Mother Arrested After Leaving Her Kids 

To Go To Work Receives More Than 

$165,000 In Donations

BY : EMILY BROWN ON : 22 FEB 2021 

Turnbull County Sheriff's Office/Facebook


More than $165,000 has been raised for a single mum who was arrested after leaving her children in a motel room so she could go to work.

A GoFundMe page was set up in support of 24-year-old Shaina Bell, of Liberty Township, Ohio, after she was arrested last week and charged with two counts of misdemeanour child endangerment.

Bell told police she usually asks someone to check on her children every hour while she works, and she felt her elder daughter, who is 10, was old enough to stay with her two-year-old sister at the Motel 6 room where they live while she went to work down the street at a Little Caesars fast food restaurant.

PA Images


The GoFundMe page aims to help Bell find permanent housing, and after members of the public heard her story hundreds of people came forward to donat
At the time of writing, February 22, the fundraiser has now received more than $165,000 in donations from generous strangers looking to help.



Speaking to WKBN, per Fox 5 News, Bell explained that while people are ‘being there for [her] and showing great support,’ she has also been the target of some hurtful comments.

Turnbull County Sheriff's Office

She continued:

I have over $100,000 in a GoFundMe account right now. I didn’t ask for that, but people gave it to me, and I’m just over appreciative to what’s going on.

Bell was released the day after she was arrested, and she has expressed her hopes to use the money raised through GoFundMe to buy a house for herself and her family.

What's in your baby's food? 

Probably dangerous heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury.

We assume that companies that make baby foods and baby products want the best for our children. Their own data proves those assumptions wrong.

Raja Krishnamoorthi
Opinion contributor

We assume that anything with “baby” on the label must be safe, gentle and wholesome. Surely companies making baby foods would not knowingly sell products with dangerous levels of toxins, right? The Food and Drug Administration must be checking?

Unfortunately, those assumptions are wrong.

Over the last year, I have been investigating baby food safety by looking at the test results possessed by the manufacturers themselves. What I learned was alarming.

Common baby foods found in grocery stores — made by trusted brands such as HappyBABY (Nurture, Inc.), Earth’s Best Organic (Hain Celestial Group, Inc.), Beech-Nut, and Gerber — contain dangerously high levels of toxic heavy metals like arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury.

Heavy metals in baby food

Toxic heavy metals are exceptionally harmful to babies’ brains. Exposure can lead to long-term brain damage, causing decreased academic achievement, lost IQ points, learning disabilities, and behavioral disabilities. Babies’ developing brains are at a much higher risk than adults, since babies are small, have other developing organ systems, and absorb more of the heavy metals than adults. The heavy metals accumulate in the body, which means that the more a baby eats tainted baby food, the worse the negative impact on their brain development.

USA TODAY Food:Arsenic, toxic metals found in baby food including Walmart, Gerber, Beech-Nut brands, according to new report

Right now, there are very few federal standards limiting the amount of heavy metals in baby food, and there is no requirement for the companies to tell us how much their products contain. But we do know that many baby foods contain much higher levels of heavy metals than products for which federal standards exist. Bottled water, for instance, may contain no more than 10 parts per billion of inorganic arsenic. In just one disturbing example that I found, apple and broccoli puffs were sold with a lead content of 180 parts per billion. Remember, the company’s own testing proved it.

In the absence of rules, baby food makers have made up their own proprietary standards. But the companies set them dangerously high, often at or above 100 parts per billion of the dangerous metals. And even then, my investigation found that the companies ignore them. If their product contains higher levels of toxic heavy metals than their proprietary standards allow, they sell them anyway. The manufacturer of HappyBABY explained to me that their testing is only intended to monitor their suppliers, not to protect babies. So, “all of the products that were tested were sold into commerce.”

Parents who seek out organic options for their babies will also be disappointed to learn that organic baby foods are just as dangerous as conventional foods in terms of heavy metal content in their foods. 

What else is there to hide?

