British firm acquires entire catalog of folk icon Leonard Cohen

Sun, 6 March 2022

Song management firm Hipgnosis says it has acquired rights to 'all 278 songs and derivatives' by Leonard Cohen, pictured December 2021, including the haunting anthem 'Hallelujah' (AFP/Mike Lawrie) (Mike Lawrie)


British song management firm Hipgnosis said Sunday it has acquired the entire catalog of famed Canadian singer-poet Leonard Cohen, in the latest big catalog purchase to hit the music world.

The London-based company said it had acquired rights to "all 278 songs and derivatives" written by Cohen, including the haunting anthem "Hallelujah," which Hipgnosis said had been covered more than 300 times and "streamed more than five billion times."

It did not reveal what it had paid the heirs of the Montreal songwriter, who died at age 82 in 2016.

Cohen's longtime manager Robert Kory represented the heirs in the negotiations.

In all, 127 of the songs come from Cohen's "Stranger Music" catalog, for which Hipgnosis acquired "the songwriter's share" of royalties for songs written up through 2000.

The company said it had also acquired full ownership of copyrights and royalties for the "Old Ideas" catalog, 67 songs written from 2001 to Cohen's death.

"To now be the custodians and managers of Leonard Cohen's incomparable songs is a wonderful yet very serious responsibility," said Hipgnosis founder and CEO Merck Mercuriadis.

"Leonard wrote words and songs that have changed our lives," said the Canadian-born Mercuriadis, who has managed artists including Beyonce, Elton John and Mary J. Blige.

The acquisition was carried out by Hipgnosis Songs Capital, a partnership between Hipgnosis Song Management and Blackstone LLP.

Hipgnosis previously purchased the catalogs of stars including American-Canadian Neil Young and alternative rockers Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Several top artists have sold their catalogs for impressive sums. British singer Sting sold his entire catalog in February for an estimated $250 million, American media reported.

Bruce Springsteen last year sold his musical rights to Sony for an estimated half-billion dollars, a record, while Bob Dylan sold his catalog to Universal Music for some $300 million.

ps/bbk/to

Thousands march in El Salvador to demand abortion rights

Author: AFP|Update: 07.03.2022


Women march in El Salvador on March 6, 2022 to demand the right to abortion / © AFP

Around 2,000 women marched in El Salvador's capital on Sunday to demand the legalization of abortion and a decrease in the killings of women in the Central American country.

With slogans such as "It's my body, abortion is my right," "No more patriarchal violence" and "Women are strong and together we take care of ourselves," they demonstrated in San Salvador wearing purple or green scarves around their necks in anticipation of International Women's Day on March 8.

They called "for abortion to be decriminalized in the country on certain grounds, so that we no longer have women imprisoned, unjustly criminalized for having suffered an obstetric emergency," Morena Herrera, leader of the Citizens' Association for the Decriminalization of Therapeutic, Ethical and Eugenic Abortion (ACDATEE), told AFP.

Herrera said abortion should be decriminalized to save the lives of women and girls; when a fetal malformation incompatible with life outside the womb has been detected; and when the pregnancy is the result of sexual violence.

El Salvador has had an outright ban on abortion since 1998, even in cases of rape or if the health of the woman or fetus are in danger.

Terminating a pregnancy can send a woman to jail for up to eight years, but Salvadoran judges often instead find women guilty of "aggravated homicide," which is punishable by up to 50 years in prison.

Many women are prosecuted after seeking medical help for complications in pregnancy, suspected of having attempted an abortion.

At least a dozen women are currently facing varying sentences for termination of pregnancy.

At the march, the women also demanded that authorities combat femicides in the country.

"Femicides must stop, women have the right to a safe life, no more violent deaths," Abigail Alvarado, a student at the state-run University of El Salvador (UES), told AFP.

Figures from the Observatory of Violence against Women indicated that in 2021, 132 women were murdered, slightly higher than the 130 cases recorded in 2020.

Probe accuses Swiss mining firm of hiding Guatemala pollution

Sun, 6 March 2022

Members of the Guatemalan army patrol the northeastern indigenous municipality El Estor, in October 2021, following protests against the Guatemalan Nickel Company, a subsidiary of Solway Investment Group (AFP/Johan ORDONEZ) (Johan ORDONEZ)

Two subsidiaries of Swiss mining company Solway Investment Group hid reports of pollution in an indigenous area of northeastern Guatemala, an international consortium of media companies said Sunday.

The "Mining Secrets" investigation -- in which 65 journalists from 15 countries participated -- also accused Solway subsidiaries Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN) and PRONICO of intimidation and influence peddling.

The investigation run by the Forbidden Stories NGO "reveals the strategies that Solway has used to hide, in collusion with authorities, any element that could infer its responsibility in serious cases of environmental pollution."

Solway has rejected the accusations, telling AFP in a statement it had reviewed the research in the investigation and found it to be "false."

According to the investigation, one of those cases was the appearance of a large red slick in Lake Izabal, the largest in Guatemala and which adjoins the company's nickel processing plant in Izabal department.

Both the company and the state blamed algae for the patch.

That sparked a protest from local fishermen, who blamed the miner for the slick. One protester, Carlos Maaz, was shot dead during a clash with police.

But investigators said documents and emails obtained by Guatemalan hackers "disprove official statements and confirm the fishermen's intuition."

According to the investigation, an internal PRONICO communication acknowledged that some mining deposits reached the lake "following heavy rainfall."

The consortium of journalists, including some from Spain's El Pais and Le Monde in France, said they had evidence that reporters were spied on, local community leaders were intimidated and manipulated, and the company had relations with a judge and "paid the police to end the protests."

In October, a group of indigenous people blocked off the town of El Estor, where the processing plant is located, for several days, alleging that the company was failing to comply with a court ruling to cease mining.

The government and the company both insisted that the court ruling only prevented PRONICO from extracting from its Fenix mine but not from continuing to process minerals mined from other plants.

Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei sent military personnel to the area, while police used tear gas to clear protesters.

Local activists accused security forces of intimidation and carrying out raids.

hma/yow/bc/to

Roger Stone said Trump's presidency was the 'greatest single mistake in American history' in video tapes obtained by WaPo

Alia Shoaib
Roger Stone, a former adviser and confidante to former U.S. President Donald Trump, addresses reporters in Washington, DC on December 17, 2021.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images


Roger Stone was furious with Trump for not issuing preemptive pardons for him and other allies, per WaPo.

The Post viewed 20 hours of documentary footage of Stone filmed by Danish filmmakers.

The videos reveal Stone's role in trying to overturn the 2020 election and events surrounding January 6.

