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| ===== How President's Day has evolved from reverence to retail ===== | ===== International Women's Day protests demand equal rights and an end to discrimination, sexual violence ===== |
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| By BEN FINLEY Associated Press | By MEHMET GUZEL and ANDREW WILKS Associated Press |
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| NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — Like the other Founding Fathers, George Washington was uneasy about the idea of publicly celebrating his life. He was the first leader of a new republic, not a king. | ISTANBUL (AP) — Women took to the streets of cities across Europe, Africa, South America and elsewhere to mark International Women's Day with demands for ending inequality and gender-based violence. |
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| And yet the United States will once again commemorate its first president on Monday, 293 years after he was born. | On the Asian side of Istanbul, Turkey's biggest city, a rally in Kadikoy saw members of dozens of women's groups listen to speeches, dance and sing in the spring sunshine. The colorful protest was overseen by a large police presence, including officers in riot gear and a water cannon truck. |
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| The meaning of Presidents Day has changed dramatically, from being mostly unremarkable and filled with work for Washington in the 1700s to the bonanza of consumerism it has become today. For some historians, the holiday has lost all discernible meaning. | The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared 2025 the Year of the Family. Protesters pushed back against the idea of women's role being confined to marriage and motherhood, carrying banners reading "Family will not bind us to life" and "We will not be sacrificed to the family." |
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| Historian Alexis Coe, author of "You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington," has said she thinks about Presidents Day in much the same way as the towering monument in D.C. bearing his name. | Critics have accused the government of overseeing restrictions on women's rights and not doing enough to tackle violence against women. |
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| "It's supposed to be about Washington, but can you really point to anything that looks or sounds like him?" she remarked in an interview with The Associated Press in 2024. "Jefferson and Lincoln are presented as people with limbs and noses and words associated with their memorials. And he's just a giant, granite point. He has been sanded down to have absolutely no identifiable features." | Erdogan in 2021 withdrew Turkey from a European treaty, dubbed the Istanbul Convention, that protects women from domestic violence. Turkish rights group We Will Stop Femicides Platform says that 394 women were killed by men in 2024. |
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| Here is a look at how things have evolved: | "There is bullying at work, pressure from husbands and fathers at home and pressure from patriarchal society. We demand that this pressure be reduced even further," Yaz Gulgun, 52, said. |
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| **Washington's birthdays were celebrated, sometimes** | **Women across Europe and Africa march against discrimination** |
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| Washington was born Feb. 22, 1732, on Popes Creek Plantation near the Potomac River in Virginia. | In many other European countries, women also protested against violence, for better access to gender-specific health care, equal pay and other issues in which they don't get the same treatment as men. |
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| Technically, though, he was born Feb. 11 under the ancient Julian calendar, which was still in use for the first 20 years of his life. The Gregorian calendar, intended to more accurately mark the solar year, was adopted in 1752, adding 11 days. | In Poland, activists opened a center across from the parliament building in Warsaw where women can go to have abortions with pills, either alone or with other women. |
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| Either way, Washington paid little attention to his birthday, according to Mountvernon.org, the website of the organization that manages his estate. Surviving records make no mention of observances at Mount Vernon, while his diary shows he was often hard at work. | Opening the center on International Women's Day across from the legislature was a symbolic challenge to authorities in the traditionally Roman Catholic nation, which has one of Europe's most restrictive abortion laws. |
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| "If he had it his way, he would be at home with his family," Coe said. "Maybe some beloved nieces and nephews (and friend) Marquis de Lafayette would be ideal. And Martha's recipe for an indulgent cake. But that's about it." | From Athens to Madrid, Paris, Munich, Zurich and Belgrade and in many more cities across the continent, women marched to demand an end to treatment as second-class citizens in society, politics, family and at work. |
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| **Washington's birthday was celebrated by his peers in government when he was president, mostly.** | In Madrid, protesters held up big hand-drawn pictures depicting Gisele Pélicot, the woman who was drugged by her now ex-husband in France over the course of a decade so that she could be raped by dozens of men while unconscious. Pélicot has become a symbol for women all over Europe in the fight against sexual violence. |
