Tencent to offload US$16 billion stake in No 2 e-commerce player JD.com as China’s antitrust pressure mounts


The market value of JD.com shares to be transferred is estimated at US$16 billion, according to a Tencent statement issued on Tuesday

Tencent is under pressure to be a neutral infrastructure service provider amid Beijing’s push for interconnectivity, forcing it to open its ecosystem to JD.com’s rivals


Iris Dengand Jane Zhang
23 Dec, 2021

Tencent headquarters in Shenzhen, China. The company is divesting its investment in JD.com under antitrust pressure from Beijing. Photo: Bloomberg

Tencent Holdings said it would distribute most of its shares in JD.com as a special dividend to investors, as China’s dominant social media network made a surprise move to pare back its stake in the country’s second-largest e-commerce platform in response to Beijing’s antitrust demands.

The market value of JD.com shares to be transferred is estimated at HK$127.7 billion (US$16.37 billion), according to a Tencent statement issued on Thursday. Shenzhen-based Tencent, previously the biggest shareholder in JD.com, will see its stake in the company fall to 2.3 per cent from 17 per cent after the transfer.

Tencent president Martin Lau Chi-Ping has stepped down from JD.com’s board, effective immediately.

Tencent said in the statement that its strategy was to “exit the investments [where appropriate] as the investees become consistently capable of self-financing their future initiatives,” adding that JD.com has now reached that position.

Tencent is looking for return on its investments as its portfolio gets bigger, and JD.com was one of the self-sufficient companies that the internet giant has helped grow, according to a company source who declined to be named.

The divestment will not affect its strategic collaboration with JD.com in areas such as online payments and advertising, and Tencent has no similar plan for its other investee companies, the person said.

Tencent ramps up legal battle against ByteDance over popular anime
22 Dec 2021


The sale will leave JD.com founder Richard Liu Qiangdong and Walmart as the e-commerce company’s biggest shareholders, with 13.9 per cent and 9.3 per cent stakes, respectively, based on its latest annual report.

“Divesting the bulk of its interest in JD could be interpreted as a move to enable greater and fairer competition among e-commerce platforms on WeChat, rather than the previous situation that gave Tencent investees favourable treatment vs. Alibaba’s services,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matthew Kanterman.

Tencent first invested in JD.com in 2014, after it decided to retreat from a head-on battle with China’s No 1 e-commerce player Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post.

At the time, Tencent acquired a 15 per cent stake in JD.com, which took over the operations of its own e-commerce platforms QQ Wanggou and PaiPai.

Their ties grew closer as competition with Alibaba intensified, prompting Tencent to raise its stake in JD.com in 2019 and 2020.

A man stands outside JD.com’s headquarters in Beijing, China, November 9, 2021. 

Photo: Reuters

In turn, JD.com’s alliance with Tencent gave it access to WeChat, China’s dominant super app where users chat, work and shop.

However, Tencent is coming under pressure to be neutral as an infrastructure service provider amid Beijing’s push for interconnectivity, forcing the company to open its ecosystem to JD.com rivals like Alibaba, according to Shawn Yang, Shenzhen-based managing director of Blue Lotus Capital Advisors.

Yang said Tencent’s divestment would not have a negative impact on JD.com in the long run as it has “moved past the stage of relying heavily on Tencent for traffic and investment”.

The Chinese government is on a mission to tear down the “walled gardens” that have long separated the online sphere into exclusive ecosystems controlled by the likes of Tencent and Alibaba. Last month Tencent announced that WeChat users will be able to directly open third-party shopping links within the platform’s group chats.

Alibaba doubles stake in tour agency as investment pace slows
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Beijing’s push for interoperability is part of the country’s antitrust crackdown on the tech sector, in which it has stepped up scrutiny of anticompetitive practices and merger and acquisition deals by major companies.

Tencent became a target of the campaign when the State Administration for Market Regulation nixed the merger of Douyu and Huya, two video game live-streaming websites Tencent controls, and slapped multiple fines on the company for failing to disclose merger and acquisition deals to the authorities.

Tencent’s divestment “is just a preliminary action of reducing their market share of different companies just like the other big tech giants in the market, as the central government would like the big companies to lower their participation in different sectors,” said Gary Ching, vice-president of research at Guosen Securities (HK).

Ching expects other Big Tech companies, such as Alibaba and Baidu, will follow suit to appease regulators.

On Thursday morning, Tencent’s Hong Kong-listed shares rallied 4.3 per cent to HK$462.20, their biggest gain since October 7, while JD.com lost 7.5 per cent. Some other Tencent investee companies also saw their shares drop, with Meituan down 3.7 per cent and Bilibili off 6 per cent.

