Today’s Headlines

A Cuban tale
As a Cuban Jew, Frida Zaitman could have left many times. “I could have gone to Israel; they pay everything,” she says. She stays not so much out of loyalty to a land that gave her family refuge from the Holocaust. Her touchstone is her friendship with Magda Danger, an 88-year-old Afro-Cuban. Tracy Wilkinson weaves together a poignant and peculiarly Cuban story.

Light a candle for this “botánica”
If you’ve visited downtown L.A. lately, you may have noticed that Latino businesses are being replaced by stores catering to the new DTLA (as hipsters call it) gentry. Farmacia Million Dollar, which sells bath washes, statues and candles for people seeking solutions to everyday worries, is the latest mainstay on the Broadway corridor battling for survival. Read Brittny Mejia’s story on a changing downtown.

He made Singapore Inc.
Once asked whether straight-laced Singapore — where even chewing gum was barred — would ever lighten up, Lee Kuan Yew replied: “I hope never…. We’d have more poor people in the streets… more drugs, more crime, more single mothers and delinquent children, a troubled society and a poor economy.” That’s vintage Lee, who died Sunday at 91. Read how he transformed a backwater city-state into one of the world’s most successful business centers.