empire

MOSCOW — President Reagan, standing within the fortress walls of the Kremlin with a smiling Mikhail S. Gorbachev at his side, said Tuesday that he no longer sees the Soviet Union as “the evil empire.”

“You are talking about another time, another era,” he said in an exchange with a handful of reporters clustered around a 39-ton cannon dating from 1586 that stands in a plaza in the center of the Kremlin.

Reagan was disavowing one of his most famous indictments of the Communist state–a description of the Soviet Union that seemed to symbolize his ultraconservative, anti-Communist views when he used it seven years ago in one of his first presidential speeches.

The change seems to reflect an evolution in his views on the Soviet Union. It has been noticeable in his statements and policy decisions for some time but has emerged with dramatic vividness here in the President’s face-to-face encounter with Moscow.

The question about the “evil empire” statement came near the end of a walking tour of the Kremlin grounds and fabled Red Square, with all its memories of celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution and May Day parades of Soviet military power.

Explains His Position

Asked if he still considers Moscow to be the seat of evil, Reagan answered, “No.” Surprised, reporters asked why.

Reagan hesitated, leaned his head to one side and thought a bit. Soviet leader Gorbachev tried to prompt him. “Are you happy with that concept?” he asked in Russian. The President then responded by saying that the phrase belonged to an earlier time.

Reagan recanted even though Gorbachev had told a crowd of Russians that he did not mind Reagan’s criticisms over the years. “We are so critical of our own country that even the President’s criticisms are weak,” the Soviet leader said. “We know what our problems are.”

In some ways, the President’s walk across Red Square was just as symbolic as his rejection of the concept of “the evil empire.” It would have been hard at the outset of his presidency to conceive of Reagan taking in the sights of Red Square and enjoying them. But on Tuesday the President said:

“I have always heard of Red Square. Mr. Gorbachev was kind enough to show it to me. And now I have seen it and set foot on it. It was much more impressive than I had imagined.”

Reagan’s determination to show how his mood had changed in recent years was evident later in the day when he spoke with writers and artists at the House of Writers in Moscow. In a short but warm speech that described his philosophy of acting and how it had helped prepare him for the White House, Reagan described the importance in the theater of avoiding rigid, stereotyped thinking and instead understanding the unique character of each situation and individual.

No Straitjacket

“Pretty soon,” he said, “at least for me, it becomes harder and harder to force any member of humanity into a straitjacket, into some rigid form in which you all expect to fit.

“In acting . . . you become in an intimate way less taken with artificial pomp and circumstance, more attentive to the core of the soul–that part of each of us that God holds in the hollow of his hand and into which he breathes the breath of life.”

Whatever view he may once have had of Soviet leaders and citizens, he could not be accused now of keeping them in a straitjacket. There was little doubt about the President’s warm feelings for many of them now, and this could be seen on his morning walk.

After meeting for more than an hour in the Kremlin, Reagan followed the Soviet leader on a tour of the grounds and Red Square. As the two men walked slowly, Gorbachev, with sweeps of his hand, pointed out the turrets, churches, palaces and other buildings. A cluster of aides and a long line of limousines trailed behind.

Red Square, an enormous plaza alongside the northeast wall of the Kremlin, is known to the outside world as the site of the massive demonstrations of Soviet military power on the annual May 1 celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution. But it has existed for five centuries, and its name has nothing to do with communism.

‘Red’ Means ‘Beautiful’

The plaza has been known as Red Square for three centuries. When the square was first named, the present-day Russian word for “red” meant “beautiful.”

Gorbachev pointed out the sights of the square: St. Basil’s Cathedral with its famous onion domes, the huge GUM department store, the Historical Museum and the Lenin Mausoleum that contains the body of V. I. Lenin, the first Soviet leader.

“We are not going to change anything here,” Gorbachev said as the two leaders stood outside the tomb. “There is no perestroika needed.”

Reagan made no attempt to enter the mausoleum to honor a man who has become a god-like figure in the Communist world, and Gorbachev made no attempt to try to persuade him.

The exchanges of Reagan, Gorbachev and some of the Russians in the square left little time for true sightseeing, but they were consistent with both leaders’ efforts to surround the tough negotiations over arms control with an aura of better feeling.

Need for Dialogue

At one point, Reagan and Gorbachev, talking with some Soviet citizens, turned philosophical about the need for face-to-face dialogue.

“What we have decided to do,” the President said, “is to talk to each other and not about each other, and that’s working just fine.”