Longtime GOP strategist and Trump ally Roger Stone said Donald Trump's presidency was the "greatest single mistake in American history," in footage obtained by The Washington Post.

The Washington Post said it had viewed 20 hours of footage of Stone filmed by Danish filmmakers for an upcoming documentary titled "A Storm Foretold."

Stone was filmed for two years, including on January 6, 2021, as the Capitol riot unfolded.

The footage reveals that Stone was furious with outgoing president Trump for issuing a blanket pardon to protect himself and other Trump allies from prosecution over their attempts to overturn the 2020 election but had ignored his wish-list, It included Michael Sessa and Victor Orena, former members of the Colombo crime family serving life sentences for murder and racketeering convictions in the 1990s, said the Washington Post.

On Inauguration day, Stone was filmed talking to a friend and savagely criticizing Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner – "he needs to have a beating" – before rounding on the former president dubbing him the "greatest single mistake in American history."

Stone was also recorded saying he would support Trump's impeachment in a video published by The Post.

"I'm done with this president. I'm going to go public supporting impeachment. I have no choice. He has to go. He has to go. Run again! You'll get your fucking brains beat in," Stone said in the clip, appearing to mock any future presidential runs by Trump.

However, a few weeks later, Stone said he would support a Trump 2024 presidential bid.

In the footage, Stone seemed especially enraged that the former president had on that day pardoned his former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who was facing federal fraud charges, The Post said.

Stone and Bannon have long feuded after the latter testified in Stone's 2019 obstruction trial, which resulted in him being sentenced to 40 months in prison. Trump later commuted Stone's sentence and then issued a full pardon.
Stone denied any involvement in the Capitol riot

The footage obtained by The Post helps piece together Stone's activities following the 2020 election, as he worked to help overturn the results, and his involvement in the January 6 rallies in Washington culminating in the Capitol attack.

Stone worked behind the scenes to promote the "Stop the Steal" movement, which spread false election fraud conspiracy theories, and galvanized Trump supporters in the lead up to January 6, the outlet reported.

Roger Stone leaves after speaking to supporters of US President Donald Trump outside the US Supreme Court January 5, 2021, in Washington, DC. 

Brendan Smialowski/ AFP via Getty Images

While Stone was initially billed as a top-tier speaker at the January 6 rally, footage filmed by the Danish filmmakers reveals that Stone ultimately did not attend because organizers had not secured him VIP access to reach the stage.

The filmmakers filmed Stone in his hotel room at the Willard Hotel, packing up to leave DC as he watched the riot unfolding on TV.

Stone appears to condemn the riot, saying: "I think it's really bad for the movement. This hurts. It doesn't help."

However, he repeated false claims about the 2020 election being stolen and suggested that violence was inevitable, The Post said.

The footage also reveals that Stone met with and corresponded with members of far-right militia groups, including Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, before and after January 6.

The cameras captured Stone being guarded on January 5 by multiple Oath Keepers, including Joshua James and Brian Ulrich, as well as James inside Stone's suite in the hours before the riot, The Post reported.

Rhodes, James, and Ulrich have all been charged with seditious conspiracy concerning the Capitol riot.

Stone denied any involvement in the Capitol riot in an email to The Post.

"Any claim, assertion or implication that I knew about, was involved in or condoned the illegal acts at the Capitol on Jan 6 is categorically false and there is no witness or document that proves otherwise," he said.

He also suggested without proof that the video clips of him could be "deep fakes."

Insider reached out to Roger Stone for comment but had not heard back at the time of publishing.

Dogs can get a canine form of dementia — and it is very similar to the human version

Matthew Rozsa, Salon
March 06, 2022

Dog (Shutterstock)

If you have ever been close with a dog, the chances are that you have wondered what your canine companion might be thinking. As time goes on and your relationship grows — whether as a primary owner, a family member or an occasional visitor — you will probably ask yourself if the dog remembers you. Like our human friends and family, we would like to think that, even if we are not in the room, dogs still think about us.

Scientists agree dogs are intelligent, emotional and capable of forming lasting relationships with humans. While there is robust debate about the extent to which this is true, animals like Bunny the "talking" sheepadoodle are able to communicate in such a sophisticated manner that they will even discuss their dreams.

The bad news is that, just like humans, dogs can develop degenerative nerve diseases which damage their minds. One illness in particular has a direct analogue in dogs: Alzheimer's disease. Dogs, sadly, can develop a similar condition — and tragically, that might mean that your dog could suffer some of the same sad Alzheimer's-like conditions, such as forgetting its close family, in its final days.

"Canine Cognitive Dysfunction [CCD] mirrors two key components of Alzheimer's disease in humans," Dr. Silvan Urfer of the Dog Aging Project and the University of Washington told Salon by email. It comes down to a pair of amino acids that will suddenly accumulate in your brain: Amyloid-beta 42 and hyperphosphorylated Tau (pTau). "While there are likely a few differences regarding the details of pTau pathology in particular, it is fair to say that CCD is the dog analog of Alzheimer's Disease," Urfer noted.

Dr. Elizabeth Head, a professor in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine at the University of California, Irvine, told Salon in writing that in addition to developing these beta-amyloid plaques — one of the hallmark features of Alzheimer disease — the dogs also suffer like humans, in that neurons die. The synapses, or connections between neurons, are lost, and these are observed in humans who as they age suffer from cognitive decline.

"From a psychological perspective dogs may show signs of disrupted sleep patterns (e.g. up pacing at night), more vocalizing, [being unable to] remember how to signal to go out and may have trouble recognizing family members," Head explained. "This can lead to more anxiety. From a physical perspective, there may be more episodes of incontinence but oftentimes other physical problems are ruled out with the CCD diagnosis (e.g. deafness, blindness, systemic illness)."

Indeed, the similarities between CCD and human dementia are so striking that researchers believe man's best friend could actually help him find a cure for the debilitating ailment. There is a nationwide study known as The Dog Aging Project — which was launched by Cornell University, the University of Washington and the University of Arizona and funded by the National Institute on Aging — which exists precisely because scientists are intrigued by those similarities. They believe that learning more about how to help dogs with the condition can, in the process, provide research data that helps fight human diseases related to senescence.

"What we're trying to do is find a better understanding of the disease in dogs and translate those findings to humans," Dr. Marta Castelhano, director of the Cornell Veterinary Biobank and one of the involved scientists, told Cornell News at the time.

Until a cure for CCD exists, the sad reality is that dogs and humans alike who experience cognitive decline will be left to manage their symptoms to the best of their ability. When speaking with Salon, Urfer stressed that he is "not providing veterinary advice on individual dogs, as there is no vet-patient-client relationship here." People who are concerned about their dogs should consult a veterinarian. What we do know for sure, however, is that causal treatments do not exist for CCD. All we know is that there are certain physical characteristics that make dogs more or less likely to be at risk.

