It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Sunday, January 23, 2022
COVID-19: African scientists say 'mild omicron' could end pandemic
The rapid spread of omicron had concerned virologists. Now, African scientists are optimistic that the variant could mark the end of the pandemic and the beginning of an endemic.
Many African countries seem to have 'accepted' that COVID is here to stay
As of Friday, January 21, the coronavirus pandemic had claimed the lives of more than 5.5 million people worldwide. The highly contagious omicron and delta variants are responsible for the exponential infection numbers recorded daily.
Omicron, first detected and documented in South Africa, is becoming the dominant variant in many parts of the world, including across Africa. A South African study has shown that, despite the high number of infections, deaths haven't increased statistically significantly when compared with previous variants.
The fourth wave of infections has been slowing in South Africa, and life is gradually returning to normal for the first time since the pandemic's start in 2020.
"I do wish that I won't even hear the name COVID. That's what we are wishing for," one resident of Cape Town told DW.
Another resident told DW: "It's very nice to see everyone going out and about, relaxing, going outside. We've been locked down in our houses for how long now?! I hope that omicron is actually the final stage of this virus."
South African virologist Wolfgang Preiser told DW that the behavior of the omicron variant gives hope that the pandemic could become endemic. But he added that it could only be achieved when most of the population has a primary immunity from a previous infection or vaccination.
"I still hope we can get around regular booster shots," Preiser said.
"If another variant doesn't come as a nasty surprise, then we can keep our immunity up by natural means via regular reinfections with the coronavirus," Preiser added.
Omicron is considered the most contagious of all known coronavirus variants 'Good news' for Africa?
The comparatively mild infections caused by the omicron variant have proved to be good news for African countries where infections have been rising — and have also given scientists hope of a possible end to the pandemic.
"This is very good news," the Ghanaian epidemiologist Fred Binka told DW. "Viruses have two major characteristics: They have virulence, and they also have the transmission capabilities."
"They either mutate and gain strength in the transmissibility or their virulence," Binka said. "So, when they become very transmissible, you have the lower virulence."
Binka sounded upbeat, adding: "It is obvious that the pandemic is coming to an end, the virus has now established itself, and it will be endemic and be here forever." He predicted that COVID-19 will become a typical disease "that we can live with and treat."
Africa is the least-vaccinated continent worldwide WHO urges caution
According to the World Health Organization, the relatively mild infections do not mean that the world is out of the danger zone yet.
This week, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters that the pandemic is nowhere near over. "Omicron may be less severe, on average, but the narrative that it is a mild disease is misleading," Tedros said.
"Make no mistake: Omicron is causing hospitalizations and deaths, and even the less-severe cases are inundating health facilities," he added.
Globally, deaths continue to rise. In Africa, there are still concerns about the impact of the pandemic, with vaccinations rates being the lowest in the world. Only 7% of Africa's population has received a COVID jab.
"If you get to a situation where nearly everyone has had it or has been vaccinated, you can relax," Preiser said.
Preiser said African countries, including South Africa, would need to keep pushing for populations to get vaccinated.
Binka also said remaining vigilant was key. "Caution is the order of the day," Binka said, adding that not all details about Omicron "has been documented, so let's wait another six months and see what will happen." African children at higher risk
The cautious optimism from the African scientists comes after another study published in JAMA Pediatrics and led by a University of Pittsburgh infectious diseases epidemiologist found that children hospitalized with COVID-19 in sub-Saharan Africa are dying at a faster rate than in the US and Europe.
According to the study, children of all ages with comorbidities — including high blood pressure, chronic lung diseases, hematological disorders and cancer — were more likely to die.
A new study found that vulnerable African children are more likely to die from COVID-19
"Although our study looked at data from earlier in the pandemic, the situation hasn't changed much for the children of Africa," said lead author Jean B. Nachega, an associate professor of infectious diseases and microbiology and epidemiology at Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health.
"If anything, it is expected to be worsening with the global emergence of the highly contagious omicron variant," Nachega said.
The professor called on officials to urgently increase COVID-19 vaccinations and therapeutic interventions for eligible at-risk children and adolescents in Africa.
On Wednesday, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa opened a COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing facility. The NantSA plant located in Brackenfell, Western Cape, will be manufacturing second-generation vaccines.
"Africa should no longer be last in line to access vaccines against pandemics," Ramaphosa said at the facility's opening.
Theranos' Third Man
Like film noir villain Harry Lime, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes' crimes aren't just financial: They've harmed medical patients.
When Theranos, the blood-testing startup she founded, was thought to be on the verge of revolutionizing the medical industry, there was nobody Elizabeth Holmes was compared to more often than Apple founder Steve Jobs. Holmes encouraged the comparison by describing Theranos’s testing system as the ”iPod of health care.” She even dressed like Jobs, wearing the kind of black turtleneck he had made his personal trademark.
With her conviction earlier this month of fraud in a trial that exposed both her and Theranos, Holmes is now the subject of a new set of comparisons. The men she is being compared with are very different from Steve Jobs.
