Wildfires torched up to a fifth of all giant sequoia trees


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Assistant Fire Manager Leif Mathiesen, of the Sequoia & Kings Canyon Nation Park Fire Service, looks for an opening in the burned-out redwood tree from the Redwood Mountain Grove which was devastated by the KNP Complex fires earlier in the year in the KingsCanyon National Park, Calif., Friday, Nov. 19, 2021. (AP Photo/Gary Kazanjian)


LOS ANGELES (AP) — Lightning-sparked wildfires killed thousands of giant sequoias this year, leading to a staggering two-year death toll that accounts for up to nearly a fifth of Earth’s largest trees, officials said Friday.

Fires in Sequoia National Park and surrounding Sequoia National Forest tore through more than a third of groves in California and torched an estimated 2,261 to 3,637 sequoias, which are the largest trees by volume.

Nearby wildfires last year killed an unprecedented 7,500 to 10,400 giant sequoias that are only native in about 70 groves scattered along the western side of the Sierra Nevada range. Losses now account for 13% to 19% of the 75,000 sequoias greater than 4 feet (1.2 meters) in diameter.

Blazes so intense to burn hot enough and high enough to kill so many giant sequoias — trees once considered nearly fire-proof — puts an exclamation point on climate change’s impact. A warming planet that has created hotter droughts combined with a century of fire suppression that choked forests with thick undergrowth have fueled flames that have sounded the death knell for trees dating to ancient civilizations.

“The sobering reality is that we have seen another huge loss within a finite population of these iconic trees that are irreplaceable in many lifetimes,” said Clay Jordan, superintendent of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. “As spectacular as these trees are we really can’t take them for granted. To ensure that they’re around for our kids and grandkids and great grandkids, some action is necessary.”

California has seen its largest fires in the past five years. Last year set a record for most acreage burned and this year, so far, is running second.

Tree deaths this year might have been worse if heavy rain and snow Oct. 25 hadn’t dampened the fire. Fires burned from August last year into January.

After last year’s Castle and SQF Complex fires took officials by surprise — and drove some tree lovers to tears — extraordinary measures were taken to save the largest and oldest trees this year.

The General Sherman tree — the largest living thing on earth — and other ancients that are the backdrop for photos that rarely capture the grandeur and scale of the giant sequoias were wrapped in foil blankets.

A fire-retardant gel, similar to absorbent used in baby’s diapers, was dropped on canopies that can sit above 200 feet (60 meters) tall. Sprinklers watered trunks and flammable matter was raked away from trees.

The measures helped spare the Giant Forest, the premiere grove of massive trees in the park, but the measures couldn’t be deployed everywhere.

The bulk of the Suwanee grove in the park burned in extreme fire in the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River drainage. The Starvation Complex of groves in Sequoia National Forest was largely destroyed.

The greatest amount of damage was done in Redwood Mountain Grove in Kings Canyon National Park. The inferno became so intense it created a fire cloud that whipped up 60 mph (97 kph) winds.

A fire ecologist accurately predicted the areas that would burn hottest, but nothing could be done in such erratic conditions to save trees in the second-largest grove, said Christy Brigham, chief of resource management and science for the parks.

“That’s even more heartbreaking to me that we knew it and we couldn’t take action to protect it,” Brigham said.

Groves with the worst damage stand like timber graveyards with blackened trunks soaring high in the sky. Canopies have faded from vibrant green to a rusty shade. Many damaged trees are expected to perish in three to five years.

Save the Redwoods League, which lost the Waterfall tree — one of the world’s largest — in 2020, suffered losses this year in its Red Hill Grove.

“We need to call this situation in the giant sequoia what it is: an emergency,” said league President Sam Hodder. “Just a few years ago, it was considered unprecedented to lose a handful of giant sequoia to wildfire in a season, but now we’re losing thousands.”

In 2013, the park had done climate modeling that predicted extreme fires wouldn’t jeopardize sequoias for another 50 years, Brigham said. But that was at the start of what became a punishing five-year drought that essentially broke the model.

Amid the drought in 2015, the park saw giant sequoias torched for the first time. Two fires in 2017 killed more giant sequoias. Just over 200 giant sequoias were killed in the fires that served as a warning for what was to come.

“Then the Castle Fire happened and it was like, ‘Oh, my God,’” Brigham said. “We went from the warning sign to hair on fire. To lose 7,000 trees in one fire is crazy.”

An accurate mortality count from last year is not available because crews were confirming how many trees died when lightning struck Sept. 9, igniting the Windy Fire in Sequoia National Forest and two fires that merged to become the SQF Complex in the park, Brigham said.

Not all the news in the park’s report on the fires was bleak.

While flames burned into 27 groves and large numbers of trees were incinerated, a lot of low-intensity fire that sequoias need to thrive will clear out vegetation and the heat from flames will open cones so they can spread their seeds.

There was also less damage in many of the groves where the park has routinely used prescribed fire to clear out accumulated vegetation under cooler and more humid conditions. Those successes emphasized the need to expand that work and, where that’s too risky, begin thinning forests, Jordan said.

However, areas where fire burned so hot that seeds were killed and trees can’t regenerate may need additional help. For the first time, the park is considering planting seedlings to preserve the species.

“I’m not ready to give up on giant sequoias,” Brigham said. “This is a call to action to better protect the remaining old growth and make our Sierra Nevada forests wildfire resilient, because the fire’s coming.”

If seedlings are planted, though, it will take hundreds of years to replace the trees that were lost.

