Weekend Round Up October 30, 2014
• November 3, 2014

Adopt Force One

October 31st, 2014 at 11:00 AM | Event Website

Downtown visitors are invited to spend part of their afternoon visiting the Washington Humane Society’s mobile adoption van. Cats and dogs greet passersby in search of a play date. And for those who want to give an animal a permanent home, the van is equipped with Wi-Fi and a printer for a speedy adoption application process.
11:00am-3:00pm; Woodrow Wilson Plaza

Address

The Ronald Reagan Building & International Trade Center; 1300 Pennsylvania Ave., NW

Trick-or-Treating at Mount Vernon

October 31st, 2014 at 03:30 PM | The cost is $10 per adult and $5 per child. Doors open at 3:30 p.m. and close at 6 p.m. Tickets are | info@mountvernon.org | Tel: 7037802000 | Event Website

A historic treat! Mount Vernon opens its doors for the first time to trick-or-treaters! Join the costumed cast of interpreters for a special opportunity to trick-or-treat in the historic area.

Address

George Washington’s Mount Vernon; 3200 Mount Vernon Memorial Highway; Mount Vernon, VA 22121

Trick or Treat Walk on Book Hill

October 31st, 2014 at 04:00 PM | Event Website

From 4 to 6 PM on Friday, October 31st bring your little ghosts and goblins trick-or-treating to the Book Hill merchants. Stores located along Wisconsin Ave between P St and the Georgetown Library will distribute treats to neighborhood children. Look for the CAG sign in the window to confirm participation. And be sure to have your photos taken by the professional photographer at the base of Book Hill Park, compliments of Long and Foster. Participating Stores include:

All We Art, Appalachian Spring, Britt Ryan, David Bell Antiques, Bacchus Wine, Susan Calloway Fine Art, Sherman Pickey, Patisserie Poupon, Salon Ilo, Urban Chic, Duo, Comer and Co., Little birdies – P St off of Wisconsin, The Phoenix, Sabun Home, Egg by Susan Lazar,

Address

Book Hill; Book Hill Merchants – Wisconsin Ave between P Street and the Georgetown Library

Fiber Art Show & Sale

November 1st, 2014 at 09:30 AM | free | president@potomacfiberartsguild.org | Tel: 703.548.0935 | Event Website

Our 25th annual sale of wearable art and fiber art supplies by twenty-five members of the Potomac Fiber Arts Gallery. Handcrafted, one-of-a-kind scarves, hats, garments, handbags, jewelry, yarn, fabrics, notions and gift items will be sold. Bargain tables include gallery-quality items and artists’ overstock of equipment, materials and supplies, books, and more. Customers may enter a drawing for a $50 gift certificate to our gallery at the Torpedo Factory!

Address

St. Mark Presbyterian Church; 10701 Old Georgetown Road; Rockville, MD 20852

Eating Local: Feeding the Urban Estate — Monthly Garden & House Tours

November 1st, 2014 at 10:30 AM | 8.00-15.00 | press@tudorplace.org | Tel: 202-965-0400 | Event Website

For almost 200 years, on-site food production was a central part of life at Tudor Place. From the smokehouse to the gardens, the estate helped sustain its owners and servants. This garden tour highlights the essential functions of the garden. The homesteading theme extends into the mansion where garden tools, cookbooks and domestic utensils complement an afternoon tour of the estate.
Choose a tour of Garden, House or both with a leisurely cafe lunch between
Garden Tour: 10:30| House Tour: 12:30

Address

1644 31st Street NW Washington, D.C. 20007

Capital Maritime Music Festival

November 1st, 2014 at 01:00 PM | Free; donations accepted | mweber@navymemorial.org | Tel: 202-737-2300 | Event Website

The U.S. Navy Memorial presents the second annual Capital Maritime Music Fest, an all-day family-friendly festival featuring songs of the sea, workshops, a star-spangled concert, a kid’s corner, and sing-a-longs. At 1 p.m., the U.S. Navy Sea Chanters will perform,followed by performances featuring the music and folklore of maritime culture. At 7 p.m., guests will enjoy performances by John Roberts, Janie Meneely and Calico Jenny, Alan Redi and Rob van Sante and the Washington Revels Maritime Voices.

