bilateral ceasefire be announced in coming days? In the past, Santos has been stubbornly opposed to a bilateral ceasefire, but his position on the issue may be shifting. In an interview with W Radio in Bogota on Wednesday morning before the news about Cuba broke, he said that he was waiting for concrete actions from the FARC that would enable a deceleration of the conflict. Less than six hours later, the FARC potentially came good on the challenge.
Larison pushes back on the notion, per Elliott Abrams, that Obama’s opening to Cuba will embolden other enemies of the US:
Restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba isn’t going to have negative “repercussions” around the world. For one thing, persisting in a useless policy towards Cuba doesn’t tell us anything about Washington’s willingness to back up its guarantees elsewhere in the world. It does hint that the U.S. is eventually capable of recognizing policy failure when it is staring it in the face, and that has to be modestly reassuring to our allies and regional neighbors. If there are any repercussions from this decision, they are all likely to benefit America. Latin American governments will have less of a reason to fault U.S. policy towards Cuba. The U.S. will be able to demonstrate that it is still capable of resuming relations with states that it has previously treated as pariahs, and that might make U.S. diplomacy more effective in other places.
Ishaan Tharoor finds it odd that Republicans who tout the benefits of trade liberalization everywhere else don’t extend the same optimism to Cuba:
It’s a strange irony that some of Washington’s biggest proponents of free trade don’t want to see the United States enable such liberalizing changes in Cuba. Closer ties to Cuba, including trade links, will ideally lead to a deepening of Cuba’s own curtailed civil society. That, at least, is the current message of the Obama administration. The more open Cuba gets, the more access its people may have to the Internet and to outside channels of information. That, the hope goes, may speed political reform in Havana.
Critics may point to countries like China and Vietnam, where decades of economic development and free enterprise have yet to yield any real liberal, democratic dividend. But Cuba is fundamentally different; it exists in the U.S.’s shadow and its links to the American mainland, including some 1.5 million Cuban Americans, mean that even the most dogged authoritarian leader will struggle to inoculate the regime from American influence — that is, once Washington finally chooses to engage with Cuba.
Joe Klein makes a similar argument:
Those who favor a continuation of our failed Cuba policy are a reflexive lot with a muddled argument. They’re the usual myopic tough guys–John McCain and Lindsey Graham immediately jumped on the President after his Cuba announcement today–who have no idea of the seductive power of the American way of life in the rest of the world. I can understand why the corroding Iranian regime would want to keep us out (a sign in Tehran: “When the Great Satan praises us, we shall mourn”). I’ve always thought: then let’s recognize the hell out of them. Let ‘em mourn. Let the Revolutionary Guard try to fend off Kanye West and Star Wars. Good luck with that.
Rich Lowry, however, insists that easing trade restrictions won’t spur the growth of free enterprise in Cuba, but rather will only enrich the Castro regime:
Consider tourism. The Cuban military has a enormous holding company called GAESA. One of its companies, Gaviota, operates an extensive network of hotels and resorts from which it earns a bonanza of foreign exchange, according to the strategic consultancy Stratfor. Imagine if the Pentagon owned the Radisson, Marriott and Hilton hotel chains. That is the Cuban tourism industry in a nutshell. If tourism were the key to empowering and eventually liberating the Cuban people, the country would be a robust democracy by now. About a million Canadian tourists go to Cuba every year. In total, more than 2 million tourists visit annually, and yet the Castro regime is still standing.
Michael Daly, meanwhile, points out that Cuba still harbors a number of American fugitives, including the infamous Assata Shakur:
Among the roughly 80 other American fugitives in Cuba is Ishmael Ali LaBeef, who hijacked an airplane after he and four buddies murdered eight innocents during a robbery at a Virgin Islands golf course in 1972. There is also Victor Gerena, who is wanted in connection with a $7 million armored car robbery in Connecticut in 1983. And then there is William Morales of the Puerto Rican independence group the FALN. He lost most of both hands while assembling a device in an FALN bomb factory in 1979, but managed to escape from a hospital ward where he was being fitted for prosthetic hands after being convicted of weapons charges and sentenced to 99 years.
Face Of The Day
A Mynah bird feeds its young in Sydney, Australia on December 18, 2014. By Guillaume Gros/GG.
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