Linus Yip, chief strategist at First Shanghai Securities in Hong Kong, said investors are worried that Tencent may also divest its holdings in these companies, triggering a sell-off in their stocks.

“The JD divestment as a dividend helps ease concerns that a dividend from its own pocket will affect growth of the company, while the company is seen to be confident of its overseas gaming business, and metaverse related business will benefit it,” said Yip.


Additional reporting by Cheryl Heng and Iris Ouyang

U.S. weapons exports down 21% to US$ 138 bil. in 2021

Updated: 2021-12-23 

Weapons exports by the U.S. fell by 21 percent this year.
The U.S. State Department said on Wednesday that gross sales of U.S. navy tools for the 2021 fiscal year came to 1-hundred-38 billion U.S. dollars.
Reuters reported that this is likely because the Biden administration is shifting away from a number of the extra arms sales practices taken by Donald Trump.
President Biden has been moving towards a new weapons export policy that emphasizes human rights in evaluating an arms sale.

Reporter : smkim@arirang.com

Migrant Deaths At An All-Time High Along The Southwest Border



By Newsy Staff
December 21, 2021

Death records from the Yuma County medical examiner show migrant deaths have already more than doubled in 2021 compared to 2020.

The Remain in Mexico policy is back in full swing after a pause. 

 Advocates who fought against the revival of the policy say they're worried it could lead to more deaths as migrants grow desperate and take greater risks to cross into the U.S. illegally.

In the Sonoran Desert, a group named Capellanes Del Desierto went on a mission to locate the body of a man who they were told died on his journey north.

Angel Mendoza Pablo believes it could be his brother Santos — a thought that torments his family back home in Guatemala where Santos left behind a wife and five kids.

Death records obtained by Newsy from the Yuma County Medical Examiner show migrant deaths have already more than doubled in 2021 compared to 2020, jumping from 16 to 34. Across the entire southwest border, the U.S. Border patrol reportedly tracked 557 migrant deaths from October 2020 through September of this year - a historic high.

Professor Brad Jones at the University of California at Davis researches migrant deaths.

"It's a killing field," Jones said. "If we were to put a cross out for every migrant who has died in some of these areas, there are places where we would literally be tripping over them."

Pima County Chief Medical Examiner Greg Hess says the border patrol numbers – high as they are – are an undercount compared to what his office sees. Deaths in his sector are more than six times higher than Yuma County. "It's been very hot in southern Arizona in 2020 and 2021, so all of that plays into potential reasons why the number of remains recovered in the last two years has increased in comparison to the previous five or six years," Hess said.

The bodies of unidentified migrants are currently stored at the Pima County morgue, where hundreds of people are reduced to serial numbers on boxes stored in a trailer.

"There's about 500 remains here because we have multiple people in in an individual box," Hess said.

DNA samples are extracted in hopes to identify the person and reunite them with family in their home country.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection's air and marine operations patrol along the border on flights to get a bird's eye view of the migrants' challenges.

Air and marine operations in Tucson reported 63 rescues in 2021.

Down on the ground, the latest numbers released by the Border Patrol show that agents in the Tucson and Yuma County sector responded to more than 650 rescues this year.

Back in the Sonoran desert – where some 20 volunteers set out looking for the remains of Santos – there was no closure for the searchers or for his brother, Angel.

The nonprofit lead seven searches for Santos over the weekend and found a body they say fits Santos' description, but they will have to wait for a DNA test, which could take at least a month for results.

Farmworkers Face Food Insecurity While Helping Feed Others

By Sam Eaton
December 22, 2021

Mano a Mano - a nonprofit family center - has become a lifeline for many of central Oregon's agricultural workers.

More than two million farms scattered across the United States provide produce, dairy and meat that end up on our dinner plates, but the people working long hours in the fields to harvest it all are struggling to feed their own families.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines food insecurity as a lack of consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life. In 2020 nearly 14 million households in the U.S. - around 10.5% - were food insecure, according to the USDA's most recent report, and among those are farmworkers.

Since the beginning of the pandemic more than half of the farmworkers in Washington state have faced challenges accessing food according to recent research by the University of Washington. Another study shows 45% of Latino farmworkers in California's central valley reported food insecurity in 2020.

Ana Peña with the nonprofit Mano a Mano Family Center, says the problem is just as bad in central Oregon.

Peña is a community health worker for Mano a Mano, which means hand in hand. She says the center's food bank has become a lifeline for many of central Oregon's agricultural workers.

"Especially during summer, we'll have maseca coming in, and maseca is awesome for our tortillas, tamales, all those goodies," Peña said.

