LUY-Development

Category: AP News Feed

  • Bosnia’s World Cup pursuit begins at a home-away-from home in the American Midwest

    ST. LOUIS (AP) — Far from its European homeland, Bosnia and Herzegovina has zealous fans in the American Midwest as it prepares for its second World Cup.

    An estimated 60,000-70,000 Bosnians live in St. Louis, with many arriving in the early 1990s during the Bosnian War and the breakup of Yugoslavia.

    Bosnia faces Panama on Saturday in an international friendly at St. Louis’ Energizer Park and plays World Cup group matches in Toronto (vs. Canada), Los Angeles ( vs. Switzerland) and Seattle (vs. Qatar).

    “We should be able to create an atmosphere like a home match,” said Elvir Kafedžić, a Bosnia-born St. Louisan and an assistant coach for the city’s MLS team, St. Louis City SC.

    He was only 9 1-2 when he fled Bosnia in 1992 with his mother and brothers to escape the war.

    “Unfortunately, I remember a lot of it,” said Kafedžić, whose story mirrors many who rebuilt in St. Louis after meandering across Europe.

    “We kind of tumbled through some different countries like Montenegro, the Czech Republic, Sweden and wound up in Germany,” Kafedžić explained.

    That ended when Germany stopped granting temporary protection to Bosnians in the late 1990s.

    “We didn’t have anywhere to go back to in Bosnia. And we already had some relatives living in St. Louis. So in 1999 we made the move with my mom and two older brothers.”

    Bosnia defeated Italy

    Bosnia qualified for the World Cup two months ago, defeating four-time World Cup champion Italy 4-1 on penalties after a 1-1 draw. The deciding penalty was converted by Esmir Bajraktarević, a Bosnian-American from Appleton, Wisconsin.

    “That day you could see cars flying Bosnian flags in the streets,” Kafedžić said of the St. Louis scene. “All the restaurants, all the coffee shops were packed wall-to-wall with strangers hugging each other. For me, this goes beyond soccer. This shows who we are, the pride, where we come from and how deeply we’re connected to our roots.”

    Bosnia’s World Cup team is led by 40-year-old captain Edin Džeko and 18-year-old winger Kerim Alajbegović. Džeko has scored at least 50 goals playing in the English Premier League, Italy’s Serie A, and the German Bundesliga.

    Bosnia’s only other World Cup appearance was at Brazil in 2014, where it was narrowly eliminated in the group stage. The team’s first World Cup goal was scored by Vedad Ibišević in a 2-1 loss to Argentina.

    Ibišević played high school soccer in St. Louis, starred at Saint Louis University and followed up with a successful professional career, primarily in the Bundesliga.

    “Little Bosnia” in St. Louis

    St. Louis surfaced as a destination for Bosnian refugees because it offered jobs, reasonable housing prices and had a small community in place.

    “We all came looking for a better life because everything was taken away from us at home,” Kafedžić said. “You can’t put in words how thankful we are.”

    A swath of the city’s South Side is known as “Little Bosnia,” anchored by rows of tidy red-brick houses, bars, cafes and bakeries and a replica wood fountain that mimics one in the capital Sarajevo, known as the Sebilj.

    “It represents Sarajevo in the heart,” said Jasmina Silić, working across the street from the monument at the Skala Bar on Gravois Avenue, the fulcrum of the community.

    A reminder of the war

    Skala is located just a few doors away from the “Association of Survivors of the Srebrenica Genocide,” a constant reminder of the war and the ethnic cleansing committed by Bosnian Serb forces.

    More than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims died in Srebrenica, which was declared a genocide by the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and others. It’s estimated that 104,000 died from the war, 2 million were displaced, and 83% of the civilian deaths were Bosnian Muslims.

    Bosnian imprint

    Bosnia’s influence is all over St. Louis, a metropolitan area of almost 3 million on the banks of the Mississippi River.