Gorbachev used a Russian proverb to make the point: “If arguments are at the boiling point, then truth evaporates. So we should have dialogue.”

During this conversation, Reagan put his arm around Gorbachev and said, “I’m glad we are standing here together like this.”

In talking with one group of Russians, the superpower leaders said they had discussed annual student exchanges. “I have a dream,” the President said, “that if all young people of the world could get to know each other, it would be a better world.”

‘Grandfather Reagan’

At another point, a woman holding a small child told the President, “We want our children to live in peace.” Gorbachev then took the child from the mother’s arms and told the child, “Shake hands with Grandfather Reagan.”

Reagan took the child’s hand in his.

After the walk in Red Square, Gorbachev led Reagan back within the Kremlin walls, directing him to a small group of journalists and camera crews waiting near the huge cannon, which had never been fired. Gorbachev evidently had an announcement for Soviet television.

“We have received several important telegrams to tell the Reagans that newly born boys and girls are being named Ronald and Nancy and Reagana,” the Soviet leader said.

But the foreign journalists were interested in other issues. “Do you still believe you are in the evil empire?” Reagan was asked. “No,” he replied, surely and quickly.

Some of our finest contemporary writers got their laurels Friday night at the 46th Los Angeles Times Book Prizes ceremony at USC’s Bovard Auditorium.

At the awards ceremony, which opens the annual L.A. Times Festival of Books weekend, Oakland-born writer Amy Tan and literary nonprofit We Need Diverse Books received achievement honors, and finalists in 13 other categories became prize winners.

The presenters and awardees who took the stage balanced a spirit of playfulness — Times senior editor Sophia Kercher called the weekend’s festival “my personal Coachella” and Times columnist LZ Granderson saluted his fellow “booktroverts” — and one of reverence as they celebrated writing as an instrument for advocacy, imagination and history-keeping.

As Bench Ansfield virtually accepted his award in the history category for “Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City,” which exposes a pattern of landlords setting residential fires to collect insurance payouts, he said, “It’s a scary time to be a historian in the United States.”

“Our field, like so many other fields, is under attack,” Ansfield said. “To understand the crises in front of us, we have to understand our history.”

Among the crises highlighted was AI encroachment, the subject of science and technology category winner Karen Hao’s “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI.” The AI expert and investigative journalist’s book is a critical investigation into the rise of OpenAI and its impact on society.

In Hao’s acceptance speech, read by presenter Jia-Rui Cook in her absence, the author said she “can’t help but be disturbed by how the themes of this book have grown more relevant by the day.”

“That said, I have never been more hopeful of our chance to advance a different future,” the author said, adding that L.A.’s history of resistance movements — including the recent Hollywood strikes — made it an apt place to accept her award.

“Gatherings like this are one of many radical acts of resistance against the imperial project that seeks to strip us of our meaning and our humanity,” Hao said. “Let us continue to resist defiantly together and let us remember lessons in history: When people rise, empires always fall.”

Tan echoed Hao’s sentiments as she accepted the Robert Kirsch Award, which celebrates literature with regional and thematic connections to the Western United States, for her acclaimed portfolio of writing exploring identity and cultural inheritance — often through the lens of the immigrant experience.

In her speech, “The Joy Luck Club” writer said that while she never particularly considered herself a “political writer,” her stance on that has changed as government actions have made her think critically about her own identities.

“My birthright and that of millions of others is now being argued before the Supreme Court, and no matter what the outcome is, it’s been a kick in the gut to know that those in the highest echelons of government and those who support them believe that we don’t belong.”

As an author, Tan said, “I imagine the lives of the people I write about,” and that act of compassion, for writers, inherently “reflects our politics and our beliefs. And so yes, I am a political writer.”

Later, Caroline Richmond, executive director of We Need Diverse Books, celebrated the work of her nonprofit — the recipient of this year’s Innovator’s Award — which has made it so her daughter “has never really had to look that far to find herself on the page.”

Still, she said ongoing book bans are threatening those strides toward a more diverse literary marketplace.

“The work is very much far from over,” Richmond said, “but I have to remind myself that the people banning books are never the good guys in history, and it’s up to us in this room and beyond — as readers, as book lovers — to fight back because diverse books, we really need them now more than ever.”

As the ceremony wore on, the room was as charged with celebration as it was with resistance.

When writer-editor and former child actor Adam Ross accepted the Christopher Isherwood Prize for “Playworld,” a semi-autobiographical novel about a teen growing up in 1980s New York, he gleamed with joy about his second novel being out in the world and finding readers.