Providing traditional foods for Latino farmworkers is one thing, but Peña says for many of her clients who live and work in remote rural areas without access to transportation, just getting to the food bank is a challenge. So the food bank goes to them.

A recent tri-state COVID-19 farmworker study revealed that fewer than a quarter of farmworkers in Washington state were able to access food banks because of their limited operations and overlap with work hours.

"They also earn an incredibly low wage where even though they're harvesting the food we all eat they can't afford those same foods themselves," Peña said. "So we're making sure that they have the same opportunities as other folks to have enough food for themselves and their families."

Because of shutdowns from this winter's flooding and the seasonal nature of farm work, many of the agricultural workers in this complex can’t find work right now.

Cristina Carrio is from Guatemala. She says she works seasonally on berry farms, and she's waiting for the season to start up again.

Carrio says it's been difficult to keep her three children fed and the electric and gas bills paid. Mano a Mano food boxes mean she’ll be able to make traditional posole and tamales for Christmas.

The farmworkers are essential workers, but long hours, remote locations and low pay make the group especially vulnerable to food insecurity.

The hunger farmworkers experience may be even worse than the numbers suggest. Oregon State University sociology professor Mark Edwards has researched food insecurity in the western U.S. for two decades. He says most official data on farmworker food insecurity comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which presents its own set of challenges.

"So a federal survey is conducted, and you can imagine that farm workers are, as a group, not going to trust this group, especially if they are here without documents and they're living busy lives, not necessarily in places that are easy to find by surveyors," Edwards said. "And so, they are underrepresented in the surveys, I'm sure, so we don't have excellent data that describes this."

Edwards says the best data often come from nonprofit organizations like Mano a Mano.

"The people who are out serving among these workers and asking questions and telling the story of what it is that they are experiencing," Edwards said.

With each box delivery, Peña and her team learn more about the challenges farmworkers are facing. One man says he isn't able to work because of leukemia. Another is hoping to hear soon about a winter job at a mill. For all of them, these food boxes will mean the difference between skipping meals and eating well.

"People are struggling and especially now during this pandemic, and it's made a lot of people become homeless," Peña said. "A lot of people are having to ask for a food box for the first time in their lives after working like 20, 40 years."

Pride is a huge barrier. Peña says farmworkers are used to working for the food they provide for their families, and because of their mixed legal status or their fear of jeopardizing their path to citizenship, few apply for government food stamps. This means for many farmworker nonprofits like Mano a Mano are their only safety net.

"For us, farm workers have the utmost respect from our organization because, you know, we're just giving back to them what they give to us," Peña said.

Peña says the pandemic has taught everyone how essential these workers are. She just hopes that lesson will translate into real change - safer work conditions, fair pay and not letting farmworkers go hungry while working to keep food on everyone else's plates.

Flawed wars

DAWN.COM

PAKISTAN
Editorial

Published December 23, 2021 

THE destructive US interventions and regime-change missions, particularly in the Muslim world, over the last few decades have long been criticised for turning functional states into failed ones. However, in the zeal to bring ‘democracy’ to these states and eliminate terrorists, the US campaigns have also resulted in high civilian death tolls, even as the world’s most powerful military machine has deployed highly sophisticated drones and precision bombs.

A thorough investigative report by The New York Times has revealed that the deaths of non-combatants in Syria and Iraq have been routine, and other than expressing regret, the US military has done little to stop the killing of innocent people, including women and children. One attack in northern Syria in 2016, which was supposed to target IS terrorists, ended up killing 120 villagers. In another such flawed operation, the US military thought it was targeting a car bomb in Mosul, Iraq. A family of four perished in the tragedy.

Many such examples have been cited by the NYT report, including the incident in August in which the US targeted a car in Kabul, killing 10 civilians. US military officials have said those responsible for the attack will not be punished. Pakistan has also experienced the destructive effects of the US drone war in its tribal belt. Meanwhile in Yemen, the US-supported Saudi-led air war has resulted in a large number of civilian casualties. When the Centcom spokesperson was approached for comment by the NYT, he said “mistakes do happen”, adding that the US military was working “diligently to avoid such harm”.

The fact is that whether it is boots on the ground, or drones and daisy cutters raining destruction from the sky, American military overreach has resulted in unacceptable deaths of innocent people. Unfortunately, there are no indications that the US intends to change course where such military operations are concerned. Rather than bringing stability to the world and countering militancy, such deadly military adventurism only helps fuel extremism and anti-American feelings around the globe.