A year later, Rhode Island buildings still say ‘Plantations’


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Visitors to the Rhode Island State House, in Providence, R.I., pass by the state seal on the rotunda floor that displays Rhode Island's full former name, Thursday, Nov. 4, 2021. Voters chose to strip the words "and Providence Plantations" from Rhode Island's formal name a year ago by approving a statewide referendum that was revived amid the nation's reckoning with racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd. The phrase remains on walls, doors, floors and rugs. (AP Photo/Jennifer McDermott)


PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Rhode Island dropped “Providence Plantations” from its name a year ago, but not from its buildings.

Providence Plantations is written in the script in marble near the State House dome and on bronze plaques in the entryway. The state seal with the full former name is on the rotunda floor, the elevator doors, door numbers and directional signs. It’s even on the rug in front of George Washington’s portrait in the state room.

Voters chose to strip the words “and Providence Plantations” from Rhode Island’s formal name a year ago by approving a statewide referendum, which was revived amid the nation’s reckoning with racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd. The word “Plantations” didn’t specifically refer to a place where slaves labored, but supporters of the measure insisted it elicited such imagery and was offensive.

Democrat Gina Raimondo signed an executive order in June 2020, when she was governor, to change state employee paychecks and executive agency websites. Voters approved the referendum in November 2020.

Since then, the state changed official websites, business cards and state employee paychecks. New letterhead is in use and citations are issued with the new state seal.

The administration is still compiling an inventory of places where the wording still exists, as well as determining potential costs and best practices for the removal, officials in Gov. Dan McKee’s administration said. A working group will convene before the end of the year to develop goals for next year.

State Rep. Anastasia Williams, a Providence Democrat, pushed to change the state name. Now she says there are other, extremely serious matters at hand that the state’s leaders need to address — the ongoing pandemic, the growing number of homeless people, the need to welcome immigrants and refugees, and an education system that has failed children of color.

“I’m not taking any of the importance of it away, but where it is for me as a priority, we already won that battle and we know it has to be done,” Williams said last week. “We have some serious things at hand that are not even being seriously addressed.”

The remaining displays of the old name can be an opportunity to strike up conversations about what the voters voted for and why, she added.

Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea is the keeper of the state seal, and has been using a new embosser to apply the redesigned state seal to official documents.

Gorbea is running for governor. If elected, she said she would make sure there’s a plan for removing the old name from the more challenging places, especially the seal in the State House rotunda, since many people see it there.

“It is the change that the voters wanted and so we should have, at bare minimum, a plan,” Gorbea said. “If it hasn’t been done, why not? But if it can be done, let’s do it.”

In early November, state Department of Administration officials said they would share the inventory of places where the old state name was written and the costs for changing it, but as of this week it had not provided that accounting to The Associated Press. In the DOA building, the old state seal is on the front desk and on the directory of rooms.

Rhode Island was incorporated as The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations when it declared statehood in 1790. In 2010, nearly eight in 10 voters rejected the shorter name in a referendum.

Gorbea said she fears people will become cynical if they voted for the change yet the most public-facing displays remain the same.

“The state has changed,” she said, “times have changed and government needs to change to accommodate that.”

Top US diplomat warns Russian group not to interfere in Mali

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Secretary of State Antony Blinken, accompanied by Senegalese Foreign Minister Aissata Tall Sall, departs following a news conference at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Dakar, Senegal, Saturday, Nov. 20, 2021. Blinken is on a five day trip to Kenya, Nigeria, and Senegal. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, Pool)


DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Saturday warned a shadowy Russian company with connections to the Kremlin not to interfere in efforts aimed at restoring democracy in the West African nation of Mali.

As he wrapped up a weeklong, three-nation tour of Africa that was dominated by crises across the continent, Blinken said it would be “unfortunate” if the Wagner Group became active in Mali, where there are internationally backed plans to have a democratically elected government in place by April.

Mali “remains a linchpin for future stability in the Sahel and we have deep concerns about that stability and deep concerns about the extremism and terrorism that is spreading tentacles in the region,” Blinken said at news conference with Senegal’s foreign minister, Aissata Tall Sall. West Africa’s Sahel region is the vast area south of the Sahara Desert where extremist groups are fighting for control.

“It would be especially unfortunate if outside actors engage in making things even more difficult and more complicated,” he said. Blinken said he was speaking particularly of the Wagner Group, which has deployed mercenaries to Syria, the Central African Republic and Libya, drawing protests from the West and others.

The Wagner Group, owned by a confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been accused by Western governments and U.N. experts of human rights abuses in the Central African Republic and involvement in the conflict in Libya.

France and Germany have objected to the presence of Wagner mercenaries in Mali, and the European Union said this past week that it would consider sanctions against anyone interfering in Mali’s democratic transition.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said the company has a “legitimate” right to be in Mali because it was invited by the transitional government, and he has insisted the Russian government is not involved.

Blinken, who has also been pressing while in Africa for an end to crises in Ethiopia and Sudan, said the United States was ready to restore aid to Mali that was suspended after a military coup.

“This is ultimately about the people of Mali and their aspirations for peace, their aspirations for development and respect for human rights,” he said. “We look forward to taking the next steps to resume the full array of assistance as soon as the democratically elected government has taken office.”

Mali has struggled to contain an Islamic extremist insurgency since 2012. Extremist rebels were forced from power in Mali’s northern cities with the help of a French-led military operation, but they regrouped in the desert and began launching attacks on the Malian army and its allies.

In June, Col. Assimi Goita was sworn in as president of a transitional government after carrying out his second coup in nine months. Mali faces increasing international isolation over the junta’s power grab. Elections are due to be held in February, but the EU fears they will be delayed.

In Dakar, Blinken was pushing American-built infrastructure projects, including an initiative to produce COVID-19 vaccines in Senegal, a first for Africa. He also promoted sustainable development, women’s empowerment and other human rights initiatives to bolster faltering democracies.