Address

United States Navy Memorial; Naval Heritage Center; 701 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

GraveYards

November 1st, 2014 at 06:00 PM | Free | Event Website

The Yards will host its first-ever Day of the Dead festival, GraveYards. This free to attend event will transform the park into a graveyard complete with traditional day of the dead elements, street performers and a beer garden. Magicians, escape artists, balloon artists, stilt walkers, contortionists, fire artists and fortune-tellers will be wandering throughout the Yards entertaining attendees. Additionally, popular hard-rock folk band Kingsley Flood will perform.

Address

355 Water St., SE

Eddie Money

November 1st, 2014 at 07:30 PM | $45.00 – $50.00 | heatherh@wolftrap.org | Tel: 877.965.3872 | Event Website

Enjoy the best of classic rock with catchy, upbeat tunes from the star who gave us ’80s hits including “Take Me Home Tonight” and “Two Tickets to Paradise”

Address

1551 Trap Road Vienna VA, 22182

Breathe Deep DC

November 2nd, 2014 at 09:00 AM | $30 | breathedeepdc@lungevity.org | Event Website

Breathe Deep DC is a 5K untimed walk raising funds for critical lung cancer research, education, and support. The course is friendly to strollers, wheelchairs and pets (must be on a leash no longer than 6 feet and cleaned up after). Participants will enjoy a festive atmosphere with music, free refreshments and kids’ activities. Awards will be given to the largest team, the top fundraising team and the most creative team name.

Address

Washington Monument (at the Sylvan Theater); The National Mall; 15th Street and Independence Avenue SW

Washington Bach Consort presents “The Little Organ Book – Part 1”

November 2nd, 2014 at 03:00 PM | Tickets $23-$65, Students 18 and younger $10, Pay Your Age 18-38 | contact@bachconsort.org | Tel: 2024292121 | Event Website

For the first time J. Reilly Lewis and the Washington Bach Consort Chorus present, in two annual cycles, all forty-five chorale preludes from the Little Organ Book (Das Orgelbüchlein), the first of three major organ collections Bach assembled over the course of his lifetime. Rounding out the program will be a selection of J.S. Bach’s brilliant organ preludes.

Address

National Presbyterian Church; 4101 Nebraska Avenue, NW

Fall Award Dinner National Aeronautic Association

November 5th, 2014 at 06:30 PM | $95/seat | events@naa.aero | Event Website

The Fall Awards Dinner will be held on Wednesday, November 5 at the Crystal Gateway Marriot in Arlington. The presentation of the Brewer, Mackay, and Katharine Wright Trophies as well as the Distinguished Statesman of Aviation and Public Benefit Flying Awards will take place.

Address

Crystal Gateway Marriott, 1700 Jeff Davis Hwy (corner of Eads & 15th) Arlington, VA

Ferguson March: Peaceful, Committed Protestors Coordinate With Police
• October 28, 2014

Protesters marched through Georgetown Saturday evening, Oct. 4, calling for justice in the Aug. 9 killing of Mike Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Mo. The members of the #DCFerguson movement called for the arrest of Officer Darren Wilson, the demilitarization of the police and a review of all D.C. police killings since 2004. The protesters gathered in at Foggy Bottom Metro stop and marched to Georgetown.

Protesters marched east to west on M Street and then up Wisconsin Avenue, stopping at various intersections — including Wisconsin and M, Wisconsin and N as well as M and 34th Street — to interrupt the nighttime traffic flow. The march surprised those at various restaurants and drivers, who had to wait at least 15 minutes.

The crowd, averaging about 250 , chanted “No justice, no peace,” “Whose street? Mike’s street,” “Justice for Michael Brown, racist cop shot him down” and “We’re young. We’re strong. We’re marching all night long.”

One of the march’s leaders was Eugene Puryear, who is also a candidate for an at-large member of the District Council.
At the same time, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama celebrated their wedding anniversary at Bourbon Steak at the Four Seasons Hotel, as protesters walked past.