When the US kills innocent people in the name of taking out terrorists, it will hardly win hearts and minds. Instead of playing the global policeman, the US needs to work with the international community and use more intelligent counterterrorism methods and abandon the regime-change mantra for good, while those responsible for civilian deaths need to be punished, and the families of the victims compensated for their loss.

Published in Dawn, December 23rd, 2021

Hong Kong's famous Tiananmen Square 'Pillar of Shame' statue removed from university

22nd December 2021

Credit: Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

By Helen Regan, Wayne Chang, Teele Rebane, Karen Smith, 

CNN Hong Kong

For more than 20 years the "Pillar of Shame" sculpture stood as a memorial to the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, in which the Chinese military crushed protests led by college students in Beijing with deadly force.

Atop a podium in the University of Hong Kong's (HKU) campus, the 26-foot-tall (8 meter) statue of contorted human torsos was one of the last iconic memorials to victims of the bloody crackdown remaining on Hong Kong soil.

But around midnight on Thursday, yellow construction barriers were erected around the statue and the sounds of cracking and demolition were heard as the sculpture was removed under the cover of darkness.

Images taken during the removal process show workers wrapping the statue in protective film and lifting it out of the campus on a crane in two distinct parts. The HKU Council, the university's governing body, said in a statement the sculpture will be held in storage.

Two children look at the "Pillar of Shame" statue at the Hong Kong University campus on October 15, 2021 in Hong Kong. 

Credit: Louise Delmotte/Getty Images AsiaPac/Getty Images

A witness said Thursday morning the site of the sculpture is now empty and students have been seen crying on campus following the removal. CNN agreed to not disclose the name of this witness because the person feared retribution from authorities.
That fear of retribution is common among those who speak out against authorities in Hong Kong since Beijing imposed the National Security Law on the city in 2020, punishing offenses such as subversion and secession with sentences of up to life in prison.

The HKU Council said in a statement the removal "was based on external legal advice and risk assessment for the best interest of the university."

Hong Kong national security police investigate Tiananmen Square vigil organizers
The sculpture, which stood in the Haking Wong Building of the university, was part of a series of works by Danish artist Jens Galschiøt created in 1997 -- the year Hong Kong was returned to China after more than 150 years of British rule. The sculpture includes the inscription: "The old cannot kill the young forever," and was built to serve "as a warning and a reminder to people of a shameful event which must never reoccur," according to the description on Galschiøt's website.

For three decades, Hong Kong has been the only place on Chinese-controlled soil where an annual mass vigil has been held to mark the events in and around Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

The clampdown remains one of the most tightly censored topics in mainland China, with discussions of it scrubbed from mass media. Chinese authorities have not released an official death toll, but estimates range from several hundred to thousands.

Security guards stand in front of barriers erected around the 26-foot-tall "Pillar of Shame."

 Credit: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

After the 1997 handover, the continuation of the vigil and similar memorials were seen as a litmus test for Hong Kong's ongoing autonomy and democratic freedoms, as promised in its de facto constitution.

However, in the wake of national security law, scores of prominent pro-democracy politicians and activists have been jailed or fled the city, and numerous civil society groups have disbanded.

The last two June 4 vigils have been banned by police, citing coronavirus restrictions. Prominent activists, including Joshua Wong and Media tycoon Jimmy Lai, were later jailed for participating in commemoration events in 2020.

A Hong Kong museum dedicated to the victims of June 4 was forced to close earlier this year and moved its entire collection online citing "political oppression."

A security guard stands in front of a shipping container as barriers and security people guard "Pillar of Shame" at Hong Kong University, as the sculpture is removed.

 Credit: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images

Following news the sculpture was being dismantled, the artist Galschiøt wrote on his Twitter account, "I'm totally shocked that Hong Kong University is currently destroying the pillar of shame. It is completely unreasonable and a self-immolation against private property in Hong Kong."

"We encourage everyone to go out to Hong Kong University and document everything that happens with the sculpture," he added in a statement. We have done everything we can to tell the University of Hong Kong that we would very much like to pick up the sculpture and bring it to Denmark."

In its statement, HKU Council said, "No party has ever obtained any approval from the University to display the statue on campus, and the University has the right to take appropriate actions to handle it at any time."

A close-up of the "Pillar of Shame." 

Credit: Louise Delmotte/Getty Images AsiaPac/Getty Images

It added the university "is also very concerned about the potential safety issues resulting from the fragile statue. Latest legal advice given to the University cautioned that the continued display of the statue would pose legal risks to the University based on the Crimes Ordinance enacted under the Hong Kong colonial government."

Efforts to preserve the memory of the sculpture are already underway, with art-activist group Lady Liberty Hong Kong creating a 3-D model made using more than 900 photos in October.