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| Congress voted during his first two terms to take a short commemorative break each year, with one exception, his last birthday in office, Coe said. By then, Washington was less popular, partisanship was rampant and many members of his original Cabinet were gone, including Thomas Jefferson. | Thousands of women marched in the capital Skopje and several other cities in North Macedonia to raise their voices for economic, political and social equality for women. |
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| "One way to show their disdain for his Federalist policies was to keep working through his birthday," Coe said. | Organizers said only about 28% of women in the country own property and in rural areas only 5%, mostly widows, have property in their name. Only 18 out of 100 women surveyed in rural areas responded that their parents divided family property equally between the brother and sister. "The rest were gender discriminated against within their family," they said. |
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| The Library of Congress does note a French military officer, the comte de Rochambeau, threw a ball celebrating Washington's 50th birthday in 1782. | In Nigeria's capital, Lagos, thousands of women gathered at the Mobolaji Johnson Stadium, dancing and signing and celebrating their womanhood. Many were dressed in purple — the traditional color of the women's liberation movement. |
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| **After his death, a market for memorabilia is born** | In Russia, the women's day celebrations had a more official tone, with honor guard soldiers presenting yellow tulips to girls and women during a celebration in St. Petersburg. |
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| Washington was very aware of his inaugural role as president and its distinction from the British crown. He didn't want to be honored like a king, Seth Bruggeman, a history professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, told the AP last year. | **German president warns of backlash against progress already made** |
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| Still, he said, a market for Washington memorabilia sprang up almost immediately after his death in 1799 at age 67, with people snapping up pottery and reproductions of etchings portraying him as a divine figure going off into heaven. | In Berlin, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for stronger efforts to achieve equality and warned against tendencies to roll back progress already made. |
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| "Even in that early moment, Americans kind of conflated consumerism with patriotic memory," said Bruggeman, whose books include "Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument." | "Globally, we are seeing populist parties trying to create the impression that equality is something like a fixed idea of progressive forces," he said. He gave an example of " large tech companies that have long prided themselves on their modernity and are now, at the behest of a new American administration, setting up diversity programs and raving about a new 'masculine energy' in companies and society." |
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| **Making it official with parades and festivals** | **Marchers in South America denounce femicides** |
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| It wasn't until 1832, the centennial of his birth, that Congress established a committee to arrange national "parades, orations and festivals," according to the Congressional Research Service. | In South America, some of the marches were organized by groups protesting the killings of women known as femicides. |
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| Only in 1879 was his birthday formally made into a legal holiday for federal employees in the District of Columbia. | Hundreds of women in Ecuador marched through the streets of Quito to steady drumbeats and held signs that opposed violence and the "patriarchal system." |
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| The official designation for the holiday is Washington's Birthday, although it has come to be known informally as Presidents Day. Arguments have been made to honor President Lincoln as well because his birth date falls nearby, on Feb. 12. | "Justice for our daughters!" some demonstrators yelled in support of women slain in recent years. |
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| A small number of states, including Illinois, observe Lincoln's birthday as a public holiday, according to the Library of Congress. And some commemorate both Lincoln and Washington on Presidents Day. | In Bolivia, thousands of women began marching late Friday, with some scrawling graffiti on the walls of courthouses demanding that their rights be respected and denouncing impunity in femicides, with less than half of those cases reaching a sentencing. |
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| But on the federal level, the day is still officially Washington's Birthday. | Kirsten Grieshaber contributed to this report from Berlin. |
| | ===== How a canoe helped turn Hawaiian culture into a source of pride and even influenced Hollywood ===== |
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| **A shift to consumerism** | ---- |