As concerning as all of this is, there are three companies that could be even worse. Walmart (seller of Parent’s Choice), Sprout Organic Foods, and Campbell (seller of Plum Organics) refused to provide their testing results as part of our congressional investigation. Our investigative body is greatly concerned that their lack of cooperation might obscure the presence of even higher levels of heavy metals in their baby foods, compared to their competitors’ products. Parents beware.

As chairman of the House Oversight Economic and Consumer Policy Subcommittee, I have investigated my share of bad acts by corporations. I find none more disconcerting than companies that make profits by putting our children’s health at risk.

I uncovered that e-cigarette maker, JUUL, was targeting kids as young as eight years old by sponsoring their summer camps. I discovered that the manufacturers of booster seats were falsely advertising their products for children too small to safely use them, putting them at risk of serious injury. However, the bad behavior of baby food manufacturers may take the cake.

Parents confront many unavoidable worries, but the safety of the baby food they give their children should not be one of them. I hope that HappyBABY, Earth’s Best Organic, Beech-Nut, Gerber, Walmart (seller of Parent’s Choice), Sprout Organic Foods and Campbell (seller of Plum Organics) take this opportunity to make their products safer. Just in case they dither, I will introduce legislation that will require them to make their products safe.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., is chair of the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, housed under the House Committee on Oversight and Reform.

The Melting of Large Icebergs is a Key Stage in the Evolution of Ice Ages

A new study, in which the Andalusian Earth Sciences Institute (IACT) (CSIC-UGR) participated, has described for the first time a key stage in the beginning of the great glaciations and indicates that it can happen to our planet in the future.

The study claims to have found a new connection that could explain the beginning of the ice ages on Earth

Antarctic iceberg melt could hold the key to the activation of a series of mechanisms that cause the Earth to suffer prolonged periods of global cooling, according to Francisco J. Jiménez-Espejo, a researcher at the Andalusian Earth Sciences Institute (CSIC-UGR), whose discoveries were recently published in the prestigious journal Nature.

It has long been known that changes in the Earth’s orbit, as it moves around the Sun, trigger the beginning or end of glacial periods by affecting the amount of solar radiation that reaches the planet’s surface. However, until now, the question of how small variations in the solar energy that reaches us can lead to such dramatic shifts in the planet’s climate has remained a mystery.

In this new study, a multinational group of researchers proposes that, when the Earth’s orbit around the sun is just right, the Antarctic icebergs begin to melt further and further away from the continent, moving huge volumes of freshwater from the Antarctic Ocean into the Atlantic.

This process causes the Antarctic Ocean to become increasingly salty, while the Atlantic Ocean becomes fresher, affecting overall ocean circulation patterns, drawing CO2 from the atmosphere and reducing the so-called greenhouse effect. These are the initial stages that mark the beginning of an ice age on the planet.

Within this study, the scientists used several techniques to reconstruct oceanic conditions in the past, including by identifying tiny fragments of rock that had broken away from Antarctic icebergs as they melted into the ocean. These deposits were obtained from marine sediment cores recovered by the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) during Expedition 361 off the sea-margins of South Africa. These sediment cores enabled the scientists to reconstruct the history of the icebergs that reached these latitudes in the last million and a half years, this being one of the most continuous records known.

Climate simulations

The study describes how these rocky deposits appear to be consistently associated with variations in deep ocean circulation, which was reconstructed from chemical variations in minute deep-sea fossils known as foraminifera. The team also used new climate simulations to test the proposed hypotheses, finding that huge volumes of fresh water are carried northward by icebergs.

The first author of the article, PhD student Aidan Starr from the University of Cardiff, notes that the researchers are “surprised to have discovered that this teleconnection is present in each of the different ice ages of the last 1.6 million years. This indicates that the Antarctic Ocean plays a major role in the global climate, something that scientists have long sensed, but that we have now clearly demonstrated.”

Francisco J. Jiménez Espejo, a researcher with the IACT, participated in his capacity as a specialist in inorganic geochemistry and physical properties during the IODP 361 expedition aboard the JOIDES Resolution research vessel. For two months, between January and March 2016, the research team sailed between Mauritius and Cape Town, collecting deep-sea sediment cores.