In meetings with female entrepreneurs and executives from U.S.-based multinational companies, Blinken extolled the benefits of boosting women’s roles in economies and of buying American. In a jab at China, with which the U.S. competes for lucrative business, he noted that America invests “without saddling the country with a debt that it cannot handle.”

“The effects are going to be felt inside of Senegal, improving infrastructure, creating jobs and reinforcing public safety and climate resilience,” he said as he witnessed the signing of four road, traffic management and other deals between Senegal and U.S. firms worth about $1 billion.

The investment, he said, shows “our shared values of democracy, transparency and rule of law as well as innovation.”

In less than two weeks Senegal will host a major China-Africa trade and investment forum, underscoring Beijing’s interest in increasing the scope of its influence on the continent. U.S.-China competition in Africa has been a major underlying theme of Blinken’s trip, although he has tried to downplay it.

“Our purpose is not to make our partners choose, it is to give them choices,” he said. “And when people have choices, they usually make the right one.”

Tall Sall, the foreign minister who will play a major role in the forum, thanked Blinken for his comments.

“We have a diplomacy of sovereignty from which we do not exclude anyone,” she said. “There is not only one choice. We have many choices.”

As he does in France and other French-speaking countries, Blinken spoke extensively in French at his public appearances, including with Senegal’s president, Macky Sall, and at an event at Dakar’s Institute Pasteur, which hopes to begin producing COVID-19 vaccines with American help next year.

In his meetings, Blinken addressed security issues, particularly a rise in jihadi violence across the Sahel and increasing authoritarianism that many believe is fueling extremism.

Senegal is a key partner in the fight against extremism and last year it hosted the U.S. military’s annual counterterrorism exercise, Flintlock.

One area where Sall may seek U.S. help is with increased security measures along the country’s borders with Mali and Mauritania, where several counterterrorism operations have taken place in recent years.

___

Associated Press writer Babacar Dione contributed to this report.

Thailand’s festival honoring rivers also pollutes them

By TASSANEE VEJPONGSAyesterday

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A Thai family places krathongs, small boats made of corn and decorated with banana leaves and flowers, into a Ong Ang canal during Loy Krathong festival in Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, Nov. 19, 2021. Thais believe that the candle-lit boats launched during the charming and popular Loy Krathong festival can carry the year's misfortunes away with them, but workers must clean up the waterways afterward to keep them from getting clogged and polluted. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)


BANGKOK (AP) — Thais flocked to rivers and lakes on Friday evening to release small floats adorned with flowers and candles in an annual festival honoring the goddess of water, with thousands of the tiny boats ending up clogging and polluting the country’s waterways.

Within hours, workers began trawling the rivers to fish out the offerings, as paying tribute to the divinity is increasingly proving to be ecologically hazardous.

The Loy Krathong festival allows believers to symbolically float their misfortunes away on “krathongs” and start another year of life with a clean slate. The festival is celebrated on the night of the full moon of the 12th lunar month, which traditionally marks the end of the rainy season.

Thon Thamrongnawasawat, a leading Thai marine biologist, said getting people to stop using harmful materials such as polystyrene foam — Styrofoam — for their floats remains the priority because they cause the most damage to the water and aquatic life. The number of endangered sea creatures found dead ashore, which he believes stems from the problem of ocean trash in Thailand, doubled from 2017 to 2020.

Activists have noted a change in people’s behavior over decades, pointing to rising awareness of the damage krathongs cause. The total number of krathongs collected in Bangkok has fallen from over 900,000 in 2012 to just over 490,000 last year, and there has been an even sharper reduction in the number of floats made of Styrofoam, from 131,000 to under 18,000 over the same period.

Even so, some conservationists advocate a more radical solution.

“We need to revolutionize the practice, allowing the ecosystem of the waterways to be restored,” said Tara Buakamsri, Thailand country director for the environmental group Greenpeace. “We should not release any floats, because even if they are made from natural materials, the amount of them exceeds what rivers can naturally deal with.”

“We depend on clean water for our livelihood and the aim of Loy Krathong should be to protect and rejuvenate our rivers without putting anything in them.”

Sales of materials for krathongs have been slow this year due to the pandemic, said Nopparat Tangtonwong, a vendor at Pak Klong market, famous for selling flowers.

“COVID-19 causes the economy to be sluggish, so people prefer saving their money and floating online instead,” she said.

At the same time, children are uninterested in banana-leaf floats, the main natural alternative to Styrofoam, she said. “They prefer fancy floats made of ice-cream cones and bread because they can feed the fish at the same time.”

Such an approach is not helpful, said Wijarn Simachaya, president of Thailand Environment Institute. “If you float somewhere with no fish, those floats will cause pollution in the water. It is difficult to collect them, too, as the bread absorbs the water and sinks into the river. ”

“In addition, the sellers usually put chemical colors in those floats, which is harmful to the water,” he said.

Banana leaves are the best krathong material because they do not decompose too quickly, and once collected, can be used for making fertilizer, Wijarn said.

“Doing a virtual Loy Krathong celebration is another good solution to avoid environmental damage, especially during the COVID-19 outbreak, but I don’t think it can satisfy people’s lifestyle, as they still want to enjoy the festival,” he said.

Late Friday night after people floated their cares away, municipal workers come out to scoop up a sea of floats that drifted along canals and down the Chao Phraya River before they decomposed and contaminated the water.

Dozens of small boats traveled along the river, each carrying about half a dozen people with hand-held nets. The boats then took their catch to a moored mothership, where it was dumped into a large shredding machine, compacted and hauled away by garbage trucks for landfill in a waste dump.