    The best-selling food at St. Louis’ MLS stadium is Bosnian fare from a restaurant called the “Balkan Treat Box.” Saint Louis University houses the Center for Bosnian Studies, and several books document the diaspora including “Bosnian St. Louis: Between Two Worlds” by Patrick McCarthy and Akif Cogo.

    It tells of tragedy, resilience and the community’s ties to Europe.

    “One woman in St. Louis still carries the keys to her house in Bosnia,” they wrote. “Another man describes his feelings toward Bosnia as a divorce he did not want from a woman he still loves.”

    Bosnia was a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation before the war, predominantly Muslim but with a large number of Croatian Roman Catholics and Serbian Orthodox Christians.

    The mix binds the World Cup team, a symbol of pride and reconciliation.

    “A lot of people from here go to Bosnia every year to see families,” said Silić, speaking at the Skala Bar. ”The team represents unity because it’s all three religions and everybody is one like it used to be when it was still Yugoslavia.”

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    AP World Cup: https://apnews.com/hub/fifa-world-cup

  • Limited interest in latest oil and gas lease sale for Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge


    JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — Two corporations bid on a handful of leases during the latest oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on Friday, a showing critics described as tepid but one that further opens the door to possible development in the pristine region.

    The Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, a state corporation that already has leases in the refuge’s coastal plain, had the winning bid on three tracts and Hex Energy LLC on two, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced. The tracts cover about 72,000 acres. Nearly 690,000 acres had been offered. Winning bids totaled $3.7 million.

    The federal agency’s state director, Kevin Pendergast, said a “new era of active leasing and exploration is just beginning to unfold.”

    While there is no active drilling underway, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority’s board last month authorized additional spending for efforts including a seismic survey program aimed at locating oil formations, as well as lease purchases in this latest sale. A message seeking comment from Hex Energy was not immediately returned.

    Opponents of drilling in the refuge’s coastal plain have pointed to a lack of industry interest in the prior two sales held there and ongoing changes in Alaska’s arctic region due to climate change as proof the region should be off-limits to drilling. There is pending litigation over the leasing program, dating to President Donald Trump’s first term.

    The Gwich’in consider the coastal plain sacred because the caribou herd they rely upon calve there. The Gwich’in people’s reliance on the coastal plain “will be irreversibly damaged if it is disturbed,” Karlas Norman, first chief of the Venetie Village Council, said in a statement. “Even though we saw minimal bids, we will not rest until this sacred place is permanently protected for our children and for generations yet to come.”

    But supporters of development see the coastal plain, which is roughly the size of Delaware, as a potential untapped resource that could boost U.S. oil production and generate new revenue and jobs. Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, an advocacy group whose members include leaders from Alaska Native communities on the North Slope, hailed the sale a success.

    A statement from the group said the sale represented “the culmination of decades of advocacy by North Slope Iñupiat leaders, in particular leaders from Kaktovik, for their right to self-determination on their homelands, including responsible exploration and development.” Kaktovik is the only community within the refuge.

    “The Trump-Vance administration is doing the right thing by advancing policies, including those that permitted the sale, supported by our community,” Kaktovik Mayor Nathan Gordon Jr. said in the statement.

    The Trump administration has taken a keen interest in Alaska, and his tax and spending bill passed by Congress last year included provisions mandating lease sales in three regions of the state. In addition to the refuge’s coastal plain, leases have also been offered in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and in Cook Inlet, an aging basin that has provided natural gas for Alaska’s most populous region for decades.

    There were no takers in the Cook Inlet auction in March. But there were hundreds of bids, including from major oil companies, for what was the first sale since 2019 in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska — despite pending litigation challenging the leasing program. The Trump administration has moved to open more lands to drilling in the reserve and rolled back protections there. The petroleum reserve is where ConocoPhillips Alaska is developing the large Willow oil project.

    On Alaska’s vast, petroleum-rich North Slope, the major oil fields of Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk lie between the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

    Bill Groffy, principal deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management, in an interview said Alaska has “some major resources.”