Jiménez Espejo’s main contribution to the study focused on identifying the geochemical variations associated with glacial and interglacial periods, which has made it possible to estimate with greater accuracy the age of the sediment and its sensitivity to the different environmental changes associated with those periods.

Over the course of the last 3 million years, the Earth began to experience periodic glacial cooling. During the most recent episode, about 20,000 years ago, icebergs continuously reached the Atlantic coasts of the Iberian Peninsula from the Arctic. Currently, the Earth is in a warm interglacial period known as the Holocene.

However, the progressive increase in global temperature associated with CO2 emissions from industrial activities could affect the natural rhythm of glacial cycles. Ultimately, the Antarctic Ocean could become too warm for Antarctic icebergs to be able to carry freshwater north, and therefore a fundamental stage in the beginning of the ice ages–the variations in thermohaline circulation–would not take place.

Ian Hall, also of Cardiff University, who co-directed the scientific expedition, indicates that the results may contribute to understanding how the Earth’s climate may respond to anthropic changes. Similarly, Jiménez Espejo, notes that “last year, during an expedition aboard Hespérides, the Spanish Navy research vessel, we were able to observe the immense A-68 iceberg that had just broken into several pieces next to the islands of South Georgia. Ocean warming may cause the trajectories and the melt patterns of these large icebergs to alter in the future, affecting the currents and, therefore, our climate and the validity of the models that scientists use to predict it.”

UNIVERSITY OF GRANADA

This First-Ever VIDEO of a Rover Landing on Mars Will Leave You Speechless


(NASA/JPL-Caltech)
SPACE



RAFI LETZTER, LIVE SCIENCE
22 FEBRUARY 2021

For the first time ever, you can watch a rover landing on Mars. And it's epic on many levels.

Human beings have been dropping machines on Mars since the 1970s: landers that parachuted to the surface, rovers that were destroyed during landing, and later rovers that survived their landings inside giant, bouncing cushions of airbags.

Now powerful skycranes lower NASA rovers to the surface. But in all that time, all those spectacular successes and failures have taken place out of sight on another world. That changed with Perseverance.

NASA outfitted the Perseverance rover and its landing vehicle, which arrived on the Red Planet Feb. 18, with a collection of high-quality, high-speed video cameras to capture the 'seven minutes of terror', as engineers refer to the plunge to the Martian surface.

The cameras were set up to offer viewers front-row seats to the final two chapters of the trucklike machine's plunge from solar orbit onto the Martian dirt: the parachute and the skycrane.

As Live Science previously reported, some tricky maneuvering is required to deposit a 10-foot-long (3.1 meter), 2,260-pound (1,025 kilograms) nuclear-powered robot gently within a narrow target on the dangerous, rough surface of another planet.

Related: 5 Mars myths and misconceptions

The video shows the rover's landing vehicle popping off its heat shield so it can "see" the ground during landing to time its parachute deployment. The metal disk falls away, revealing the long drop that still separates the US$2.7 billion, nuclear-powered rover from the ground.

Another camera shows the parachute unfurling, a sheet of fabric tasked with slowing the descent from 940 mph (1,512 km/h) to 190 mph (306 km/h) in two minutes.

Then, the lander drops away from the parachute the robotic pilot took on its toughest challenge: Identifying and maneuvering toward a safe landing site. Finally, the skycrane hovers 65 feet (20 meters) above the Martian surface, kicking up a dust storm as it lowers a gently swaying rover on long cables to the ground before flying away.

None of the video was available to NASA during the entirely robot-controlled landing. (Getting data from Mars takes time, and the uplink bandwidth is far short of streaming speed - though NASA did manage to haul 30 gigabytes of media across interplanetary space in a few days.)

But Perseverance uploaded the material over the weekend in time for NASA to release it Monday (Feb. 22).

Related: Here's every spaceship that's ever carried an astronaut into orbit

NASA said that the video will offer important data that will help future missions and confirmed that just about every stage of the descent went as expected and planned. The closest thing to a problem visible on the video: an apparently harmless loose spring on the back of the heat shield, visible as the protective shroud drops away from the lander.