Two of them went to prison: In 2006 Andrew Fastow, the former chief financial officer of Enron was sentenced to serve six years and required to forfeit $23.8 million for his role in the fraud scheme of Enron, the Houston-based energy company. In 2009 Bernie Madoff was convicted of cheating investors out of an estimated $65 million in a giant Ponzi scheme and sentenced to 150 years.
This month in the New York Times, Holmes was even compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, who for a time tried to pass himself off as a man of inherited wealth despite earning his money as a bootlegger. David Streitfeld, the author of the front-page Times article on Holmes’ trial, observed, “Gatsby was practically Ms. Holmes’s brother.”
All of these comparisons capture part of Holmes’s story, but they also obscure the smallness that characterizes her. The grift she is associated with today is best understood when she is linked to someone with a less-than-commanding presence—the American con man Harry Lime, the central figure in Carol Reed’s classic 1949 film, The Third Man. Lime makes his living selling adulterated penicillin in post-World War II Vienna and hides in the city’s sewers. He takes advantage of desperate times and is brought down when, after seeing some of the victims of his penicillin fraud in the hospital, a close friend leads the police to him.
Linking Lime (played in The Third Man by Orson Welles) and Holmes is their willingness to take risks with other people’s health. Penicillin had just come into widespread use in the 1940s, and Lime, like Holmes, was aware that any lifesaving medical breakthrough offered a great opportunity for exploitation. The key to Lime’s character comes in a scene in which he sits in a ferris wheel and looks down on the people below him and sees only “dots.”
Theranos grew into a $10 billion company based on its promise of revolutionizing blood testing by being able to run many different tests using only a few drops of blood and a small, portable machine.
In the most thorough book to date on Holmes and Theranos, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, investigative reporter John Carreyrou provides a detailed account of individual patients who were given inaccurate blood-test results from Theranos. Carreyrou goes on to point out that the number of blood tests that Theranos “voided or corrected” in California and Arizona eventually reached 1 million.
This patient side of the Elizabeth Holmes scandal has not gotten the attention it deserves in the media in the wake of her trial. Trial reportage has focused on the fact that the crimes for which she was convicted—three for fraud, one for conspiracy to commit fraud—were all against Theranos investors. Writers such as Christopher Weaver and Heather Somerville in the Wall Street Journal and Bethany McLean on the opinion page of the New York Times have been the rare exceptions, showing interest in the lives of the patients who were affected by Theranos tests.
The bulk of reporting and commentary on the Holmes trial has repeated the well-worn point that Holmes and Theranos epitomize the reckless culture of Silicon Valley with its emphasis on get-rich-quick schemes. Lost has been the opportunity to cut Holmes and her enablers down to size and see them as every bit as sordid as Harry Lime.
What will happen next in Holmes’ life is far from settled. Each of the charges on which she has been found guilty carries with it the possibility of a 20-year maximum sentence. In addition her conviction points to failures in due diligence by a host of figures who should know better—from Theranos investors such as publishing mogul Rupert Murdoch and former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, to members of Theranos’s board of directors, which included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former Secretary of Defense William Perry.
Holmes, who is 37 and the mother of a baby born during her trial, seems likely to pay dearly for her misdeeds. Between now and September 26, when she is scheduled to be sentenced, she and her attorneys will have their work cut out for them if she is to have any kind of a life left for herself. The great pity is that those who supported her and basked in her presence during her heyday appear set to go on as before—only with less money in their pockets.
Nicolaus Mills is professor of literature and American studies at Sarah Lawrence College. He is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.
The Cult of Ideology vs. The Cult of Personality
The most important clashes aren’t between right and left but within right and left
Do you ever read an idea and feel enlightened and envious at the same time? You simultaneously think, “Aha! That’s insightful,” and “Dang! I’ve been sniffing around this concept and haven’t quite nailed it like he did.” In this instance, it’s a concept that helps explain both the deep dysfunction of our political system and the deep discomfort that so many people of good will—on both sides of our political spectrum—feel with our political culture.
It’s summed up in this tweet by a sharp lawyer I follow who tweets under the name “A.G. Hamilton.”
If you click on the tweet you can read his entire thread, but his point rests on two key and obvious trends. First, the Democratic Party has moved quite decisively to the left, and the median Democrat has moved far more to the left than the median Republican has moved to the right. This chart, recently made famous in a column by progressive writer Kevin Drum, illustrates the point nicely:
And as millions upon millions of Americans have moved collectively to the left—especially when those Americans are disproportionately clustered in like-minded urban enclaves—they have become increasingly intolerant of dissent. Although there are signs that at least some of the cancel culture fever is breaking, I like what Drum says to those who refute its existence:
And for God’s sake, please don't insult my intelligence by pretending that wokeness and cancel culture are all just figments of the conservative imagination. Sure, they overreact to this stuff, but it really exists, it really is a liberal invention, and it really does make even moderate conservatives feel like their entire lives are being held up to a spotlight and found wanting.