    “The ability to go and utilize those resources is something the president wants us to look at, and the secretary wants us to looks at,” he said, referring to U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

    The arctic refuge’s coastal plain could contain 4.25 billion to 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, according to U.S. Geological Survey estimates, but there is limited information about the amount and quality of oil.

    The coastal plain, bordering the Beaufort Sea in northeast Alaska, features rolling hills and tundra and provides habitat for wildlife including musk oxen and migratory birds.


  • Longtime CBS correspondent Scott Pelley lived many workers’ fantasy: Telling your boss off

    NEW YORK (AP) — As if Scott Pelley’s years in a glamorous, globetrotting, seven-figure dream job weren’t enough, he’s pulled off one more thing to stir your envy: a cutting takedown of his boss that went loudly public.

    The “60 Minutes” correspondent’s searing rebuke of CBS management this week, in which he questioned his bosses’ credentials and motives, may have ended in his firing, but amounted to the sort of mouthing-off that workplace peons typically only fantasize about.

    “That’s the American dream — to be able to tell off your boss and walk out the door,” says Zach Tyra, a 40-year-old data analyst from Jones, Oklahoma, who found a kindred spirit in the newsman, recalling his own experience with a former boss he said was clueless. “I couldn’t do what Scott Pelley did because I didn’t have the safety net or the resources or the network that he has. I couldn’t tell my boss to stick it. I just had to sit there and eat it.”

    Pelley’s message may have been delivered in the measured baritone of someone polished by decades on the airwaves. But his backtalk stirred many who’ve felt the simmering rage of feeling a clueless boss was turning their days into a nightmare.

    “It’s also kind of weird, like, Pelley isn’t some blue-collar hero. There’s a wide gap between, like, Pelley and your local everyday guy down at the hardware store,” Tyra says. “But I think everyone can relate to standing up for what they believe.”

    A staff meeting that went deeply awry

    Pelley’s dressing-down came in a Monday staff meeting with the new executive producer of “60 Minutes,” Nick Bilton, brought aboard by Bari Weiss, who became CBS News’ editor-in-chief in October. The correspondent reportedly grilled Bilton about the firings last week of Bilton’s predecessor, Tanya Simon, and correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega, accusing management of “murdering” the program, a revered cornerstone of TV journalism and a mainstay of Sunday nights for nearly six decades.

    “She has no qualifications for her job,” Pelley said of Weiss, according to the media news site Status, which reported he then turned his ire at Bilton. “You have slender qualifications for this job.”

    In firing Pelley, Bilton called his outburst an “ambush” of “remarkable incivility and contempt.” But, with Pelley becoming a proxy for the American worker, others cheered.

    Parry Headrick, who runs a public relations firm in Boston, was immediately transported to his days as a young reporter at a small newspaper, where he had been carefully chronicling the trials of people who fell ill from what was believed to be exposure to toxic waste.

    He had earned the trust of one family only to find editors plastered a headline on the story that reduced the sick child to a “toxic boy” and caused Headrick to lose all faith in his bosses. He screamed at the paper’s publisher and editor-in-chief before quitting.

    “I lost my goddamn mind when they did that. And the story with Pelley resonated so hard specifically because of that,” says 57-year-old Headrick, who thinks many people can see Pelley’s point of view. “There exists in most Americans the desire to speak truth to power.”

    That such an outburst arose in the news business may be no surprise; journalists pride themselves as a truth-to-power, voice-for-the-voiceless bunch. Staff meetings with reporters sassing editors are common, and in newsrooms everywhere, managers have been subjected to the type of tough questions they pay their people to ask others.

    The threshold for dismissal varies from place to place

    The line separating acceptable discourse with fireable offense is as different in each workplace as the settings themselves, whether a dive bar or diocesan chancery.

    “In the real world, there are layers of politeness and cordiality that don’t really exist in journalism,” says Headrick, who cheered Pelley “pushing back on something larger.”

