Editors' Note: July 30, 2025
An article on Monday about a family who uploaded their father's lengthy reading list after his death in hopes of inspiring readers misstated the name of the high school that the man, Dan Pelzer, attended. It was Detroit Catholic Central High School, not Detroit Central Catholic High School.
An article on Monday about the box office earnings for Marvel's 'The Fantastic Four: First Steps' misidentified the movie with the lowest box office total in Marvel's history. 'Thunderbolts*' had the second-lowest box office total in Marvel's history, after 'The Marvels,' which had the lowest.
A Critic's Notebook article on Monday about the National Ballet of Japan making its British debut referred imprecisely to a debut of the National Ballet of Japan. Its European debut was in Moscow in 2009, not last week. The error was repeated in a capsule summary of the article and a picture caption.
A photo caption with an article on Tuesday about NASA's soft drink space race misspelled the surname of an astronaut. He was Karl G. Henize, not Karl Heinz.
An obituary on Saturday about Joe Vigil, a renowned coach and leading expert on distance running and altitude training, misstated the branch of the military in which he served. It was the U.S. Navy, not the Army.
Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
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Los Angeles Times
2 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Large Great White Shark spotted near Santa Monica
A roughly 15-foot Great White shark was captured on video last week swimming close to Santa Monica's shores, providing a rare glimpse of the fully grown apex predator idling in near-urban waters. Photographer Carlos Guana launched a drone Thursday about a mile north of the Santa Monica Pier after hearing reports that some Great White sharks had been observed breaching — launching themselves out of the water in acrobatic displays of force and fury. He figured he'd find juvenile sharks, which are known to frequent the area and can grow up to 10 feet. Experts say that newborn and juvenile Great White sharks are attracted to near-shore warm waters where there is plenty of easy-to-catch prey and few predators. Adults, on the other hand, prefer colder, deeper waters. But, soon after launching his drone, Guana said he was stunned to see the silhouette of a 15-foot Great White gliding near the surface about 50 yards off the coast. 'The Santa Monica Bay is known as a nursery ground for juveniles,' Gauna said. 'But this was no juvenile. This is the real deal.' Gauna said he later informed a local lifeguard as a precaution. In California, encounters with sharks, especially violent ones, aren't frequent, according to California Fish and Wildflife. Around 200 incidents have been verified in California waters from 1950 to 2021, with 107 resulting in injuries and 15 in deaths. For Gauna, the shark sighting was more awe-inspiring than fear-inducing. And he said it's a spectacular example of the magnificent kinds of creatures that lie just off our shores. 'It's a good reminder of how a great ecosystem exists next to one of the busiest cities in America,' Gauna told The Times. 'And just how rare a shark attack here really is!'
Boston Globe
12 hours ago
- Boston Globe
A bid to undo a colonial-era wrong touches a people's old wounds
Their efforts to repatriate ancestral remains, which have been in a British museum for more than a century, have been 'a trigger for the Nagas,' said Dolly Kikon, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is Naga herself. Naga society has changed immensely since those remains were taken. To contemplate their return means reckoning with those changes, and with how many of them are the result of external forces and violence. Advertisement Members of Naga communities in northeastern India have worked for five years with the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, whose collection of Naga cultural objects is the largest in the world, toward the goal of repatriating the hundreds of human remains in the collection. In June, a delegation of 20 Naga leaders, elders and scholars visited the museum and saw those objects for the first time. 'I stood there beside them quietly, feeling a deep sorrow in my heart,' Kikon said. The human remains in the collection, which number more than 200, include a warrior's cranium, a woman's skull decorated with buffalo horns and a piece of skin with hair attached. Naga tradition holds that human remains are sacred, carrying life and spirit. 'They are restless, the spirits will not be in peace unless they find a resting place,' said K. Ongshong, a Naga elder from Longleng village in the Indian state of Nagaland. Advertisement Most of the remains were donated to the museum by J.P. Mills and J.H. Hutton, British colonial administrators in northeastern India. While some were given to the men as gifts, most were collected against Naga people's will during military expeditions into villages, according to experts. For years, the skulls were included in a Pitt Rivers exhibit titled 'Treatment of Dead Enemies,' under the label 'headhunting trophies' alongside remains from other Indigenous groups, including the well-known shrunken heads of the Shuar people of South America. That changed in 2020, when 120 of the human remains in the collection, including the shrunken heads and Naga remains, were removed from display and put in storage. In their place stand blue information boards explaining the contentious collection and the museum's decolonization efforts. 