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| By the late 1960s, Washington's Birthday was one of nine federal holidays that fell on specific dates on different days of the week, according to a 2004 article in the National Archives' Prologue magazine. | {{:en:ecrit:ap25068028178507.jpg?300 |}} |
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| Congress voted to move some of those to Mondays, following concerns that were in part about absenteeism among government workers when a holiday fell midweek. But lawmakers also noted clear benefits to the economy, including boosts in retail sales and travel on three-day weekends. | By AUDREY McAVOY Associated Press |
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| The Uniform Monday Holiday Act took effect in 1971, moving Presidents Day to the third Monday in February. Sales campaigns soared, historian C. L. Arbelbide wrote in Prologue. | KANEOHE, Hawaii (AP) — Hawaii's American colonizers once banned the Hawaiian language in schools. Some Native Hawaiians tried to lighten their skin with lye. Many people believed Polynesian voyagers had simply lucked into finding the islands by drifting on logs. |
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| Bruggeman said Washington and the other Founding Fathers "would have been deeply worried" by how the holiday became taken over by commercial and private interests. | But a canoe launched half a century ago helped turn Hawaiian culture from a source of shame to one of pride, reviving the skill of traveling the seas by decoding the stars, waves and weather. That vessel — a double-hulled sailing canoe called the Hokulea, after the Hawaiian name for the star Arcturus — would even influence the Disney blockbuster "Moana" decades later. |
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| "They were very nervous about corporations," Bruggeman said. "It wasn't that they forbade them. But they saw corporations as like little republics that potentially threatened the power of The Republic." | To mark the anniversary, the Hokulea's early crew members gathered Saturday for ceremonial hula and kava drinking at the Oahu beach where the canoe launched on March 8, 1975, and where they began their first training sails. |
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| Coe, who is also a fellow at the Washington think tank New America, said by now the day is devoid of recognizable traditions. | |
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| "There's no moment of reflection," Coe said. Given today's widespread cynicism toward the office, she added, that sort of reflection "would probably be a good idea." | |
| ===== Trump's AI ambition and China's DeepSeek overshadow an AI summit in Paris ===== | |
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| {{:en:ecrit:ap25048627735669.jpg?300 |}} | "It's a vehicle of exploration. It's a vehicle of discovery," Nainoa Thompson, the CEO of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, said in an interview. "It's also been our vehicle for justice as Native Hawaiians, as Pacific Islanders, as a very unique, special culture of the Earth." |
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| By SYLVIE CORBET and RAF CASERT Associated Press | In 1980, Thompson became the first Hawaiian in six centuries to navigate to Tahiti without a compass or other modern instruments — a span of about 2,700 miles (4,300 kilometers). |
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| PARIS (AP) — European leaders insisted Monday they must have a say in international talks to end the war in Ukraine despite the clear message from both Washington and Moscow that there was no role for them as yet in negotiations that could shape the future of the continent. | **Hawaiian culture had long been repressed** |
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| Three hours of emergency talks at the Elysee Palace in Paris left leaders of Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, NATO and the European Union without a common view on possible peacekeeping troops after a U.S. diplomatic blitz on Ukraine last week threw a once-solid trans-Atlantic alliance into turmoil. | Thompson, 71, remembers stories from his grandmother, born less than a decade after the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. Teachers beat her for speaking Hawaiian, and her uncle tried to wash the brown off his skin with lye. |
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| U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer called for U.S. backing while reaffirming he's ready to consider sending British forces on the Ukrainian ground alongside others "if there is a lasting peace agreement." | When she had children, she didn't teach them Hawaiian. |
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| There was a rift though with some EU nations, like Poland, which have said they don't want their military imprint on Ukraine soil. French President Emmanuel Macron was non-committal. | "If her children tried to be Hawaiian, they would get hurt in the new society," Thompson said. "And so you have to become something else." |
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| **European call for working with the US** | A resurgence of Hawaiian pride and identity starting in the late 1960s and 1970s set off a cultural renaissance. Artist Herb Kane began painting ancient canoes based on drawings from European explorers and got the idea to build a double-hulled canoe with tall, triangular sails similar to those his ancestors had used hundreds of years earlier. |
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| Macron said overnight he spoke by phone to U.S. President Donald Trump and then Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following the meeting. | **Debunking the drifting log theory** |
