Colombian nun freed four years after being kidnapped by Mali jihadists


Issued on: 10/10/2021 - 07:42

Sister Gloria Cecilia Narvaez celebrates her release from captivity in Mali, October 10 2021. © FRANCE 24 screengrab.
Text by: NEWS WIRES

A Franciscan nun from Colombia kidnapped by jihadists in Mali more than four years ago has been freed, Mali's presidency said.

Sister Gloria Cecilia Narvaez was taken hostage on February 7, 2017 in southern Mali near the border with Burkina Faso where she had been working as a missionary.

A statement on the presidential Twitter account paid tribute to her "courage and bravery" along with photos of the nun taken after her release Saturday.

"I thank the Malian authorities, the president, all the Malian authorities, for all the efforts you've made to liberate me, may God bless you, may God bless Mali," Sister Gloria said in images broadcast on state television showing her with Mali's interim president Colonel Assimi Goita and the archbishop of Bamako Jean Zerbo.


"I am very happy, I stayed healthy for five years, thank God," the nun said, smiling and wearing a yellow robe.

Her liberation had been the fruit of "four years and eight months of the combined effort of several intelligence services", the presidency said.

In the official statement, Goita assured that "efforts are under way" to secure the release of all those still being held in Mali.

Archbishop Zerbo said Sister Gloria was "doing well".

"We prayed a lot for her release. I thank the Malian authorities and other good people who made this release possible," the archbishop said.

Sister Gloria, 59, was kidnapped near Koutiala, 400 kilometres (250 miles) east of Bamako. She had worked as a missionary for six years in the parish of Karangasso with three other nuns.

According to one of her colleagues, Sister Carmen Isabel Valencia, she offered herself in place of two younger nuns the kidnappers were preparing to take.

"She is a woman of a very particular human quality, down to earth ... moved by the love of the poor," Sister Carmen said.

In Colombia, her brother Edgar Narvaez said he was very emotional after receiving news of her release.

"She is in good health, thank God. They sent me pictures and she looks well," he told AFP.

In a letter sent last July by the Red Cross to her brother, Sister Gloria said she was held by "a group of GSIM", the Al-Qaeda-linked Group to Support Islam and Muslims, the largest jihadist alliance in the Sahel.

A source close to the negotiations to release her told AFP she had not been ill-treated during her captivity and during that time she had learned the Koran.

"The negotiations lasted months, years," said the source, without giving further details.

Bound for Rome

An official at Bamako airport, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP the nun had arrived in the Malian capital on Saturday evening from where she was due to fly to Rome. Her departure from Bamako was confirmed by the city's archdiocese.

In Colombia, Vice-President Marta Lucia Ramirez -- who is also foreign minister -- said she was "very happy" at Sister Gloria's release, which she attributed to the work of the government and also stressed the "humanitarian efforts of the French government to contribute to this success".

National police director Jorge Luis Vargas also welcomed her release.

"Today is very good news for Colombia, but also for the national police for all the efforts made over the years to secure the safe release of our compatriot," he said.

Vargas said meetings had been held with several European and African ambassadors to try to secure the nun's release.

"With Interpol, and with other international organisations, we have always sought to bring those responsible to justice."

There were irregular reports about the nun over the years, including at the beginning of 2021, when two Europeans who managed to escape captivity reported that she was well.

Then in March, her brother received proof that she was still alive, passed on from the Red Cross.

It was a letter written in capital letters "because she always used capital letters", containing the names of their parents and ending with her signature, he told AFP earlier this year.

Mali has been struggling to contain a jihadist insurgency that first emerged in the north of the country in 2012, and which has since spread to neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger.

Kidnappings, once rare, have become more common in recent years as a security crisis has deepened in Mali, particularly in the centre of the former French colony.

French journalist Olivier Dubois was abducted on April 8 in northern Mali by jihadists affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

Dubois, who worked with several French news outlets, said in a hostage video that GSIM had abducted him.

(AFP)

Iran's power company warns of cuts due to illegal crypto mining


Issued on: 10/10/2021 

The global values of cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin 

have massively fluctuated over the past year 

Yuri CORTEZ AFP/File

Tehran (AFP)

Illegal cryptocurrency mining in Iran risks causing new power cuts this winter, the state electricity company warned Sunday.

Iranian officials regularly accuse unlicensed cryptocurrency miners of using vast amounts of electricity.

Illegal cryptocurrency mining will account for at least "10 percent of electricity outages this winter", the power company said in a statement carried by state news agency IRNA.

Such illegal mining was responsible for 20 percent of blackouts over the summer, it added.

Iran was among the first countries in the world to legalise the mining of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in September 2018, but it requires miners to have a licence.

Authorities said in May that "illegal" miners who usually have access to subsidised electricity consume between six and seven times more power than those with permits.

The same month, Iran announced a temporary ban on all cryptocurrency mining, a day after the energy minister apologised for unplanned power cuts in major cities.

Authorities lifted the ban in mid-September.

Iranian news agencies have reported frequent police raids on "illegal farms" for cryptocurrency.

Profitably creating, or mining, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies requires masses of computers dedicated to solving deliberately complicated equations -- an endeavour that globally consumes more electricity than some entire nations.

An Iranian official last month suggested that cryptocurrencies could be used to overcome problems related to international sanctions imposed on the Islamic republic.