"We know that bigger dogs have a lower risk of developing CCD than small dogs, and there is also some evidence that intact males have a lower CCD risk than neutered males, and that existing CCD progresses faster in neutered than in intact males," Urfer explained. "This is interesting in that it also mirrors findings from human medicine that taller people are less likely to get Alzheimer's disease, and that men who undergo anti-androgen treatment for prostate cancer have an increased Alzheimer's disease risk."

If your dog is healthy now, then the best thing to do is make sure they stay healthy. That can prevent CCD from developing. It is the exact same as the approach for homo sapiens.

"The best approach is always prevention – ensure good physical health (e.g. keep up with dentals), exercise, lots of social and cognitive enrichment, and a good diet, manage co-occuring conditions (e.g. obesity) – just like for people!" Head told Salon.

Satellite internet services like Elon Musk's Starlink won't make giant undersea cables extinct, experts

Kate Duffy
Sat, 5 March 2022

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.Patrick Pleul/picture alliance via Getty Images.

Satellite internet like Elon Musk's Starlink won't make undersea cables extinct, experts say.

They told Insider that satellite systems and submarine telecoms cables would exist side by side.

Cables are cheap and have great capacity but satellite systems are better for rural areas, they said.

Satellite internet constellations like SpaceX's Starlink and Amazon's Project Kuiper won't lead to the extinction of giant undersea telecoms cables, industry experts say.

Over the past year, thousands of satellites have been launched into orbit to build out internet service for people on Earth. Elon Musk's Starlink has about 2,000 satellites in orbit presently, and plans to have 42,000 by mid-2027. Amazon's Project Kuiper constellation plans to put more than 3,000 satellites in orbit, while the UK's OneWeb has already launched more than 400 satellites.

Meanwhile, there are more than 400 undersea internet cables connecting the world.

While undersea cables handle hundreds of terabits of data per second and can connect entire continents, satellite internet systems target individual homes, businesses, and communities in rural, underserved, and remote locations.

Brian Lavallée, a senior director at telecoms equipment supplier Ciena, said satellite internet networks and undersea cables were "highly complementary" and not intended to compete against each other.

"Think of satellite networks as on-ramps to highways with the highways being the submarine networks," he told Insider. "For small islands with no submarine cables, satellite networks are a viable, or sometimes the only, alternative."

He added: "Satellite internet access is not likely to overtake undersea cable infrastructure in our lifetime, primarily because they're not intended to compete."

Howard Kidorf, managing partner of undersea telecoms consultancy Pioneer Consulting, said satellite networks were "synergistic" and posed "no threat" to undersea cables.

"When it comes to delivering traffic to underserved regions, either in the United States, Africa, or Australia, yes, the satellite constellations are the game-changer," he told Insider.

Satellite networks have a key advantage over undersea cable networks: If a satellite network already serves a particular area, users need only buy an uplink kit to get online. Meanwhile, it takes weeks or months to lay an undersea internet cable – and that's not including the planning process beforehand, which can take up to two years because permitting, environmental, and regulatory hurdles need to be jumped.

Satellite systems are expensive, though. Musk said Starlink would likely need up to $30 billion in investment to become a viable business. Submarine cables are "tremendously cheaper" by comparison, Kidof said, costing the industry around $2 billion a year.

In January, Tonga was hit by a volcanic eruption that triggered a tsunami and severed the island's 514-mile undersea internet cable, cutting off the country's communication links to the rest of the world. SpaceX's Starlink jumped in to restore Tonga's internet while the cable was repaired.

But even if Starlink had been up and running before the eruption, it might not have helped maintain Tonga's connection, Lavallée suggested.

"The undersea volcano spewed a giant plume of dust and ash into the atmosphere, which could adversely affect or outright block communications between satellites and ground stations, even if you had sufficient satellite connectivity," he said.

Elon Musk says Starlink was told to block Russian news sources but it will not do so unless forced 'at gunpoint'

Sam Tabahriti

Elon Musk said he was "sorry to be a free speech absolutist." 


SpaceX's Starlink was told by some governments to block Russian news sources, Elon Musk says.
On Saturday, Musk tweeted that the company would not do so "unless at gunpoint."
Musk had previously shared concerns over Starlink systems being targeted in Ukraine.

SpaceX's Elon Musk tweeted on Saturday that Starlink was told by some governments to block Russian news sources.

Musk said on Twitter: "Starlink has been told by some governments (not Ukraine) to block Russian news sources."

"We will not do so unless at gunpoint," he added. "Sorry to be a free speech absolutist."

SpaceX did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

On Friday, the CEO warned Starlink systems could be "targeted" in Ukraine and advised people to use it with caution as the system "is the only non-Russian communications system still working in some parts of Ukraine," Insider reported.

Musk said in another tweet, minutes before announcing that it would not block Russia's news outlets: "SpaceX reprioritized to cyber defense & overcoming signal jamming."

He added that it "will cause slight delays in Starship & Starlink V2."

Musk said on February 27 that SpaceX had activated its Starlink internet service in Ukraine after pleas from Mykhailo Fedorov, vice prime minister and the minister of digital transformation, to provide more Starlink stations as the Russian invasion is disrupting the country's internet services.

Insider's Kate Duffy reported recently that a Starlink customer in Ukraine said he had readied his satellite internet dish for emergency use, in case regular broadband services were cut during Russia's invasion.

In early February, SpaceX launched a faster version of the satellite internet service, called Starlink Premium. It said the version was designed for better performance in extreme weather conditions.

Elon Musk says SpaceX focusing on cyber defense after Starlink signals jammed near Ukraine conflict areas


By Tariq Malik 

Starship and Starlink V2 progress will be delayed, Musk said.

A fleet of SpaceX Starlink internet satellites is seen poised for deployment in orbit in this file image from a May 24, 2019 launch. (Image credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said Friday that his company is now focusing on cyber defense and overcoming signal jamming of its Starlink internet satellites amid Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Musk and SpaceX sent Starlink terminals to Ukraine at the request of a government official after internet service was disrupted across the country by the Russian invasion. A shipment of Starlink ground terminals, which use an antenna and terminal to access the satellite broadband service, arrived in Ukraine by Monday Feb. 28). With the terminals in use, SpaceX is working to keep them online, Musk said.

"Some Starlink terminals near conflict areas were being jammed for several hours at a time," Musk wrote in a Twitter statement Friday (March 1). "Our latest software update bypasses the jamming."
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Related: How will Ukraine keep SpaceX's Starlink internet service online?