NASA also released the first sounds recorded with a microphone on Mars.

Watch the full video of the announcement, in which NASA engineers break down the video frame by frame, right here.

Extremist Brains Perform Poorly at Complex Mental Tasks, Study Reveals


(Science Photo Library/Getty Images)
HUMANS

PETER DOCKRILL
23 FEBRUARY 2021

People with extremist views aren't only identified by their political, religious, or social beliefs, according to new research.

Those ideological convictions run deep, scientists say – so deep, in fact, that they can be recognised in a 'psychological signature' of cognitive traits and aptitudes that typifies the thinking patterns of the extremist mind.

"There appear to be hidden similarities in the minds of those most willing to take extreme measures to support their ideological doctrines," explains psychologist Leor Zmigrod from the University of Cambridge.

"This psychological signature is novel and should inspire further research on the effect of dogmatism on perceptual decision-making processes," she and colleagues write in their newly published study.

Moreover, it's possible those psychological patterns could be what compels some individuals to adopt strong or radical ideological positions in the first instance, the researchers suggest.

"Subtle difficulties with complex mental processing may subconsciously push people towards extreme doctrines that provide clearer, more defined explanations of the world, making them susceptible to toxic forms of dogmatic and authoritarian ideologies," Zmigrod says.

In the new study, Zmigrod and fellow researchers ran an experiment with 334 participants, who provided demographic information and filled out a series of ideological questionnaires about their personal beliefs, including political, social, and religious beliefs.

In a previous, unrelated study involving the same group of people, the participants had performed an extensive set of 'brain games' tests – cognitive and behavioural tasks on a computer, designed to test things like their working memory, information processing, learning, and mindfulness, among others.

When Zmigrod ran the results from the ideological questionnaires against the cognitive tests, she made a surprising discovery.

"We found that individuals with extremist attitudes tended to perform poorly on complex mental tasks," she explains in The Conversation.

"They struggled to complete psychological tests that require intricate mental steps."

Specifically, those with extremist attitudes – such as endorsing violence against specific groups in society – showed poorer working memory, slower perceptual strategies, and impulsive, sensation-seeking tendencies.

However, the tests didn't only spotlight the traits of extremist thinking – other kinds of ideological beliefs also revealed the shape of their psychological signatures.

Participants who showed dogmatic thinking were slower to accumulate evidence in speeded decision-making tasks, the researchers found, but were also more impulsive and prone to taking ethical risks.

Individuals who were politically conservative showed reduced strategic information processing, heightened response caution in perceptual decision-making paradigms, and displayed an aversion to social risk-taking.

In contrast, participants with liberal beliefs were more likely to adopt faster and less precise perceptual strategies, displaying less caution in cognitive tasks.

Similarly to the conservative group, people with religious views reflected heightened caution and reduced strategic information processing in the cognitive domain, along with enhanced agreeableness, risk perception and aversion to social risk-taking.

"Our research shows our brains hold clues – subtle metaphors, perhaps – for the ideologies we choose to live by and the beliefs we rigidly stick to," Zmigrod explains.

"If our mind tends to react to stimuli with caution, it may also be attracted by cautious and conservative ideologies. If we struggle to process and plan complex action sequences, we may be drawn to more extreme ideologies that simplify the world and our role within it."

Of course, the results here are open to a fair degree of interpretation, and there are limitations to what relatively small psychological studies like this can tell us without further replication involving larger samples.

Nonetheless, the methodology here could lay the groundwork for future psychological tests that may be able to identify individuals at risk of radicalisation and adopting extremist beliefs – as well as suggesting what kind of thinking shields others from the same.

"The [analysis] reveals the ways in which perceptual decision-making strategies can percolate into high-level ideological beliefs, suggesting that a dissection of the cognitive anatomy of ideologies is a productive and illuminating endeavour," the authors write in their study.

"It elucidates both the cognitive vulnerabilities to toxic ideologies as well as the traits that make individuals more intellectually humble, receptive to evidence and ultimately resilient to extremist rhetoric."

