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Later, in San Diego there’d be a choppy sea of dinner preparations, wine, music, jokes, dogs and kids. My mother would insist we sing “Happy Birthday” to Jesus, a new and awkward tradition that thankfully wouldn’t stick. Presents would be opened. My nephews, beautiful little boys, would love their marshmallow shooters and eat the ammunition. […]

Two years ago, more than a decade after college, I was commissioned to write about the history of Kwanzaa. That’s when I learned that Karenga had been convicted of heinous felonies. Though he denied the allegations, in 1970 he and three other members of the US Organization, a black nationalist group based in Los Angeles, […]

When my twin daughters were born 11 years ago, their mother and I employed several women part-time to help us as we hopscotched across Los Angeles to and from our jobs. The woman who stayed on the longest, was from Oaxaca. Her name, like that of one of the indigenous characters in Roma, is Adela, […]

American-style dance halls were springing up around the same time, and while police usually cracked down on them as morally objectionable, they were given a pass on Christmas, according to Kang Jun-man, a communications professor at Chonbuk University who surveyed accounts in Korean newspapers about Christmas celebrations. Source: latimes.com – Los Angeles Times

To the editor: Andrew J. Bacevich is spot-on about the American failure we call the Afghanistan occupation. After close to 20 years — that’s right, 20 years — of our engagement in that quagmire, it’s painfully apparent that the policy of three presidential administrations has been a colossal failure…. Source: latimes.com – Los Angeles Times

While VOA’s job is to tell America’s story abroad, the mission of RFE/RL, which is based in Prague, is to create a free local press in nations where independent media do not exist or are still developing. RFE/RL provides accurate local news to a 20-nation region that includes the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, Iran, […]