Photos: Russia's invasion of Ukraine as seen in satellite images

Americans Will Fly Broomsticks Instead of Russian Rockets, and Elon Musk Has the Best Kind

5 Mar 2022, 08:14 UTC

 

by Elena Gorgan 

As Russia continues its violent invasion of neighboring country Ukraine, no-longer-veiled threats against the United States and NATO members are coming from all sides. The International Space Station (ISS) and whatever agreements Russia had with other countries for space exploration are also subject to them.

 6 photos

On March 3, Roscosmos chief Dmitry Rogozin announced that Russia would no longer supply rocket engines to the United States, or offer service and maintenance to those already delivered. As per an ongoing agreement, Russia delivered 122 RD-180 engines to the U.S. since ‘90s, of which 98 were used to power NASA launch vehicles, and 24 were still in use.

Rogozin went on state television to say that the U.S. would not be getting any more rocket engines and that those 24 were now officially without service, Reuters reports. The announcement came as response to the decision to impose sanctions against Russia for the Ukraine invasion, Rogozin added, and it would leave Americans without a means to get to space.

“In a situation like this we can't supply the United States with our world's best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don't know what,” he said.

A few years ago, Rogozin told the national media that Americans would have to use trampolines to launch themselves into space if it were not for Russian tech, so a flying broomstick would be a step forward either way. As luck would have it, Elon Musk has just the perfect kind of flying, American-made broomstick and, no, he didn’t steal it from a witch.

The SpaceX CEO is clearly keeping very close tabs on the Ukraine crisis, and how it has already and could further impact space exploration. After previously saying he would “save” the ISS should Russia decide to stop powering it and just let it drop from space onto whatever piece of land they wanted, Musk is now offering his very own broomstick as a good replacement for Russian rocket engines.

“American Broomsticks,” Musk tweeted, adding a video of Falcon 9 launching 47 Starlink satellites into orbit.

SpaceX is already a partner for NASA, but Musk is determined to show that it could successfully substitute for Russia in every aspect used by Roscosmos and Rogozin as some sort of leverage against the U.S.

Editor's note: Photos in the gallery show the SpaceX American Broomstick, also known as Falcon 9.

Too much reality: Putin's Ukraine invasion summons Europe's dark past

Is Putin Hitler?

 It's the wrong question: He must be stopped long before we get anywhere near that point

By JIM SLEEPER
PUBLISHED MARCH 1,2022

A view of damage due to armed conflict between Russia, Ukraine in Donetsk region under the control of pro-Russian separatists, eastern Ukraine on February 28, 2022. Stringer/Anadolu Agency via Getty 

"Humankind cannot bear very much reality," T.S. Eliot once noted. Americans, especially, have what the historian Louis Hartz called a "vast and almost charming innocence of mind." But we can't afford any willed innocence about Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin has reduced Russia to a failed state that runs on thuggery, cyber-piracy, gas and war, and all this has been getting cover from Putin's longtime sycophant Donald Trump and his Republicans, not least through the recently concluded Conservative Political Action Conference. Putin must be stopped by force, and his American apologists must be thoroughly discredited, much as Hitler and Mussolini and their American apologists and collaborators were, even if doing so requires pain and sacrifice from the rest of us.

What T.S. Eliot called "very much reality" doesn't stop there.

Putin has suggested that Russian forces will round up and kill anyone who resists the invasion. He is trapped in the past, mourning the Soviet Union's collapse, whose redress, he believes, will be his legacy to Russia, it isn't hard to imagine Russian soldiers collecting Ukrainian resisters, including civilians in street clothes who fired guns or threw Molotov cocktails at Russian troops, and massacring them on Putin's orders.
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RELATED: Right's desperate Putin pivot: CPAC derailed by Ukraine invasion, struggles to blame "wokeness"

Soviet soldiers did precisely that, on Joseph Stalin's orders, in April and May of 1940, when they massacred nearly 22,000 Polish army officers, police, landowners, factory owners, lawyers, officials and priests and left them in mass graves. (Many of the victims were Ukrainians and Jews, including the chief rabbi of the Polish Army.)

Of course it's true that most mass killings in Eastern Europe in that period, including the horrific massacres in Kharkiv, now Ukraine's second-largest city, were committed not by Russians but by the German occupiers after 1941. It's also true that many in the Soviet republics, such as Ukraine and the Baltic countries, welcomed the Germans at first as their liberators from the Soviet boot, and that many of their citizens collaborated with them in murdering Jews.

Photos taken by the Nazis in Ukraine in 1941 to document what they and some Ukrainians were doing, too horrifying for me to display here, can be seen easily enough at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. We don't know whether Putin could do anything similar to Ukrainian resisters.

I admit to being sensitive about this. Although my Lithuanian-Jewish grandparents came to America in 1909, they had siblings, cousins and elders who were terminated in 1941, in much the same way as the mass killings in Ukraine.

In 2002, I went to the sites where they'd been slaughtered, and I stood in a Lithuanian Jewish State Museum reading English translations of Nazi Einsatzgruppen reports about Lithuanians who worked with and for the Nazis. "Work" like that was done throughout Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, as recounted in the historian Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" and in Jan and Irena Gross' "Golden Harvest," the latter showing how thousands of Poles raided the homes of Jews who'd been taken to slaughter, even extracting gold fillings from the teeth of the corpses.

The Einsatzgruppen documents report that some Lithuanians got drunk even while machine-gunning their victims under German supervision because they didn't "like the work" and wanted to dull their pain and disgust. A few even went AWOL.

I abhor what Putin is doing and threatening to do, and support Ukrainians' truly heroic resistance to it. They're also redeeming their country from part of its past by standing with a president who happens to be Jewish.

But I can't forget — and dread any renewed possibility — of the "very much reality," mentioned by Eliot, that's depicted in photos that perhaps we can't bear to see but no willed innocence of mind can prevent. Read the lines below from W.H. Auden, who felt it all coming in 1939, and then a few lines from me about an arresting moment I experienced in Berlin on Holocaust Memorial Day, more than a decade ago.

From W.H. Auden, "Ode to W.B. Yeats," January 1939:

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
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To solace myself, I add some lines of my own, first published by the Washington Monthly in 2018. Some of it may appear outdated, but not by much.

Donald J. Trump isn't a Nazi, although his father came close. It's true that historical analogies between Trump's policies and Hitler's are often facile, and sometimes dangerously misleading. But here's one that I'm not inclined to shrug off.