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Antibiotics Given to Students in Close Contact with Meningitis Victim
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Health officials have confirmed that a strain of bacterial meningitis is the cause of Georgetown University sophomore Andrea Jaime’s death. Jamie’s close friends have been treated with an antibiotic as a precaution; no one else is infected.

As the student body mourns a classmate, the university sent students an email warning against sharing drinks, cigarettes and food with friends to avoid exposure.

Also, the university is working closely with the D.C. Department of Health and Center for Disease Control to prepare itself in case this isolated event evolves into something more severe. The CDC does not recommend that the entire student body be treated because there are no signs of a larger outbreak.

The Weekend That Was: Correspondents, Opera, the Derby and Much More
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Weeks and days, and seasons and news can be blue or incessant—we get floods and a street in Baltimore collapses onto a train track, and the buzz of war lingers over the Ukraine like lightning, and all people can talk about and write about is Donald Sterling, a rank racist and the contents of his conversation with his non-girlfriend, which spread like rancid mints over the internet and there are horrible mud slides and forest fires, and the plane is still missing and people are still shooting each other, it’s enough to make a body weep but out of sight of any iPhone lest we ourselves go viral.

Then comes along a weekend, and it’s not that it makes you forget everything—the net never sleeps—but that it makes you think of other things for a while, that there are stories out there with no speculative qualities, days and nights that run into each other with nothing but serendipity, full of the spirit of photographer Walker Evans, who told us to go out into the world with hungry eyes—and, we might add, ears and a spring in the step.

That’s why, even as we notice that the city is changing at a hard-to-believe pace, we also notice the rites of spring, the end of April, the improbable rise of a horse who made his own birthright, Washington residents and visitors bursting into the streets to visit embassies all over the city, and other Washingtonian pouring toward the Washington Hilton and sundry other party sites for the city’s annual rite of awkward fame and glitz. Others did other things and did not feel left out of the scheming of things, the rhythm of season and song. We blended our own daily comings and goings into the buzz around us, partook of the things we could, and read stories about the world and paid our bills, and picked up the dry cleaning and groceries and watched the beginning-last of the blossoms fall from our neighborhood trees, creating hundreds of white—but not red-carpets.

This is what happened on a month of Saturdays and Sundays—every bike rack in the city appeared empty, and everyone went out and about. En route from dry cleaning and laundry, and across Massachusetts Avenue to Whole Foods in Glover Park, we saw crowds stand in line for a very long time, mess up traffic patterns, and generally act like the inquisitive family of man, woman and child to visit the opening salvo of some 50 embassies in the city which had opened their doors for the annual rite of Passport D.C. This yearly event, which has grown from its small beginnings as an impromptu even by European Union embassies several years ago, now stretches across the whole merry month of May, and it has become a major attraction because: it is free, it has exhibitions, music, bags, and the opportunity to travel the whole world over or at least a good portion of it by way of visiting the embassies of countries not our own, and hear languages we do not speak, but wish sometimes we did.

As we drove up Mass. Ave., we the crowds around the embassies of Japan, Ghana, South Africa, where Nelson Mandela is still freshly ensconced, and lines form in our neighborhood for Mexico, and the Spanish Cultural Center, and in Dupont they formed up for Argentina and a host of others. Crowds were everywhere, the sun delivering the weather goods.

That night, the who’s whos, but not the Who, of This Town, which is Our Town, but not our town, gathered at the Washington Hilton for the annual rite called the Washington Correspondents’ Dinner, in which the media by now almost helplessly rounds up the usual celebrities and some new ones, to sit at tables and preen—who’s hot, who’s not, the best and worst dresses and addresses and so which cover four pages of the style section with roughly 36 photographs. The president and a comedian make jokes, Oscar winners and news folks dressed as movie stars arrive while movie stars do the same. The Style teaser headlines pretty much tell it all: Richard Marx and Rick Springfield? Whatcha got in that goodie bag? Um, I’m with the band, who was the biggest diva? Three-day blowout, and handing out the superlatives, the latter ranking the best lines, the awkward moments and more. Oh, look, the most interesting man in the world. You kid you not.

