With eye to China investment, Taliban now preserve Buddhas

By SAMYA KULLAB

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In this photograph made on Tuesday, Oct. 12, 2010 in Mes Aynak valley, south of Kabul, Afghanistan, Buddha statues are seen inside an ancient temple. The valley is the world's second-largest unexploited copper estimated to be worth nearly $1 trillion. 

(AP Photo/Dusan Vranic, File)


MES AYNAK, Afghanistan (AP) — The ancient Buddha statues sit in serene meditation in the caves carved into the russet cliffs of rural Afghanistan. Hundreds of meters below lies what is believed to be the world’s largest deposit of copper.

Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers are pinning their hopes on Beijing to turn that rich vein into revenue to salvage the cash-starved country amid crippling international sanctions.

The fighters standing guard by the rocky hillside may once have considered destroying the terracotta Buddhas. Two decades ago when the Islamic hard-line Taliban were first in power, they sparked world outrage by blowing up gigantic Buddha statues in another part of the country, calling them pagan symbols that must be purged.

But now they are intent on preserving the relics of the Mes Aynak copper mine. Doing so is key to unlocking billions in Chinese investment, said Hakumullah Mubariz, the Taliban head of security at the site, peering into the remnants of a monastery built by first-century Buddhist monks.

“Protecting them is very important to us and the Chinese,” he said.

Previously, Mubariz commanded a Taliban combat unit in the surrounding mountains battling with U.S.-backed Afghan forces. When those troops capitulated last year, his men rushed to secure the site. “We knew it would be important for the country,” he said.

The Taliban’s spectacular reversal illustrates the powerful allure of Afghanistan’s untapped mining sector. Successive authorities have seen the country’s mineral riches, estimated to be worth $1 trillion, as the key to a prosperous future, but none have been able to develop them amid the continual war and violence. Now, multiple countries, including Iran, Russia and Turkey are looking to invest, filling the vacuum left in the wake of the chaotic U.S. withdrawal.

But Beijing is the most assertive. At Mes Aynak, it could become the first major power to take on a large-scale project in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, potentially redrawing Asia’s geopolitical map.

TOP PRIORITY

In 2008, the administration of Hamid Karzai signed a 30-year contract with a Chinese joint venture called MCC to extract high-grade copper from Mes Aynak. Studies show the site holds up to 12 million tons of the mineral.

But the project got tied up in logistical and contract problems, and it never got past some initial test shafts before it ground to a halt when Chinese staff left in 2014 because of continued violence.

Mere months after the Taliban seized Kabul in August, consolidating power over the country, the group’s newly installed acting Minister for Mining and Petroleum Shahbuddin Dilawar urged his staff to re-engage Chinese state-run companies.

Ziad Rashidi, the ministry’s director of foreign relations, approached the consortium made up by MCC, China Metallurgical Group Corporation and Jiangxi Copper Ltd. Dilawar has had two virtual meetings with MCC in the last six months, according to company and ministry officials. He urged them to return to the mine, terms unchanged from the 2008 contract.

A technical committee from MCC is due in Kabul in the coming weeks to address the remaining obstacles. Relocating the artifacts is key. But MCC is also seeking to renegotiate terms, particularly to reduce taxes and slash the 19.5% royalty rate by nearly half, the percentage owed to the government per ton of copper sold.

“Chinese companies see the current situation as ideal for them. There is a lack of international competitors and a lot of support from the government side,” Rashidi said.

China’s ambassador to Afghanistan has said talks are ongoing, but nothing more.

Acquiring rare minerals is key for Beijing to maintain its standing as a global manufacturing powerhouse. While stopping short of recognizing the Taliban government, China has stood out from the international community by calling for the unfreezing of Afghan assets and has kept its diplomatic mission running in Kabul.

For Afghanistan, the contract at Mes Aynak could bring in $250-300 million per year to state revenues, a 17% increase, as well as $800 million in fees over the contract’s length, according to government and company officials. That’s a significant sum as the country grapples with widespread poverty, exacerbated by financial shortfalls after the Biden administration froze Afghan assets and international organizations halted donor funds. Some has since resumed.

GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES

At Mes Aynak, a 2,000-year-old Buddhist city sits uncomfortably alongside a potential economic engine. Afghanistan’s tumultuous modern history has gotten in the way of both exploring the archaeology and developing the mines.

Discovered in the 1960s by French geologists, the site was believed to have been an important stop along the Silk Road from the early centuries AD.

After the Soviet invasion in the late 1970s, Russians dug tunnels to investigate the copper deposit; the cavernous bore holes are still visible. These were later used as an al-Qaida hideout, and at least one was bombed by the U.S. in 2001.