He was speaking as parliament discussed a report outlining the size of the cryptocurrency market in Iran and how best to use the technology.

Some 19,500 Bitcoins are mined annually in Iran, compared with 324,000 around the world, while around 700 Bitcoins are traded daily in the country, the report said.

© 2021 AFP

Guest post: AI surveillance in prisons is a terrible idea, both technologically and ethically


Editor’s note: This is a guest post written by University of Washington professors Emily M. Bender and Rachael Tatman on the use of AI in prison settings.

© Provided by Geekwire University of Washington professors

 Rachael Tatman and Emily M. Bender. (UW Photos)

Thomson Reuters Foundation reported on Aug. 9 that a panel in the U.S. House of Representatives has asked the Department of Justice to explore using so-called “artificial intelligence” (AI) technology to monitor phone communication from incarcerated people with the ostensible purpose of preventing violent crime and suicide.

This is not a hypothetical exercise: LEO Technologies, a company “built for cops by cops,” already offers automated surveillance of incarcerated persons’ phone calls with their loved ones as a service.

As linguists who study the development and application of speech recognition and other language technologies, including the ways in which they work (or don’t) with different varieties of language, we would like to state clearly and strongly that this is a terrible idea both technologically and ethically.

We are opposed to large-scale surveillance by any means, especially when used against vulnerable populations without their consent or ability to opt out. Even if such surveillance could be shown to be in the best interests of the incarcerated people and the communities to which they belong — which we do not believe that it can be — attempting to automate this process scales up the potential harms.

The primary supposed benefit of the technology to the incarcerated people, suicide prevention, is not feasible using an approach “based on keywords and phrases” (as LEO technologies describes its product). Even Facebook’s suicide prevention program, which itself has faced scrutiny from legal and ethics scholars, found keywords to be an ineffective approach as it does not take context into account. Furthermore, humans frequently take the output of computer programs as “objective” and therefore make decisions based on faulty information with no notion that it is faulty.

And even if the ability to prevent suicide were concrete and demonstrable, which it is not, it comes with massive potential for harm.

Automated transcription is a key part of these product offerings. The effectiveness of speech recognition systems is dependent on a close match between their training data and the input they receive in their deployment context, and for most modern speech recognition systems this means that the further a person’s speech is from newscaster standard, the less effective the system will be at correctly transcribing their words.

Not only will such systems undoubtedly output unreliable information (while seeming highly objective), the systems will also fail more often for the people the U.S. justice system most often fails.

A 2020 study that included the Amazon service used by LEO Technologies for speech transcription corroborated earlier findings that the word error rate for speakers of African American English was roughly twice that of white speakers. Given that African Americans are imprisoned at a rate five times greater than white Americans, these tools are deeply unsuited to their application and have the potential to increase already unacceptable racial disparities.

This surveillance, which covers not just the incarcerated but also those they are speaking with, is an unnecessary violation of privacy. Adding so-called “AI” will only make it worse: The machines are incapable of even accurately transcribing the warm, comforting language of home and at the same time will give a false sheen of “objectivity” to inaccurate transcripts. Should those with incarcerated loved ones have to bear the burden of defending against accusations based on faulty transcripts of what they said? This invasion of privacy is especially galling given that incarcerated people and their families often have to pay exorbitant rates for the phone calls in the first place.

We urge Congress and the DOJ to abandon this path and to avoid incorporating automated prediction into our legal system. LEO Technologies claims to “shift the paradigm of law enforcement from reactive to predictive,” a paradigm that seems out of keeping with a justice system where guilt must be proved.

And, finally, we urge everyone concerned to remain highly skeptical of “AI” applications. This is especially true when it has real impacts on people’s lives, and even more so when those people are, like incarcerated persons, especially vulnerable.

Thanks to Big Oil, Your Tax Dollars Are Spent Ruining the Climate

Jeff Goodell
Fri, October 8, 2021

ROLLING STONE

Huntigton Beach. Oil Spill Clean Up Efforts. - Credit: Ted Soqui/Sipa USA/AP

About $11 million a minute. That’s the amount of direct and indirect subsidies the International Monetary Fund calculates the global fossil fuel industry receives to ensure that cooking the planet remains profitable for them. If you do the math, it comes to about $5.9 trillion a year.

As The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer has pointed out, only $826 billion of that comes from actual price cuts or tax breaks. The rest is calculated from damages caused from the environmental and health costs of carbon pollution. But that’s sorta the point. This is an antiquated industry that is knowingly and willfully poisoning the planet and killing millions of people every year. And governments of the world — which ultimately means you and me and everyone else who pays taxes — are essentially paying them to do it.

It’s no wonder the rallying cry for upcoming demonstrations in Washington D.C. is “People vs. Fossil Fuels.” For decades, the fossil fuel mafia has been pretending to be a good citizen, pretending that it didn’t really understand the risks of climate change, and pretending that fossil fuel consumption is really your problem, not theirs. If the world is burning, it’s because you’re too lazy to switch your lightbulbs, not because the industry has shoveled millions of dollars into lobbying efforts to make sure that the energy that powers our world is generated by coal or gas, even if there are better, cheaper, cleaner alternatives.