During a long stay in Berlin in 2009, I went often to the Grunewald railway station to have my coffee. It's a picturesque little station, built in the 1899, fronted by a cobblestone square and surrounded by splendid, well-preserved villas of that period.

It's also the point from which more than 50,000 Berlin Jews were shipped to concentration camps, a few hundred a week, from 1942 to 1945. At the station's Track 17, a steel strip along the platform edge records, in raised letters, each week's shipment of several hundred "Juden" to Theresienstadt, Minsk, Riga, Kaunas, Łódź and, later, directly to Auschwitz and other death camps.

It's hard for most Americans, especially those of us whose parents fought in World War II, to imagine that people who boarded the trains had no idea of what lay ahead. Yet, although Jews had been vilified and some attacked on the streets since 1938, some things remained unthinkable to Berlin Jews, most of whom had been middle-class, law-abiding citizens since birth. They showed up at station on the appointed dates, children and luggage in tow, for what they'd been told would be deportation to resettlement and work centers. At worst, they expected something like what Japanese-Americans experienced in internment camps on our own West Coast during the same war.

Under the watchful eyes of German police, they took their seats in ordinary passenger coaches for many of these departures. Only later, far beyond Berlin, were they transferred to box cars. Some time after that, postcards they hadn't written were sent to relatives or acquaintances whom they'd listed with the authorities, assuring them that all was well in their new locations. ...

I recount this now because some Americans remind me of Berlin Jews who didn't think the unthinkable when they should have. After watching the Trump administration tear apart weeping parents and children — on the initiative of its senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who's Jewish — I'm thinking that although Trump has now found it politically expedient to halt the practice, more than a few of my fellow Americans were thinking, "Well, they deserve it, unlike me, a law-abiding citizen, and a veteran."

Those Berlin Jews had been law-abiding citizens, too, at least until 1935, and more than a few were military veterans: Some 12,000 of the Jews who had served in the German military had fallen in World War I. In an irony beyond ironies, it was a Jewish lieutenant, Hugo Gutmann, who secured an Iron Cross, First Class, for a 29-year-old corporal under his command, Adolf Hitler.

Read the rest of my historical analogy here.

JIM SLEEPER is the author of "Liberal Racism" (1997) and "The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York" (1990).MORE FROM JIM SLEEPER

Ukraine and the dark lessons of war: What does it mean to 'take' a country or a city?

Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
March 05, 2022

Ukraine Rebel troops (AFP)

Kherson, a port city in the south of Ukraine, has fallen to Russian forces. It is an important port on the Dnieper River delta, and military strategists say that now that the Russians have taken Kherson, they can turn their attention to Odessa to the west, Ukraine's third largest city, a major port and a center of tourism on the Black Sea.

This article first appeared in Salon.

Meanwhile to the north, Ukraine's two largest cities, Kyiv and Kharkiv, remain under siege, with Russian forces targeting civilian neighborhoods indiscriminately. According to the UN, the number of civilians killed by Russian bombs and shelling is approaching 1,000, but judging from what I've seen in television coverage, it's likely much higher. A video on the website of the New York Times on Thursday showed what appear to be projectiles fired from a Russian rocket launcher hitting a civilian neighborhood in Chernihiv, a city to the east and north of Kyiv. You can see civilian pedestrians on the street near where the rockets were about to hit, and then you can't see them. The video has red circles picking out six rocket warheads as they fly in and strike the street and surrounding buildings.

I've also seen a video showing cluster munitions striking an apartment complex in Kharkiv. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons that are banned under international agreements that Russia and the U.S., among others, have not signed. There are no concentrations of Ukrainian army forces on battlefields in this war against which cluster munitions could legitimately be used. The fact that these bombs are landing in neighborhoods populated entirely by civilians suggests that Russian forces have been issued the munitions specifically to target civilian human beings.

Numerous photographs emerged this week of extensive damage to civilian neighborhoods in various cities in Ukraine showing the faces of apartment complexes entirely blown off, fires in what appear to be office and apartment buildings, and other damage to civilian areas.

What does it mean to "take" a city like Kyiv or Kharkiv or Kherson? Russian military commanders have clearly been ordered to "take" these Ukrainian population centers in the process of conquering and occupying the entire country. But from video footage of this war — and from the evidence of every other war in history — "taking" a city pretty much means destroying it, as in the famous GI saying that became a symbol of the Vietnam War: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

What is the purpose of an aggressor "taking" a city, or even the entire country, if in the process you are destroying the thing you say you want? If you are the one who ordered the invasion — in this case, Vladimir Putin — what do you do after you have "taken" a country you have destroyed, and how do you plan to deal with a population you have devastated by intentionally killing them with your military forces?

The contrast between "taking" a city or a country and what happens after that defines the essence of war. Look at Aleppo, for example, one of the Syrian cities the Russian air force was credited with helping to "take" from rebel forces opposing the Assad regime. Aleppo is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and one of the capitals of the cradle of civilization. It has a history that goes back to a time before the Babylonian and Assyrian empires. Dozens if not hundreds of wars were fought over thousands of years between rulers of Aleppo and the kings and potentates of Ur and Babylon, in what is now Iraq, and the Egyptian empire. Aleppo was destroyed and rebuilt again and again. The ruins of Assad's and Russia's war on Aleppo sit on top of the ruins of one king's destroyed empire after another.

In the modern context, that's exactly what is happening today in Ukraine. The Russian army has been ordered to "take" Ukraine, and in so doing it is destroying Ukraine's cities and killing its citizens. In the coming days, we will no doubt see the ruins of onion-domed Orthodox cathedrals that have been destroyed in Kyiv and Kharkiv. I looked at Google Maps to check out Chernihiv, the city mentioned above that was hit hard by Russian rockets and artillery on Wednesday and Thursday. Along with several elaborate Orthodox cathedrals, there is something called the Hollywood Mall in Chernihiv located next to the Hypermarket Vena and the city's Hospital No. 2. Already we are seeing videos and reading reports of hospitals and schools destroyed in Kyiv, and I expect that soon we will see the ruins of the Hollywood Mall in Chernihiv alongside a hospital battered by Russian artillery shells and rockets.

There is a contradiction between the orders given in wars and what those orders accomplish. When armies of aggression invade foreign nations, the homes and apartment buildings and hospitals and grocery stores don't belong to those armies, so they just follow orders and destroy them. Sometimes the destruction occurs by accident, but in the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it is being done on purpose on the orders of the Russian president.