Yup. Exactly. We can disagree about the extent of American cancel culture—or whether any given event qualifies—but to deny its existence is to engage in willful partisan blindness.
Lots of folks on the right forwarded around and commented on Drum’s post last summer (it was provocatively titled, “If you hate the culture wars, blame liberals”). Thoughtful conservatives asked their progressive friends to look at the data and examine whether their movement was becoming unacceptably extreme, fueled by the kind of radicalizing frenzy that we so often see from ideologically homogeneous communities.
In fact, as I wrote in my most recent book, Divided We Fall, this phenomenon was explained and predicted by Cass Sunstein almost a generation ago. In a 1999 paper called “The Law of Group Polarization,” he explains that when like-minded people gather, they tend to grow more extreme. Or, here’s how he put it in more academic language:
In a striking empirical regularity, deliberation tends to move groups, and the individuals who compose them, toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by their own predeliberation judgments. For example, people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed; people who tend to support gun control are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm; people who believe that global warming is a serious problem are likely, after discussion, to insist on severe measures to prevent global warming.
“This general phenomenon—group polarization—has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions,” He wrote. “It helps to explain extremism, ‘radicalization,’ cultural shifts, and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations; it is closely connected to current concerns about the consequences of the Internet.” (Emphasis added.)
Remember, this was written in 1999, before The Facebook was a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.
But Hamilton’s tweet captures something that Drum’s chart doesn’t—the nature of radicalization on the right. Any fair reading of the right’s ideology would include the phrase “deeply confused.” After all, where does disproportionate resistance to vaccines come from? That wasn’t even on the right-wing radar before 2020, and to the extent that conservatives cared, they mainly saw it as a product of the crunchy, green weird left, not the populist right.
Right-wing ideology is so up for grabs that it’s hard to know “the right’s” position on everything from the size and role of government, the First Amendment (for example, it’s somewhat fashionable now for Republican governors to sign obviouslyunconstitutional bills regulating corporate speech), and foreign policy. After all, the right’s top cable host is now openly echoing the Kremlin’s line in its looming conflict with Ukraine.
The right’s cult is different. Hamilton calls it a cult of personality. That can imply “Trump,” but I think it’s deeper (and Hamilton notes that it’s deeper). It’s a cult of a certain type of personality, one that is relentlessly, personally, and often punitively aggressive. The aggression is mandatory. The ideology is malleable.
And don’t think for a moment that this began with Trump. He both channeled and amplified a pre-existing tsunami of outrage and animosity. Years back, well before I entered the world of journalism full-time, I spent considerable time, energy, and effort trying to help Mitt Romney win the presidency. My wife and I formed a group called “Evangelicals for Mitt” designed to help persuade my fellow Evangelicals that the Mormon former governor of Massachusetts was the best man for the world’s most difficult job.
In our conversations we emphasized his integrity, his decency, and his competence. Talk about missing your audience—turns out that each of those virtues turned out to be less important than pugilism or aggression.
But even then, the message from much of the grassroots was clear. Hit harder. No, hit even harder. Lack of aggression was perceived as lack of effort, a lack of a will to win. Mitt’s primary competitors weren’t necessarily more conservative than him, but they were more aggressive.
What we now call “Trumpism” is really Trump’s imprint on an impulse that pre-existed Trump and is likely to persist well past his presidency. If you pay little attention to talk radio, you’re likely missing the extent of devotion to the cult of aggression.
The same thing goes for the top-rated television shows and websites. The same personality characteristics persist. It’s pugilists almost all the way down. Reasoned voices are hard to find. And when I say “pugilists,” there is almost no limit to the rhetoric. In a recent New Yorker profile of Dan Bongino—one of social media’s most prominent right-wing voices—Evan Osnos quotes him as describing “insane leftists” as people who “wish death on me and everyone else from COVID, because they’re legitimately crazy satanic demon people.”
That’s absurd rhetoric. Just absurd. But words like “evil,” “satanic,” and “demonic” are routinely thrown around to describe political opponents. Write something that the Trump right disagrees with (especially on matters of race), and you’re “loathsome,” “despicable,” and “odious.” I oughta know, those words were written about me.
Hamilton optimistically argues that the right will be less difficult to reform because the cult of personality is driven by the search for a “winner.” Change the identity of the winner, and you change the nature of the cult. I hope he’s right. While I don’t like the cult concept in general, I could at least sip the Kool-Aid in a cult of Sasse, but I’m dumping out the entire glass of Trump.
Unfortunately, however, there is now evidence that parts of the right might “move on” from Trump by becoming more aggressive than Trump. Alex Jones (don’t laugh, he has a huge following) has threatened to turn on Trump for pushing the COVID vaccine. Candace Owens (again, another person with a huge following) has also sharply disagreed with Trump on vaccines, suggesting Trump is too old to follow the latest “independent research.”