“When it became clear to me that I was writing something that was going to be a lot bigger and take a lot longer than I planned, I promised myself I would use all of my ability to capture my experience of a particular era in an enduringly magical city, and to hopefully express it in such a way that any reader willing to embark on a journey with me, but upon finishing close the book and say, ‘Yes, I know exactly what that was like,’” Ross said in his acceptance speech.

“Winning this award makes me feel like I succeeded in that endeavor,” the author said.

Other winners included Ekow Eshun, who topped the biography category for “The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them,” which parses Black masculinity as embodied by various civil rights activists, philosophers and other visionaries, and Bryan Washington, who accepted the fiction award for “Palaver,” which details the tense reunion of a Jamaican-born mother and her queer son, who are navigating years of estrangement in Tokyo.

The 31st annual L.A. Times Festival of Books will host 500-plus authors and celebrities and 300-plus exhibitors across more than 200 events including panels, book signings and cooking demonstrations. Top-billed guests include musician-memoirist Lionel Richie, veteran actor and recent Golden Globe Carol Burnett Award honoree Sarah Jessica Parker, and the mastermind behind “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David.

The schedule for the Saturday-Sunday event can be found here.

Here’s the full list of finalists and winners for the Book Prizes.

Robert Kirsch Award

Amy Tan

Innovator’s Award

We Need Diverse Books

The Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose

Adam Ross, “Playworld: A Novel”

The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

Andy Anderegg, “Plum”

Krystelle Bamford, “Idle Grounds: A Novel”

Addie E. Citchens, “Dominion: A Novel”

Justin Haynes, “Ibis: A Novel” | WINNER

Saou Ichikawa translated by Polly Barton, “Hunchback: A Novel”

Achievement in Audiobook Production, presented by Audible

Molly Jong-Fast (narrator), Matie Argiropoulos (producer); “How to Lose Your Mother”

Jason Mott, Ronald Peet, and JD Jackson (narrators), Diane McKiernan (producer); “People Like Us: A Novel”

James Aaron Oh (narrator), Linda Korn (producer); “The Emperor of Gladness: A Novel”

Imani Perry (narrator), Suzanne Mitchell (producer); “Black in Blues”

Maggi-Meg Reed, Jane Oppenheimer, Carly Robins, Jeff Ebner, David Pittu, Chris Andrew Ciulla, Mark Bramhall, Petrea Burchard, Robert Petkoff, Kimberly Farr, Cerris Morgan-Moyer, Peter Ganim, Jade Wheeler, Steve West, and Jim Seybert (narrators), Kelly Gildea (producer); “The Correspondent: A Novel” | WINNER

Biography

Joe Dunthorne, “Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance”

Ekow Eshun, “The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them” | WINNER

Ruth Franklin, “The Many Lives of Anne Frank”

Beth Macy, “Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America”

Amanda Vaill, “Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution”

Current Interest

Jeanne Carstensen, “A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis”

Stefan Fatsis, “Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary”

Brian Goldstone, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America” | WINNER

Gardiner Harris, “No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson”

Jordan Thomas, “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World”

Fiction

Tod Goldberg, “Only Way Out: A Novel”

Stephen Graham Jones, “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”

Mia McKenzie, “These Heathens: A Novel”

Andrés Felipe Solano translated by Will Vanderhyden, “Gloria: A Novel”

Bryan Washington, “Palaver: A Novel” | WINNER

Graphic Novel/Comics

Eagle Valiant Brosi, “Black Cohosh”

Jaime Hernandez, “Life Drawing: A Love and Rockets Collection” | WINNER

Michael D. Kennedy, “Milk White Steed”

Lee Lai, “Cannon”

Carol Tyler, “The Ephemerata: Shaping the Exquisite Nature of Grief”

History

Char Adams, “Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore”

Bench Ansfield, “Born in Flames: The Business of Arson and the Remaking of the American City” | WINNER

Jennifer Clapp, “Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters”

Eli Erlick, “Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950”

Aaron G. Fountain Jr., “High School Students Unite!: Teen Activism, Education Reform, and FBI Surveillance in Postwar America”

Mystery/Thriller

Megan Abbott, “El Dorado Drive” | WINNER

Ace Atkins, “Everybody Wants to Rule the World: A Novel”

Lou Berney, “Crooks: A Novel About Crime and Family”

Michael Connelly, “The Proving Ground: A Lincoln Lawyer Novel”