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| "We seek a strong and lasting peace in Ukraine," Macron said on the social platform X. "To achieve this, Russia must end its aggression, and this must be accompanied by strong and credible security guarantees for the Ukrainians." | At the time, many people accepted the notion that Polynesians settled islands by accident. |
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| "We will work on this together with all Europeans, Americans, and Ukrainians," he added. | Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl had theorized that Polynesians arrived from South America, pushed west by the prevailing winds and currents. In 1947, he set out to prove it by floating from Peru on a log raft. He landed in the Tuamotu Islands north of Tahiti and wrote a best-seller. |
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| Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof acknowledged the Europeans "need to come to a common conclusion about what we can contribute. And that way we will eventually get a seat at the table," adding that "just sitting at the table without contributing is pointless." | Heyerdahl's theory took hold even though Hawaiians for generations had passed down stories of people who traveled from the distant lands -- including Kahiki, possibly what is today known as Tahiti — by canoe, bringing with them edible plants such as ulu, or breadfruit. |
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| Starmer said a trans-Atlantic bond remained essential. "There must be a U.S. backstop, because a U.S. security guarantee is the only way to effectively deter Russia from attacking Ukraine again," he said. | Kane, University of Hawaii archaeologist Ben Finney and Honolulu surfer Tommy Holmes wanted to challenge the drifting log concept. They started the Polynesian Voyaging Society, intent on sailing a canoe to Tahiti without modern instruments. |
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| Top U.S. officials from the Trump administration, on their first visit to Europe last week, left the impression that Washington was ready to embrace the Kremlin while it cold-shouldered many of its age-old European allies. | They needed a navigator. Traditional long-distance voyaging skills had all but disappeared, but a Peace Corps volunteer on the isolated atoll of Satawal in Micronesia told them about Pius "Mau" Piailug, who had been taught navigation from childhood. Over about a month in 1976, Piailug guided the Hokulea from Hawaii to Tahiti — about the same distance from Hawaii to California. |
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| **The US to leave Europe out of negotiations** | Some 17,000 people thronged the Tahitian shore to greet them and witness what one crew member called "the spaceship of our ancestors." |
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| Gen. Keith Kellogg, Trump's special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, said Monday he didn't think it was "reasonable and feasible to have everybody sitting at the table." | Former Hawaii Gov. John Waihe'e was in his 20s then, and a delegate to the 1978 state Constitutional Convention. The Hokulea's success spurred delegates to make Hawaiian an official state language even though few residents still spoke it, he said. They also created the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to improve the well-being of Native Hawaiians. |
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| "We know how that can turn out and that has been our point, is keeping it clean and fast as we can," he told reporters in Brussels, where he briefed the 31 U.S. allies in NATO, along with EU officials, before heading to Kyiv for talks on Wednesday with Zelenskyy. | "It helped us believe in everything that we were doing," Waihe'e said. |
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| His remarks were echoed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was equally dismissive about a role for Europe. "I don't know what they have to do at the negotiations table," he said as he arrived in Saudi Arabia for talks with U.S. officials. | Today, two dozen schools have Hawaiian language immersion programs, and Census data show more than 27,000 people in Hawaii, and 34,000 in the U.S., speak Hawaiian at home. |
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| Last week, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a flurry of speeches questioned both Europe's security commitments and its fundamental democratic principles. | **Bringing dignity to the elders** |
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| Macron, who has long championed a stronger European defense, said their stinging rebukes and threats of non-cooperation in the face of military danger felt like a shock to the system. | In 1978, an ill-prepared crew set out for Tahiti in poor weather, and the Hokulea capsized just hours after leaving port. Crew member Eddie Aikau paddled his surfboard to get help. The Coast Guard rescued the canoe, but Aikau was never found. |
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| The tipping point came when Trump decided to upend years of U.S. policy by holding talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in hopes of ending the Russia-Ukraine war. | The voyaging society overhauled itself in response, setting clear goals and training requirements. Thompson studied at a Honolulu planetarium and spent over a year under the tutelage of Piailug. In 1980, he navigated to Tahiti. |