"The idea is that everyone can print a copy it and place it wherever they want," said Alex Lee, the founder of the group. "In the digital age, there's no limitation of what you can do with virtual or physical objects -- (the hope is) for everyone to try to preserve this symbol."

Workers remove part of the "Pillar of Shame" statue into a container at University of Hong Kong on December 23. 

Credit: Anthony Kwan/Getty Images

On Sunday, Hong Kong's first "China patriots only" legislative election witnessed a record low turnout, reflecting a steep decline in civic and political engagement following Beijing's overhaul of the city's electoral processes earlier this year.
Following the vote, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam traveled to Beijing and met with Chinese Leader Xi Jinping, who endorsed her administration and praised her for moving the city "from chaos to order," according to a government statement of the meeting.

Calling the election -- in which turnout was just 30.2% -- a "success" Xi said the city had "made solid progress in promoting democratic development that suits Hong Kong's reality."

"The democratic right of Hong Kong compatriots has been shown," Xi said.
A number of Hong Kong activists who fled abroad labeled the election -- in which prospective candidates were first screened by the government -- as a "sham," a criticism echoed by many rights groups and international observers.

Top image: Workers remove part of the "Pillar of Shame" into a container at the University of Hong Kong on December 23, 2021

Fauci: 'Dangerous' to assume Omicron's apparent mildness means the end of the pandemic is in sight

David Knowles
·Senior Editor
Wed, December 22, 2021

While Dr. Anthony Fauci pointed on Wednesday to two new studies showing that the hypercontagious Omicron variant of the coronavirus is less deadly than the Delta variant, he cautioned against drawing the conclusion that the data might be a sign that the pandemic was drawing to a close.

At a briefing by the White House COVID-19 response team, Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser, was asked about the belief among some South Korean health officials that Omicron was a blessing in disguise given its apparent heightened degree of transmissibility and diminished overall severity.

“I would hate to say a ‘blessing in disguise.’” Fauci replied. “I never thought of a virus that can infect and kill people as a blessing in any way. But if you’re talking about would it be preferable to have Omicron be totally pervasive and be a relatively low degree of severity, yes, obviously that would be preferable. But it’s dangerous business to be able to rely on what you perceive as a lower degree of severity.”

Earlier in the briefing, Fauci discussed two new studies that showed that Omicron appears to result in less serious illness than those infected by the Delta variant.

“It appears that in the context of South Africa, there is a decrease in the severity compared to Delta, both in the relationship in the ratio between hospitalizations and the number of infections, the durations of hospital stays and the need for supplemental oxygen therapy,” Fauci said of findings from researchers in South Africa, where Omicron was first discovered.

Fauci then referenced the findings of a separate study conducted by researchers in Scotland that “appears to validate and verify the data that are in South Africa.”

“This is good news. However, we must wait to see what happens in our own population, which has its own demographic considerations,” Fauci added. “I would point out that even if you have a diminution in severity, if you have a much larger number of individual cases, the fact that you have so many more cases might actually obviate the effect of it being less severe.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Omicron now accounts for more than 73 percent of U.S. COVID-19 cases, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said at the briefing, and cases nationwide have increased by 25 percent over the past week. Deaths from the disease caused by exposure to the coronavirus were up 3.5 percent over the prior week, though those fatalities were believed by many experts to have been from people who had contracted the Delta strain.

If the affects of Omicron can be controlled through vaccination, boosters and antiviral drugs like the Pfizer pill approved on Thursday, this variant may prove manageable and ultimately less deadly than those that preceded it. Yet with Omicron currently racing across the globe, health officials have not yet begun celebrating.

Fauci acknowledged the premise that diminished health risks from Omicron could, if the data confirms it, signal a welcome development in the pandemic. Still, with different strains of the virus continuing to circulate widely, further mutations are likely, which may be why Fauci hedged on declaring that that end of the pandemic was in sight.

“It’s conceivable, but you don’t want to count on it,” Fauci said on the conclusion being drawn about the findings. “You don’t want to count on anything when you’re dealing with a virus that has fooled us so many times before.”

Darkness caused by dino-killing asteroid snuffed out life on Earth in 9 months

Mindy Weisberger  Live Science

The years following the asteroid impact that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs were dark times — literally. Soot from raging wildfires filled the sky and blocked the sun, directly contributing to the wave of extinctions that followed, new research has found.

 Following the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, parts of the planet would have been plunged into darkness.

After the asteroid struck, around 66 million years ago, the cataclysm extinguished many forms of life instantly. But the impact also caused environmental changes leading to mass extinctions that played out over time. One such extinction trigger may have been the dense clouds of ash and particles that spewed into the atmosphere and spread over the planet, which would have enveloped parts of Earth in darkness that could have persisted for up to two years.