“We hope that this year the numbers of krathongs made with Styrofoam will continue to decrease and will be less than last year. And we will finish our cleanup operation before 5 o’clock in the morning,” said Chatree Wattanakhajorn, a top Bangkok official.

 

Worker collect small floating krathong from Chao Phraya River during Loy Krathong festival in Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, Nov. 19, 2021. As Thais flocked to waterways Friday to release small floats adorned with flowers and candles in an annual festival honoring the goddess of rivers, they also pile trash that clogs drains and canals and pollutes the country's rivers. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

A Thai woman prays before floating a krathong, a small boat made of corn and decorated with banana leaves and flowers, into a Ong Ang canal during Loy Krathong festival in Bangkok, Thailand, Friday, Nov. 19, 2021. Thais believe that the candle-lit boats launched during the charming and popular Loy Krathong festival can carry the year's misfortunes away with them, but workers must clean up the waterways afterward to keep them from getting clogged and polluted. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

Catholic Church finally offers apology

The Roman Catholic Church is responding to renewed criticisms after it was revealed that the church had managed to avoid many commitments to pay residential school survivors as part of the 2005 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA).

That agreement, in which the federal government offered a formal apology and compensation to residential school survivors, also obligated the Catholic Church to pay survivors $29 million and offer another $25 million as “in-kind” donations.

However, a 2015 investigation by CBC and the Globe and Mail unearthed court documents that demonstrated how the church managed to reduce its payment to only $1.2 million. It was able to get out of fundraising obligations after only raising $4 million out of the pledged $25 million.

The church said it had nonetheless donated $25 million in “in-kind” donations, which included addiction treatment and scholarships, but also questionable items such as Bible study groups and routine travel expenses to send clergy to remote communities.

The Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations and others are calling for a criminal investigation. Part of the concern is over the fact that the Catholic Church in Canada does not have one centralized body. Thus, the legal obligations from the IRSSA were against a corporation formed to represent the Catholic Church in the legal proceedings.

That corporation was dissolved after 2015, which means no central Catholic entity remains that is responsible for reparations to residential school survivors. The Anglican, Presbyterian and United churches, also parties to the IRSSA, respected their financial obligations – but the Catholic Church ran most of Canada’s residential schools.

All of this was settled behind the scenes in a 2015 court case, in which federal government officials alleged that the church had spent more than $6.4 million of the fund meant for survivors on legal and administrative fees and other expenses.

The documents were only unearthed in early October after CBC News and the Globe and Mail won a judicial order to expose the contents of that court case. A further Globe and Mail investigation revealed that the Catholic Church across Canada had combined assets of $4.1 billion, while receiving yearly donations of $886 million, making it the largest charity in the country.

Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, director of the University of British Columbia’s Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre, told CBC News that the documents showed that the Catholic Church had betrayed survivors, but also that the federal government and courts allowed them to get away with it.

“From the get-go, this was not something survivors sat in the room and agreed to. Survivors were outside of this,” she said. Turpel-Lafond noted that the Canadian government could re-open the court case.

After calls to boycott Catholic mass, a petition to end the church’s tax-exempt status, calls by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the Catholic Church to take responsibility, and churches burned down after the unearthing of mass graveyards on the grounds of former residential schools, Catholic bishops from across the country finally issued a public apology to residential school survivors on September 24.

“We, the Catholic Bishops of Canada, gathered in Plenary this week, take this opportunity to affirm to you, the Indigenous Peoples of this land, that we acknowledge the suffering experienced in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools,” the statement on behalf of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) read.

“Along with those Catholic entities which were directly involved in the operation of the schools, and which have already offered their own heartfelt apologies, we, the Catholic Bishops of Canada, express our profound remorse and apologize unequivocally.”

The CCCB also pledged a renewed fundraising effort to raise $30 million over five years, encouraging local parishes to participate. They pledged that funding would be determined locally, in consultation with Indigenous communities in each region.

Assembly of First Nations National Chief RoseAnne Archibald said in a statement that she welcomed the apology. “However, I am disappointed that the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops did not take the long overdue step of passing a motion/resolution to formally invite the Pope to Canada to offer his apology to First Nations and Indigenous survivors and intergenerational trauma survivors here on Turtle Island,” Archibald added.

The CCCB told the Nation that the bishops recently committed to engage with the Pope on a potential visit to Canada and highlighted that a delegation of Indigenous leaders would be granted a papal audience from December 17-20 at the Vatican.

“While we cannot speak for the Holy Father, we are confident in his understanding of the ongoing and historical trauma caused by residential schools, as well as his commitment to playing a constructive role in the healing and reconciliation journey,” the CCCB said in a statement.

The bishops’ organization said that it believed that the Catholic parties to the IRSSA had met their obligations, but that they recognized there was “widespread disappointment” with the fundraising campaign, and that they were confident their renewed fundraising pledge would be successful in “achieving its financial goal and in delivering meaningful contributions to Indigenous communities and residential school survivors.”

The Pope had said in June that he was pained by the discovery of children’s remains at residential schools but did not offer an apology at the time, despite offering similar apologies for the church’s role in colonialism and sins committed in Bolivia against Indigenous communities there.

Benjamin Powless, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Nation

'The city almost feels dead': Afghanistan's only music school completes its exit


ZOHRA FEMALE ORCHESTRA (Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images file)

Yuliya Talmazan and Mushtaq Yusufzai
Thu, November 18, 2021
The last two of more than 270 students, faculty and staff from Afghanistan’s only music school have left the country in the wake of the Taliban takeover, the institution's founder said on Thursday.

