BERLIN (AP) — People were killed and injured in an attack on Friday at a festival in the city of Solingen in western Germany, the news agency dpa reported. It wasn’t immediately clear how many casualties there were.

The local Solinger Tageblatt newspaper reported that authorities called on people to leave downtown Solingen and that one of the festival organizers, Philipp Müller, said on a stage that emergency workers were fighting for the lives of nine people.

The dpa report cited unidentified police sources as saying the weapon was believed to be a knife and no one had yet been arrested. The attack happened on a central square, the Fronhof.

The festival marking the city’s 650th anniversary began on Friday and was supposed to run through Sunday.

Solingen has about 160,000 inhabitants and is located near the bigger cities of Cologne and Duesseldorf.

According to City Hall, since rolling out new stricter re-sheltering rules for adult migrants without children in May, it’s assessed over 2,600 shelter extension cases, issuing over 850 approvals and over 1,780 denials.

Emilio ate an apple outside the city’s “Reticketing Center,” at the former St. Brigid’s School in the East Village, where migrants can get a ticket to leave the city or reapply for an extension of their shelter stay.

Emilio, who asked that his full name not be used, was waiting near Tompkins Square Park for his friend, who like him hails from Ecuador. The two were visiting the Center to apply for more time in the shelter system; Emilio had been in the city since April, and was previously staying in a shelter in Midtown.

“They gave me 60 days,” Emilio, 39, said in Spanish, noting that he had recently applied for asylum with the federal government. He was assigned to two more months at the city’s large tent shelter for migrant adults at Randall’s Island. 

A couple of hours after arriving, his friend, Marcelo Canchingre, 37, emerged from the former St. Brigid’s School with a strip of white paper with the address of a Long Island City shelter. Canchingre arrived in the city in November, and had been sleeping in a shelter in Flatbush until his time ran out. He was already working at a restaurant in Manhattan.

“Not bad. You’re only a few stops from Manhattan,” Emilio commented after looking at the address. 

“They gave me 30 days,” Canchingre said, about the length of shelter stay he’d just received. Unlike Emilio, he has yet to apply for federal asylum.

It’s been several months since new rules went into effect for how migrants and asylum seekers can earn more time in the city’s shelters, based on their efforts to leave the system and often determined on a case-by-case basis. The city is now granting longer, 60-day extensions to those who fall into a category known as Permanently Residing Under the Color of Law (PRUCOL), meaning they’re eligible for certain public benefits.

As a result of a New York Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance guideline issued in May, migrants who have applied for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or asylum—among other criteria—might be eligible for safety net assistance and state public benefits, such as temporary shelter.

The city has been granting additional shelter time for those with PURCOL status for months, but offering them longer, 60-day extensions, rather than 30 days as others have received, appears to be a more recent development, according to homeless advocates.

The legal settlement that established the current rules for re-sheltering adult migrants without children, reached in March, specifies that those who meet the city’s varied criteria for more time after an initial stint must be offered at least another 30 days if the applicant is older than 23, and at least 60 days for those who are younger.

When asked when the city had initiated this change, City Hall stated that the longer extensions to migrants with PRUCOL status began after the settlement with the Legal Aid Society and Coalition for the Homeless was reached.

But according to Josh Goldfein, an attorney for the Legal Aid Society who negotiated the right-to-shelter settlement, this change was implemented recently.

He said the idea of granting more time to those who’ve applied for asylum was proposed to the city by advocates in the last month or so. Additional time will provide stability to asylum applicants while they wait to obtain a work permit, Goldfein said, which they can only do 150 days after filing.

“They [the city] told us that was their plan,” Goldfein said, “But this is the first time I’m hearing that they went ahead and actually implemented it.” The mayor’s office said it did not have figures to share when asked how many people had received 60-day extensions because of their PRUCOL status.

On the morning of Aug. 13 outside the Reticketing Center, City Limits spoke to nine migrants after they applied for a shelter extension. All eight who had filed an asylum application received two months in a replacement approval notice. The one who hadn’t submitted for asylum received a 30-day extension instead.

Under the settlement reached in March, migrants applying for another bed after initial 30- or 60-day shelter stays could get extensions for “extenuating circumstances,” such as recovering from a medical procedure or if they have an upcoming immigration court date.

They could also earn more time if they show “significant efforts” to leave the system, such as applying for Temporary Protected Status—under which they can obtain work authorization—attending classes or securing a job, among other factors.