You don't have to take the Ukrainians' word to understand that this is Putin's intent. All you have to do is see that he has issued rocket launchers with thermobaric missiles to his army, with the apparent intention of using them against Ukrainian cities. Thermobaric warheads, also known as "vacuum bombs," are not intended to destroy military fortifications. They have one purpose, and that is to kill human beings by exploding a gas cloud that sucks the oxygen from the air around the explosion, collapsing the lungs of anyone near it. There has been video footage that appears to show these missiles landing in civilian neighborhoods where people are walking down the street. The Russians are not even trying to hide what they're doing. They've allowed American TV reporters to film TOS-1 rocket launchers mounted on T-72 tank chassis as they cross the border into Ukraine on their way to Kharkiv. The only purpose of these rocket launchers is to fire thermobaric warheads.

The defenders of cities and countries under attack by invaders have only one order that they must follow: Defend their land and their homes and their country's treasures at all costs, with their lives if necessary. Their orders contain no contradictions at all. The cities and their buildings and their cathedrals and their homes belong to them. That's why they fight so hard, as the Ukrainians appear to be doing at this very moment. And that's why almost every time the invaders end up being driven away. In Aleppo, that's been going on for thousands of years. The people who live there today are descended from the ancient civilizations that defended the city from Hittites and Assyrians and Phrygians and Babylonians and Persians, and eventually the Macedonians and Byzantines. Now they are rebuilding their city, but if any lesson at all can be learned from history, they will one day be doing it again.

I've been watching the coverage of the war in Ukraine on MSNBC with great interest. One of the sharpest commentators has turned out to be Gen. David Petraeus, who had various commands in both Iraq and Afghanistan and was credited with the "surge" in Iraq that supposedly "won" that war, until it didn't.

As a reporter in Iraq in 2003, I was embedded in the unit Petraeus commanded, the 101st Airborne Division, in Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq. Mosul incorporates Nineveh, the ancient city that was first settled in 6000 B.C. and was the center of the Assyrian Empire around 2000 B.C. — yes, the same Assyrian Empire that included Aleppo. Mosul, which succeeded Nineveh, was conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. and was conquered by other armies along the way. When I was with Petraeus and his division in 2003, they were only the latest in that very, very long line of conquerors.

Petraeus was helpful to me as a reporter. He gave me the run of the region his division had "taken," including Mosul and Tal Afar and other towns his division "held." After I had been there for a while, I discovered something curious. Neither Petraeus nor his brigade commanders — three very talented West Point colonels — seemed to know what they were doing there. They established various base camps, both large and small, their units drove around in Humvees and the commanders flew around in helicopters, but they weren't really doing anything.

One day, when I was in Petraeus' headquarters in a former Saddam Hussein palace in Mosul (where I had gone to take a shower, because the palace had hot water), I asked the general what he was doing in Mosul. The way I put the question was, "General, what were your orders before you left Baghdad for Mosul?" He gave me a blank look, as if he had never been asked that question before. I then asked him, "Were you ordered to 'take Mosul,' for example?" He again looked at me blankly. It wasn't like I was asking him to divulge some top-secret piece of information. His entire division was up there in northern Iraq, right out in the open. The war was being widely covered on television and by newspapers. Everybody knew where the 101st Airborne was in Iraq. I was wondering what they were doing there, so I asked him a third time: "Were your orders, 'Go to Mosul?'" He didn't answer the question directly, but there was enough of a flicker of recognition on his face that I realized I had hit pretty close to the nub of it.

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An entire American infantry division had been ordered to go to Mosul and not told what to do when they got there, other than to do what they were now doing, which was driving around and defending themselves from insurgent attacks, but basically occupying space. Being there. You might say they were engaged in the occupation of Mosul, but that wasn't true, because you can't occupy a city or a country unless you've conquered it, and that wasn't what had happened with the 101st and Mosul.

Petraeus and his soldiers faced different reactions from the citizens of Mosul and northern Iraq. The Kurds were happy they were there. I visited a Kurdish unit at an outpost near the Turkish border, and they couldn't have been nicer to the brigade commander I was with. They served us a lavish lunch and took us all around and showed us their fortifications and told us what they were doing. The Shiites were less happy, but they weren't what you would call angry with Petraeus and his army, because they had been second-class citizens under Saddam and now that the Americans had come, they saw an opportunity to take over from the hated Baath Party of the Sunni tribes loyal to Saddam, who had run the country before the Americans got there. And then there were the former Baath party officials and Sunni commanders and soldiers of Saddam's army. They weren't happy at all, because they had been deposed from power, and they were probably the ones who were laying IEDs and shooting at American soldiers every time they got a chance.

And then it came to me: Petraeus and his division were waiting to be relieved by another American unit so they could go home. I soon discovered they were scheduled to return to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, about a month later. I asked who was coming to replace them and discovered it was a "Stryker" brigade from the 9th Infantry Division, which was downright astounding. Petraeus had about 30,000 troops spread over an area the size of Pennsylvania, and even he admitted he didn't have a large enough force to occupy this area that was full of insurgents who were fighting his soldiers and killing them. And now a unit one-third the size of his division was coming in.

I asked one of the brigade commanders who gave that order, and he answered, "General Rove." He was referring to Karl Rove, the Republican consultant who had run George W. Bush's campaign and was now a senior adviser to the president. The sarcastic referral to Rove as a "general" was because everything coming out of Washington to the American forces in Iraq was being done with an eye to Bush's 2004 re-election campaign. Orders had come down for the 101st and other units in Iraq to lower their casualty rates, because dead American bodies weren't exactly selling well to voters back home. Now "General Rove" was going to send a much smaller force into Mosul, perhaps in hopes that with fewer soldiers, they would suffer fewer casualties. Which was upside down and backward, of course, but then Rove wasn't really a general, so how the hell would he know?

The story of Petraeus and the 101st was essentially the story of America's war in Iraq. Units were sent over there and given tasks like occupying cities and training Iraq's reconstituted army while suffering as few casualties as possible, which was a contradiction in terms because they were in a war. And then those units were sent back to the U.S. and replaced with new units, and so on and so on.

Petraeus returned several times on other missions, and then he was sent to solve the hellish situation the U.S. had gotten ourselves into by 2007 when it appeared to be losing the war. He came up with the "surge" that suppressed opposition for a time and lowered casualties, but it didn't answer the question that I had way back in 2003, which was what the hell was America doing in Iraq?

Our military was also fighting a war in Afghanistan, and in 2010, Petraeus replaced Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces there. By that time, the U.S. had been rather unsuccessfully occupying Afghanistan for almost 10 years — or doing something anyway.