During that time photosynthesis would have failed, leading to ecosystem collapse. And even after sunlight returned, this decline could have persisted for decades more, according to research presented Dec. 16 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), held in New Orleans and online.

The Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago) ended with a bang when an asteroid traveling at approximately 27,000 mph (43,000 km/h) slammed into Earth. It measured about 7.5 miles (12 kilometers) in diameter, and left behind a scar known as the Chicxulub crater, which lies underwater in the Gulf of Mexico near the Yucatán Peninsula and spans at least 90 miles (150 km) in diameter. The impact eventually snuffed out at least 75% of life on Earth, including all non-avian dinosaurs (the lineage that produced modern birds is the only branch of the dinosaur family tree that weathered the extinction).

Clouds of pulverized rock and sulfuric acid from the crash would have darkened skies, cooled global temperatures, produced acid rain and sparked wildfires, Live Science previously reported. Scientists first proposed the post-asteroid "nuclear winter scenario" in the 1980s; this hypothesis suggested that darkness played a part in the mass extinctions after the Cretaceous impact, said Peter Roopnarine, a curator of geology in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology at California Academy of Sciences, and a presenter at the AGU meeting.

However, it's only in the past decade or so that researchers developed models showing how that darkness may have impacted life, Roopnarine told Live Science in an email.

"The common thinking now is that global wildfires would have been the main source of fine soot that would have been suspended into the upper atmosphere," Roopnarine said. "The concentration of soot within the first several days to weeks of the fires would have been high enough to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight to a level low enough to prevent photosynthesis."
Dark days

long-term darkness by reconstructing ecological communities that would have existed at the time of the asteroid impact. They used 300 species known from the Hell Creek Formation, a fossil-rich expanse of shale and sandstone that dates to the latter part of the Cretaceous and extends over parts of Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.

"We focused on that region because the fossil record is well-sampled and well-understood ecologically, so we could reconstruct the paleocommunity reliably," Roopnarine said.

They then created simulations that exposed their communities to periods of darkness lasting from between 100 and 700 days, to see which intervals would produce the rate of vertebrate extinction that was preserved in the fossil record — about 73%, according to the presentation. The onset of post-impact darkness would have been rapid, reaching its maximum in just a few weeks, Roopnarine said in the email.

The researchers found that ecosystems could recover after a period of darkness that lasted up to 150 days. But after 200 days, that same community reached a critical tipping point, where "some species went extinct and patterns of dominance shifted," the scientists reported. In the simulations where darkness lasted for the maximum duration, extinctions spiked dramatically. During a darkness interval of 650 to 700 days, extinction levels reached 65% to 81%, suggesting that the Hell Creek communities experienced about two years of darkness, according to the models.

"Conditions varied across the globe because of atmospheric flow and temperature variation, but we estimated that the darkness could have persisted in the Hell Creek area for up to two years," Roopnarine said, adding that these findings are preliminary and

Once an ecosystem reached that tipping point, it could eventually rebound with a new distribution of species; however, that process would have taken decades, the researchers found. Extended stimulations of Hell Creek communities that went dark for 700 days showed that after the darkness lifted, it took 40 years for conditions in the ecosystem to start to rebound, the scientists reported at the conference.

Originally published on Live Science.

PROOF OF INDEPENDENCE

Why Puerto Rican Christmas Carols Are a Symbol of Patriotism

Frances Solá-Santiago

For all the political limbo Puerto Ricans have endured in the last 500 years, one thing is clear: come Christmas, we’ll cook lechón asado, improvise patriotic trovas, and drink pitorro. Despite the pervasiveness of American capitalism and influence on the archipelago, Navidad is a piece of Puerto Rican culture that hasn’t perished at the mercy of U.S.-style malls and English-language pop songs.

While the season is a time of reverence in Christianity, ​​Christmas in Puerto Rico is also synonymous with patriotism. It’s the one time a year when we fully acknowledge—no matter what political party or ideology we are aligned with—that we are proud to be Puerto Rican. Despite our colonial status, we enter a boricua utopia where music comes from a cuatro—the Puerto Rican autochthonous guitar—and food is arroz con gandules. In doing so, we’ve made Santa Claus and the Three Kings—the Christmas traditions we’ve inherited from the United States and Spain—mere commodities of the season, not the protagonists.

We revel in this boricua Eden as long as possible; after all, Puerto Rico is famous for having the longest holiday season, spanning from Thanksgiving Day to las octavitas, which is celebrated in mid-January. It’s as if come the new year, we don’t want to wake up to the realities of an oversight board, a second-class citizenship, two national anthems, and an economic crisis—just listen to our música navideña.