S.A. Cosby, “King of Ashes: A Novel”

Poetry

Gabrielle Calvocoressi, “The New Economy”

Chet’la Sebree, “Blue Opening: Poems”

Richard Siken, “I Do Know Some Things”

Devon Walker-Figueroa, “Lazarus Species: Poems”

Allison Benis White, “A Magnificent Loneliness” | WINNER

Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction

Stephen Graham Jones, “The Buffalo Hunter Hunter”

Jordan Kurella, “The Death of Mountains”

Nnedi Okorafor, “Death of the Author: A Novel”

Adam Oyebanji, “Esperance”

Silvia Park, “Luminous: A Novel” | WINNER

Science & Technology

Mariah Blake, “They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals”

Peter Brannen, “The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World”

Karen Hao, “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI” | WINNER

Laura Poppick, “Strata: Stories from Deep Time”

Jordan Thomas, “When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World”

Young Adult Literature

K. Ancrum, “The Corruption of Hollis Brown”

Idris Goodwin, “King of the Neuro Verse”

Jamie Jo Hoang, “My Mother, the Mermaid Chaser”

Trung Le Nguyen, “Angelica and the Bear Prince” | WINNER

Hannah V. Sawyerr, “Truth Is: A Novel in Verse”

Dilapidated buildings and decaying signage may put off the casual observer. But for Redlands-based artists James McClung and Marcus Mercado, the gritty patina of the Inland Empire urban landscape conjures memories of life in the region.

Honoring these unassuming entities is the main focus of a new community exhibit, titled “Our Empire,” at the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture.

A total of 29 acrylic, mixed media paintings and drawings by McClung and Mercado will be on display at the Altura Credit Union Community Gallery until Oct. 23.

“James and Marcus’ artistic excellence, deep local roots and passion to tell the stories of their neighborhoods aligns with the vision of the Altura Credit Union Community Gallery — a space dedicated to providing opportunities for SoCal artists to showcase their work and uplift the people and places of our region,” said Valerie Found, interim executive director of Riverside Art Museum.

“A lot of people that grew up in these communities see some of these locations and they’re very relatable to their upbringing,” says McClung. “Things have transformed this area as well.”

Take for instance the San Bernardino Santa Fe smokestack, a towering 189-foot-tall structure from the 1920s that fueled the nearby railway power plant until 1994.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

For McClung, who grew up drawing comic book strips with his brother, the historic tower conjures memories of being in transit — after all, it is not far from the San Bernardino Santa Fe Depot, which links the city to other Southern California locations by train.

“I would go out to L.A. in my early 20s, just go off on my own and have a little adventure day,” says McClung. “Santa Fe structure stands out like a monument in the city.”

McClung depicts the tower with rigid orange triangles and hints of dewy sun-kissed hues, alongside a pencil-drawn image of the old Mt. Vernon Avenue Bridge, an 86-year-old structure that connected communities on the west side to the downtown commercial district. The bridge reopened last August under a $244.8–million project.

An elderly man holding a cane is also shown in the upper left area of the painting.  ”Who knows, he probably walked that bridge most of his life,” says McClung, who says he began to appreciate where he grew up following the pandemic.

“When I was a kid, I just remember driving around, looking out the window and observing the area around me,” says McClung. “I think growing up here teaches you to accept the small things and appreciate them too, appreciating small businesses and local establishments.”

Mercado’s interpretation of the Santa Fe tower is subtle, with the smokestack laid out behind the long-stretching freight trains carrying J.B. Hunt and FedEx shipping containers that pass below the renovated Mt. Vernon Avenue Bridge — an industrial crossroad between old and new San Bernardino.

“It’s mostly a reflection of your starting point heading towards L.A.,” he said.

Mercado notes that he took an interest in painting familiar, neglected sites about four years ago. His subjects include the sun-faded hamburglar at the Historic Original McDonald’s Museum in San Bernardino, located at the site where brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald established what would become the largest fast-food chain in the world.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

The defunct Redlands Mall, which is set to be demolished this year, is also a central subject in his artwork.

“I remember specifically being there, memories of the nail salon chemicals. There was a record shop and a hot dog on a stick,” says Mercado of the mall, which opened in 1977. “You’d go during Redlands Market Night, people would be hanging out, so all your friends would kind of meet up for that one night a week.”