The findings are reported in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

HUMANS

Guess Which Animal Is in Australia's Oldest Rock Painting, Dating Back 17,000 Years

The cave with the kangaroo inside. (Damien Finch)

DAMIEN FINCH ET AL., THE CONVERSATION

23 FEBRUARY 2021

In Western Australia's northeast Kimberley region, on Balanggarra Country, a two-metre-long painting of a kangaroo spans the sloping ceiling of a rock shelter above the Drysdale River.

In a paper published today in Nature Human Behaviour, we date the artwork as being between 17,500 and 17,100 years old - making it Australia's oldest known in-situ rock painting.

We used a pioneering radiocarbon dating technique on 27 mud wasp nests underlying and overlying 16 different paintings from 8 rock shelters. We found paintings of this style were produced between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago.

Our work is part of Australia's largest rock art dating initiative. The project is based in the Kimberley, one of the world's premier rock art regions. Here, rock shelters have preserved galleries of paintings, often with generations of younger artwork painted over older work.

By studying the stylistic features of the paintings and the order in which they were painted when they overlap, a stylistic sequence has been developed by earlier researchers based on observations at thousands of Kimberley rock art sites.

They identified five main stylistic periods, of which the most recent is the familiar Wanjina period.

Styles in rock art

The oldest style, which includes the kangaroo painting we recently dated, often features life-sized animals in outline form, infilled with irregular dashes. Paintings in this style are said to belong to the "Naturalistic" stylistic period.

The ochre used is an iron oxide in a red-mulberry colour. Unfortunately, no current scientific dating method can determine when this paint was applied to the rock surface.

A different approach is to date fossilised insect nests or mineral accretions on the rock surfaces that happen to be overlying or underlying rock art pigment. These dates provide a maximum (underlying) or minimum (overlying) age range for the painting.

Our dating suggests the main period for Naturalistic paintings in the Kimberley spanned from at least 17,000 to 13,000 years ago.

The oldest known Australian rock painting

Very rarely, we'll find mud wasp nests both overlying and underlying a single painting. This was the case with the painting of the kangaroo, made on the low ceiling of a well-protected Drysdale River rock shelter.

We were able to date three wasp nests underlying the painting and three nests built on top of it. With these ages, we determined confidently the painting is between 17,500 and 17,100 years old; most likely close to 17,300 years old.

 (Picture by Damien Finch. Illustration by Pauline Heaney)

Our quantitative ages support the proposed stylistic sequence that suggests the oldest Naturalistic style was followed by the Gwion style. This style featured paintings of decorated human figures, often with headdresses and holding boomerangs.

From animals and plants to people

Research we published last year shows Gwion paintings flourished about 12,000 years ago - some 1,000-5,000 years after the Naturalistic period.

 

Above: This map of the Kimberley region in Western Australia shows the coastline at three distinct points in time: today, 12,000 years ago (the Gwion period) and 17,300 years ago (the earlier end of the known Naturalistic period).

With these dates, we can also partially reconstruct the environment in which the artists lived 600 generations ago. For example, much of the Naturalistic period coincided with the end of the last ice age when the environment was cooler and drier than now.

During the Naturalistic period, 17,000 years ago, sea levels were a staggering 106 metres below today's and the Kimberley coastline was about 300 kilometres further away, more than half the distance to Timor.

Aboriginal artists at this time often chose to depict kangaroos, fish, birds, reptiles, echidnas and plants (particularly yams). As the climate warmed, ice caps melted, the monsoon was re-established, rainfall increased and sea levels rose, sometimes rapidly.

By the Gwion period around 12,000 years ago, sea levels had risen to 55m below today's. This would undoubtedly have prompted long-term adjustment to territories and social relations.

This is when Aboriginal painters depicted highly decorated human figures, bearing a striking resemblance to early 20th-century photographs of Aboriginal ceremonial dress. While plants and animals were still painted, human figures were clearly the most popular subject.

Reaching into the past

While we now have age estimates for more paintings than ever before, more work is continuing to find out, more accurately, when each art period began and ended.