“It was extremely emotional,” the Afghanistan National Institute of Music’s founder and director Ahmad Sarmast said of students he greeted at the airport in Doha on Tuesday. “They just couldn’t stop crying and I was crying together with them.”

More than 100 students and faculty were able to escape to the Qatari capital in October, but Sarmast, 59, and others had been working to evacuate the remaining 200 students and staff who were missing some paperwork.

Ahmad Sarmast hugs Zohra and Farida, both aged 13, as they arrived in Doha, Qatar. (Omar Nashat)

“I am very relieved,” he told NBC News over the the telephone. “It’s good to see them happy, and also hopeful about the future.”

The 272 evacuees, including the all-female Zohra orchestra, will continue on to Portugal next, where they were granted asylum, the school’s officials said in a statement. They plan to resume the school’s activities there.

Sarmast’s students and faculty are the lucky ones.

Thousands of Afghans have been trying to flee the country since the United States and its allies withdrew their forces in August, seeking to escape repression, violence and a crumbling economy. But musicians face an especially difficult time under the austere fighters, whose interpretation of Islam has led them to outlaw music altogether in the past.

While the departures could be lifesaving for the students and faculty themselves, they are a blow to a decadeslong international effort to foster the best and brightest of the country’s musicians.

Since the school was founded in 2010, its male and female students have performed around the world — a symbol of progress in modern Afghanistan.

After the invasion in 2001 and the previous Taliban government’s departure, music thrived in Kabul and other parts of the country.

But the Taliban’s return in August has thrown a blanket of silence over much of the country.

Although music has not been formally banned, people in capital Kabul are cautious: Cafés and restaurants only play music inside, and even then — quietly. Less music is played on radio and TV. Wedding halls have stopped playing live music altogether, according to several wedding hall owners who spoke to NBC News.

“When I speak with my friends and family in Kabul, they say that music is very rare,” said Arson Fahim, a pianist who escaped the Afghan capital shortly before the Taliban takeover. “They say that without music, the city almost feels dead.”

While Afghanistan has a rich, centurieslong music tradition, and the Quran does not explicitly prohibit music or make it “un-Islamic,” the Taliban are using their extremist interpretation of Islam to justify erasing history and identity, of which music is a mainstay, historian Mejgan Massoumi at Stanford University said.

“It will be devastating for the Afghan people to attempt to silence voices and souls,” Massoumi said.

But Taliban commanders have told NBC News that listening to music is against Islamic law. While they have not issued an overarching ban on all music since their takeover in August, they have raised awareness about the “evils of music,” Taliban spokesman Bilal Karimi said.

When they were first in power between 1996 and 2001, the Taliban banned all music outright. But this time around, trying to project a more moderate image, the group has stayed away from issuing a sweeping ban.

Despite promises of moderation, the Taliban have unleashed a brutal crackdown since returning to power as they try to consolidate control over the fractious country and force Afghans to adhere to their strict interpretation of Islam.

That has left many Afghan musicians paralyzed with fear — uncertain about whether they will ever be able to play music again.

The United Nations special rapporteur on cultural rights, Karima Bennoune, said she has received reports of attacks on musicians in Afghanistan, destruction of musical instruments, closure of institutions associated with music and musicians forced to flee, making her “gravely concerned” about the safety of Afghan musicians.

Pianist Arson Fahim, 21, left Kabul for the U.S. just 2 weeks before the Taliban took over the Afghan capital to study music in the U.S. (Isabela Balena )

“Musicians are terrified,” said Katherine Butler Schofield, senior lecturer in South Asian music and history at U.K.’s King’s College London. “They are in hiding. They have buried and destroyed their instruments. They have silenced themselves.”

Many have tried to leave the country, including during the chaotic evacuation of Western forces at the end of August. Until this week, the students and staff of Afghanistan’s most prominent music school were among them.

Sarmast said that his school’s activities were suspended as the Taliban took over the country. He said his students and faculty had targets on their backs because they promoted coeducation, with boys and girls not only learning music, but touring together.

We were “on the forefront of promoting democratic values through music,” he said.

Sarmast said the Taliban have given him reassurances that the school premises will be safe — until further notice from their senior leadership. But no students or staff have been allowed to enter, he added, and one of the school campuses has been turned into a military barrack.

Fahim, a pianist who graduated from the school earlier this year, left for the U.S. just two weeks before Kabul fell to the Taliban to study at Massachusetts’ Longy School of Music of Bard College.

AFGHANISTAN-YOUTH-TALIBAN-CONFLICT-TALKS

 (Wakil Kohsar / AFP via Getty Images file)

He said he considers himself enormously lucky, but he has been riddled with worry about his former colleagues in Kabul and the school that he said changed his life.

“It was everything to me. It was like home,” Fahim, 21, said from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

He said he never thought the school, along with hundreds of Afghan musicians, could be silenced.

“Can you imagine not being able to do what you love, having to hide and being in danger because of something as beautiful as music?” Fahim said.

Sarmast said 13 years of his life’s painstaking work, building and promoting his school, had been ripped away when the Taliban marched into Kabul in August.

“Unexpectedly, all that is gone,” he said.

While he is now concentrating on trying to rebuild the school in Portugal, he still hopes to return to Kabul one day to resume his work there — as naive as it may sound, he admitted.

“If my safety is assured and I get the freedom to run a music school, I am going back to Afghanistan,” Sarmast said. “I do have hope.”

Could oral antiviral pills be a game-changer for COVID-19? An infectious disease physician explains why these options are badly needed


Patrick Jackson, Assistant Professor of Infectious Diseases, University of Virginia
Fri, November 19, 2021

If authorized, molnupiravir could be a key oral treatment to help keep COVID-19 patients out of the hospital. Plyushkin/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Nearly two years into the pandemic, it has become starkly clear that we need better treatments for COVID-19 for people in the earlier stages of disease.