According to City Hall, since rolling out the new, stricter re-sheltering rules in May, it’s assessed over 2,600 shelter extension cases at the Reticketing Center, issuing over 850 approvals and over 1,780 denials.

The city wouldn’t detail how it weighs applications, but Goldfein said the 20-point system it began using this spring, in which someone can earn points for every effort they demonstrate to leave shelter, hasn’t changed.

“When people request extensions,” explained Dave Giffen, executive director at Coalition for the Homeless, “they are first screened for PRUCOL status, then if they do not have PRUCOL status, they can still request a shelter extension based on extenuating circumstances.”

When it was time to speak to a case manager inside the facility, migrants leaving the Reticketing Center that day reported being asked a few questions at most, while most said they were not asked any questions at all.

“We went in. We waited,” said Colombian Fernando Alemán, 23, in Spanish, who entered with a friend, and was given 60 more days at another shelter. “They didn’t ask us anything. They gave us the letter and the new address.”

Right: A man enters the Reticketing Center. Left: A prepackaged meal distributed to shelter applicants.
Photos by Adi Talwar.

Several, like Emilio, went out to eat the pre-packaged meals—consisting of an apple, boiled egg, and a bread roll—they had received inside.

More than 14,000 adult migrants without children remained in the city’s shelter system at the end of June, the most recent month for which population data is available. The stricter rules for shelter extensions over the last few months has resulted in more migrants sleeping and setting up camp outdoors, according to media reports, and city officials recently cleared one such encampment on Randall’s Island. 

Another more than 51,000 people in shelter in June were migrant families with children, who aren’t subject to the tougher re-sheltering rules. But many families with children in the system have been issued 60-day shelter deadlines, at which point they must reapply for another placement. And this week, city officials confirmed that they will begin issuing two-month notices to migrant families with kids in Department of Homeless Services’ shelter sites, who until now had avoided the time limits. 

Some 8,835 migrant families with children, or more than 30,000 people, were staying in DHS shelters at the end of June. Homeless and immigrant advocates have slammed the policy change, saying that forcing homeless children to move shelters every two months is disruptive to their routines and access to education, and comes just as the new school year is about to start. 

More faith-based shelters to open

On the morning of Aug. 13, some asylum seekers came out of the Reticketing Center with optimism on their faces.

But others complained that they were assigned to shelters far from where they worked, or were assigned to one of the nine houses of worship across the city that have opened as part of the faith-based shelter program announced by the mayor last year.

Under the plan, 50 houses of worship were selected to provide overnight housing for more than a dozen adults per facility, but after more than a year, just nine are currently providing shelter for migrants.

Unlike other shelters the city has opened, the religious sites can take in far fewer people and only operate overnight.

“They open at 7 p.m., and you leave at 7 a.m.,” said a Haitian immigrant in French, who did not want to be identified by name but who said he was assigned to one such site. 

Migrants and asylum seekers have the option of going to two “daytime hospitality centers,” which are open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and provide food, showers, and clothing distribution.

According to Peter Gudaitis, executive director and CEO of New York Disaster Interfaith Services (NYDIS), two more faith-based shelters are supposed to open this month and over 20 more are working to open.

For months, the program has been stalled by the Fire Department’s approval process, including complying with rules around the number of beds, and a Department of Buildings (DOB) requirement to obtain a temporary use permit.

“All delays are still related to the FDNY and DOB code compliance for getting a Temporary Use Permit,” said Gudaitis.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Daniel@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

Robert Lloyd | Los Angeles Times (TNS)

“Pachinko,” a beautifully wrought historical melodrama, is back for its necessary second season, to fill in some holes, fiddle with loose ends and extend the story even farther beyond the borders of Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel. It is a transitional season, which ends with little resolved and gaps still to fill, and while it offers all the sensual pleasures of the first season’s performances and production, its portion of love and death, it is very much the middle of a book.

Unlike the novel, which proceeds chronologically, the series, returning Friday on Apple TV+, alternates between the “present day” — 1989 Osaka — and the evolving story that gets us there. Season 1 began in 1915 before the birth of main character Sunja (Minha Kim) in Japanese-occupied Korea, then followed her through her country-girl youth into a romance with handsome, dangerous Hansu (Lee Minho). An unexpected pregnancy led to a marriage of convenience, later affection, with Isak (Steve Sanghyun Noh), a Christian preacher; together they moved to Osaka to join his brother Yoseb (Junwoo Han) and wife, Kyunghee (Eunchae Jung), where they become Zainichi, the term for Koreans living in Japan — a population much discriminated against. (Incidents of prejudice dot the current season, almost as a reminder of what the first season firmly established.)