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| Shortly before the meeting in Paris Monday, Macron spoke with Trump, but Macron's office would not disclose details about the 20-minute discussion. | Thompson said he felt a deep obligation to fulfill Aikau's wish to follow the path of his ancestors and "pull Tahiti out of the sea." But he didn't celebrate when the Hokulea got there. |
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| **Europeans stand by their support to Ukraine** | "I just went into a quiet, dark place and just told Eddie we pulled it out of the sea," Thompson said. "There's no high fives. It's too profound." |
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| Starmer, who said he will travel to Washington next week to discuss with Trump "what we see as the key elements of a lasting peace," appears to be charting a "third way" in Europe's shifting geopolitical landscape — aligning strategically with the U.S. administration while maintaining EU ties. Some analysts suggest this positioning could allow him to act as a bridge between Trump and Europe, potentially serving as a key messenger to the White House. | In decades since, the society has sailed the canoe around the Pacific and world, including New Zealand, Japan, South Africa and New York. |
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| German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told reporters a possible peace agreement with Russia cannot be forced on Ukraine. "For us, it must and is clear: This does not mean that peace can be dictated and that Ukraine must accept what is presented to it," he insisted. | It inspired other Pacific Island communities to revive or newly appreciate their own wayfinding traditions. |
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| Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said that any peace agreement would need to have the active involvement of the EU and Ukraine, so as to not be a false end to the war "as has happened in the past." | In Rapa Nui, Chile — also known as Easter Island — islanders have embarked on long-distance canoe voyages. The University of Guam has a navigation program. Similar trends have surfaced in the Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Samoa and Tonga, said Mary Therese Perez Hattori, the director of the Pacific Islands Development Program at the East-West Center. |
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| He went on: "What cannot be is that the aggressor is rewarded." | "We come from very, very ancient societies," said Hattori, who is Chamorro, the Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands. "Hokulea sort of helped us remind the world of this." |
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| A strong U.S. component, though, will remain essential for the foreseeable future since it will take many years before many European nations can ratchet up defense production and integrate it into an effective force. | **Hollywood makes a blockbuster** |
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| **Sending troops after a peace deal?** | Hokulea's influence spread in 2016 when Disney released "Moana," an animated film about a 16-year-old girl who learns wayfinding about 3,000 years ago. |
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| Highlighting the inconsistencies among many nations about potential troop contributions, Scholz said talk of boots on the ground was "premature." | Thompson spoke to hundreds on the movie's creative team about wayfinding and the importance of canoes to Pacific culture, said Aaron Kandell, a Hawaii-born writer who worked on the movie. |
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| "This is highly inappropriate, to put it bluntly, and honestly: we don't even know what the outcome will be" of any peace negotiation, he added. | Kandell, who is not Native Hawaiian, spent a year studying navigation with the Polynesian Voyaging Society during his 20s and incorporated that into the script, including where Moana learns to use her outstretched hand to track the stars and runs her hand in the ocean to feel the currents. |
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| European nations are bent though on boosting their armed forces where they can after years of U.S. complaints, and most have increased defense spending to 2% of gross domestic product, but the path to reaching 3% is unclear. | Crew members taught animators about coconut fiber ropes so they would look right when Moana pulls on them, Kandell said. |
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| "The time has come for a much greater ability of Europe to defend itself," Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk said. "There is unanimity here on the issue of increasing spending on defense. This is an absolute necessity." Poland spends more than 4% of its GDP on defense, more than any other NATO member. | The Polynesian Voyaging Society's initial plan was to sail to Tahiti once, supporting a documentary, book and research papers. Thompson remembers pushing Hokulea's hull into the water with the crew back in 1975. |
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| Casert reported from Brussels. Associated Press writers Thomas Adamson in Paris, Suman Naishadham in Madrid, Lorne Cook in Brussels, Geir Moulson and Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin, Dusan Stojanovic in Belgrade, Serbia, Vanessa Gera in Warsaw, Poland, Justin Spike in Kyiv and Karel Janicek in Prague, Czech Republic contributed to this report. | "It was really a moment — I didn't recognize it — but this was going to change everything," he said. |
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