Most notably, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, arguably the leading contender for post-Trump Republican leadership has triggered a feud with Trump by being evasive about his vaccine status and criticizing the president’s early handling of the pandemic as too draconian. And don’t forget he recently signed a bill in Brandon, Florida—an obvious nod to the right-wing “Let’s go Brandon” slur.
The existence of these two cults does much to explain why so many Americans feel so deeply alienated and conflicted about American politics. They explain why so many of us should feel alienated and conflicted. You can take the most thoughtful and committed Christian socialist or progressive (and I know more than a few), and even those folks who might welcome greater awareness of systemic injustice and profound income inequality are deeply chagrined at the package-deal ethics that come with increasing extremism.
“Do I really have to affirm that a man can get pregnant, or that there are no true biological distinctions between men and women?”
“Do I have to support taxpayer funding of abortions?”
At the same time, you can take the most thoughtful and committed Christian pro-life and religious liberty activist, a person who has spent their entire life seeking uphold and advance values of decency, integrity, and fidelity and face the following questions:
“Should I keep my thoughts about a lifesaving vaccine to myself to avoid fracturing my political coalition even when people I know and love are dying tragic and needless deaths?”
“Is even the idea that this nation bears responsibility for addressing the continued consequences of centuries of racist oppression too ‘woke’ to speak?”
“Is loving my enemies now naïve? Does exhibiting the fruits of the spirit—even in politics—mark me as weak?”
When mutual animosity escalates—and when that gap between red and blue in the chart above widens—the temptation to overlook these internal fault lines can become overpowering. Indeed, the primary reason why 2019’s “against David-Frenchism” essay (which argued that my classical liberal philosophy and personal manner were uniquely problematic to the new right) went viral wasn’t because of its attack on the classical liberalism of the American founding. That’s still a fringe idea that would shock Republican Americans who revere the founders and the founding documents.
No, it was the attack on decency and civility as “secondary values.” Here was a Christian rationalizing the sidelining of clear and unequivocal biblical commands—commands written when political enemies were far more deadly and the church far more vulnerable than it is today.
The most important cultural clashes in America in the present moment aren’t between right and left but rather within right and left. They’re aimed at arresting the present trends that render public life increasingly miserable and our union increasingly fragile.
And here’s where the hope lies. There is evidence of increasing awareness on the left that the movement has simply gone too far. From London Breed’s crackdown on crime in San Francisco to Eric Adams’s election in New York City, there is increasing evidence that regular voters are starting to reject the dangerous extremes. “Defund the Police” is a dead slogan, relegated back to isolated corners of Twitter and small parts of the academy.
And what of the right? I keep going back to the spiritually and culturally consequential 2021 Southern Baptist Convention. At a crucial moment when a “conservative” movement that all too often mirrored aggression and pugilism of the political right tried to seize control of the SBC, other conservatives (this was no moderate v. conservative contest) answered that they, in the words of former SBC president J.D. Greear, are “great commission Baptists. We have political leanings. But we are not the party of the elephant or the donkey. We are the people of the lamb.”
They elected as president Ed Litton, a man known as a pastor, not a culture warrior, and who has engaged in faithful and consistent efforts at racial reconciliation.
We can and should find purpose and meaning in our discontent, in our sense that we don’t truly “fit” with either of America’s most aggressive political and cultural factions. It’s that discontent, given voice and put into practice, that can rescue us from the cults of ideology and personality, the movements that are ripping our families, our communities, and our nation apart.
One more thing …
I originally envisioned the Good Faith podcast as an extension of the discussions in this newsletter, but the podcast comes out before I write, so that’s not always going to work. This week is no exception. Curtis and I take a hard look at why pastors are leaving churches, what that says about us, what that says about the church, and what we can do about it.
Please listen to the whole thing. Curtis is a former pastor, and his story about why he left the pulpit echoes powerfully with pastors who write to me almost every day.
One last thing …
I’ve shared this song before, but I think it’s particularly salient this week, mainly because of the first line—“I’m done trusting in what’s sinking. These boats weren’t built for me.” These political movements that command our loyalty and commitment? Those boats weren’t built for us.
Corporate Media Spin in Defence of Transnational Mining Operations in Ecuador
If Australian mining baroness Gina Rinehardt is to believed, the Ecuadorian arm of her transnational mining operations, Hanrine, has been under siege by ‘swarms’ of ‘bandits’ who are backed by ‘organised crime,’ protected by ‘scoundrel layers’ and ‘unscrupulous politicians,’ and are carrying out ‘environmentally destructive’ and illegal mining operations around the concessions granted to Hanrine by the Ecuadorian government in 2017. The Ecuadorian government, Hanrine alleged at the beginning of the year, has been forced to send in the military to restore order.
These claims from Hanrine Holdings come in the face its own operations in the small town of La Merced de Buenos Aires, against which the residents of the area have been organised in ardent opposition for the best part of five years. More than 300 residents spent over a month blockading access roads for Hanrine machinery, trucks and employees when they first arrived, and have now set up a permanent camp around the new copper mine in protest at its destructive effects on their local community and ecology.