It is impossible, of course, not to feel a little envy for not being there, because this mash-mish-mash of celebrities, Hollywood, Hollywood on the Potomac, swag, parties, pre-and-post-and during just sort of comes through town like Moby Dick, swallowing everything, including a lot of champagne. If you’re not in there, you’re out there, like so many people we saw gawking as guests arrived. Two country music stars were there—Brad Paisley and Bob Schieffer. But, then again, if Willie Robertson of the “Duck Dynasty” is there, how exclusive can it be?

As it was, we were 20 minutes late getting to the Kennedy Center for the opening night of the Washington National Opera’s “The Magic Flute,” us and many children dressed to the nines, along with Newt Gingrich, and opera buff and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and not one single member of the Ducky Dynasty. This seems to happen yearly now: the WCAD and the WNO opening night. Do not know whether to laugh or to cry, but we were in awe of set and costume designer Jun Kaneko, on display on stage and in an exhibition. It was a magic “Magic Flute.”

Other things happened: the Adams Morgan BID kicked off its summer season of concerts at Columbia Road where bikers stopped to listen, and the new kids on the block—the babies and the pre-schoolers and the dogs and the parents stopped to listen. I talked about the way-down-the-road election in November, and stopped by Joseph’s House, the hospice for the homeless, where they were holding a yard sale, and I saw signs asking for news of Romeo, their house cat, which had disappeared months ago, but had apparently recently been sighted. In Georgetown, the Chanticleers were at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Sights and sounds, and music and musings.

And the best story of the week popped out of the Kentucky Derby, where California Chrome, an odds-on favorite, oddly enough, rode to a smooth victory. Here’s the thing: this West Coast horse, head-held-high beautiful stallion, was brought to hallowed Churchill Downs from California, by way of parents who were bought with a grand total of around 5,000 bucks, by a couple of regular guys, had a trainer at age 74 in his first Kentucky Derby , leaving doubtful experts in the dust.

This is class triumphing over Class and breeding and big money, always a good story in these our times.

Here’s an idea: Whether he wins the triple crown or not, somebody who with a little class and imagination ought to invite California Chrome to next year’s White House Correspondents Dinner instead of Kim and Taylor, and Katie and the rest of faddists.

I might just kiss a Duck to get in there, just to sit next to California Chrome.

Streetcars Getting Real Along H Street
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The D.C. Department of Transportation will start training streetcar operators in real-time traffic Aug. 4 along H Street and Benning Road, the first segment of the new D.C. streetcar system to offer passenger service later this year.

The first 2.4-mile long segment of the D.C. streetcar rail extends from Oklahoma Ave., NW, to Union Station, making multiple stops along H Street and Benning Road. Each operator will train with supervisors under various traffic scenarios as a part of the certification process to carry passengers.

D.C. Transportation Officials said that drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists are advised to use caution when travelling along the H Street corridor as the streetcars will now begin operating.

“Remember to ‘Look, Listen, Be Safe!’ around streetcar vehicles at all times – look both ways and listen for the streetcar before stepping into the crosswalk, and never walk in front of a moving streetcar,” said a DDOT official.

Also be alert that vehicles will now be ticketed and towed that are parked in the streetcar’s path, including cars parked outside the white lines and illegally double-parked cars.

For more information about the new streetcars, visit dcstreetcar.com.

Sewerage Overflow Spills Into C&O Canal
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Last week’s torrential rainstorm caused untreated sewerage to flow into the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, according to the National Park Service. The wastewater also flowed into the canal in Georgetown, prompting NPS to caution people not to fish in the canal and to sanitize any items that were in the water below Lock 6 until the end of Sunday. NPS said that the overflow amounted to 5 million gallons.

The canal’s towpath remains open.

Other spillage from the storm also caused the Capital Crescent Trail between Fletcher’s Cove and Water Street (K Street) to be closed. The trail will be closed for several weeks, according to WJLA.

Monday Musings: Baseball, Africa Summit, Jim Brady
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In this town, which is our town, the world is always with you, right outside the morning-opened door, the Georgetown streets, in cushy hotels, in front of the White House which we pass every day, in the traffic jams, from which we glimpse visiting black limo dignitaries, amid the demonstrators who come here every year, always different but always the same.