I grew up in a family that heralded música navideña as one of its main pillars. Every Christmas party included hours-long sessions of trova and aguinaldos. Tío Gerardo was on the cuatro, my primo Gerardito on the guitar, and my primo Luigi was the musical director. We’d sing through our well-rehearsed repertoire that started with “El Coquí” by Danny Rivera, a call to Puerto Ricans to preserve our culture and traditions amid colonialism, and came to height with “Canción de los Carreteros” by Tony Croatto, an ode to the archipelago’s rural working class. At some point in the night, tío Victor would stand in the middle of the crowd to sing the revolutionary anthem “Coño Despierta Boricua” by Andrés Jiménez; other times, titi Magie would sing a solo of the poor man’s “Allá en la Altura” by Francisco Roque Muñoz.

Looking back, this repertoire was the foundation of my own Puerto Rican patriotism, one that fuels nostalgia for the days of trullas and fogón from my current apartment in Manhattan. Every year, come November, I turn to the tunes of my childhood via a Spotify playlist, listening to songs like “Cantares de Navidad” by el Trío Vegabajeño, “Alegre Vengo,” and “Dame La Mano, Paloma.” And I’m not alone.

Growing up in Carolina, Puerto Rico, Johnny Irizarry remembers there was always music playing in the background during the Christmas season. “We listened to salsa the most and some merengue,” he says. “But, at some point in the night, Asalto Navideño—the Christmas album by Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe—would come on.” This two-part album series—released in 1970 and 1973, respectively—are at the core of many Puerto Rican Christmas celebrations. It combines trova and salsa traditions in songs that evoke both the joy and patriotic sentiment of the season. In “Canto a Borinquen,” Lavoe professes his love for Puerto Rico, saying, “Borinquen, soy tu hijo y no voy a olvidarte.” Today, much like Lavoe in the ‘70s, Irizarry lives in Florida. But he still turns to trova and Christmas classics to engulf his nostalgic feelings for home with songs like “Defensa al Jíbaro,” written by Quique Domenech and performed by Tony Croatto, “El arbolito” by El Gran Combo, and “Aires de Navidad” by Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón. “I think it influences that love and pride toward la patria, toward the people that build it every day,” he says.

Press play on any Puerto Rican Christmas record, and you’ll find a reference to the archipelago’s history and traditions. Unlike U.S. Christmas music, which relies heavily on the image of peace, tranquility, family, and Christianity, Puerto Rican música navideña is sprinkled with folkloric and political connotations. Take, for example, “El Coqui,”’ one of the archipelago’s most popular Christmas songs, which urges boricuas to preserve their traditions, from music like danza and bomba to the calls of the coquí. “Tienes que preservar tú la tradición porque si no el coquí no cantará,” the chorus reads. “Yo soy como el coquí que me amanezco, que la noche va alegrando, que en Borinquen he vivido, que soy nativo de aquí, coquí.”

Then, there’s also trova, a folkloric musical tradition that was born in Cuba but adopted by rural Puerto Rican communities. It relies on written and improvised poetry, as well as instruments like the cuatro, to narrate stories about daily struggles of life in el campo, patriotic sentiment, and political consciousness. According to statistics by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, the genre generates more than $23 million annually with 70-plus festivals performed across the archipelago. Still, come November, trova becomes synonymous with Christmas.

As a kid, I always marveled at my cousins’ talent to come up with original décimas; some were rehearsed and others were improvised, but every single one evoked a sense of pride in the traditions we carried and our national identity. There were also songs that taught me to value el campo and its ways of life. In “Allá en la altura,” for example, lyricist Francisco Roque Muñoz contrasts the luxuries of modern life with the rustic lifestyle of rural Puerto Rico, saying, “Yo vivo aquí en la altura mejor que un adinerado.” Others like Andrés Jimenez’s “Coño Despierta Boricua” and “La Estrella Sola” push back against colonialism and rally Puerto Ricans to look for a better future independently. All of this in the middle of Christmas dinner.

For Patricia Ruiz, música navideña shaped how she identifies as a Puerto Rican today. Growing up in Yauco, Puerto Rico, Ruiz says she felt a strong affinity to “Villancico Yaucano.” The song, popularized by Danny Rivera, narrates a Yaucano’s devotion for Jesus, as well as his town pride, saying, “Soy del pueblo del café, por si quieres dos saquitos, también, yo, te los traeré.” While she now lives in Texas and married an American, she says the best way to teach her community and her husband about where she comes from is have them listen to Puerto Rican Christmas carols.