For example, one minimum age on a Gwion painting suggests it may be more than 16,000 years old. If so, Gwion art would have overlapped with the Naturalistic period but further dates are required to be more certain.

Moreover, it's highly unlikely the oldest known Naturalistic painting we dated is the oldest surviving one. Future research will almost certainly locate even older works.

For now, however, the 17,300-year-old kangaroo is a sight to marvel at.

Acknowledgements: we would like to thank the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, the Australian National Science and Technology Organisation, Rock Art Australia and Dunkeld Pastoral Co for their collaboration on this work. 

Damien Finch, Postdoctoral Researcher, The University of Melbourne; Andrew Gleadow, Emeritus Professor, The University of Melbourne; Janet Hergt, Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, The University of Melbourne, and Sven Ouzman, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology and Centre for Rock Art Research + Management, University of Western Australia.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Fur for thought: How Covid has killed the fur industry

Fur has become a controversial product in recent years, but has the pandemic made it a thing of the past?
February 20, 2021




Jack Shute

You may question who and why people are still buying fur; it seems that the industry is old-fashioned and unsought after in this day and age. Faux fur is everywhere, and the love for animals never dies, especially now. The first lockdown caused a significant rise of pet adoptions, according to Pets at Home, which saw a sharp sales rise.

However strong the stigma against fur seems, the industry has still been able to thrive in previous years. The Fur Information Council of America recorded the world's total fur retail sales in 2019 amounted to around €22 billion. Sales may have been in a slow decline over the years, but the industry is far from dead.

Well, until now, that is. The coronavirus pandemic has had a significant effect on the industry in Europe following outbreaks at fur farms across Denmark.

The country is known for being the world's biggest mink producer and farms, with up to 17 million of them in the name of 'fashion'. The outbreaks lead to an announcement from Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, where he announced "a mass culling" of millions of minks.

The slaughters were described as "necessary," as Denmark officials called it a "reservoir" of disease, which could pose a considerable health risk for the human population. Potential mutations found in mink-related strains of the virus could also prevent the success of any future vaccine. The Danish government proposed a ban on mink farming until 2022. Negotiations are being dragged out as the ban will cause 6,000 job losses.

The fur trade was flourishing just a decade ago; with Chinese incomes growing, a demand for luxury goods grew with it, and the love for fur was apparent as China became the biggest fur importer. Kopenhagen Fur, the world's largest fur auction house, sold a staggering £1.5bn of furs in 2013, with mink production worth £3.2bn globally.


Why antibiotics being used on healthy farm animals is an issue for humansconversations.indy100.com

The superbug crisis in factory farming can lead to overuse of antibiotics, making them ineffective in treating secondary infections in humans.

Despite its success and a freeze in fur production caused by the pandemic, the industry has been suffering for years before. In 2019, multiple luxury brands announced how they were stamping out the sale of fur products.

Prada, Macy's, and others joined brands such as Chanel and Burberry to remove any animal fur in their clothing lines. The same year also saw an increase of vegan products by a substantial 258 per cent within the UK and US markets.

With the fur aesthetic still being a huge influence and desire in fashion, brands and retailers are increasingly providing faux fur products. This also comes with the rise of vegan leather as countless brands have also banned exotic skins like crocodile and snake. A recent poll of 2,000 people from the UK and US indicated that two-thirds of British adults and 47 per cent of US adults view fur as "inappropriate material".


This disastrous year shows just how important emergency pet preparedness is conversations.indy100.com

Animals have similar needs to humans when it comes to disasters, but they can't take matters into their own hands. It's up to us.

Animal welfare groups say the pandemic is further proof of why the fur industry should be shut down, as well as the unethical practices it involves. Dr Joanna Swabe from the Humane Society International told the BBC, "Fur farms are not only the cause of immense and unnecessary animal suffering, but they are also ticking time bombs for deadly diseases."

In recent years, after countless protests and animal welfare campaigns, the fur industry's reality has been exposed and caused public opinion to change drastically. As well as the lack of demand due to the rise in faux fur, there seems to be no need for fur production- in Europe.