In this town, which is our town, history is always with us, our monuments are concrete paeans and poems to our shared histories and memories. We’re always remembering, commemorating, celebrating the singular events of our events, which are imbedded in cement, in the grassy knolls of our memories and cemeteries, in books and street addresses.

No other city is quite like this in this quality—our local news are national and world news, our daily travels to offices, work and chores take us through a kind of daily theme park of history. Some things occur here, rest here and our part of our routine like a backpack, the clothes we wear, the messages we retrieve from our open pads while having coffee at a Starbucks.

Yet, we live in our blocks and villages and neighborhoods, and sleep under blue-dark skies, and wake up to retrieve the morning or pore over the magical contents of a baseball box score: IP 7 H 3 R 0 ER 0 BB 1 SO 10 MNP 99 ERA 3.39. That would be the beatifically splendid pitching line on the Washington Nationals’ Stephen Strasburg in a 4-0 win over the Phillies.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, a large part of the other part of the world came to Washington as part of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, in which leaders from most of the nations in the continent of Africa arrived for discussions, workshops, gatherings, speeches and policy-making, headed by President Barack Obama.

They—political leaders and business leaders and perhaps social and cultural leaders— came from all over Africa, from Algeria, Angola, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and a host of other countries. Black cars whizzed around town, stopping traffic around places like the Mandarin Hotel. There was a particular logjam around the Four Seasons Hotel across from the Georgetowner office on M Street. Still and all, the day proceeded on the avenue: a couple taking a self, sitting on the faux cow in front of Ben and Jerry’s, a father trying to tickle his baby boy into a laugh in front of a clothing store, and fashion-conscious girls prancing in twos and threes along the avenue as if it were spring still and all.

We breathe, we dance or come out of the Whole Foods Store, slightly less richer on a Saturday when the bloody struggle in Gaza came home to Lafayette Square in front of the White House in a protest rally by thousands of Palestinian supporters, condemning the rising death toll there, the Israeli incursion and invasion of the Gaza strip to stop rocket firing by Hamas. It is one of those horrible tragedies where we all have opinions, in our town, this town.

Earlier in the week, Latinos, some of them illegal immigrants also gathered to protest in front of the same White House, demanding an end to deportations sparked by the flow of illegal immigrants mostly young people at the Texas border, streaming up from Central American countries.

The world echoes loudly here, especially if, as some of us do, or have done, we mingle with the gathered crowds, and when we do that, we seem to tumble under the onrush of history.

Life, of course, doesn’t care about the town, any town, and it moves on, and provides us with its own lessons. One day, a 69-year-old woman named Patsy Stokes Burton of La Plata, Md., a mother of four, went to one of her four jobs in Upper Marlboro and was struck by a bus and died of her injuries. Her husband Mack Burton said, “When she left yesterday, she told me to have a good day and I told her to have a good day.” The words, so everyday, suddenly turned into last words. Burton said, “I have no vendetta against that driver. Like I said, she was just out doing her job. It happened, and not a thing in the world anybody can do about it.”

One day, history comes that way in our town, old history, refreshed in the passing of someone we felt we knew who made history. Today, the news came that James Brady, the former press secretary of President Ronald Reagan, who was among those who was shot in an assassination attempt on the president in 1981, died at the age of 73. He was paralyzed by his wounds. For a time his name was on gun control legislation—the Brady Bill—which was eventually allowed to expire as law.

In this town, our town, we make our own diversions, the daily life this city gives. On Saturday, we went to the National Zoo, in hopes of catching up with Bao Bao, which we did not. But we did see the two sets of lion cubs, three by three, and their lionesses, their mothers, lounge a little separate from each other, like worldly, sanguine young ladies and women. A distance away, father lion lounged, his tail swatting flies, looking like the laziest, most regal of lion kings, black mane darkly royal.

The young cubs posing on ledges, with their mothers, looked for all the world, like feline debutantes in a John Singer Sargent painting, languid, self conscious and aware of being beautiful and rare, and pure. A mom licked the ears of one of the cub. You could practically hear the cub whisper, “Oh, mom, not in front of everyone,” as if an ordinary teenager.