Two new antiviral drugs could soon be the first effective oral treatments for COVID-19 to help keep people out of the hospital. An advisory committee to the Food and Drug Administration plans to review the data supporting molnupiravir – a pill made by Merck and partner Ridgeback Therapeutics – on Nov. 30, 2021.

And in early November, Pfizer released preliminary results for its antiviral pill, Paxlovid, another potentially promising tool for COVID-19 treatment. On Nov. 16, Pfizer formally requested emergency use authorization of the oral pill from the FDA.


If these drugs get authorized in the coming weeks, they could be an important new treatment option for people with COVID-19, especially for those at high risk in the early stages of infection. The ability to treat COVID-19 with a pill rather than an injection or infusion means more people can be treated faster.

As an infectious diseases physician and scientist at the University of Virginia, I have helped care for hundreds of people with COVID-19. I’ve also helped conduct clinical trials to find new treatments. Molnupiravir and Paxlovid would fill a need that hasn’t been met by other COVID-19 drugs, which are either difficult to administer or only suitable for patients in the hospital.

Here’s a preview of why these new antiviral drugs are important, how they work and how they could be used.

Filling a gap in treatment

Researchers have so far found just a few drugs that are effective for the treatment of COVID-19. Until now, only antiviral monoclonal antibodies could be used to treat patients who are not hospitalized. However, these antibody drugs – which work by blocking the virus from entering cells – have to be given in a monitored setting like a doctor’s office.

And many patients who could benefit from monoclonal antibodies don’t have access because administration sites aren’t located nearby. They are also not affordable for many people outside the U.S. In the U.S., monoclonal antibodies are free to patients under emergency use authorization but could ultimately become far more expensive if and when they receive full approval by the FDA.

Early data suggests that both molnupiravir and Paxlovid are effective new drugs that patients can take at home to prevent complications of COVID-19 – which could be particularly beneficial for those at high risk of severe disease. Once authorized, these pills will allow patients to be treated earlier in the course of infection, at the point when antiviral drugs are more effective. By stopping the virus from growing in the body early on, the drugs can prevent the inflammation that causes severe COVID-19.

Although oral antiviral pills could be a major step forward in treating COVID-19, vaccines still offer the best protection from the virus. Prostock-Studio/iStock via Getty Images Plus

How molnupiravir and Paxlovid work

Molnupiravir works by causing the virus to record inaccurate genetic information. SARS-CoV-2 stores its instructions for making new viruses in a strand of RNA. Inside the cell, the virus makes copies of the RNA and then continues to make duplicates of those copies. When a patient takes molnupiravir, the drug masquerades as one of the key molecules in RNA and gets incorporated into the strands that the virus produces. When an RNA strand containing molnupiravir gets copied in turn, the virus makes errors in the copy. Over multiple rounds of copying, molnupiravir forces more and more mistakes until the virus is no longer able to function – a phenomenon in virology called “error catastrophe.”

Paxlovid uses a different mechanism to prevent the virus from replicating. SARS-CoV-2 creates proteins that are needed to build new viruses as one long string, called a polyprotein. But the polyproteins have to be chopped into smaller parts by a viral enzyme called a protease in order to become active. Paxlovid blocks the virus’s protease from doing this job, thereby preventing the virus from completing its life cycle.

How COVID-19 pills would be used

There are currently two primary forms of treatment for COVID-19 in the U.S.: antiviral and anti-inflammatory medications. Antiviral drugs stop the virus from growing in the body and are given within the first few days of symptoms to prevent severe disease. Anti-inflammatory drugs moderate the immune response and are used to help sicker patients who need oxygen.

Molnupiravir and Paxlovid were studied in separate clinical trials with similar designs. In both studies, the drugs were tested in outpatients with risk factors for severe COVID-19 who were at an early stage in their illness. Both studies also looked at how likely patients were to either die or be hospitalized. However, neither study has yet been peer-reviewed.

Molnupiravir reduced the risk of death or hospitalization by about 50% in non-hospitalized adult patients with mild to moderate COVID-19 when treated within five days of symptom onset. Paxlovid reduced this risk by about 89% for patients treated within three days of symptoms and 85% for patients treated within five days. Importantly, no patients who took either drug died in the studies. Because the drugs were not studied head to head, it’s difficult to say whether one will be better than the other in the real world. In early November, Britain became the first country to approve molnupiravir for use.

Molnupiravir did not help hospitalized patients recover faster from COVID-19. It is likely that Paxlovid would also not be useful at the point of hospitalization. Most patients who are in the hospital with COVID-19 are sick because of unregulated inflammation and not because the virus is still replicating in their bodies.

If and when these drugs get authorized in the U.S., they will probably be used for the same higher-risk patients who are eligible for monoclonal antibodies today. Monoclonal antibodies may still be used, though, for pregnant people, people on dialysis and some immune-compromised patients.

The U.S. has already purchased millions of doses of both molnupiravir and Paxlovid in anticipation of their authorization. However, the pills will only be useful if people also have access to cheap, fast and accurate COVID-19 tests, which are currently in short supply. If COVID-19 is diagnosed too late, patients will already be outside the window of time when antiviral drugs can be helpful.

Other antiviral drugs are in development, including an oral form of the first COVID-19 drug, remdesivir and long acting injectable monoclonal antibodies.

Researchers are also working on repurposing existing drugs to treat COVID. Inhaled steroids like budesonide and an antidepressant called fluvoxamine are particularly promising.