The fossil fuel mafia has used money and political muscle to stall and derail action on the climate crisis, and they will do everything they can to draw out the inevitable transition to clean energy as long as possible. Given the stunning decline in the cost of solar and wind power in most of the world, they know their days are numbered. It’s not a question of if they go. It’s a question of how fast. But every day they wait, every delay tactic they come up with, imperils the rest of us.

To put it another way, this is no longer an economic issue. It is a climate justice issue.

“Climate justice is the simple idea that those who have done the most to cause the climate crisis – and who have the most resources – must also do the most to fix it,” Brandon Wu, the director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, has said. “In global terms, this means that wealthy countries like the U.S. must lead by example when it comes to climate action by undertaking urgent emissions reductions at home and providing hugely ramped-up financial support for action in poorer countries.”

An essential opportunity to move the ball on climate justice is coming up fast, in the next round of international climate talks, known as COP26, which will begin in Glasgow on October 31st. Maybe it’s too much to say that life on Earth depends on the outcome of these talks. So let’s just say that climate negotiators have a lot of work to do. A recent U.N. analysis found that even if nations meet their current promises for CO2 emissions reductions, the climate would still warm by 2.7 C by the end of the century — a path U.N. Secretary António Guterres has described as “catastrophic,” dramatically boosting the frequency and intensity of heat waves, wildfires, storms, and drought, as well as increasing the risk of ice sheet collapse in West Antarctica and disrupting planetary-scale systems like the circulation pattern of current in the Atlantic.

Since a central tenet of a just climate transition is that the countries and people most responsible for climate change should take the most responsibility in stopping it, the question then becomes, who is most responsible? A lot of people like to point the finger at China. Just google “CO2 emissions by nation” and you will see why: In 2019, China emitted about 10 billion tons of CO2, which is about 28 percent of the global total. The U.S., in contrast, emitted 5.3 billion tons, or about 15 percent of the global total. The EU is third, with about 10 percent of global total, and India below that with 7 percent.

In addition, Chinese emissions are continuing to rise fast, while U.S. emissions have plateaued and started to decline in recent years. And a lot of China’s emissions growth has come from continued reliance on coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel. Last year, China built more than three times more new coal power capacity than all other countries in the world combined, equal to “more than one large coal plant per week,” according to estimates from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air in Finland.

What all this means is that without a big commitment from China, there will be no meaningful progress toward the goal of keeping warming below 1.5 C, which is the threshold scientists have identified to maintain some semblance of a stable climate.

Chinese President Xi Jinping seems to understand this. He has promised his country will start reducing CO2 emissions from coal, gas, and oil by 2030 and then stop altogether by 2060. But will they?

Xi has made some moves to show they are serious about addressing the climate crisis. He recently pledged to finance no new coal plants outside of China, which is a big deal. But as John Kerry, President Biden’s international climate envoy, recently pointed out, the Chinese still plan to build 247 gigawatts of new coal power within China. That is nearly six times Germany’s entire coal power capacity. China’s plan “would actually undo the ability of the rest of the world” to avert climate catastrophe, Kerry said.

So if you’re looking for a fall guy in the climate crisis, China fits the bill.

But that’s not the whole picture. China’s current status as the biggest emitter has been very convenient for U.S. politicians who have been protecting the interests of the fossil fuel industry. China has been their perfect “whataboutism” foil. A classic example: During a congressional hearing in 2019, Rep. Garret Graves (R-Louisiana), then the ranking Republican on the Climate Crisis Committee, tried to use the example of China as a reason the U.S should hang back on climate action. “So while in the United States we need to continue investing in innovative solutions and exporting clean energy technologies, it makes no sense for us to be doing it if we’re simply watching for increases in China,” he said.

Jamie Margolin, a teenage climate change activist from Seattle who was testifying before the committee, dismantled Graves’ argument: “When your children ask you: Did you do absolutely everything in your power to stop the climate crisis, when the storms were getting worse and we’re seeing all the effects … Can you really look them in the eye and say, ‘No, sorry, I couldn’t do anything because that country over there didn’t do anything, and if they’re not going to do anything then I’m not.’ That is shameful and that is cowardly, and there is no excuse to not take action. …”

How you judge a nation’s responsibility for the climate crisis also depends on how you count emissions. For one thing, CO2 – the main greenhouse gas – is not like other forms of air pollution, such as sulfur dioxide, which rain out of the sky quickly once you stop emitting them.

Most fossil fuel CO2 stays in the atmosphere for centuries before it is removed by geologic processes. But about 25 percent of it remains in the atmosphere essentially forever. “The climatic impacts of releasing fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere will last longer than Stonehenge,” University of Chicago oceanographer David Archer writes in his book The Long Thaw. “Longer than time capsules, longer than nuclear waste, far longer than the age of human civilization so far.”

So when you ask, “Who is responsible for the climate crisis?” what matters is not just current emissions, but also historic emissions. From a strictly scientific perspective, a ton of CO2 emitted in 1921 is just as potent as a ton emitted in 2021.

A new report by Carbon Brief lays all this out. If you do the math this way, the U.S. has done twice as much to cause the problem as China.

Credit: Carbon Brief

Carbon Brief

(The Carbon Brief calculation also takes into account land use and deforestation, as well as the burning of fossil fuels, which is the main reason why Brazil and Indonesia are high on the list.)