In this town, our town, the world is always with us, one way or another, within walking distance, within a shout or the murmurs of hearts and minds, our hearts and minds.

Infectious Diseases Put World and D.C. on Alert
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The Ebola crisis in West Africa has put the world on high alert, forced some leaders to remain in their home nations to miss the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit and caused the postponement of “The Future of Development and Business in Africa, ” a forum to be held today at Georgetown University.

Like some other universities, Georgetown University has taken action against the spread of the virus. Joseph Yohe, associate vice president for risk management, and James Welsh, assistant vice president for student health, announced Friday that there will be a temporary travel moratorium on all university-sponsored trips and programs to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, three West African nations in the midst of battling what is considered to be the worst Ebola outbreak in history. This moratorium follows U.S. health officials’ travel warning about the dangers of the virus, which kills 90 percent of those infected. As for when the travel moratorium will conclude, Yohe and Welsh intend to comply with the CDC’s guidelines.

The Gaston Hall event was to feature Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who delivered the university’s School of Foreign Service commencement speech in 2010. The forum’s focus was to discuss private investment in Africa while looking at its role in the region’s health, education, poverty and emerging business opportunities, as well as benefits of receiving support by the United States’ government and other international organizations. The event has yet to be rescheduled.

Sirleaf, along with 50 other African leaders, was invited to attend the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in D.C., taking place Monday to Wednesday this week. To contain the deadly virus that has already killed over 700 people, Sirleaf and leaders of Guinea and Sierra Leone have cancelled their attendance to the summit.

Although there have been no known Ebola outbreaks in the United States to date, residents should still take caution when coming into contact with those exhibiting flu-like symptoms. A Washington, D.C.-area man was hospitalized last month after contracting a flesh-eating bacterial disease. Joe Wood of Stafford, Va., was swimming in the Potomac River when a scratch on his leg became infected with an aggressive bacteria that feeds on flesh – vibrio vulnificus. Wood was admitted to Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg where he received skin graft surgery the following week.

This news comes just days after a 66-year-old Maryland man was treated for the same strain, characterized by fever, chills, vomiting and other flu-like symptoms. In Maryland, the number of vibrio cases reached a 10-year high last year, according to the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

James Garner: One All-American Actor Everyone Loved
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James Garner was a purely American actor.

You would never think to call him a thespian, or imagine him playing Hamlet — or, getting old, King Lear.

Garner was a movie star, a television star, and in both venues, he often and famously and most memorably played the hero as anti-hero, or the anti-hero as hero. He was also a natural—his most famous anti-hero heroics were done in such a way that he hardly seemed to be acting at all. He inhabited the leads in “Maverick” (for three seasons) and, later in his life, the hero of “The Rockford Files” with a combination of elan and ease that it made him look almost lazy. In his starring movie roles, he ranged quite a bit further, but that casual comic style stayed with him through several romantic comedies with Doris Day—taking over where Rock Hudson had left off.

Garner died July 19 at the end of a long career and a full life, during which he carried his movie and television personas with him, not like baggage, but like a coat you could dig into to find reminders of his screen life.

He led a life, and it took him a while to become who he was, which was, originally, a fella by the name James Scott Bumgarner, born in Norman, Oklahoma, the home of the University of Oklahoma and “sooner boomer” football mania, a place you could stare across the flat landscape and feel the breath of next door neighbors Missouri and Texas. He did not initially dream of becoming an actor and instead went from job to job, got into the Merchant Marine and fought in Korea, and awarded two purple hearts.

A friend encouraged him to get into theater, from which he started getting small parts in films like “Sayanora” and a bigger part in “Darby’s Rangers,” a World War II, small-scale epic, in a part turned down by Charlton Heston.