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McChrystal is the other commentator on MSNBC who seems to be on the ball about what is going on over in Ukraine, and it finally dawned on me why these two former American generals understand the situation so well: because they did the same thing to Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. played the role of Russia in those two countries, invading them and trying to occupy them with forces that were too small to accomplish the mission, just as the Russians have. Now Petraeus and McChrystal can sit at home in their studies with a clear understanding of the problems the Russians face in Ukraine — because they faced the same problems themselves. They had to deal with populations that didn't want us there, and were bent on fighting us as fiercely as they could to drive us out. Iraqi and Afghan citizens who didn't want us invading their countries fired RPGs at our vehicles. They set up ambushes to trap our convoys. They fired AK-47s at our soldiers and killed them.

We fought the insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan, but neither Petraeus nor McChrystal nor the soldiers they commanded did what the Russians are doing in Ukraine: purposefully targeting civilians and civilian neighborhoods and hospitals and schools with thermobaric missiles and cluster bombs. But thousands of civilians were killed in both conflicts. The Watson Institute at Brown University has attempted to count civilian deaths in its "Costs of War" study. According to the institute, civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were caused by airstrikes, crossfire, IEDs, assassinations, bombings, night raids on suspected enemy positions, including civilian homes, and other causes. It is unknown how many civilian deaths are attributable to American forces, but the Watson Institute estimates that 71,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan and somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 were killed in Iraq.

When I was in Iraq, I saw the discipline involved in keeping American soldiers who were under attack every day by an enemy they couldn't see from striking out indiscriminately against the neighborhoods from which hostile fire was coming. American forces made mistakes and civilians were killed, but they didn't launch a campaign of terror against a civilian population the way the Russians appear to be doing in Ukraine.

The Russians invaded Ukraine without provocation, and they are attempting to subjugate and occupy it by attacking not just its army, but its entire population. You would think they would have learned from what happened to them in Afghanistan in 1980 when they were driven out of that country in abject defeat, and you would think they would have learned from the way the U.S. lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They obviously haven't.

Petraeus and McChrystal understand exactly what's going to happen to the Russians in Ukraine, because it's the same thing that happened to our army in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Russians will end up being driven out of Ukraine by the people who live there, because the cities the invaders have been ordered to "take" belong to the people who are defending them. Like the Iraqis and the Afghans, the Ukrainians mean it, and that is why they will end up winning the war the Russians have brought to their country.

That is why the city of Mosul is still there and David Petraeus is gone, and it's why Kabul is still there and Stanley McChrystal is gone. The citizens of Mosul and Kabul meant it when they told the Americans to get the hell out of their cities and go home. That's why the city of Aleppo, damaged as it may be, is still there and will be rebuilt as it has been for thousands of years, and that's why the Russians who bombed it are now bombing other cities in another country. Aleppo has been destroyed and rebuilt for millennia by the people who fought to defend it and those who are descended from the defenders of the past. One of the apparent lessons of history is that wars will never stop being fought over land that one group holds and another group wants.

Wars and the reasons they are fought are stupid because the people who order them are stupid, and that truth hasn't changed for thousands of years. The Russian who ordered his army to "take" a neighboring country that doesn't belong to him will end up in his dacha somewhere in the Ural, just as the American who ordered his army to "take" countries far from his shores has ended up on his ranch somewhere in Texas.

It's always men, and they're always egomaniacal and arrogant and stupid. History marches on and there are ruins to prove it that you can visit all around the world, including right here in the good old U.S. of A. Syria has Aleppo and we have Gettysburg, and soon Ukraine will have Kyiv and Kharkiv and Kherson.

What are thermobaric weapons? And why should they be banned?

The Conversation
March 03, 2022

Thermobaric weapons create a high-temperature fireball and a massive shockwave that literally sucks the air out of any living being in the vicinity.

 Sergei Ilnitsky / EPA

Russian forces in Ukraine may have used thermobaric weapons and cluster bombs, according to reports from the Ukraine government and human rights groups.

If true, this represents an escalation in brutality that should alarm us all.

While cluster munitions are banned by international convention, thermobaric munitions – also known as fuel-air explosive devices, or “vacuum bombs” – are not explicitly prohibited for use against military targets.

These devastating devices, which create an oxygen-eating fireball followed by a deadly shockwave, are far more powerful than most other conventional weapons.

What are thermobaric weapons?

Thermobaric weapons are generally deployed as rockets or bombs, and they work by releasing fuel and explosive charges. Different fuels can be used, including toxic powdered metals and organic matter containing oxidant.

The explosive charge disperses a large cloud of fuel which then ignites in contact with the oxygen in the surrounding air. This creates a high-temperature fireball and a massive shockwave that literally sucks the air out of any living being in the vicinity.

Thermobaric bombs are devastating and effective in urban areas or open conditions, and can penetrate bunkers and other underground locations, starving the occupants of oxygen. There is very little that can protect humans and other life forms from their blast and incendiary effects.

A 1990 CIA report, cited by Human Rights Watch, noted the effects of a thermobaric explosion in a confined space:
Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal, thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness.

A history of horror

Crude versions of thermobaric weapons were developed by Germany during World War Two. Western states, as well as the Soviet Union and latterly Russia, have used them since the 1960s.

The Soviet Union is believed to have used a thermobaric weapon against China during the Sino-Soviet conflict of 1969, and in Afghanistan as part of its takeover of that country in 1979. Moscow also used them in Chechnya, and has reportedly provided them to separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine.

The United States has used these weapons in Vietnam and in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Why some weapons are banned, even in war

Although thermobaric weapons are not yet unequivocally banned, there are several points that argue against their development and use.

International humanitarian law stipulates what is and is not permissible during warfare. There has long been an understanding that even wars have their limits: while some weapons are considered legal, others are not, precisely because they violate key principles of humanitarian law.

A new report from Human Rights Watch makes it clear the Russian invasion of Ukraine is illegal. It draws on the Geneva Conventions to define the illegitimacy of Moscow’s actions, including its use or potential use of particular weapons.

The use of weapons in indiscriminate attacks – those that cannot distinguish between combatants and civilians - is forbidden by the Geneva Conventions.

A thermobaric weapon might be targeted specifically at military installations and personnel, but its effects cannot be contained to one area. In all likelihood, many civilians would be killed if such bombs were used in any city.

Using explosive weapons in populated areas would result in indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks. Aerial bombs, even if aimed at military objectives, pose a grave threat to civilians because of their wide blast radius.

Unnecessary suffering

Efforts to ban these weapons have not yet produced a clear prohibition. The 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (commonly called the “Inhumane Weapons Convention”) addresses incendiary weapons, but states have managed to avoid an explicit ban on thermobaric bombs.

In addition to the impacts on civilians, thermobaric bombs would cause superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering. Under international humanitarian law, they should not be used.