When Mercado acquired photos from inside the vacant Redlands Mall from a friend, he saw his beloved hot dog on a stick shop, which he frequented in his middle and high school years, now in a desolate state with empty soda boxes and graffiti that depicted workers as stick figures. He painted it as such.

“To me, it is just a reflection of how we treat our memories or how we remember things,” says Mercado. “Is it the same as what we remember? Is it something that we wanna leave behind, or is it just, like, a ruin?”

Two extinct malls are referenced in the “Our Empire” exhibit, though the second might be hard to decipher unless someone remembers a mystery flute man who used to frequent the Carousel Mall in San Bernardino, which was demolished in 2023 after closing in 2017. McClung painted the flutist after hearing him in an empty parking structure beside the shopping center.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

“I was driving around places in the [Inland] Empire that I wanted to capture. I would go out and take reference photos,” says McClung. “I park in a big parking structure at Carousel mall and I hear this flute. Come to find out he would go there weekly because of the acoustics in the area.”

A quick online search will prompt a flurry of Reddit and Facebook discussion about where the flute man — dubbed the mystical flute man by many — is located now. Besides some streamer vlogs in the area, no formal article or website has ever recognized the elderly man as an idol. His memory, as it exists in McClung’s painting, is reserved for those who share a unique collective experience.

Perhaps others in the area have stumbled upon the mysterious flute man themselves, or can recall the smell of monomer from a nail salon at the Redlands Mall. Or perhaps Inland Empire residents can recognize home from the towering Santa Fe smokestack.

“I want people to come and feel like they are part of this as well,” McClung says. “We have our own memory of what that space was for us, but other people have their own story, too.”

CHESSY, France — A 118-foot mountain of ice rose over the suburban Paris countryside this weekend as Disney opened its Arendelle kingdom to the world — Elsa’s palace glowing at the summit, a “Frozen” Nordic fishing village below, and the company’s new chief executive standing before a crowd of celebrities.

World of Frozen, an immersive land themed to the blockbuster animated franchise, opened Sunday as a centerpiece of a $2.2-billion transformation at Disneyland Paris.

The transformation renames one of Disneyland Paris’ two parks from Walt Disney Studios Park to Disney Adventure World. The inauguration drew Penélope Cruz, Naomi Campbell and Teyana Taylor.

It is the largest expansion in the 34-year history of Disneyland Paris, and one node in a roughly $60-billion global build-out of Disney’s parks, resorts and cruise lines.

A new CEO’s first stage

It is also the first major international stage for Josh D’Amaro, who took over as Disney’s CEO on March 18 — 11 days before the French gates opened — after nearly three decades in the company’s theme parks division.

The parks-and-experiences business reportedly generated 57% of the company’s $17.5 billion in segment operating income last year, the force that observers say propelled D’Amaro from parks chief to the corner office.

“The Walt Disney Co. was built on one man’s dream, and for more than 100 years we’ve shared that dream with the world,” D’Amaro told the inauguration crowd.

“Storytelling is fundamental to everything that we do, whether that’s on screen or stage, in our theme parks, on our cruise ships, or even at home.”

He called the opening “a transformational moment” and paid tribute to the creative team behind the attraction, including “Frozen” writer-director Jennifer Lee — who are all now at work on “Frozen 3.”

An Associated Press journalist accompanied D’Amaro on the “Frozen” ride Saturday night.

The carriage splashed through water to childlike cheers from riders and laughter from the new CEO as they glided past Elsa singing in the dark. Some stepped off lightly wet.

The evening’s emotional peak came when Lou, an 11-year-old whose wish was granted through Make-A-Wish France, took the stage to sing a few notes of “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?”

A next-generation robotic Olaf walked out to join her. It was the 25,000th wish fulfilled for a sick child at Disneyland Paris since 1992.

A French reversal

On Friday, D’Amaro had stood alongside Emmanuel Macron at the resort.

The French president used the visit to claim the park as a national economic asset, calling Disneyland Paris “the leading tourist destination in Europe” and describing it as “a genuine ecosystem of success.”

Macron said the latest expansion would create 1,000 additional direct jobs.

“Since the beginning, that’s 13 billion euros invested on this territory,” Macron said, a figure equivalent to about $15 billion.

Disneyland Paris says it has recorded more than 445 million visits since 1992, accounting for 6.1% of France’s national tourism revenue.

Macron’s presence underscored a remarkable reversal.

When the park opened as Euro Disney in 1992, French intellectuals derided it as a “cultural Chernobyl.” The president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, dryly derided the new attraction as “not exactly my cup of tea.”