Hanrine’s allegations are of particular interest and concern insofar as the actual chronology of events associated with the discovery of copper deposits around Buenos Aires sits conspicuously at adds with the claims published in the mainstream Australian corporate media at the beginning of the year—claims that have neither been upheld with any evidence, nor withdrawn for lack of any. The best lies, as political propagandists have long understood, are those spun from partial truths, not those cut from whole cloth. In this case, the claims from Hanrine are brazen distortions of half-truths.
The half-truth being weaponised by Australian mining operations in Ecuador in this instance is that the discovery of gold deposits in the area in 2017, four years ago, did indeed attract a rush of unlicensed miners from as far away as Peru and Venezuela. According to the Murdoch press article carrying the Hanrine claims, Buenos Aires was ‘plagued by violence, prostitution and drug addiction’ for two years until the Ecuadorian state put the area under a 60-day state of emergency. At the time, neoliberal Ecuadorian president LenÃn Moreno tweeted, ‘Illegal mining and its network of associated crimes must be stopped!’
While it is clear then that the first discovery of precious minerals in the area did produce a gold rush, with all of the social ills typically associated with them, no explanation from Hanrine or the Murdoch Press has been forthcoming as to how this constituted either ‘banditry’ or ‘organised crime’—much less to say such activity protected by nebulous ‘scoundrel layers’ or ‘unscrupulous politicians.’ The existence of the oldest profession in the area was hardly proof; for all anyone knows all involved were self-employed. The existence of prostitution in the area certainly does not bear association with the narcotrafficking and official corruption more typically associated with South America. Nor is there any explanation to how a gold rush that failed to bear such descriptions four years ago has any bearing on anti-mining organising around Buenos Aires in 2021.
No less problematically, claims that the 2017 gold rush was ‘environmentally destructive’ because it was illegal are belied by the fact, pointed to as one of the main bones of contention by residents of Buenos Aires, that legal mining operations are just as environmentally destructive—if not more so. The attempt by Hanrine and their enablers in the Murdoch Press to establish a pretence to the contrary is, in this case, telling, in meeting attempts by Buenos Aires residents to hold them accountable with PR spin associating ecological sustainability with legalism. Insofar as Ecuadorian President Moreno colludes in perpetrating this false assumption, this also serves to call into question his impartiality. No enabling ‘scoundrel layers’ or ‘unscrupulous politicians’ to be seen here.
Further clues as to what is actually going on, and what purposes the claims from Hanrine actually serve, are suggested by testimony from Earth defender Natalia Bonilla. As Bonilla points out, when
her organization, Acción Ecológica, took an interest in what was happening in Buenos Aires, and started trying to work with residents to resist the mining operation, she realised that the people clustered around the mine were residents of the area, not participants in a gold rush. ‘It is a community of farmers, ranchers and agricultural people,’ she stated, arguing further that the spin from the mining company had ‘marked them as illegal miners and made them invisible’ (Cardona 2021).
The holes in the story as published by the Murdoch Press here in Australia, along with the direct testimony from Earth defenders on the ground in Ecuador, tends towards the conclusion that the claims from Hanrine, parroted and platformed by the Murdoch Press, have been constructed for the express purpose of invisibilising protest and demonising Earth Defenders. This is consistent with two decades of counterterrorist moral panic operating on the logic of ‘doubting the judgment of the powerful gives aid to the terrorists’—the association of Earth defence with terrorism being as predictable today as it was in 2001.
Indeed, as Rebekah Hayden, a member of the Rainforest Action Group points out,
Villagers say Hanrine is acting illegally in trying to forcibly enter their territories. They do not want any kind of mining in their territories, particularly a foreign-owned mine, and they view the incursion as a violation of their rights. Despite reports in Australian and Ecuadorian press that resistance in the area was by illegal miners, locals insist this is not the case, saying that Hanrine is conducting a smear campaign against them.
If it is a truism that throwing mud at others is a reflection of what we fear most about ourselves, we might conclude from the abovementioned facts that, in contrast to the claims from Hanrine, Ecuador is under siege from legal mining bandits. Backed by organised crime and scoundrel layers in the form of a neoliberal national government, who are enabling them in environmentally destruction, it is transnational mining corporations—in this instance, Hanrine, and in other instances, any number of others—who are culpable for extractivist destruction in what remains of the world’s forests.
Even if the claims published in the corporate media are threadbare, hysterical and bizarre, they nevertheless serve to muddy and disguise these basic facts associated with the global ecological crisis and its root causes—claims that the Earth defenders demonised as a result of media propaganda and demonisation work tirelessly to draw attention to.
DE-ESCALATION, YES PLEASE Germany will not supply weapons to Kyiv for now, defence minister says
Fri., January 21, 2022
BERLIN (Reuters) - Berlin is ruling out arms deliveries to Ukraine in the standoff with Russia for now, German Defence Minister Christine Lambrecht said in an interview published on Saturday, a few days after Britain started supplying Kyiv with anti-tank weapons.