You can see why this gets complicated. U.S. climate negotiators use China’s booming emissions to argue – justifiably – that the climate problem won’t be solved unless China takes dramatic action now to reduce emissions. Furthermore, they argue that weighing historic emissions is unfair, because in, say, 1920, nobody knew anything about climate change. Meanwhile, the Chinese argue – justifiably, also — that because of the U.S.’s large historical emissions, the U.S. has the moral duty to take the lead and make a much bigger contribution to emission cuts.

But in the midst of a climate emergency, when island nations are disappearing beneath the waves, and drought is leaving millions without food and heat waves are killing a billion marine creatures in the Pacific Northwest, it feels almost comically self-destructive to be wasting time doing math and finger-pointing while the world burns. “For us, it is inexplicable the world isn’t taking action and it suggests we in small islands are to remain dispensable and remain invisible,” Mia Mottley, prime minister of Barbados, recently said.

The point is, we need both China and the U.S., and every other big, rich polluter, to go full speed on transitioning off fossil fuels now. But the foot-dragging and the squabbling and the bowing to Big Oil and Big Coal over and over and over again reveals the heartbreaking dynamic at the foundations of the climate crisis: The rich pollute. The poor suffer. And the rich don’t really care.

At the moment, the primary mechanism for dealing with the inequities of the climate crisis is the Green Climate Fund, by which wealthy nations of the world promised $100 billion a year in funding to developing nations to help them transition to clean energy and adapt to climate impacts.

But that isn’t going so well. The latest figures from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development show that in 2019, rich nations channeled $79.6 billion to vulnerable countries, up just 2 percent from $78.3 billion in 2018. An analysis by aid charity Oxfam put the real figure for 2018 much lower, between $19 billion and $22.5 billion, when counting only grants and not loans that have to be paid back. Meanwhile, according to Reuters, the 46 least-developed countries between 2014 and 2018 received just $5.9 billion in total for adaptation.

This is likely to be a key issue in Glasgow. President Biden recently vowed to double the aid the U.S. gives to developing nations to $11 billion, but that is only a fraction of what is needed. African negotiators have already signaled they want to up contributions to $1.3 trillion by 2030. As climate impacts accelerate, the gap between rich and poor, between the saved and the suffering, will only grow.

It may be that Glasgow marks a new turning point in the climate fight, one where the justice and equity finally take center stage and access to power and money shifts from the old to the new. After all, we know now that the climate crisis is not some kind of inadvertent and unfortunate consequence of two centuries of fossil fuel consumption, or because we humans don’t give a shit about the planet we live on. It is the deliberate and willful consequence of a handful of powerful corporations and their political enablers who have knowingly stolen our future and cashed it in for a quick buck. And we have let them get away with it.

Until now, anyway. Just as there are climate tipping points, there are also human tipping points, where the path to a better world suddenly becomes clear and the journey to it becomes unstoppable.

Let’s hope Glasgow is one of them.

Georgia: Several dead after part of building collapses

Many of the residents in the building were thought to be trapped in the rubble as rescue workers searched for survivors. The accident is suspected to be caused by unsafe renovation work.


Georgia's building collapse crushed several cars parked 

outside and left several buried under the rubble

At least five people, including two children, were killed when a residential building partially collapsed in the Georgian Black Sea resort city of Batumi, the country's interior ministry said on Saturday.

The five-story building collapsed on Friday, and several people are believed to be trapped in the rubble.

"So far emergency responders have saved two citizens, who were brought to hospital, and recovered five bodies," police said in a statement.

However, one of the injured died after being transferred to the hospital, they said later.

Prime Minister Irakli Garibachvili and Interior Minister Vakhtang Gomelauri traveled to Batumi where hundreds of rescue workers were searching for survivors.

Rescue teams were initially using their bare hands to remove the huge mounds of rubble before professional equipment arrived at the scene of the collapse.

Hundreds of first responders reached the scene of the 

collapse in the port town of Batumi

'Violation of safety rules'

The accident  PREVENTABLE INCIDENT has been blamed on unsafe renovation work, authorities said.

Three people have been arrested in an investigation into the collapse; the owner of a ground-floor apartment, and two construction workers he had hired.

The two workers were acting under the direction of the owner and "in gross violation of safety rules," which ultimately led to the collapse of one of the entrances of the apartment building, according to a police statement.

All three face between two and 10 years in prison if convicted.

The residential building was constructed in 1981, and over the years, two additional floors were subsequently added, along with a lift.

adi/rc (AFP, dpa)

Rudy Giuliani testified that he represented Trump's 2020 

campaign for free because the president 'ordered me to do it'

AMERICAN APHORISM;

THERE IS SUCKER BORN EVERY MINUTE 

Kenneth Niemeyer

Fri, October 8, 2021

Rudy Giuliani. Jacquelyn Martin/AP

• Giuliani said Trump ordered him to represent his campaign for free, according to court documents. 

• He was called to testify in a defamation suit brought by a former Dominion Voting Systems employee.

• Giuliani said Trump told him to "go over and take over the campaign, tell them you're in charge."

Rudy Giuliani testified that he represented President Donald Trump for free after the 2020 election because Trump "ordered me to do it," newly released court documents showed.

Giuliani had led the Trump campaign's effort to contest the 2020 election results by filing dozens of lawsuits that alleged there was widespread election fraud, all of which were thrown out by federal judges.