The UK placed a ban on fur production in 2003, with Austria, Germany and Japan following the same footsteps with wiping out the fur. Clearly concerned and desperate to boost sales, many fur industry associates are now marketing fur as a 'sustainable option', compared to faux fur, which is still mostly made of synthetic materials, including polyester or modacrylic.

This might seem hypocritical as animal farming raises larger environmental issues such as greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the use of faux fur is much more ethical in terms of animal welfare.

The whirlwind of 2020 saw many changes in societal infrastructures; businesses had to adapt to the new way of life until things go 'back to normal'- whenever that is.

Fashion has been affected just as much as any other industry, though some people may see the decline in fur as one of the very few positive outcomes from the pandemic. Still, it's a massive market in China, and demand is still alive. Will fur farming be killed off for good one day? We will have to see.

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Spike in Afghan civilian casualties since start of peace talks

The number of civilian casualties in November 2020

 was the highest of any month since 2009

A full year has passed in Afghanistan without a US combat death, the only such period since the United States invaded in 2001

David Zucchino

‘2020 could have been the year of peace in Afghanistan’
(AFP via Getty Images)


Civilian casualties rose sharply in Afghanistan after peace negotiations between the government and the Taliban began in September, even as overall deaths and injuries dropped during 2020 compared with the previous year, the United Nations has reported.

In its annual report documenting civilian injuries and deaths, the United Nations’ mission in Afghanistan found that the escalation in civilian casualties began shortly after intra-Afghan negotiations opened on 12 September in Doha, Qatar, increasing by 45 per cent in the final quarter of 2020 versus the same time period in 2019. The number of civilian casualties in November was the highest of any year that month since the UN began systematically documenting Afghan casualties in 2009, the report said on Tuesday.

“2020 could have been the year of peace in Afghanistan,” said Deborah Lyons, the special representative of the UN secretary-general for Afghanistan. “Instead, thousands of Afghan civilians perished due to the conflict.”

The report was released as talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban remain stalled amid unrelenting violence, and a February 2020 agreement between the United States and the Taliban is under review by the Biden administration.

Read more
Afghan peace talks resume, but path is anything but certain
Russia steps in, trying to aid stalled Afghan peace process

Following that agreement, made a year ago, the number of civilian casualties for the year was 15 per cent lower than in 2019. The 8,820 civilian casualties documented in 2020 — 3,035 killed and 5,785 wounded — represented the first time since 2013 that this figure dropped below 10,000, the report said.

The decline was attributed to a reduction by the Taliban of mass casualty attacks in major cities and a decline in the number of US airstrikes — both of which contributed to high civilian casualty rates in previous years.

But civilian casualties surged in the fourth quarter as fighting raged in the countryside between the Taliban and Afghan government forces. At the same time, a targeted assassination campaign of shootings and bombings killed government workers and security force members, journalists, civil society advocates and family members of combatants.

Also targeted were religious minorities, especially Hazaras, most of whom are Shiite Muslim, and the country’s small Sikh population.

The 2,792 civilian casualties (891 deaths and 1,901 injuries) recorded in the final three months of 2020 represented the second-highest total for this time period since 2009.

The Taliban have denied targeted attacks against anyone other than government employees or supporters, but the Afghan government has blamed the militants for most such attacks.

Last year was the seventh consecutive year that the UN has documented more than 3,000 civilian deaths, “with Afghanistan remaining among the deadliest places in the world to be a civilian,” the report said.

The report noted that many Afghans had hoped that violence would diminish after government and Taliban negotiators began formal talks, which are aimed at agreeing on a road map for a future Afghan government and working toward a comprehensive cease-fire.

“Instead, there was an escalation of violence with disturbing trends and consequences,” the UN report said.

After the two sides agreed on procedures to guide negotiations in early December, the talks were recessed until the first week of January. But there have been no formal negotiations since then. Instead, there has been heavy fighting, as both sides await a decision by the Biden administration on whether to honor or extend the 1 May deadline for withdrawing the remaining 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan, as stipulated in the February 2020 agreement between the United States and the Taliban.

