Most Recent Posts

President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping are meeting this weekend at Sunnylands, an exclusive retreat center near Palm Springs, Calif. On top of 11 lakes, a private golf course and a world-renowned art collection, the compound holds more history than even a 200-acre estate should be able to contain. Obama is the eighth U.S. president to have spent time there. Frank Sinatra married his fourth wife there.

Many news organizations have written about the history of Sunnylands, including The New York Times. In a story Wednesday morning, the newspaper published the photo below, saying it shows "Henry Kissinger during a dinner at Sunnylands, date unknown."

"That was me," Carol Swanson Price told me. Price is the woman in the green dress, sitting to Kissinger's right in the photo. She was close friends with Walter and Leonore Annenberg, who built Sunnylands as their winter home. Her late husband was Ambassador Charles Price, who represented the United States in Britain during the Reagan administration.

"The Annenbergs were like a second family to me," Mrs. Price says, joking that her car practically drove to Sunnylands on autopilot.

As for the photo, "I believe that that was taken at Walter's 75th birthday," she says. "He died in 2002 at 90, so that was a long time ago." Twenty-six years, to be exact: The photo was taken in 1987.

"Lee always had a very special birthday party for him and always made it wonderful with great conversation," Price says. "She took a lot of time and effort to try to place people well so they'd enjoy one another. She was a fabulous hostess."

You can hear the full story of Sunnylands's colorful history on tonight's All Things Considered.

You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet

Director: Alain Resnais

Genre: Drama

Running time: 115 minutes

Not rated: smoking

With: Lambert Wilson, Mathieu Amalric, Pierre Arditi, Sabine Azema, Denis Podalydes, Anne Consigny, Michel Piccoli

In French with subtitles

German Garcia-Velutini got into his car and left work one day. It took him 11 months to get home.

Kidnappers had nabbed the Venezuelan banker. His abduction is part of a problem that's been getting worse every year for the past decade in Venezuela, which belongs to a region riddled with crime and the most violent cities in the world.

Gracia-Velutini tells his story at an outdoor table at a hotel in Caracas, the capital, with a view of a mountainside that climbs into the clouds.

He recalls his departure from work that fateful day in 2009, which took him as usual to a highway ramp, where he had to hit the brakes.

"It was like a stopover by what I thought were policemen because of their jackets," he says. "They had long guns, automatic rifles."

Garcia-Velutini is a trim man, with glasses and a mild expression that matches his mild tone as he describes learning the men were not police.

"They took me out of the car and pushed me into another vehicle and injected me" in the thigh, he recalls.

"I passed [out] in seconds. ... When I woke up, I was being pushed in a small room. They took all my clothes," he says, leaving him only with a T-shirt and underwear.

The banker had fallen into the hands of professional kidnappers, who held him for months as they demanded ransom from his family.

"They were very proud of what they were doing. They took pride in their profession," says Garcia-Velutini, who came to that conclusion because of the kidnappers' elaborate techniques.

They kept him in one windowless room. Music played constantly so he would hear nothing from outside. Cameras followed his every move. He never saw his kidnappers, who pushed food and notes for him through a sort of doggy door.

Enlarge image i

Babylon, like many favelas, is located a short distance from the most affluent areas of Rio, where property is among the most expensive in the world. Shoup lives only a few hundred feet from the tourist beach at Leme. She says the main reason she moved to a favela was because it was cheap, but the low cost isn't why she stays.

"I always say I feel a lot safer at night walking here than I do in Copa or Leme," she says. "I like sprint through Copa or Leme when I get off the bus. When I get here, I say whoa, OK."

That feeling of security in favelas like Babylon is the result of a government project called pacification. In the past, police used to raid the favelas, battle with the drug gangs and then withdraw.

Now a specially created cadre of police called Police Pacification Units live and work in certain favelas full time, providing a permanent security presence. It's been a success in places like Babylon; the drug gangs have been driven out and now foreigners are moving in.

It's a similar story across town in the favela called Vidigal where 23-year-old Kate Steiker-Ginzberg lives.

"I have 180 degrees of ocean views living here in Vidigal," she says.

It's one of the ironies of Rio that its poor have the best views in the city. Many of Rio's favelas crawl up the city's verdant cliffs. The makeshift cinder-block homes sprout from the creases in the hills, overlooking the long white beaches and tourist hotels where the affluent come to play. In Vidigal, in particular, the views are breathtaking.

But it's not just the vista that attracts Steiker-Ginzberg.

"I think there are a lot of young people and a lot of students who come here with this idea of: How can we come and live here and really try and learn from a place?" she says. "How can we really try and insert ourselves in the community?"

Business Is Booming

There's another reason why many foreigners and Brazilians with means are coming to the pacified favelas these days — money.

Enlarge image i