Looters then pillaged many antiquities from the site. Still, archaeologists who came in 2004 managed a partial excavation, uncovering remnants of a vast complex, including four monasteries, ancient copper workshops and a citadel. It became clear the area had been a major Buddhist settlement, a crossroads for traders coming from the west, and pilgrims from afar, even China.

To the shock of the non-Taliban technocrats in his own ministry, Dilawar is committed to saving the site and told MCC’s director in Beijing it was an important part of Afghanistan’s history, according to two officials present in one virtual meeting.

He dismissed open-pit mining schemes that would raze the site entirely. The alternative option of underground mining was judged too pricey by MCC. The Culture Ministry has been tasked with presenting a plan to relocate the relics, most likely to the Kabul Museum.

“We have already transferred some (artifacts) to the capital, and we are working to transfer the rest, so the mining work can begin,” Dilawar told The Associated Press.

While the ministry is optimistic a deal can be reached, MCC officials are cautious and pragmatic.

They did not speak to the AP on record, citing sensitivities around the talks happening while international sanctions still prohibit dealings with the Taliban.

They expressed concerns over the feasibility of other contractual obligations, including building a railway to the Pakistan border at Torkham, a coal-fired power plant, and community amenities such as a hospital and schools.

Another issue is how to compensate residents of three villages near Mes Aynak cleared out a decade ago.

Mullah Mera Jan, a 70-year-old local elder, said he is still waiting for funds promised to him by ministry officials after being forced out of his village of Wali Baba.

Still, he too hopes mining will start soon. Villagers were promised 3,000-4,000 direct and 35,000 indirect jobs. The men from his village are on top of the hiring list.

OPEN FOR BUSINESS

In the ministry’s labyrinthine halls, hopeful investors stand in line, documents ready to stake their claim of Afghanistan’s untapped mineral riches, including large iron deposits, precious stones and -- potentially -- lithium.

Knocking on Rashidi’s office door these days are Russians, Iranians, Turks and of course, the Chinese.

All are “in a great hurry to invest,” he said. Chinese interest is “extraordinary,” he said. Rashidi has also reached out to China’s CNPCI to revamp an oil contract to explore blocks in Amu Darya near the Turkmenistan border, terminated in 2018.

Dozens of small-scale contracts have been handed out local investors, many of whom have joint ventures with international companies, mainly Chinese and Iranian.

Ministry revenues have increased exponentially, from 110 million afghanis ($1.2 million) in the year preceding the Taliban takeover, to $6 billion afghanis ($67 million) in the six months since the Taliban assumed power, according to documents seen by the AP. Most of that, however, appears to be from more aggressive taxing, as the Taliban merged their informal tax economy with that of the government. Apart from coal, it not clear if actual mining production has increased.

Ironically, it was the Taliban that hindered work in Mes Aynak for over a decade.

An MCC official recalled how the road leading to the mine was laden with IEDs targeting Afghan forces and NATO allies. An entire Afghan regiment guarded Chinese engineers at the site compound. Mubariz, now the security chief, said he remembered watching them from the mountains where he plotted attacks.

The MCC official said that when his Taliban hosts told him they had restored safety so work could resume, he replied in jest, “Wasn’t it you who was attacking us?”

The men, machine-guns slung around their necks, laughed too.

WHITE CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM

Ukrainians welcome in Hungary but Afghan student was not

By JOVANA GEC

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Hasib Qarizada a student from Afghanistan stands outside his room in the "Krnjaca" refugee centre near Belgrade, Serbia, Thursday, Feb. 24, 2022. While tens of thousands of refugees from Ukraine have found safety and help in Hungary, thousands of others weren't so lucky. Among them was Hasib Qarizada, a 25-year-old student from Afghanistan. He had been studying in Hungary for years butwas expelled last September even as his native country unraveled. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)


BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) — When Russia launched its war, Hungary opened its borders for the tens of thousands of refugees escaping Ukraine. Other refugees have been left with no help in a field in Serbia.

After studying in Hungary for three years, Hasib Qarizada sought asylum there after his native Afghanistan unraveled in chaos last August. But rather than receiving refuge, Hungarian authorities whisked Qarizada over the border six months ago into neighboring Serbia, kicking him out into a country he didn’t even know.

“Police just came over and handcuffed me,” Qarizada told The Associated Press in Belgrade, the Serbian capital. “They told me ‘Don’t try to run away, don’t try to fight with us, don’t do anything stupid.’”

Left all alone in a field in Serbia with no one in sight for miles, the 25-year-old Qarizada had no idea where he was, where to go or what to do.
“I was a student, and they just gave my life a totally different twist,” he said. “They didn’t give me a chance to grab my clothes, my (phone) charger or my laptop or anything important that I would need to travel.”