A bipartisan group of U.S. senators also promised weapons to Ukraine, which could include missiles, small arms and boats, to help the country defend itself from a potential invasion amid a Russian military build-up https://www.reuters.com/world/top-diplomats-us-russia-meet-geneva-soaring-ukraine-tensions-2022-01-21 on its borders.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, however, has stressed Berlin's policy of not supplying lethal weapons to conflict zones.
"I can understand the wish to support Ukraine, and that's exactly what we are doing already," Lambrecht told the Welt am Sonntag weekly.
"Ukraine will receive a complete field hospital together with the necessary training in February, all co-financed by Germany for 5.3 million euros ($6.01 million)," she said, noting that Germany has been treating severely injured Ukrainian troops in its military hospitals for years.
But Berlin is not ready to supply Kyiv with weapons for the time being, the minister said.
"We have to do everything to de-escalate. Currently, arms deliveries would not be helpful in this respect, there is agreement on this in the German government," Lambrecht said.
With her remarks, she sided with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock who said Germany would not criticize other countries for being ready to supply weapons to Ukraine.
"But I don't think it is realistic that such deliveries could tip the military balance," Baerbock told Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
"The most powerful weapon...is for NATO allies, EU member states and the G7 to make it clear (to Russia) that every fresh aggression will be answered with massive consequences."
($1 = 0.8818 euros)
(Reporting by Sabine Siebold, Editing by William Maclean)
VERY BRIEF A brief history of Afghan women's rights For over a century, Afghanistan's rulers and ethnic groups have been arguing about what women should do and how they should be. Women haven't had much say. Women queue up for cash at a World Food Program site in Kabul, Afghanistan
"I was working for the Defense Ministry. I know those women are at high risk. They were in a really, really bad situation, struggling to find a hiding place and maybe counting moments to their death," says Zarifa Ghafari, who previously served as the mayor of Maidan Shahr, capital of Wardak province, before joining Afghanistan's Defense Ministry in Kabul.
Ghafari barely managed to flee Afghanistan with her family days after the Taliban took over in September last year. She says her female colleagues at the ministry have completely stopped working now.
Recently, she heard her friends talking about three children abandoned on the streets by their mother, who was unable to look after them anymore.
"Why would anyone do that," Ghafari asks rhetorically, explaining that many women simply have no choice: As single mothers and the sole bread-earners of the family, they have been particularly affected by the Taliban's ban on work for women.
The regime has also banned women from showing their faces on all kinds of media, including advertisements and television; schools have been closed down for girls, and women are not permitted to move outside their homes without a male consort. Early feminists
Since the 1920s, the country's leaders have consequently sought to empower women in an attempt to create a sense of nationhood, she adds.
Women's empowerment received a boost after Amanullah Khan succeeded the throne following his father Habibullah's assassination in 1919. That same year, he overthrew the British in the Third Anglo-Afghan War.
He took inspiration from the modernization in Turkey under Kemal Ataturk and implemented changes like advocating monogamy, education and replacing the full-body burqa for women and so on.
King Amanullah implemented laws that would grant women more rights
His wife, Queen Soraya, also appeared without the traditional shroud, wearing a wide-brimmed hat with a diaphanous veil instead.
Amanullah and the Queen also traveled to Europe and returned to their country to implement new laws they thought would benefit women.
Most attempts by Amanullah were however met with strong opposition from tribal leaders and he was forced to scale back many of his laws, including those regarding increasing the age of women's marriage to 21 from 18 and abolishing polygamy. Amanullah was finally forced to abdicate, after considerable pressures from tribal leaders, and fled to Europe.
After the fall of the monarchy and increasing developmental assistance by the USSR, women were in demand in the workforce and joined medical and teaching professions. In the 1970s, more measures to protect girls' rights were adopted, including increasing women's age of marriage and making education compulsory.
However, this too resulted in a massive backlash from religious tribal groups.
The subsequent rise of the Mujahideen, and later the Taliban, led to more emphasis on enforcing traditional Islamist rules and confining women to their homes. Women from conservative communities also perceived western, modern influences as "corrupt," Ahmed-Ghosh writes in her research. Women in Afghanistan today
Even today, Afghanistan is a patriarchal society, especially in rural areas, says Britta Rude, an economist working on inequality in Afghanistan and researcher at the ifo Center for International Institutional Comparisons and Migration Research in Munich.
Women working outside the home is not considered proper in the view of Afghan conservatives, adds Rude: "There's a very traditional division of labor. Women are the ones doing all the work in the household while the men go outside and work there. Women also take care of children and the elderly."
LIFE IN AFGHANISTAN UNDER THE TALIBAN
New but old dress code
Although it is not yet mandatory for women to wear a burqa, many do so out of fear of reprisals. This Afghan woman is visiting a local market with her children. There is a large supply of second-hand clothes as many refugees have left their clothes behind.
This division of roles is still widely accepted, and even preferred, by Afghan men.