That storyline got us to 1938. The new season picks up in early 1945 (skipping much of the novel), and times are difficult as Japan fearfully braces for an American attack; Sunja and Kyunghee eke out a living selling kimchi, and the cabbage has almost run out. Sunja’s children, Noa (Kang Hoon Kim), her son with Hansu, and Mozasu (Eunseong Kwon), her son with Isak, have grown accordingly. Noa, who is unaware of his birth father and takes after his adoptive father, is shy and studious, Mozasu brash and unsuited to study. Isak is in prison, having been arrested last season for rabble-rousing; Yoseb is working in a munitions factory in Nagasaki, which should raise an eyebrow. But a friendly new character, Mr. Kim (Kim Sungkyu), is hanging around helpfully, and Hansu, keeping an eye on them from near and far, will be back and involved.

(The Nagasaki sequence, which opens the fifth episode, is shot in black and white in standard aspect ratio, before returning to color and widescreen when the bomb drops. The title credit that follows omits the usual cheerful shots of the cast dancing to the Grass Roots’ “Let’s Live for Today” as inappropriate. Understandably.)

Nearly all the capital of the 1989 storyline having been spent in the first season, showrunner Soo Hugh has had to create fresh material to keep those characters busy while the earlier narrative catches up. (At the end of the season, they still have three decades to go.)

Older Sunja (Yuh-Jung Youn) is still living in Osaka with her successful son Mozasu (Soji Arai), who has grown up to own pachinko parlors — a sort of pinball cum slot machine — and, as a somewhat disreputable if popular business, one of the few avenues then open to Koreans. (Mozasu himself, a major character last season, is mostly absent from this one.) Mozasu’s son, Solomon (Jin Ha), college-educated in America, is in Tokyo, involved in high finance and real estate. In Season 1, he’d attempted to pry an old woman from her home in hopes of putting a golf resort on the land and impressing his bosses; in the end, he advised her not to sign the papers, but the current season finds him unfortunately back on that horse, in a complete moral backsliding. (I found the particulars of Solomon’s business dealings somewhat hard to follow, or perhaps just not worth the effort.)

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This authorial trouble making might be expressed in the old Hollywood formulation as “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets (possibly a different) girl” and so on, whether or not we are actually talking about boys and girls. It’s a problem familiar to ongoing original series, where fresh conflicts must be created each year. One expects it will build eventually to another shot at redemption — the series is too sentimental, too good-hearted not to offer him the chance.

And of course we get enough of Good Solomon to justify our interest, just as we get enough of Good Hansu to make up for his criminality. Parts of Solomon’s story, which brings in some unsavory characters, do feel constructed as a deliberate mirror of Hansu’s; perhaps not coincidentally they are played by the show’s best-looking actors. As to Sunja’s new, extra-textual adventures, she’ll strike up a friendship with a man at the supermarket that allows for an adorable scene in a Mexican restaurant, something seemingly new to 1989 Osaka.

Though historical events are acknowledged, what with World War II and the Korean War falling within the earlier timeline, and the Japanese asset price bubble and crash on the horizon in the later one, the current season focuses on family life and domestic detail, even as, or perhaps because it’s disrupted. In 1989, Sanju travels on her own from Osaka to Tokyo to check on her grandson, whom she senses is not all right. There’s a lovely scene in which she slices vegetables alongside Solomon’s Japanese love interest and former colleague, Naomi (Anna Sawai); I almost wrote “throwaway scene,” but, in fact, that naturalism is essential to the series, making something real out of the extravagant, even soap-operatic plotting.

And food, often in short supply in the earlier storyline, plays a part — making a meal, making a living, making a place at the table, making a home — most tangibly, out of a barn that Sanju, Kyunghee, Noa, Mozasu and Mr. Kim occupy at the end of the war. (Hansu’s tragedy is that though he provides support for the family, with or without the knowledge, he remains an outsider.) Characters speak of a “life well lived,” which is not at all the same thing as living well.

Obviously, this is not the season to start with “Pachinko,” but if you haven’t yet, it’s worth beginning at the beginning. Even if you watched the first season — which, given that you’ve read this far, I assume you have — it may be worth a look back to remember who all these characters are, what they have to do with one another, and what kind of trouble they got in and out of previously. And if the new season lacks the expositional energy of the first, if it’s more muted in tone, if Sunju is not quite the ray of sunshine she was, her older self will still have occasion to say here that hers was a life well lived.