'These displays didn't match with our values any more,' Laura Van Broekhoven, the museum's director, said in an interview. Headhunting was practiced among Naga warriors, who collected the heads of enemies they killed in raids or war. (Despite the labeling by the museum, experts said it was unlikely that all the Naga skulls were enemy trophy heads; some may have been taken from burial sites.) Because of the gruesome nature of the practice, and the way it helped to feed a persistent stereotype of the Nagas as violent and warlike, some Nagas are hesitant to bring the remains home. The repatriation discussions are also touching on deeper wounds for many of the Naga people, who number about 2.5 million. Advertisement That is clear from the difficulties raised, in this case, by one of the first questions in any repatriation process: Where should these objects go? Today, most Nagas live in the Indian state of Nagaland. But Naga communities can also be found in the states of Assam, Manipur and Arunachal Pradesh -- and in Myanmar. Before the British colonists drew their borders, the Nagas lived in a contiguous region loosely known as the Naga hills, now divided among those modern states. In 1928, Nagas began making formal demands for independence, not wanting to be a part of the British Raj or India. 'The Nagas shared no cultural similarities with India,' said Akum Longchari, a peace and conflict activist based in Nagaland. But when the British left the subcontinent in 1947, Nagas were brought under the control of the Indian state. Decades of political struggle and armed resistance followed, broadly known as the Naga National Movement. India saw it as a threat and suppressed the insurgency. The fighting killed thousands over the years. India implemented laws that gave sweeping powers to its security forces and protected them from prosecution, which experts say led to human rights violations. Although a ceasefire was reached in 1997, the state of Nagaland remains one of India's most militarized regions. For some Nagas, the truce feels precarious, and much suspicion and mistrust remain. Longchari said Naga society had been in a constant state of struggle since British colonization in the 1800s. 'Nagas have had no time for reflection,' he said, adding, 'One colonizer left and another took their place right after.' Another factor complicating the repatriation process is the enduring legacy of American Christian missionaries, who first arrived in the Naga hills in the 19th century. Advertisement If the remains are laid to rest, some Nagas wonder, what funeral rituals should they be accorded -- the rites of Christianity, since that is the religion most Nagas now follow, or traditional, animistic ones? Knowledge of those older rites may now be limited, since the missionaries changed the region's culture along with its religion, said Nepuni Piku, a human-rights activist. 'They did not just come with their Bible, but with their cultural baggage,' Piku said. Naga culture was painted as backward and outdated, Christianity as modern, which led to the abandonment of many Naga cultural practices and rituals, he said. Naga activists and scholars, along with the Forum for Naga Reconciliation in Nagaland, a civil society organization, have been trying to build consensus on these questions and more. Once there is agreement on a plan for repatriating the remains and artifacts, a claim will be made to the university. If the university accepts the claim, then the governments of both countries will get involved. Last fall, a two-day conference on the proposed repatriation brought together community elders, scholars and students in a nondenominational Christian church in Dimapur, the largest city in Nagaland. A college student at the conference asked what relevance the traditions of the past had for the urban world he inhabits. Loina Shohe, a sociologist, replied that Naga culture, like any other, is not static but evolves with time. 'Our ancestors were self-sustained, not primitive or savage,' she said. The Nagas' history has caused them immense intergenerational trauma, Dr. P. Ngully, a psychiatrist in Nagaland, said in an interview last year. He was part of the delegation that visited Oxford, one month before he died in July. Such trauma, which he called an 'invisible epidemic,' can exacerbate alcohol and substance abuse, he said, problems that Naga society is trying to address among its youth. Advertisement Some younger Nagas are looking for ways to reconcile with that traumatic history. Throngkiuba Yimchungru, 35, conducts art workshops that he calls DeConstructing Morung. Long ago, morungs were youth dormitories where Nagas came together to socialize -- one of the traditions lost to Christianity and time. Yimchungru said he wanted to adapt the concept to the present. 'Morungs can be anywhere -- in a school, office, within a big city,' he said. 'They needn't be within an architectural structure.' Nagas' discussions with the Pitt Rivers Museum have also been an attempt to reconcile with the past. But the return of the remains in the museum's collection could conceivably take decades. The fastest repatriation the museum has ever carried out took a year and a half, while the longest -- the repatriation of Tasmanian human remains -- took 45. The Naga delegation to the museum opened its June visit with an Indigenous chant that alludes to the original parting of the Naga ancestors from their creator. The chant concludes with the hope that the ancestor will be reunited with the creator and help to heal the wounds of the past. 'I don't know if the process of repatriation will do the healing for us,' Kikon said. 'But I do know there's a lot of trauma and we need the healing.' This article originally appeared in
Boston Globe
13 hours ago
- Boston Globe