An executive for Dominion Voting Systems, Eric Coomer, subsequently brought defamation lawsuits against Giuliani, the former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell, and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, alleging that they knowingly spread false information about his involvement in election fraud.

According to a newly released deposition transcript, Coomer's attorney Charles Cain asked Giuliani whether he was ever paid to represent the Trump campaign. Cain noted that Giuliani said in a conspiracy-theory-filled November 19 press conference that he was representing both Trump personally and the Trump campaign.

Giuliani replied that he was not paid to represent the campaign and had been reimbursed for only his expenses, according to the transcript. Cain then asked Giuliani why he would represent the Trump campaign without compensation.

"The president - the president ordered me to do it," Giuliani said.

Trump had previously cut off Giuliani and was refusing to pay his legal bills, Michael Wolff says in his book "Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency." The amount that Trump may owe Giuliani is unclear, but Maria Ryan, a Giuliani associate, told The New York Times Giuliani gave a rate of $20,000 a day to the Trump campaign for his work on the election lawsuits.

According to the deposition transcript, Giuliani told Cain Trump called him into the Oval Office on "either the 4th or the 5th" of November - after the presidential election - and told him to "go over and take over the campaign, tell them you're in charge."

Giuliani's attorney Joe Sibley immediately reminded the former New York City mayor not to disclose information about his conversation with Trump that could be protected by attorney-client privilege, according to the transcript. 

"It doesn't matter if he made the statement. Don't disclose it if it's attorney/client privilege," Sibley said, to which Giuliani replied that he would be "very careful" not to disclose any privileged information.

"He said go over and tell them you're in charge, it's got to be straightened out," Giuliani said, adding that he wasn't sure if Trump wanted him to take over the entire campaign or only the campaign's legal representation. 

  

Stephanie Grisham said she was 'part of something unusually evil' in the Trump White House

John L. Dorman

Sat, October 9, 2021, 

White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham watches as US President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before he boards Marine One at the White House on November 08, 2019. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

• Stephanie Grisham said a "rebrand" would be tough after her time in the Trump administration.

• In a New York Magazine profile, the former White House press secretary opened up about her tenure in the White House.

• "I think this will follow me forever," she said.

Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said in an article published this week that her role in former President Donald Trump's administration will make it difficult for her to "rebrand" and would likely stick with her "forever."

Grisham, who was former first lady Melania Trump's chief of staff and press secretary at the time of her resignation on Jan. 6, was the subject of a profile by New York Magazine's Olivia Nuzzi, where the longtime GOP official said her future opportunities would be limited.

The former press secretary recently released a bombshell memoir, "I'll Take Your Questions Now," which chronicles her time in the often-turbulent Trump White House.

While scores of former White House press secretaries have catapulted from their high-visibility role at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to plum positions in the private sector and academia, many former Trump staffers have had difficulties in the job market, and even more so after the Capitol insurrection.

"I don't think I can rebrand. I think this will follow me forever," Grisham told Nuzzi of her time in the White House. "I believe that I was part of something unusually evil, and I hope that it was a one-time lesson for our country and that I can be a part of making sure that at least that evil doesn't come back now."

Grisham, who said in a recent CNN interview that she didn't vote for Trump in the 2020 election, is ringing the alarm regarding another stint in the White House by the former president, which she said would be defined by "revenge."

"He's on his revenge tour for people who dared to vote for impeachment," she told ABC News host George Stephanopoulos on Monday. "I want to just warn people that once he takes office, if he were to win, he doesn't have to worry about reelection anymore. He will be about revenge."

"He will probably have some pretty draconian policies that go on," Grisham added. "There were conversations a lot of times that people would say, 'That'll be the second term.' Meaning, we won't have to worry about a reelection."

In a Friday interview with Insider, Grisham said that she struggled with anxiety and had to be "deprogrammed" after her resignation from the White House in response to the Jan. 6 riot.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, Grisham moved to a small town in Kansas and spent her final months in the administration commuting between her new home and Washington, DC. In her interview, she spoke of the pressures that came with her tenure in the Trump White House.

"I don't want to speak for my colleagues, but I know for me, a toxic environment was normal," she said. "I've tried to explain to people that when I left and went to Kansas, normal things were not normal to me. Like quiet nights with crickets chirping and stars, it gave me anxiety. And having just dinner with family and watching TV, normal things made me anxious because I had been so used to the chaos."

While speaking with Insider, Grisham also said that she would have resigned from the White House even if her relationship with the Trumps hadn't soured and the events of Jan. 6 had never occurred.

"I was, by that time, done," Grisham said. "I had been done for probably six months before I resigned and had tried to resign a few times and the first lady had talked me into staying, which also contradicts her statements that I was troubled and terrible."

UPDATES

Czech election: Opposition wins surprise majority

Two opposition alliances have narrowly defeated Prime Minister Andrej Babis's ANO party in the Czech parliamentary elections. The Pirates and Mayors grouping says they want to start talks on forming a government.


Spolu leader Petr Fiala celebrates winning the Czech election on Saturday

The Czech center-right and liberal opposition groups have won a majority in the lower house, narrowly defeating Prime Minister Andrej Babis' centrist ANO party in Saturday's parliamentary election.

The surprise development could spell the end of the populist billionaire's time in power.

What were the results?

Together, a liberal-conservative three-party Spolu coalition won 27.8% of the vote, while Pirates and Mayors, another opposition group, got 15.6%.