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Laura King | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

AMSTERDAM — Travel can be exhilarating or awful, and like it or not, we all leave footprints. Of course, some tourists tread more heavily than others, leaving residents swearing, slack-jawed or just shaking their heads.

In this busy European travel season, here are some things tourism professionals and local people would like you to know, so you won’t be that tourist.

Buy locally made items

“Don’t just purchase cheap souvenirs,” said Lony Scharenborg, who manages a merchants’ association for Amsterdam’s Nine Little Streets, a picturesque shopping area in the canal district.

“Remember that the people who live here need their bakeries and their grocery stores. Pick up something from there.”

You’re a guest, so act like it

“A city is not only monuments and marbles; it is people,” said Giovanni Andrea Martini, a City Council member in Venice.

“Show respect and coexist.”

In another overburdened destination, Emma Martin of Spain’s Turisme de Barcelona also said a little consideration goes a long way. She urged visitors to think of themselves as “temporary but integral” citizens.

During big events, consider an alternative locale

In Paris this summer, plenty of locals fled the Olympics influx, while some travelers deferred their visits or found last-minute bargains.

Another example: Scotland’s historic capital of Edinburgh is even more jam-packed than usual during the Festival Fringe in August, but Malcolm Roughead, chief executive of VisitScotland, points out that lesser-known parts of the country are “filled with hidden gems.” The moral: Whenever possible, get off the beaten track.

Think sustainability, especially with transportation

“Choose sustainable options if you can — come by train, use an electric vehicle, use public transport when in the city, use a bicycle,” said Charel van Dam, marketing director for the Netherlands Board of Tourism and Conventions. “Stay longer in the same place — less movement is always better.”

In every big European city, and in many smaller ones, there are travel apps to help you avoid bottlenecks.

Be curious — and friendly

“I’m happy when people ask me about cheese — but very happy when they ask me about other things, about life here!” said Spyros Chalikias, 39, who works in a tourism-focused cheese shop in central Amsterdam.

When you can see you’re part of the problem …

“If you see that huge line at that TikTok place, think of the impact in a tiny street, and maybe take your business elsewhere,” said Scharenborg.

Try to help local causes

German tourist Manuela Pietsch, 52, from Heidelberg, attended a recital in Amsterdam’s Westerkerk, a 17th century church, with her voluntary donation earmarked to help with restoration of its historic Duyschot organ. “It makes me feel good to be part of this,” she said. “And it was a wonderful recital!”

In many European destinations, history is painful

“Yes, you can mention the war,” said Jan Katzmarczyk, who has been conducting walking tours in Berlin for 13 years, including of many notorious Nazi sites. He urges visitors to be direct in their queries, but not accusatory toward the current generation. “We’ll take the blame, but not the shame,” said Katzmarczyk, pointing out that virtually all of Germany’s wartime leaders are long dead.

No, it’s not like home

That’s why you’re traveling! So bear in mind: There won’t be air conditioning everywhere, especially in smaller and older European hotels. Carry small coins for public restrooms (although many will let you use a credit card for the tiny charge).

Many restaurants may expect you to order bottled water instead of providing a free glass of tap water. Ice may be hard to come by. Brush up on tipping etiquette, which varies from one European country to another — although tips are almost always less than is expected in the U.S.

Adapt! As in, bring a plug adapter to charge your devices

USB sockets are a relative rarity, especially in older accommodations, and chances are slim the hotel will have an adapter to lend you.

“I can’t tell you how often Americans ask,” said the receptionist at one moderately priced Paris hotel, who did not want her name used because her employer wouldn’t approve. “Sometimes I want to say, ‘Oh, yes — let me just go out back and pluck one off the tree where they grow.’”

Don’t take things out on service workers

They’re trying to do their jobs and help you. Try to work with them and find solutions for that canceled flight or overbooked hotel. Document what happened — save texts, emails and proof of payment. When it’s all over, write a calm note, and chances are pretty good that the airline or cruise line or tour operator will try to make it up to you.

Leave the obvious jokes alone

If a particular place name sounds hilarious to English speakers, you can bet local people are tired of having that pointed out by giggling visitors.

And don’t do pretend German accents, said Katzmarczyk — “It sounds mostly terrible.”

_________

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.