Sneaking into the Spy Museum's new vault
As with most museums, a vast majority of those objects are not on display. And until a few weeks ago, they were far away, stored at a location outside the capital -- making it a challenge for museum historians to reach the objects for study and preservation. Advertisement In 2020, the museum began consolidating its collection in its new building, a project that it completed this year. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Many of the artifacts in the vault came from one man: H. Keith Melton, a founding board member of the museum, who became one of the world's renowned spy collectors. He is not a former intelligence agent himself; rather, he made his money as one of the country's largest McDonald's franchise owners. A condition of his donation, which he first pledged in 2016, was that the collection would eventually be moved to the museum itself, Melton said. 'To properly care for, maintain, catalog, access the artifacts, they needed to be on the premises,' Melton said in an interview. 'You can't deal with it remotely. Artifacts need care and feeding and vigilance, and they need to make sure they're not deteriorating ." Advertisement The collections team at the International Spy Museum recently opened the doors to its den of secrets, offering a reporter and photographer a look at tools of the trade that, like much of spycraft itself, are kept out of public view. There are roughly 4,000 books in the vault, most of them donated by Melton. The most treasured of these is a World War II-era briefing book created by MI9, a wartime branch of British intelligence, to get Americans up to speed on its top secret espionage innovations. It includes designs for cameras disguised as cigarette lighters, coat buttons and gold teeth concealing compasses, and maps printed on clothing. Laura Hicken, the museum's collections manager, estimated that there were fewer than 20 copies of this book in the world. Among the museum's newest acquisitions are original courtroom sketches by William Sharp, an illustrator who died in 1961. One is of Rudolf Abel, the Soviet spy who operated undercover in the United States for almost a decade and who was portrayed by Mark Rylance in the 2015 Steven Spielberg thriller 'Bridge of Spies.' In the drawings, Sharp portrayed Abel as looking stressed. 'For us, where so much of our history is told through gadgets and weapons and concealment devices, this is so incredibly personal and such an intimate look into the consequences of the things we cover,' Hicken said, referring to the sketch. (The museum, which is recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's largest espionage museum, has come under criticism in the past for sanitizing the unethical behavior of spy agencies.) Advertisement Another set of Sharp-penned sketches is from the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were arrested in 1950 for espionage and executed in 1953. The drawings feature Judge Irving R. Kaufman, who sentenced them to death, and an unguarded Ethel Rosenberg, whose culpability has come under doubt in the last decade. The Spy Museum has also received gifts and loans from international governments. The South Korean government, for example, lent items said to have been seized from a North Korean spy who crossed into the south. Among these is a pen that, when clicked a certain way, would have been capable of injecting a paralyzing agent into an unsuspecting victim, as well as a code sheet that spies could use to communicate with someone equipped with a counter code sheet. The German government lent an army propaganda rocket from the early 1940s. These were launched over Russian soldiers on the battlefield, where they would eject pamphlets encouraging them to abandon Josef Stalin. According to a translation, the pamphlets inside the rocket say: 'Red Army men! You will not experience peace, you will not return to your home. Stalin will not allow this because he knows that any Red Army soldier who has been in Europe will pose a threat to the Stalinist system.' Sitting on top of a large shelf is a couch that belonged to Robert P. Hanssen, a former FBI agent who spied for Moscow off and on for decades. Hanssen died in 2023 in his Colorado prison cell. Melton also persuaded Hanssen's family to donate other items, including a suit and watches. The museum has no shortage of knives, some of which are hidden in spatulas and boots. But there are less subtle blades, including one developed by the Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, to be a combat weapon. Advertisement 'There are a lot of challenging elements to our collection because so much of it was meant to kill or destroy or distract,' Hicken said. 'We have powders that were meant to be tipped into gas tanks that would essentially erode the gas tank very quickly so you could disable somebody's vehicle.' Also in the vault are several items that once belonged to Tony Mendez, the celebrated CIA officer who was played by Ben Affleck in the 2012 Academy Award-winning movie 'Argo.' Mendez was particularly known for disguises, exfiltration and forgery. One drawer in the vault includes wigs he designed and a pair of shoes with lifts inside to make the wearer appear significantly taller. In addition, there's a self-portrait of Mendez, a former board member of the museum, depicting several aspects of the 'Argo' story, which involved Mendez's plan to rescue American diplomats trapped in Iran in 1980. 'Everything in our collection is two things,' Hicken said. 'The purse actually conceals a camera. The pen conceals a microdot viewer. The shoe has a knife in it.' This article originally appeared in