There is a point at which – even if a war is deemed legitimate or “just” – violence must not involve weapons that are excessively cruel or inhumane.

If a weapon is likely to prolong the agony of soldiers (or civilians) or result in superfluous and unacceptable injuries, theoretically its use is not permitted. Thermobaric weapons clearly seem to meet this definition.
Cluster bombs and nuclear weapons

It is not only thermobaric weapons that cause us concern in the current war.

Ukraine’s government and human rights groups say Russia has also used cluster munitions. These are bombs or rockets that release a cluster of smaller “bomblets” over a wide area.

Cluster munitions were banned under an international convention in 2008. Russia has not signed (nor has the US, China or India), but until now it has largely respected the convention’s provisions.

Perhaps of greatest concern, however, is Moscow’s nuclear weapons arsenal. President Vladimir Putin has hinted strongly that he would potentially be willing to use them, putting Russian nuclear forces on high alert and warning that countries which interfere in the invasion will face “consequences you have never seen”.

Russia has around 6,000 nuclear weapons and an escalation of conflict could result in their use – either deliberately or inadvertently during the fog of war.

Putin is not the only one to have made threats like this. The US holds around 5,500 nuclear weapons of its own, and its nuclear policy promises nuclear devastation to opponents.

Even the British and French resort to nuclear pressure, and former US president Donald Trump, when threatening North Korea, used similar language. But Putin’s statement goes beyond even these threats.

It is these very real dangers that led 122 states at the United Nations to vote in favour of developing the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017.

The war in Ukraine is the latest reminder that we must act to eliminate thermobaric, cluster, and nuclear weapons, under strict international control. The stakes are simply too high to allow these dangers to remain.

Marianne Hanson, Associate Professor of International Relations, The University of Queensland

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

Death: How long are we conscious for and does life really flash before our eyes?

The Conversation
March 05, 2022

Brain image (Shutterstock)

The first time I reached past the sheer horror of the concept of death and wondered what the experience of dying may be like, I was about 15. I had just discovered gruesome aspects of the French revolution and how heads were neatly cut off the body by a Guillotine.

Words I remember to this day were the last of Georges Danton on April 5, 1794, who allegedly said to his executioner: “Show my head to the people, it is worth seeing.” Years later, having become a cognitive neuroscientist, I started wondering to what extent a brain suddenly separated from the body could still perceive its environment and perhaps think.

Danton wanted his head to be shown, but could he see or hear the people? Was he conscious, even for a brief moment? How did his brain shut down?

On June 14, 2021, I was violently reminded of these questions. I set off to Marseille, France, having been summoned to Avignon by my mother because my brother was in a critical state, a few days after being suddenly diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. But when I landed, I was told my brother had passed away four hours ago. An hour later, I found him perfectly still and beautiful, his head slightly turned to the side as if he was in a deep state of sleep. Only he was not breathing anymore and he was cold to the touch.

No matter how much I refused to believe it on that day, and during the several months that followed, my brother’s extraordinarily bright and creative mind had gone, vaporised, only to remain palpable in the artworks he left behind. Yet, in the last moment I was given to spend with his lifeless body in a hospital room, I felt the urge to speak to him.


What can brain waves really tell us?
Shutterstock

And I did, despite 25 years of studying the human brain and knowing perfectly well that about six minutes after the heart stops, and the blood supply to the brain is interrupted, the brain essentially dies. Then, deterioration reaches a point of no return and core consciousness – our ability to feel that we are here and now, and to recognise that thoughts we have are own own – is lost. Could there be anything of my beloved brother’s mind left to hear my voice and generate thoughts, five hours after he had passed away?
Some scientific experiments

Experiments have been conducted in an attempt to better understand reports from people who have had a near death experience. Such an event has been associated with out-of-body experiences, a sense profound bliss, a calling, a seeing of a light shining above, but also profound bursts of anxiety or complete emptiness and silence. One key limitation of studies looking into such experiences is that they focus too much of the nature of the experiences themselves and often overlook the context preceding them.

Some people, having undergone anaesthesia while in good shape or having been involved in a sudden accident leading to instant loss of consciousness have little ground to experience deep anxiety as their brain commences to shut down. On the contrary, someone who has a protracted history of a serious illness might be more likely to get a rough ride.

It isn’t easy to get permissions to study what actually goes on in the brain during our last moments of life. But a recent paper examined electrical brain activity in an 87-year-old man who had suffered a head injury in a fall, as he passed away following a series of epileptic seizures and cardiac arrest. While this was the first publication of such data collected during the transition from life to death, the paper is highly speculative when it comes to possible “experiences of the mind” that accompany the transition to death.

The researchers discovered that some brain waves, called alpha and gamma, changed pattern even after blood had stopped flowing to the brain. “Given that cross-coupling between alpha and gamma activity is involved in cognitive processes and memory recall in healthy subjects, it is intriguing to speculate that such activity could support a last ‘recall of life’ that may take place in the near-death state,” they write.

However, such coupling is not uncommon in the healthy brain – and does not necessarily mean that life is flashing before our eyes. What’s more, the study did not answer my basic question: how long does it take after the cessation of oxygen supply to the brain for the essential neural activity to disappear? The study only reported on brain activity recorded over a period of about 15 minutes, including a few minutes after death.

In rats, experiments have established that after a few seconds, consciousness is lost. And after 40 seconds, the great majority of neural activity has disappeared. Some studies have also shown that this brain shutdown is accompanied by a release of serotonin, a chemical associated with arousal and feelings of happiness.

But what about us? If humans can be resuscitated after six, seven, eight or even ten minutes in extreme cases, it could theoretically be hours before their brain shuts down completely.

I have come across a number of theories trying to explain why life would be flashing before someone’s eyes as the brain prepares to die. Maybe it is a completely artificial effect associated with the sudden surge of neural activity as the brain begins to shut down. Maybe it is a last resort, defence mechanism of the body trying to overcome imminent death. Or maybe it is a deeply rooted, genetically programmed reflex, keeping our mind “busy” as clearly the most distressing event of our entire life unfolds.

My hypothesis is somewhat different. Maybe our most essential existential drive is to understand the meaning of our own existence. If so, then, seeing one’s life flashing before one’s eye might be our ultimate attempt – however desperate – to find an answer, necessarily fast-tracked because we are running out of time.

And whether or not we succeed or get the illusion that we did, this must result in absolute mental bliss. I hope that future research in the field, with longer measurements of neural activity after death, perhaps even brain imaging, will provide support for this idea – whether it lasts minutes or hours, for the sake of my brother, and that of all of us.

Guillaume Thierry, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Bangor University