The two alliances have won a combined 108 seats in the 200-member lower house, according to the Czech Statistics Office.

The Pirates and Mayors coalition leader Ivan Bartos said they will begin talks on forming the next government.

The ruling ANO party, led by populist billionaire Babis, finished in second place, winning 27.1% of the vote, according to the latest results.

"Ano" means yes in the Czech language. Babis, a Euroskeptic, was hoping to secure a second term in office despite a turbulent first term with many scandals.
Babis concedes defeat

Billionnaire Babis finally accepted the results of the vote on Saturday night but not without first lashing out at his rivals.

"That's life, we understand and accept that," the 67-year-old said. But Babis accused the opposition of a "smear campaign" during the lead-up to the election.

Czech Prime Minister and founding leader of ANO Andrej Babis votes in the Czech elections

"The change is here, we are the change," said the conservative Spolu leading candidate, Petr Fiala.

But despite the surprise result from the 65% election turnout, more drama could still unfold as the winning coalition tries to form government.

President Milos Zeman has said a number of times he will only give the mandate to a single party and not to a coalition of different political groupings.

A presidential spokesman said Zeman has invited Babis to talk about his chances of continuing in office on Sunday morning.
At odds with the EU

Before Saturday's vote, Babis led a minority coalition government consisting of ANO and the Social Democrats, with the support of the Communists.

Throughout the campaign, Babis scapegoated asylum-seekers and refugees even though the Czech Republic is not home to very many. He also condemned the EU's climate change plans.

He has not ruled out forming a coalition with Freedom and Direct Democracy, a party that seeks an exit from the EU and hopes to hold a referendum on the country's NATO membership.

This week the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported that Babis placed over $20 million in shell companies to purchase 16 properties in France as part of its "Pandora Papers" reports.

ar/rc (AP, Reuters)

Populist Czech PM Babis's party narrowly loses election in surprise result

Czech Republic's Prime Minister and leader of centrist ANO (YES) movement Andrej Babis addresses the media after most of the votes were counted in the parliamentary elections, Prague, Czech Republic, October 9, 2021.

 © Petr David Josek, AP

Text by: NEWS WIRES

Issued on: 09/10/2021 - 

Prime Minister Andrej Babis' centrist party on Saturday narrowly lost the Czech Republic's parliamentary election, a surprise development that could mean the end of the populist billionaire's reign in power.

The two-day election to fill 200 seats in the lower house of the Czech Republic’s parliament took place shortly after the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reported details of Babis’ overseas financial dealings in a project dubbed the “Pandora Papers.” Babis, 67, has denied wrongdoing.

With almost all the the votes counted, the Czech Statistics Office said Together, a liberal-conservative three-party coalition, captured 27.8% of the vote, beating Babis' ANO (Yes) party, which won 27.1%.

In another blow to the populists, another center-left liberal coalition of the Pirate Party and STAN, a group of mayors, received 15.6% of the vote to finish third, the statistics office reported.

“The two democratic coalitions have gained a majority and have a chance to form a majority government,” said Petr Fiala, Together's leader and its candidate for prime minister.

Five opposition parties with policies closer to the European Union’s mainstream compared with the populist Babis put aside their differences in this election to create the two coalitions, seeking to oust the euroskeptic prime minister from power.

The result means “an absolute change of the politics in the Czech Republic,” analyst Michal Klima told Czech public television. “It stabilizes the country’s position in the West camp.”

“It’s a huge defeat for (Babis),” he added.

The major anti-migrant and anti-Muslim force in the Czech Republic, the Freedom and Direct Democracy party, finished fourth with 9.6% support.

Both the Social Democrats and the Communists, the country’s traditional parliamentary parties, failed to win seats in parliament for the first time since the split of Czechoslovakia in 1993.

Babis has had a turbulent term featuring numerous scandals, but all public polls before the vote had favored his ANO party to win the election.

“We didn't expect to lose,” Babis said. “We accept that.”

He still declared the election results “excellent.”

Prior to the vote, Babis led a minority coalition government of ANO and the Social Democrats in the Eastern European country of 10.7 million people, which is a member of both the European Union and NATO. He has also governed with the support of the maverick Communists.

The leader of the strongest party usually gets a chance to form a new government. President Milos Zeman didn't immediately comment but previously indicated that he will first appoint the leader of the winning party, not the winning coalition, to try to form a new government, which would be Babis. The two leaders will meet on Sunday.

“We're the strongest party,” Babis said. “If the president asks me to create a government, I'll open the negotiations about it.”

Any new government has to win a parliamentary confidence vote to rule, however, and Babis and his potential partner, the Freedom party, don't have enough support for that.


Czech voters oust communists from parliament for first time since 1948

Michael Kahn and Robert Muller

Sat, October 9, 2021, 1:39 PM·2 min read

PRAGUE (Reuters) - Czech voters evicted the communists from parliament on Saturday for the first time since the end of World War Two, voting out a party whose forebears ruled the central European nation from 1948 until the Velvet Revolution of 1989 that ushered in democracy.

The communists jailed tens of thousands in forced labor camps in the 1950s and brutally repressed dissidents such as playwright-turned-president Vaclav Havel, but remained in parliament following the revolution.