Part of the increase in fourth-quarter casualties was caused by an increase in homemade magnetic bombs attached to vehicles and detonated by timer or remote control. The UN report also documented a continued high rate of civilian casualties caused by roadside and car bombs detonated by the Taliban and other anti-government elements.

The UN report attributed 62 per cent of civilian casualties in 2020 to anti-government elements, with the Taliban blamed for 45 per cent of the overall total and the Islamic State group in Afghanistan responsible for 8 per cent. Another 9 per cent was attributed to undetermined anti-government elements. Though the Isis group has been weakened, and is mostly contained in the east, it has turned to guerrilla-style and mass-casualty attacks in urban areas, as it attempts to rebuild its ranks.

Government forces were responsible for 22 per cent of civilian casualties for the year, according to the report, with an additional 2 per cent attributed to pro-government armed groups. The report attributed 13 per cent of civilian casualties to crossfire or undetermined causes.

US-led international forces were responsible for just 1 per cent of civilian casualties in 2020, the report said — 120 civilian deaths and injuries, a decrease of 85 per cent from 2019, when 786 casualties were attributed to international forces. It was the lowest number in that category since 2009.

After the February 2020 agreement, the Taliban refrained from attacking US or other NATO forces. US commanders have generally limited airstrikes to instances in which government forces were under extreme threat during Taliban assaults.

But that has not stopped US aircraft from dropping hundreds of bombs with little accountability after the military stopped publicly reporting the strikes last year.

A full year has passed in Afghanistan without a US combat death, the only such period since the United States invaded in 2001. The two most recent US combat deaths in Afghanistan occurred on 8 February 2020, three weeks before the agreement was signed between the Taliban and the United States.

The New York Times

Alberta-Born Ted Cruz Embarrasses Canada With Mexico Trip

Calgary-born Ted Cruz is the latest to come under fire for taking a vacation while his constituents are in a crisis.

• By Mel Woods

Another Canadian-born politician is under fire for taking a vacation to a sunny destination while his constituents suffer through a crisis.

No, we’re not talking about Alberta cabinet ministers or Ontario’s former finance minister. 

This time, it’s Calgary-born Texas senator Ted Cruz who was spotted boarding a plane to Cancun, Mexico Wednesday, while his state remains locked in a disastrous deep freeze with accompanying power outages. 

Cruz was born in Calgary and spent the first four years of his life in the true North strong and free before his family moved to Texas. He was a Canadian citizen until formally renouncing in 2014 ahead of his presidential campaign. Cruz’s biggest memories of Canada are reportedly that it was “cold” — ironic considering the current weather in his state. 

With the ill-advised Mexico trip, Cruz does have something in common with his homeland — he joins a wave of Canadian politicians and staffers who were caught vacationing internationally over the winter holidays in late December despite explicit Canadian public health guidance not to do so and the onset of the dangerous second wave of COVID-19. 

Then-Ontario finance minister Rod Phillips travelled to St. Barts while then-Alberta municipal affairs minister Tracy Allard vacationed in Hawaii. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s chief of staff also travelled to the U.K., and actually had to come back via the U.S. because the Canadian government had halted all flights to and from the U.K. in the wake of the new coronavirus variant. All in all, dozens of public officials were caught suitcase-handed over the winter. 

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Senator Ted Cruz speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington on Feb. 13, 2021, 

on the fifth day of the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump.

Cruz’s state is still locked in the same global pandemic we’ve all been facing, but is also facing the compounding crisis of frigid temperatures paired with infrastructure failures that have led to widespread power outages. 

So, maybe it’s not the time to go to Mexico. 

But go Cruz did, as many politicians before him north of the border did, too. Like many of the Canadian politicians caught abroad while their constituents suffered, Cruz appears to have quickly realized his miscalculation. The Associated Press reports that the senator will be returning to Houston “imminently.” 

As for his Canadian homeland, don’t expect any imminent return here. 

The border between Canada and the U.S. remains closed to non-essential travel for the foreseeable future.