Now a French president was standing in front of cameras calling it an engine of national prosperity.

European roots

“‘Frozen,’ of course, has its roots in European storytelling,” said Michel den Dulk of Walt Disney Imagineering.

“It’s very loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen. So to have a northern European, charming wooden little village here in Disneyland Paris — it just made sense.”

The new Tangled family ride, too, draws from European folklore — the Brothers Grimm’s Rapunzel.

The land re-creates Arendelle around a lagoon, its timber buildings painted in muted Scandinavian pastels, facades adorned with rosemaling, a traditional Norwegian decorative art.

At the center is Frozen Ever After, a boat ride featuring state-of-the-art animatronics and immersive projection effects.

Guests can meet Anna and Elsa inside Arendelle Castle, have a conversation with a responsive baby troll named Mossy who talks back, and watch a lagoon celebration called the Snow Flower Festival — featuring an original song.

Visitors praised the scale of the mountain and the detail of the village, even after delays and minor glitches.

“Despite the wait, it was well worth it. The attention to detail is incredible, and the perspective of the ice mountain is breathtaking,” said Daniel Weber, 41, an architect from Munich, Germany, after the ride Sunday.

“You forget you’re outside Paris. For a few minutes, it really feels like Arendelle,” said Léa Moreau, 27, a graphic designer from Lille, France.

Beyond World of Frozen, the rebranded park brings a vast new lake called Adventure Bay, a Tangled family ride, 15 new dining locations — including the posh Regal View Restaurant — and a nighttime spectacular called Disney Cascade of Lights featuring more than 380 drones.

A Lion King land, already under construction, will follow.

More than 90% of the second park’s offerings will have been redesigned since it opened in 2002, and Disney says the footprint will roughly double once the full transformation is complete.

Disney’s streaming has swung from deep losses to profitability, but the parks remain the company’s most dependable earnings engine — and D’Amaro is the man who ran them.

“We continue to dream bigger and bring stories to life in brand new ways,” D’Amaro told the crowd.

Pyrotechnics lighted up Arendelle Village.

The ice palace on the mountain turned blue.

And 34 years after Euro Disney became a punchline, a brand-new kingdom opened in the fields east of Paris — for the first time in forever.

Adamson writes for the Associated Press.

It was so big it couldn’t use the English Channel, Suez Canal or Panama Canal.

The biggest ship in the world was longer than both the Eiffel Tower and the Empire State Building. It was known as the Seawise Giant and became one of the longest self-propelled ships in history.

The boat, later called Happy Giant, Knock Nevis and Mont, was built in Japan between 1974 and 1979. It had the greatest deadweight tonnage of a ship ever recorded.

Fully laden, it was 657,019 tonnes and was the heaviest in the world. Seawise Giant had a draft of 24.6 meters (81ft) and a length of 458.45 meters (1,504.1 ft).

Due to its size, it was incapable of navigating the English Channel, the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal.

The ship has a long history, and was created by Sumitomo Heavy Industries, Ltd in Yokosuka, Kanagawa, Japan, as an Ultra Large Crude Carrier.

It remained unnamed for a long time and was identified as its hull number, 1016. The ship suffered severe vibration problems during sea trials, and an unknown Greek owner refused to take delivery of it.

Eventually, the Japanese shipyard sold the ship thanks to a deal with Hong Kong Orient Overseas Container Line. Yet, they wanted to lengthen the ship by several meters and add 146,152 tonnes of cargo capacity.

Two years later, the ship relaunched as the Seawise Giant. In 1988, it was damaged during the Iran-Iraq war after fires erupted aboard the ship, and oil spread into the water.

The ship was still intact but was so damaged it was not deemed economical to repair.

However, a Norwegian investment firm bought the damaged ship. Over the next few years, it was repaired and renamed Happy Giant.

Up until 2004, the ship was owned by various Norwegian investment firms. It was then purchased by First Olsen Tankers and renamed Knock Nevis.

The ship was converted into a primarily moored storage tanker in the Persian Gulf.

However, it was then taken on by new owners Amber Development and named Mont. It had one final voyage to India where the ship was scrapped.

The ship was beached in December 2009 and due to its size, it took until the end of 2010 for it to be scrapped. The Seawise Giant’s anchor was saved and is on public display in Hong Kong.

It goes down in history as the longest ship ever constructed at 458.45 meters and is taller than many of the world’s tallest buildings. The Eiffel Tower stands at 330 meters and the Empire State Building at 443 meters.