While it’s exciting to see new treatments for COVID-19, prevention is still the best strategy. The COVID-19 vaccines continue to be the most effective tool for helping to end the pandemic.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Patrick Jackson, University of Virginia.

Read more:

What is herd immunity? A public health expert and a medical laboratory scientist explain


Why vaccine doses differ for babies, kids, teens and adults – an immunologist explains how your immune system changes as you mature

Patrick Jackson receives funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Ivy Foundation. He is affiliated with Indivisible Charlottesville.

Archeologists dug up MOCAD site: Here's what they found



Alanna Williams, Detroit Free Press
Thu, November 18, 2021,

Pieces of a clay pot. An old medicine bottle.

These random household items, plucked from the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) by Wayne State history sleuths, will be transformed into works of art.

MOCAD partnered with Wayne State University’s Anthropology Department to conduct an excavation on the museum’s grounds as part of an ongoing art exhibit entitled "All Monsters" by Chicago native Jan Tichy.

The exhibit is located in Mike Kelley's "Mobile Homestead," a full-scale replica of Kelley's 1950s ranch-style home in Detroit. Kelley, who died in 2012, worked with a variety of media and is considered to be one of Detroit's most influential artists. He asked that the ground floor rooms of the home be used as a community gallery and gathering space.

Crystal Palmer, youth program coordinator for MOCAD, said the exhibit is inspired by Kelley's band, Destroy All Monsters, and the fact that "Mobile Homestead" explored themes similar to Tichy’s pieces.

“So he did this whole series called 'Educational Complex,' where he was building models, very, very precise models of schools that he had been to since elementary all the way to his college career because the sites were very formative for his art, career, and knowledge,” Palmer said. “Yet it was also a place where he experienced all forms of trauma. So he's kind of weaving these, his own personal narratives into these buildings, these structures, and this is kind of like a branch off of that 'Educational Complex' body.”

Kelley's childhood memories were not the only traumas to take place on this land, however. The plot where "Mobile Homestead" sits is adjacent to the site of what was once a women’s prison and a place that housed homeless women and children, said Krysta Ryzewski, a professor of anthropology at WSU.

The professor said Tichy wanted to incorporate the land’s history into his piece.

“He thought that archaeology might be a really interesting way to connect with the art that's on display in his part of the homestead,” Ryzewski said. “So we thought it might be a way to dig underground and bring up the stories of this property and the people who used to live here and utilize the space and many of those people are not known to Detroit's history.”

The artifacts will be used by MOCAD’s Teen Council to create new pieces, but before that can happen, Ryzewski said, WSU’s Anthropology Department will document them.

By studying these findings, a new narrative of what took place on the land emerges, Ryzewski said.

“We are literally excavating other histories that have been rendered inaccessible because of the changes to the landscape and Detroit over time.”

Tichy’s "All Monsters" will be on display until Jan. 23.

For more information visit MOCAD’s official website.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Archeologists dig up Detroit museum site: Here's what they found

Rocket Lab's Electron booster splashes down in the Pacific Ocean



Aria Alamalhodaei
Wed, November 17, 2021

Rocket Lab’s reusability program advanced one more step on Wednesday night when the company recovered the booster from its Electron launcher for the third time.

The successful mission comes after a period of delays due to weather, but all went according to plan, with the “Love at First Insight” mission taking off at 8:39 p.m. EST from the company’s launch facility on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula. Separation occurred at around 8:41 p.m. EST with the first stage splashing down at around 9:24 p.m. EST, according to a tweet from Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck.

Rocket Lab has successfully recovered the first-stage booster twice in its history — the only other company besides SpaceX to achieve reusability. The first successful recovery took place November 2020 and then again in May 2021, though that latter mission resulted in the destruction of the payload.

Like those flights, this booster made a splashdown via parachute. But the recovery included an additional element: The presence of a helicopter, which hovered near the splashdown area to track and observe the booster as it made its descent. While the helicopter didn’t actually do anything related to the recovery, its presence is significant, as it indicates that Rocket Lab is also a step closer to executing its ultimate reusability plan: using a parachute to slow the velocity of the booster and capturing it midair with a helicopter.

The Electron sent two BlackSky Earth geospatial imaging satellites to low Earth orbit, part of a rapid five-launch agreement on behalf of BlackSky between Rocket Lab and launch services provider Spaceflight Inc. These satellites were originally scheduled to go to LEO in August, part of a three-launch schedule that ended up being delayed due to a small resurgence of the coronavirus in New Zealand and subsequent lockdown measures.

The two BlackSky satellites will join seven others already in orbit, as the geospatial intelligence company aims to grow its constellation to 14 satellites by the end of this year. Earlier this year, two BlackSky satellites were lost due to a significant anomaly that occurred shortly after the Electron’s second stage ignited.

This mission marks Rocket Lab’s 22nd Electron launch and the fifth mission this year.

Rewatch the launch here:
youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-sVCWo_xpE

Spain faces its past in mass graves bill. Will it be enough?

SPANISH ANARCHISTS & REVOLUTIONARIES MASSACRED IN SPANISH CIVIL WAR

MANU FERNÁNDEZ and JOSEPH WILSON
Fri, November 19, 2021,

GUADALAJARA, Spain (AP) — Carnations in hand, 94-year-old Julio López del Campo has come decade after decade to mark the spot where he believes the body of his brother, Mariano, was tossed into a pit along with other victims of the brutal regime of Francisco Franco in Spain.

“They took him to the prison in Guadalajara and in 1940 he was shot,” Julio said at the site next to a cemetery chapel. “I have come here every year since. I bring carnations and leave a few. I will keep coming until my strength gives out.”