In this week's election https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/czechs-vote-final-day-election-pm-babis-seeks-cling-power-2021-10-08, the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia took 3.62% of the votes with nearly all precincts reporting, less than the 5% needed to enter parliament and potentially marking a final chapter for a party that has gradually shrunk as its ageing membership dwindled.

"It pleases me, it pleases me a lot," Jiri Gruntorad, 69, a former dissident who signed the dissident Charter 77 statement and was jailed for subversion from 1981 to 1985 by the communist authorities, told Reuters. "But it's coming too late."

"It was one of the last communist parties in the world apart from the Chinese and Cuban ones that held on to its name. The others have at least renamed themselves and started behaving a little differently."

Voters also handed a defeat to Prime Minister Andrej Babis' ANO party against centre-right opposition group Together in a surprise result.

After 1989, the communists sought to appeal to senior citizens and working class Czechs but they never resonated with younger voters and failed to shake the party's history with others as a totalitarian rulers who had stifled freedom.

"I am very disappointed because it is a really big failure," said Communist Party leader Vojtech Filip, who also resigned.

POST-1989

Havel opposed banning the party -- which resisted the country's European Union and NATO membership and kept warm ties with Russia and China -- despite calls from the public to do so.

The communists lingered mostly in isolation after 1989, though they cooperated with other parties seeking votes to pass legislation in parliament. They were also close to current President Milos Zeman.

The party regained influence in 2018 when Babis -- a former Communist Party member -- leaned on them to support his minority government with the Social Democrats.

It was the closest the party came to power since 1989 but appears also to represent their final act as a political force in the former Soviet-bloc nation.

"I am overjoyed that this era is now over – not only for those of us still living, but also for those who have passed away and who were persecuted by the regime,” said Hana Palcova, 74, who left the country under threat from the secret police.

(Writing by Michael Kahn; Additional reporting by Jan Lopatka; Editing by Mike Harrison)

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2021/10/czech-communists-stalinists-risk.html

SpaceX astronaut says she was sick for the first 2 days of Inspiration4's mission and thought the spaceflight wasn't long enough, a report says

Kate Duffy
Sat, October 9, 2021

Dr. Sian Proctor, on the far right, told National Geographic she felt sick during the first part of her mission. Inspiration4/John Kraus


Dr. Sian Proctor, a SpaceX astronaut, told National Geographic she felt sick for two days in space.


Proctor also said SpaceX's three-day mission around the Earth wasn't long enough.


She said her head was "a little stuffy" on the second day, National Geographic reported.

A SpaceX astronaut who took part in the company's Inspiration4 mission a month ago said she was sick for the first two days in space, National Geographic reported Friday.

Dr. Sian Proctor, one of the four crew members onboard SpaceX's first all-civilian mission, told National Geographic that she started feeling unwell on the first day.

"Space sickness is one of those things that a lot of people suffer from," Proctor said in the interview. "You're just not on your game."


Astronauts can experience motion sickness when they're in space due to the weightlessness which they feel with zero-gravity.

Proctor told National Geographic that she felt better on the second day but her head was "a little stuffy."

"But man, I woke up the third day, and I was humming, and everything was perfect," Proctor told the publication. "I had adapted, I was good, and I was like, 'What? I have to come home?! No, no, no!'"

The Inspiration4 mission launched on September 16, sending four civilian astronauts into orbit for three days onboard SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft.

"I would go for longer. Three days was not enough," the geoscientist and science communication specialist told National Geographic.

"I think, ideally, a five-day mission in the Dragon capsule with the cupola would be perfect," Proctor added.

The cupola is a glass dome roof located at the nose of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, which the astronauts looked out of to see Earth from space. Proctor told National Geographic that this was "the best feature of our spaceflight."

The toilet, which malfunctioned mid-flight, was also located in the cupola. Proctor said in the interview that it was "a waste fan issue," which the crew members quickly fixed. "I think it was made into an event that was bigger than it actually was," she added.

G__D ENABLED BULLYING

Gas Giants May Have Bullied Planet 9 to the Fringes of Our Solar System

ANTHROPOMORIC COSMOLOGY


Caroline Delbert
Fri, October 8, 2021

Photo credit: Steven Hobbs/Stocktrek Images - Getty Images

A smaller planet more like Earth or Mars could have been pushed to the outer reaches of our solar system (or into deep space), according to a new paper.

Scientists think Planet 9 used to be more like Planet 6 or 7—meaning it once swirled among the gas giants before they ultimately kicked it out of orbit.

The solar system has three zones: inner planets, outer planets, and what's beyond.

Scientists believe that there could be a ninth planet in our solar system, lurking somewhere beyond Neptune—but don't get too excited, because this isn't about Pluto.

Rather, this is the story of a mysterious Earth- or Mars-sized planet that may have swirled beyond the asteroid belt, among the gas giants, before they ultimately swept this potential "Planet 9" toward the outer reaches of our solar system ... or even into deep space. The theory makes sense on its face: Jupiter is kind of known as a bully, after all.

That's according to two researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Arizona who have studied various computer simulations depicting the evolution of our solar system. Their findings are outlined in a new paper, published last month in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

In it, the scientists speculate that there's something missing in those models, like the fact that our solar system would have four gas giants in a row (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) and then no other planets after that other than small, irregular dwarf planets like Pluto.