“Explaining our history to him through music makes me feel so good,” she says. “I’m sure that once we have kids it’ll be the same and will continue to be an important part of our family.”

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Inspiration for the movie 'The Exorcist' has been identified as former NASA engineer

The boy who provided inspiration for the movie ‘The Exorcist’ has been identified as a former NASA engineer who died last year at the age of 85.

Ronald Hunkeler and William Bowdern.

Relatives say Ronald Edwin Hunkeler, who was previously known only as Ronald Doe, underwent exorcisms in Cottage City, Maryland, and in St. Louis, Missouri in 1949, as a 14-year-old.

A NASA engineer for 40 years, Hunkeler contributed to the the Apollo missions in 1960s and even patented a technology that allowed space shuttle panels to tolerate excessive heat.

PUBERTY PRODUCES POLTERGEIST PHENOMENA

When he was a teenager, family members reported noticing strange phenomenon in Hunkeler’s wake, according to the magazine Skeptical Inquirer. As he moved across a room, chairs around him scattered, Hunkeler’s family minster wrote to the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University. His bed, claimed Rev. Luther Schulze, rattled when he lay down on it.

The family floor was “scarred from the sliding of heavy furniture” and, at one point, a chair “threw him out,” the letter said.

Schulze’s letter describes seeing a framed picture of Jesus Christ on the wall tremble in Hunkeler’s presence.

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The boy’s mother worried the frightening spells were related to his recently deceased Aunt Tillie, a spiritualist who showed him how to used an Ouija board to communicate with otherworldly spirits, according to the podcast The Devil in the Details.

Hunkeler would live his life in fear that his NASA colleagues may discover the movie ‘The Exorcist’ was based, in part, on his life, a companion told the New York Post.

“On Halloween, we always left the house because he figured someone would come to his residence and know where he lived and never let him have peace,” she said. “He had a terrible life from worry, worry, worry,” she added.

After a series of medical and psychological tests failed to find anything out of the ordinary, his family appealed to religious elders.

“The family was Lutheran and they went through all the stages you see in the film: They went to doctors, clinics and finally went back to their own pastor in the Lutheran church, who recommended they see a priest,” William Friedkin, director of the Exorcist, told Entertainment Weekly in 2012.

Eventually, they sought the help of William Bowdern, a Jesuit who would perform at least 20 exorcisms on the teen in a span of three months. Bowdern’s diary describes the boy entering a trance-like state in front of more than dozen witnesses during one exorcism.

It says his mattress started shaking while there was the sound of a “scratching which beat out a rhythm as of marching soldiers.

“(A) second class relic of St. Margaret Mary was thrown on the floor,” it goes on to say. “The safety pin was opened but no human hand had touched the relic. R. started up in fright when the relic was thrown down.”

© Wikimedia Alexian Brothers Hospital. Wikimedia

Hunkeler was eventually taken to St. Louis, to expel the evil spirits said to inhabit him.

“On one evening the word ‘Louis’ was written on the boy’s ribs in deep red [scratches]. Next, when there was some question of the time of departure, the word ‘Saturday’ was written plainly on the boy’s hip,” wrote Bowdern. “As to the length of time the mother and boy should stay in St. Louis, another message was printed on the boy’s chest, ‘3 1/2 weeks.’ The printing always appeared without any motion on the part of the boy’s hands. The mother was keeping him under close supervision.”

In March 1949, Hunkleler was admitted to the Alexian Brothers Hospital in St. Louis, where, consumed in one of his fitful spasms, he broke a priest’s nose.

Less than a month later, according to the podcast The Devil in the Details, Hunkeler claimed he saw St. Michael holding a flaming sword in a vision and that he was free of the devil.

© File The Exorcist.

“In all except the last of these (exorcisms), the boy broke into a violent tantrum of screaming, cursing and voicing of Latin phrases – a language he had never studied – whenever the priest reached the climactic point of the ritual, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, I cast thee (the devil) out,’” a 1999 Washington Post article quotes Father Raymond Bishop, a Catholic priest, as saying.

The priest kept a diary of events on which the author William Peter Blatty would base his 1971 horror novel.

Hunkeler’s companion told the Post he was not religious and had later admitted to her that he was never actually demented.

“He said he wasn’t possessed, it was all concocted,” said the companion. “He said, ‘I was just a bad boy’.”

But, she said, something occurred shortly before his death last year that she couldn’t account for.

A Catholic priest arrived at Hunkeler’s door to perform last rites, she told the Post, adding that she hadn’t called for him.

“I have no idea how the Father knew to come,” she said, “but he got Ron to heaven. Ron’s in heaven and he’s with God now.”