Obama ivory crackdown leaves open California loopholes
In this Monday, July 27, 2015 photo, Heike Dietrich, of Germany, looks at a mammoth ivory tusk for sale in the window of a Chinatown shop in San Francisco. Merchants of carved ivory tusks and trinkets in San Francisco's Chinatown wonder what impact President Obama's sweeping new order restricting ivory sales will have in California, the country's No. 2 market for elephant ivory. Lawmakers in New York recently closed most loopholes allowing ivory sales, but California lawmakers this summer rejected similar measures. (AP Photo/Eric Risberg)
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Ivory dealers in San Francisco’s Chinatown stood in their shop doors besides store windows full of carved ivory tusks and trinkets this week, unfazed by President Barack Obama’s announcement of proposed rules that the White House says go as far as the administration can go toward banning all U.S. trade of ivory from the world’s endangered elephants.
“Wooly mammoth ivory,” not elephant ivory, Chinatown store manager Michael Rasoyli said of the carved tusks in his store in San Francisco, which with Los Angeles makes up two of the country’s top three hubs for ivory sales.
“Cow bone,” store manager Virginia Lo said, in another Chinatown shop next door, of the half-dozen curved tusks up to 4
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