"Logic suggests there should be some planets of other sizes, and their simulations back them up," Phys.org reports. "Adding another Earth- or Mars-sized planet to the outer solar system, perhaps between two of the gas giants, produces a more accurate model—at least during the early stages of development."

The new research focuses on the the initial position of this "Planet 9"—a common name for the loose collection of hypotheses about a potential ninth planet outside the main area of our solar system. Planet 9 could be a black hole, for instance, or it could be 10 times the size of Earth.

Specifically, the paper zooms in on the possibility that the four gas giants pushed Planet 9 to the outer reaches of the solar system. Planets exercise gravity on each other, which is partly why experts suspect that Planet 9 exists in the first place.

How would the gas giants shove out a much smaller, much denser planet, then? Jupiter especially already acts like a linebacker in orbit, deflecting smaller objects like comets or meteors as they approach the solar system. (This is one of many reasons a Melancholia-like rogue planet is extremely unlikely.)

Photo credit: NASA

The scale of our solar system appears even larger when you consider where Planet 9 is roughly believed to exist. First, there is the inner planets zone, where Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars are packed relatively tightly together. After that is the Kuiper Belt, full of icy rocks and other small items.

From there, the scale zooms way out to accommodate Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, all gas giants that are spread much further apart. Neptune may appear small among these titans (see the image above), but is still many times Earth's mass, and large enough to fit 57 Earths inside by volume.

After that, Pluto is the star of the so-called third zone, a huge expanse dotted by, so far, just dwarf planets and other celestial bodies like comets. This is where scientists get stuck, because it seems so unlikely that the evolution of our solar system would cough up just four very similar gas giant cores and then stop.

How do we actually find Planet 9 if it exists? These scientists posit that increasingly more powerful telescopes could bring us some closure in the near future. If not, one string theorist proposed something a little wild last year: an array of tiny probes that would blanket the third zone in order to shake loose any items—like larger planets or even the primordial black hole—that some scientists believe is Planet 9.

China's Moon mission returned youngest ever lavas


Jonathan Amos - BBC Science Correspondent
Fri, October 8, 2021, 

The rock samples brought back from the Moon in December by China's Chang'e-5 mission were really young.

It's all relative, of course, but the analysis shows the basalt material - the solidified remnants of a lava flow - to be just two billion years old.

Compare this with the samples returned by the Apollo astronaut missions. They were all over three billion years of age.


The findings are reported in the journal Science.

China's robotic Chang'e-5 mission was sent to a site on the lunar nearside called Oceanus Procellarum.

It was carefully chosen to add to the sum of knowledge gained from previous sample returns - the last of which was conducted by a Soviet probe in 1976.


First crew blasts off to new China space station


China lands its Zhurong rover on Mars


China's Chang'e-5 mission returns Moon samples

The laboratory analysis of the basaltic rock gives an age of 1,963 (plus or minus 57) million years

Xiaochao Che and colleagues at the Sensitive High Resolution Ion MicroProbe (SHRIMP) Center in Beijing led the Chang'e-5 dating analysis, but worked with a broad international consortium.

The age data they've produced is fascinating because it proves volcanism continued on the Moon long after one might have expected such a small body to have cooled down and given up the activity.

Theorists will now be thinking through new ideas for what kind of heat source might have sustained the late-stage behaviour.

It doesn't appear to have been driven by concentrated radioactive decay because the Chang'e-5 samples don't contain a lot of the kind of chemical elements associated with this effect.

"One of the other options we discuss in the paper is maybe the Moon was able to stay active longer because of its orbital interactions with Earth," speculated Dr Katherine Joy, a co-author from the University of Manchester, UK.

"Maybe the Moon wobbled back and forth on its orbit, resulting in what we call tidal heating. So, a bit like the Moon generates ocean tides on Earth, maybe the gravitational effect of the Earth could stretch and flex the Moon to generate frictional melting," she told BBC News.

Nothing like Chang'e-5 had been tried since the Soviet Luna-24 mission in 1976

One really important outcome from the study is the way it helps calibrate the crater-counting technique that is used for dating planetary surfaces.

Scientists assume that the more craters they see on a surface, the older that terrain must be; and also, obviously, in the reverse: the presence of very few craters is suggestive of a surface that has only recently been laid or remodelled.

But this technique has to be anchored in some absolute dates that are derived from measured samples, and for the Moon the chronology was not well constrained between one and three billion years ago.

The Chang'e-5 material now provides a precise waypoint in the middle of this time period.

Moon graphic

Prof Brad Jolliff, from Washington University in St Louis, US, is another co-author in the consortium. He's now hoping China will send its next sample return mission to a region on the Moon's farside called South Pole Aitken Basin.

This vast depression, some 2,500km wide and up to 8km deep, was created by a spectacular impactor very early in lunar history.

"If Chang'e-6 goes to South Pole Aitken it will give us the age of the oldest big impact basin on the Moon, and that provides a very different part of the calibration, in the range of four to four-and-a-half billion years ago. We don't know what the flux of big impactors was back then, and a sample from the South Pole Aiken Basin region has the potential to answer the question."

Chang'e-5 marked the start of an astonishing few months for China's national space programme.

Within six months of the lunar probe returning home with its rock samples on 16 December, another spacecraft had successfully entered orbit around Mars to place a rover on its surface; and Chinese astronauts had begun the occupation of a new space station at Earth.