    Clare Haynes had a middle-management role at a nonprofit when she had her Pelley moment two decades ago. She was three weeks into a job where she thought she’d been brought aboard to institute changes that would achieve an innovative work culture. But every suggestion she made was dismissed. Her boss said his boss wouldn’t buy the idea.

    “Are you saying you’re too weak to ask?” she snapped. His mouth fell open. He stared at her silently for a full minute.

    Haynes survived, lasting three more years at the firm, but things were never the same.

    “I didn’t lose my job, but I paid the price, being seen as maverick,” says 55-year-old Haynes, of Royal Leamington Spa, England, who now runs a coaching firm that trains executives how to handle difficult workplace conversations.

    Johan Konst was working at a Swedish media company when he felt pushed to the limit seven years ago. After years of high-stress, hard-selling days pushing advertising he didn’t believe in, he finally said his piece, delivering a blunt, profanity-dotted message to his boss.

    He was promptly shown the door.

    “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” says 34-year-old Konst, of Amsterdam, who walked away with a nice severance check. “At some point, this had to happen.”

    ___

    Matt Sedensky can be reached at msedensky@ap.org and https://x.com/sedensky

  • A rare Edith Wharton story is unearthed about the gap between everyday life and the horrors of WWI

    NEW YORK (AP) — When World War I broke out in 1914, Edith Wharton’s initial response was less as a storyteller in search of material than as a citizen and intrepid witness.

    The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The House of Mirth,” “The Custom of the Country” and other probing stories of New York society was living in Paris at the time and soon set out to help those imperiled by the clash between Allied and German forces. She set up a workroom for seamstresses and others who had lost their jobs, established hostels that aided thousands of refugees and even reported from the trenches for a series of dispatches that ran in the American periodical Scribner’s Magazine.

    But Wharton eventually — and inevitably — channeled her observations and experiences into fiction. She worked on a novel published after the war, “A Son at the Front,” and attempted a story about an affluent couple in the French countryside who decide that the war is going well enough that they can resume the social gatherings of the past. “The Men Who Saved the World” — unfinished and never before published — appears Friday in the new issue of The Strand Magazine, which has released rare works by Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and many others.

    “The boom of guns can be heard in the distance. A few young soldiers sit among the guests. And the hostess wants to know whether they might have dancing,” Strand Managing Editor Andrew Gulli writes in a brief introduction. “Wharton asks a question that is as relevant today as it was over a century ago: what is the cost of refusing to see the horrors beyond the softly curtained windows — and who pays it?”

    Wharton had long scrutinized the rich from the inside. Born into a wealthy New York City family in 1862, she knew firsthand the manners and codes and traditions that she picked apart in her best known work. In “The Men Who Saved the World,” believed to be written in 1918, she shifts the narrative from the New York drawing rooms of her early fiction to a French chateau within miles of a battlefield.

    The author had a deep affinity for France and French culture, which she regarded as “one of the greatest cultures in the world, perhaps the greatest culture,” Wharton scholar Julie Olin-Ammentorp wrote in an email, adding that she was unsure why the author never finished “The Men Who Saved the World.” The German attack stirred Wharton’s conscience, and her imagination.

    “The Men Who Saved the World” dramatizes the separation between civilian and military life, and what happens when they merge. It’s told through the perspective of a young American nurse, Milly Arden, a guest at the home of Fred and Madge Upshall, who are preparing a dinner party in the same setting where they had once permitted an army surgeon to perform amputations. Arden finds herself seated next to a war hero, Capt. Sherman Wake, regarded by Mrs. Upshall as one of the “real people.” Capt. Wake proves eager to discuss the “catastrophic horror and waste” he has seen nearby.

    “You hear the guns pretty distinctly here,” Wake tells Arden. “They must make the windows rattle when everything’s quiet, don’t they?”

    “Yes, they do,” she responded, looking out on an orchid “which the cannonade had displaced just before dinner.”