Only 15% of Afghan men believe women should be allowed to work after marriage and two-thirds complained that Afghan women had "too many rights," according to a 2019 study conducted by UN Women and Promundo, as summarized by Reuters. (Given the current need to protect the identity of Afghan women, the original study has been temporarily removed from the internet at the request of UN Women.)
Furthermore, the idea of "honor" also has an impact on Afghan women, the researcher explains, adding that the sense of community and understanding within the community are of paramount importance for families and individuals.
Economist and researcher Britta Rude
"For example, if a woman does something that is not aligned with the values and norms of this community, it can affect the reputation of the entire family. That's why they pay so much attention to the behavior of women and try to limit them," Rude explains.
"The norms and values are prescribed by men, and women are supposed to follow these norms and rules. As soon as women step out of these, it can affect the honor of the family. That is also why honor killings still take place in Afghanistan," she says.
Ethnic tribes and communities often also have their own formal "rulings'' regarding perceived crimes and misdemeanors. They overrule government laws — like those against honor killings — and implement their own punishments, adds Rude.
Traditional Afghan attire for women is colorful: Historian Bahar Jalali led the 2021 Twitter campaign #DoNotTouchMyClothes
No hope in the near future
For former mayor Zarifa Ghafari, tribal, anti-women laws and current developments under the Taliban go totally against her perception of Afghan culture in the early 20th century.
"Afghan culture was beautiful before the last 60-70 years of war," she says, adding that those were good times for women, "their rights, their education and development."
Ghafari talks about her grandmother, who would have been nearly 100 years old today and who'd often tell her stories from her days of youth, when women were able to go to university and wear any clothes they wished to.
"Afghan culture is the culture of Malala Maiwandi, the culture of Rabia Balkhi," Ghafari says. Maiwandi was a journalist who was killed by gunmen in Jalalabad in 2020; Balkhi was a 10th-century poet who killed herself after being separated from her slave lover, who she was not allowed to marry.
"This is my culture," Ghafari insists.
"In Islamic culture, the hijab is more about your level of comfort while wearing it," she explains — as opposed to the Taliban's strict orders. Press agency AFP reported earlier in January that the Taliban's religious police have put up posters around Kabul ordering women to cover up; even though the posters refer to the obligation to wear the hijab, they include a photo of the face-covering burqa, interpreted as another sign of creeping restrictions.
"Stupid people who make a business out of religion say, 'If you do this, you will go to hell, if you do that, you will go to hell,'" Ghafari adds.
At present, there seems little hope that things will improve considering that the Taliban have not followed up on the promises they initially made on women's rights.
For Ghafari, the only way out is to convince the international community of the urgency of the situation and put the Taliban under diplomatic pressure to act as they have promised.
Syria battle between IS, Kurdish forces kills over 120: monitor
Sun, January 23, 2022
A fierce battle raged in Syria for a fourth day Sunday between US-backed Kurdish forces and Islamic State group fighters who have attacked a prison, killing at least 120 people including seven civilians, a war monitor said.
More than 100 insurgents late Thursday attacked the Kurdish-run Ghwayran jail in Hasakeh city to free fellow jihadists, in the most significant IS operation since its self-declared caliphate was defeated in Syria nearly three years ago.
Intense fighting since then has seen the militants free detainees and seize weapons stored at the jail, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, in what experts see as a bold IS attempt to regroup.
"At least 77 IS members and 39 Kurdish fighters, including internal security forces, prison guards and counter-terrorism forces, have been killed" inside and outside the prison since the start of the attack, the Observatory said.
At least seven civilians are among those who died in the fighting in the northeastern city, said the monitor.
The battles continued for a fourth consecutive day on Sunday as the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), backed by coalition strikes, closed in on jihadist targets inside and outside the facility.
"Fierce clashes broke out overnight Sunday... as part of an ongoing attempt by Kurdish forces to restore control over the prison and neutralise IS fighters deployed in surrounding areas," said the Observatory, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria.
- 'A miracle we made it out' -
An AFP correspondent in the city's Ghwayran neighbourhood reported the sound of heavy clashes in areas immediately surrounding the jail, which houses at least 3,500 suspected IS members.
The SDF deployed heavily in areas around the prison where they carried out combing operations and used loudspeakers to call on civilians to leave the area, the correspondent said.
IS fighters "are entering homes and killing people," said a civilian in his thirties who was fleeing on foot.
"It was a miracle that we made it out," he told AFP, carrying an infant wrapped in a wool blanket.
"The situation is still very bad. After four days, violent clashes are still ongoing."
Hamsha Sweidan, 80, who had been trapped in her neighbourhood near the jail, said civilians were left without bread or water as the battle raged.
"We have been dying of hunger and of thirst," she told AFP as she crossed into SDF-held areas in Hasakeh city. "Now, we don't know where to go."
IS has carried out regular attacks against Kurdish and government targets in Syria since the rump of its once-sprawling proto-state was overrun in March 2019.
