Author Archives: lawac
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Japan’s ambassador to the United States, Kenichiro Sasae, told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on Tuesday that Japan is getting increasingly concerned about China, and – more worrying still – has not yet found a way to handle the heightened levels of tension. The two countries dispute sovereignty over the islands that Japan calls the Senkakus and the Chinese refer to as the Diaoyu Islands in the East China Sea, and their naval ships and air force jets patrol dangerously close to each other. More recently Beijing’s announcement of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) that extends over areas under Japanese and S Korean control has caused anxiety around the region for its potential to interfere with civilian air traffic, and has even been criticized by the US.
Yilmaz Erdogan/portals/0/MoviePosters/ButterflysDream.jpg
Nepal, as Kunda Dixit told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on Wednesday evening, is a singularity among countries – and a country not often discussed at the Council.Dixit, the editor of the Nepali Times in Kathmandu, gave a brief overview of the turbulence and violence of the past two decades that has left Nepal, nestled in the Himalayas, impoverished and politically fractured.
Elon Musk told 1,200 members and guests of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on Monday night how his companies SpaceX and Tesla narrowly avoided going bust in 2008 and 2009 respectively, how he gets some of his best ideas from science fiction, how running a car company and a rocket company gives him useful cross-pollination of ideas – and why he didn’t put coat hooks in the back of the Tesla.The full video of the talk with Elon Musk is available here:
LAWAC on YouTubeAdmiral Jonathan Greenert, the Chief of Naval Operations for the US Navy and the Navy’s representative on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made a strong case on Friday for why the US Navy is likely to expand in the coming decade, even as other parts of the military will experience cutbacks
This fascinating documentary by Swiss film-maker Markus Imhoof brings the viewer not only into the world of bees and the threats to their survival, but – and this is what makes the film so memorable – it also introduces us to a range of idiosyncratic humans whose lives revolve around bees. By the end we come to realize that just as we depend on bees for honey, they depend on us for their survival./portals/0/MoviePosters/More-than-honey.jpg
James Clad, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who is now a senior adviser at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, talked to Board and International Circle members over lunch on Tuesday about the shale oil revolution, which he described as “a phenomenal reversal – just six years ago the best minds in the industry thought the US would be the biggest importer of natural gas, and built facilities accordingly – now they have reengineered those facilities to export liquid natural gas (LNG).”
The President of Haifa University, Amos Shapira, and Admiral Ami Ayalon, the former head of Israel's Shin Bet security service talked to Board and International Circle members of the Los Angeles World Affairs Council Monday night about their respective views of the future of Israel and the Middle East. Although both men had very different starting points and trajectories in their careers, they both ended up focusing on the same thing – how to hand down a better and safer life to future generations.
Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan spoke to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on Monday night about Turkey’s extraordinary economic development in the past 11 years – and also confronted some of the more controversial aspects of the country’s past. A Fulbright scholar who earned his MBA at Northwestern and worked for a bank consulting company in Chicago before returning to Turkey, Mr. Babacan is one of the technocrats who is most closely associated with overseeing Turkey’s economic take-off. Turkey is now the 17th biggest economy in the world.
“God Loves Uganda”, the documentary which LAWAC screened on Friday, is as much about the US and the culture wars here as it is about Uganda. The film examines the rise of homophobia in Africa, and the extent to which conservative evangelical missionaries from the US have contributed to the anti-gay sentiment. The feature-length documentary focuses on Uganda, where in 2009 the Parliament proposed an Anti-Homosexuality Law which sought to impose the death penalty on gays, and where gay people are regularly singled out for beatings – and worse – on the streets. Roger Ross Williams
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This beautifully-filmed documentary focuses on three families in rural Cambodia as they struggle to adapt to the rapid economic changes in their country in the past decade, which have brought riches to some, but led to environmental degradation and social dislocation to many more. The film-maker Kalyanee Mam follows a family of forest-dwellers in the north-east, a fishing family who live on the Tonle Sap river and a farming family just south of the capital Phnom Penh. Each of the families is struggling: the forests are being cut down to harvest the timber and to make way for plantation-style farming of cassava and rubber; the inland fisheries are being depleted by industrial fishing that has decimated the fish-stocks; farmers are being preyed upon by unscrupulous bankers who give them loans at interest rates so high they are always struggling to pay back what they owe./portals/0/MoviePosters/A-River-Changes-Course.jpg
Director Andrew Dosunmu has created a film that moves forward like a Greek tragedy, where the characters are pushed and pulled by cultural and family imperatives they are powerless to resist. But his major achievement is to keep us invested in the lives of the married couple, and the manipulative mother-in-law – with her all-knowing smiles./portals/0/MoviePosters/mother_of_george.jpg
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