More than 70 years on, the mass grave in Guadalajara, a small city just east of Spain’s capital, Madrid, has finally been dug up, and 26 bodies were recovered. Julio now hopes that a genetic test will confirm that Mariano's remains are among them.


The Guadalajara exhumation was carried out by volunteer associations who, along with some of Spain’s regional authorities, have led the fight to recover the missing and return them a shred of the dignity they have been denied for over half a century.

Until now, there has been little or no help from Spain’s central authorities, and families have seen time running out as a generation quickly fades away. But now there is some hope.

A bill is working its way through parliament that Spain’s left-wing coalition government says will deliver on its pledge to respond to the plight of families. The bill aims to improve on a 2007 Law for Historical Memory which experts and activists agree fell way short of emptying the hundreds of still-untouched mass graves.

The bill faces hurdles on both sides in parliament. The minority government needs the backing of smaller left-wing parties who want it to go further. Meanwhile, right-wing parties are vowing to vote against it.

If it passes, the law will recognize the families of victims have the “right to the truth” and will make the central government responsible for the recovery and identification of the missing. To help do so, it establishes a national DNA bank as well as an office to support families.

Like tens of thousands of others, Mariano disappeared after returning home from fighting for Spain’s Second Republic that Franco's right-wing military uprising destroyed in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. He turned himself in to police and, despite promises that he would not be harmed, was never seen again. He was 23.

Only 19,000 bodies of an estimated 114,000 victims of Franco's regime during and after the war have been recovered in the four decades since the dictator’s death. Spain’s government calculates that it is likely only 20,000 bodies are still in a condition to be found.

The president of the association that carried out the exhumation in Guadalajara and others across Spain is skeptical that the new law will achieve justice.

“These are just words that won’t lead to acts,” Emilio Silva, the president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, told The Associated Press.

The bill "talks about the truth, but it focuses on the victims and says nothing about the executioners; it talks about justice, but does not force anyone to face trial; it talks about reparation, but is not going to give anything back to the families of the dictatorship’s victims,” said Silva, whose grandfather was also buried in a mass grave.

In the past two years, the government of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the leader of Spain’s Socialist Party, has dedicated 5 million euros ($5.6 million) to finance 300 exhumations of mass graves and it has budgeted another 5.5 million euros for more exhumations next year.

But for Silva, the law won’t stop what he calls the “clientele politics” that has plagued efforts to recover bodies, because it won’t oblige future governments to dedicate funds to exhumations. The previous government of the conservative Popular Party, which is currently leading the opposition, cut off all central funds for exhumations when in power from 2011-18.

The Popular Party has already warned that it would replace the new law once back in power because, in the words of lawmaker Macarena Montesinos, it “seeks to destroy our legacy of concord" that crossed ideological lines and made possible Spain's 1978 Constitution when democracy was restored.

One of the highlights of the bill is the creation of a new State Prosecutors’ Office for Human Rights and Democratic Memory. The government ministry that oversees the protection of Spain’s Democratic Memory said in an email that the office will “guarantee the right to investigate the human rights violations during the (Spanish Civil) War and Dictatorship.”

Experts, including the United Nation’s Committee on Enforced Disappearances, say that this new figure, however, will be hamstrung as long as Spain does not amend its 1977 Amnesty Law. That law freed thousands of political prisoners of Franco's regime but also prevented the prosecution of any politically motivated crime prior to that date.

The law was a critical part of Spain’s peaceful transition to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975. It is still defended by right-wing political parties and some center-left Socialists who want to preserve the initial foundation of Spain's parliamentary monarchy, but others see it as a bar to justice for the families of the victims.

This week, a group of small left-wing regionalist and separatist parties presented an amendment to the new bill that would overturn the Amnesty Law as well as strip Felipe VI of his title as Spain's King. They argue that the monarchy is also a vestige of the dictatorship since Felipe's father, Juan Carlos, was put back on the throne by an aging Franco.

The amendments have little chance of passing, but the Socialists and the junior member of their governing coalition felt pressured enough to tweak their own bill by adding language that they say will allow for the prosecution of war crimes or acts of genocide carried out by Franco's regime without reforming the Amnesty Law. Critics argue that won't be enough.

The sensitive negotiations in parliament point to the heart of a debate in Spain about the role of the monarchy, which for many is seen as another keystone of democracy's return in the late 1970s. Franco had hoped to maintain his regime by restoring Juan Carlos to the throne. Instead, the king provided support to the country's fragile moves toward democracy after Franco's death, never more so when he was key in defusing an attempted military coup by reactionaries in 1981.

Margalida Capellà, Professor of International Public Law at the University of the Balearic Islands and expert in historical memory, said that while the new law would be a big step forward, Spain won’t be able to have a reckoning with its past until Juan Carlos's son Felipe and its prime minister take an important symbolic step.

“Reparation won’t be complete until the Head of State and the Head of the Government ask for forgiveness,” Capellà said. “During the dictatorship its victims were of course not treated as such, but during democracy it has (also) taken a long time for them to earn that recognition and what has happened to their families has been a disaster. That is the original sin of Spain’s democracy.”

___ Joseph Wilson reported from Barcelona.

A volunteer works next to skull of a victim before his exhumation inside a mass grave at an excavation of A.R.M.H., Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory at the cemetery in Guadalajara, Spain, Friday, Oct. 8, 2021. For decades, family members of the tens of thousands victims of Francisco Franco's brutal regime in Spain have had little help from central authorities to recover their loved ones from the country's hundreds of mass graves. Some aid should finally be on its way as a bill makes its way through Spain's Parliament that the left-wing government promises will finally make the state responsible for the exhumation of the missing.

 (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)