But it was the “Maverick” series which made a star out of Garner—although he stayed only for three years—and in a way branded him. The series—which debuted in a time when the so-called adult westerns were king on network television—featured Garner (and later a brother played by Jack Kelly), as a slick, fancy-shirt, black hat, black jacket, gambler, who avoided conflict at all cost, not to mention heroics. Bret Maverick was catnip for ladies, often got in trouble, even when he would admit he was a coward, but somehow, kicking and screaming and very reluctantly was often the hero. He was the opposite of James Arness’s Matt Dillon on “Gunsmoke.” Imagine the husky, slow-moving Arness playing Bret Maverick.

This aversion to violence made Maverick a convincing anti-hero, even when he resorted to violence. It was a kind of style you would often find in other Garner roles—“Support Your Local Sheriff,” a comedy western which was great fun, with the wonderful Jack Elam as his sidekick and, most convincingly, “The Americanization of Emily,” a World War II story, cynical and slick, in which he played an American officer who did not want to be sent to the combat zone. The parts seemed to suit Garner or he suited them. He played men who appeared strong but could dance around conflict—and commitment in the romantic comedy version—with ruggedness and verve.

Every now and then, the hidden fire and flame underneath came out as a form of obsession, a quality he shared with another well-liked star, James Stewart. He could play the all-American hero, influenced by obsession, Wyatt Earp on a killing spree in “Hour of the Gun,” the anti-hero of “Duel at Diablo” or “Mister Buddwing”.

“The Rockford Files,” another long-running series (six years), brought Garner back to television and another huge success, although he was injured in the course of playing a private eye several times and suffered mental stress in a law suit over net profits.

Although he could wear a suit and tie almost as well as Cary Grant, he was at heart a heartland kind of guy. He would continue to work in his later years—“Space Cowboys”, a popular quasi-comic story about aging astronauts with Clint Eastwood and Tommy Lee Jones, and “Murphy’s Romance,” playing a widower opposite Sally Field, a role for which he got an Oscar nomination, and the title of greatest kisser by his co-star.

James Garner, American actor, lived in Brentwood, Calif., and was 86.

At Summit, Equatorial Guinea’s President Looks to Soften Image
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President Obama and other African leaders are expected to meet with President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, who denies ongoing human rights abuses in the small Central African nation.

Obiang will be honored by the Corporate Council for Africa, which is highlighting the “new Africa” at the summit, according to Al Jazeera America.
Many meetings will be held during the first-ever U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington D.C. from Aug. 4 to Aug. 6, with 50 heads of state in the city at the same time. It is the largest gathering of national leaders ever for a three-day event in the nation’s capital.

“President Obiang is trying to shed his image as the head of a corrupt and abusive government,” said Lisa Misol, senior business and human rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Instead of giving him propaganda opportunities, President Obama should press for an end to torture, corruption and other abuses that are rife in Equatorial Guinea.”

In a recent human rights report, the State Department cited the most serious human rights abuses in Equatorial Guinea as “disregard for the rule of law and due process, including police use of torture and excessive force; denial of freedom of speech, press, assembly, and association; and widespread official corruption.”

Nguema Mba, a former military officer who was granted status as a refugee in Belgium in 2013, was abducted illegally in his visit to Nigeria in late 2013 and turned over to Equatorial Guinea, where he is believed to be held by government authorities and tortured. Nguema still remains in custody and reportedly was transferred to solitary confinement on July 26.

The Obiang government has denied that torture takes place in Equatorial Guinea. In 2013, when the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights inspected the country, the delegation from the government highlighted “the absence of torture in the country’s prisons and the care given to inmates.”

Equatorial Guinea is one of the largest oil-producing countries in sub-Saharan Africa and has a population of 735,000, making it the wealthiest country per capita in Africa.
However, government critics allege that corruption has led to the country having only a small portion of the population sharing the wealth, while conditions for most Guineans remain worse than in many African countries with fewer natural resources.

“It is shocking that President Obiang gets the red-carpet treatment in Washington while his perceived opponents in Equatorial Guinea are thrown in prison to be flogged,” said Tutu Alicante, a human rights lawyer from Equatorial Guinea. “We hope President Obama tells President Obiang loud and clear to end false imprisonment, torture and oil-fueled corruption.”

Obiang has been in power since 1979 as its president, having overthrown his uncle, who was the first president of the small nation, in a bloody coup d’etat.