Most of their guerrilla attacks have been against military targets and oil installations in remote areas, but the Hasakeh prison break could mark a new phase in the group's resurgence. - Weapons and captives -
The Observatory said that Kurdish forces had managed to recapture more than 100 IS detainees who had tried to escape, but that many more were still on the run. Their exact numbers remained unclear.
IS, in a statement released on its Amaq news agency overnight, claimed that it took over a weapons storage room in the prison and freed hundreds of fellow jihadists since the operation began with a double suicide bombing.
A video it released on Amaq purported to show IS fighters carrying the group's black flag as they launched the attack on the facility and surrounded what appears to be a group of prison guards.
A second video released Saturday showed nearly 25 men whom IS said it had abducted as part of the attack, including some dressed in military fatigues.
AFP could not independently verify the authenticity of the footage.
Commenting on the video, the SDF said the captives were "kitchen staff" from the jail.
"Our forces lost contact with them during the first attack," it said in a statement, without elaborating.
The Kurdish authorities have long warned they do not have the capacity to hold, let alone put on trial, the thousands of IS fighters captured in years of operations.
According to Kurdish authorities, more than 50 nationalities are represented in a number of Kurdish-run prisons, where over 12,000 IS suspects are now being held.
Many of the IS prisoners' countries of origins have been reluctant to repatriate them, fearing a public backlash at home.
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Dozens killed as fighting rages on after IS prison attack in eastern Syria
Fighting raged for a third day Saturday between the Islamic State group and Kurdish forces in Syria after IS attacked a prison housing jihadists, with the violence killing nearly 90 people, a monitor said.
"At least 28 members of the Kurdish security forces, five civilians and 56 members of IS have been killed" in the violence, said Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
IS launched the attack on Thursday night against the prison housing at least 3,500 suspected members of the jihadist group, including some of its leaders, the Observatory said.
The jihadists "seized weapons they found" in the detention centre and freed several fellow IS fighters, said the Britain-based monitor, which relies on sources inside war-torn Syria for its information.
Hundreds of jihadist inmates had since been recaptured but dozens were still believed to be on the run, it added. With air support from the US-led coalition, Kurdish security forces have encircled the prison and are battling to retake full control of surrounding neighbourhoods, which jihadists have used as a launchpad for their attacks.
The Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said "fierce clashes" broke out in neighbourhoods north of Ghwayran, where it carried out raids and killed more than 20 IS fighters.
An AFP correspondent saw Kurdish fighters raiding homes in the flashpoint area near the jail in search of militants while coalition helicopters flew overhead.
In one location, Kurdish fighters gathered around five bloodied corpses of suspected IS fighters that had been placed along the roadside, the correspondent said.
'No one but God'
The battles have triggered a civilian exodus from neighbourhoods around Ghwayran, with families fleeing for a third consecutive day in the harsh winter cold as Kurdish forces closed in on IS targets.
"Thousands have left their homes near the prison, fleeing to nearby areas where their relatives live," Sheikhmous Ahmed, an official in the autonomous Kurdish administration, told AFP.
But not all the displaced had a safe haven.
"We don't know where we are going," said Abu Anas, who was forced out of his home on Saturday.
"We have no one but God," he told AFP as he fled on foot with his wife and four children.
IS has carried out persistent attacks against Kurdish and government targets in Syria since the rump of its once-sprawling proto-state was overrun in March 2019.
Most of them have targeted military outposts and oil installations in remote areas, but the Hasakeh prison break could mark a new phase in the group's resurgence.
IS said in a statement released by its Amaq news agency that the attack on the jail aimed to "free the prisoners".
An IS video released by Amaq on Saturday purported to show armed jihadists infiltrating the prison at the start of the operation.
They raised the group's black flag as they stormed the facility and surrounded what appears to be a group of prison guards.
AFP could not independently verify the authenticity of the footage.
It was not immediately clear whether the prison break was part of a centrally coordinated operation -- timed to coincide with an attack on a military base in neighbouring Iraq -- or the action of a local IS cell.
'Fat target' Analyst Nicholas Heras of the Newlines Institute in Washington said the jihadist group targeted the prison to bolster its numbers.
The Islamic State group "wants to move beyond being the terrorist and criminal network that it has devolved into, and to do that it needs more fighters," he told AFP.
"Prison breaks represent the best opportunity for ISIS to regain its strength in arms, and Ghwayran prison is a nice fat target for ISIS because it's overcrowded," he said, using another acronym for IS. The Kurdish authorities have long warned they do not have the capacity to hold, let alone put on trial, the thousands of IS fighters captured in years of operations.
They say more than 50 nationalities are represented in Kurdish-run prisons, where more than 12,000 IS suspects are now held.
Many of the prisoners' countries of origins have been reluctant to repatriate them, fearing a public backlash at home.
The autonomous administration's top foreign policy official, Abdulkarim Omar, blamed the prison attack on the "international community's failure to shoulder its responsibilities".
The war in Syria, which broke out in 2011, has killed close to half a million people and spurred the largest conflict-induced displacement since World War II.
