Day: May 4, 2017

Basketball’s international governing body has approved a new rule that will allow players to wear headgear that complies with their religious faith.

The Switzerland-based body, known as FIBA, says the rule will take effect in games from on Oct. 1.

Then, players can wear hijabs, turbans and yarmulkes after a 20-year ban on head coverings that was initially imposed for safety reasons.

FIBA member federations passed the rule Thursday at a congress in Hong Kong after studying the issue since 2014, and with several conditions on design and color.

Headgear will be permitted under the following conditions: must be black, white or the same dominant color as a team’s uniform; not cover any part of the face entirely or partially; and have “no opening/closing elements around the face and/or neck.”
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Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus first wowed audiences in the 19th century. For the iconic American spectacle’s final act, it will broadcast the final performance on a 21st century medium: Facebook Live.

The company told The Associated Press this week that the final circus show on the evening of May 21 will be streamed live on the social media network and on the circus’s website. The final performance will be in Uniondale, New York.

Earlier this year, Feld Entertainment, the company that owns the iconic circus, announced that the show would end in May.

Many reasons for decline

The circus’s decline happened because of a variety of factors. Declining attendance, combined with high operating costs, changing public tastes and prolonged battles with animal rights groups all contributed to its demise.

Sam Gomez, the circus’s vice president of digital and relationship marketing, said Ringling did something similar, although on a smaller scale, during the final elephant act performance in 2016. 

During that broadcast on Facebook, Ringling showed a pre-recorded intro, then cut to the live act. For the May 21 show, the entire performance will be broadcast live from start to finish and will be hosted by Kristen Michelle Wilson, Ringling’s first female ringmaster.

Organizers have taken into consideration that most people will probably tune in on phones or tablets.

“It’s basically a TV shoot and we’re certainly thinking about lighting and sound,” said Gomez. “How will this look when you’re looking at it on your phone or your tablet? We’ve had lots of conversations about tight shots so you can see the performer’s skill and expressions and their artistry.”

Gomez said Ringling would leave the video up for a short while — it’s unclear how long — but not forever.

Witness end of an era 

The live show allows people to “witness the end of an era.”

“We wanted to give families around the world one last chance to experience ‘the greatest show on earth’ together,” he said.

Ringling Bros. has two touring circuses; one will perform for four nights in Providence, Rhode Island, starting Thursday and ending for good in that city Sunday. The other touring show will end at the Nassau County Coliseum in New York on May 21.

The circus, with its exotic animals, flashy costumes and death-defying acrobats, has been a staple of entertainment in the United States since the mid-1800s. Phineas Taylor Barnum made a traveling spectacle of animals and human oddities popular, while the five Ringling brothers performed juggling acts and skits from their home base in Wisconsin. Eventually, they merged and the modern circus was born.
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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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