He told the AP he “had no idea where Serbia was, what language they speak, what kind of culture they have.”

Hungarian police haven’t immediately responded to AP’s request for a comment on Qarizada’s expulsion in September.

While Hungary is notorious for how its treats migrants fleeing wars and poverty, Qarizada’s case points to a particularly sinister practice of sending people into a third country they hadn’t come from.

Rights activists in the region registered the first such case back in 2017, when a 16-year-old Kurd from Iraq was deported into Serbia from Hungary though he had initially entered Hungary from Romania and managed to reach Austria before he was sent back.

More recently, a woman from Cameroon who entered Hungary from Romania was sent to Serbia last December. Another African woman who flew in from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a year ago also ended up in a field in Serbia.

“This is something that unfortunately has become normal, regular and something which cannot be considered as unusual,” Serbian rights lawyer Nikola Kovacevic said.

Qarizada’s expulsion illustrates the stark differences in the treatment of people from Ukraine and those from non-European war zones under right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Similarly, Croatia — another EU country that has been accused off using violence against migrants — has said Ukrainians can come and stay.

Activists have applauded the shift while also warning of discrimination against refugees and migrants from the Middle East and Africa, who for years have faced perils and pushbacks at the borders of Hungary, Croatia and other European nations.

“For those of us following these issues, it is hard to miss the stark contrast of the last few weeks with Europe’s harsh response to people fleeing other wars and crises,” said Judith Sunderland of Human Rights Watch. “A staggering number of people from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East die every year attempting to reach Europe.”

Zsolt Szekeres from the Hungarian Helsinki Committee noted that “the (Hungarian) government is trying their best to explain now why Ukrainians are good asylum-seekers and others are bad migrants.”

With Hungary’s April 3 election approaching, government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs dismissed as “fake news” media reports that authorities were discriminating even among the refugees arriving from Ukraine.

Border pushbacks, which are illegal under international law, means that people are sent from one country to another without consideration of their individual circumstances.

When, like Qarizada, they are expelled to a country they hadn’t come from, “the severity of the violation is higher,” said Kovacevic, the Serbian lawyer.

Qarizada’s deportation was even more drastic as he hadn’t arrived in Hungary along any illegal migration route. A self-financed student who shared an apartment and had an established life in Budapest, Qarizada sought asylum because the turmoil in Afghanistan meant his family could no longer pay his university fees and therefore he couldn’t renew his residence permit.

In rejecting his asylum application, activists say, Hungarian authorities disregarded the fact that Qarizada’s homeland of Afghanistan couldn’t be considered safe as the Taliban returned to power.

Qarizada told the AP that his family had connections with Afghanistan’s pre-Taliban government and were in danger of retribution. “They hardly go outside,” he said.

Helsinki Committee lawyers have taken Qarizada’s case both to the courts in Hungary and the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that his unlawful expulsion runs against the European Convention of Human Rights, Szekeres said.

A Hungarian court has ruled in favor of Qarizada, but the lawyers are now waging another legal battle to force Hungarian authorities to implement the decision and allow him to come back, he added.

“He applied for asylum, he was staying here, and he was in need of protection, and he was pushed out in a summary manner,” Szekeres insisted. “He was never given the possibility or option to explain his situation.”

For Qarizada, the days after the expulsion were the worst of his life.

Abandoned in Serbia, he walked for hours, finally reaching a gas station where a woman let him charge his phone and directed him toward the nearest asylum center. The facility was full so he slept outside for four nights.

“I felt very horrible ... because I was a normal student. I was studying, I was going to classes. I had my own friends. I had my own life,” he said. “I wasn’t doing anything bad.”

Karox Pishtewan, the Kurdish minor deported into Serbia in 2017 and who was granted asylum there, also told the AP that Hungarian police “just opened the gate and told us to go.”

“It was July and everything was green,” he recalled. “I was quite shocked. We hadn’t slept for three days and they just kicked us out there. I had no idea where I was and what was happening.”

Szekeres said the acceptance of refugees from Ukraine shows that solidarity with people in need has remained strong among ordinary Hungarian people despite the government’s years-long anti-immigration agenda.

“There is no difference between Ukrainian parents fleeing with their children and Afghan parents fleeing with their children,” he said. “This is a good reminder for everyone that asylum-seekers, no matter where they come from, need protection.”

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Justin Spike contributed to this report from Budapest, Hungary.

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Follow AP’s global migration coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/migration

‘We will SMASH you’: Dropkick Murphys feud with neo-Nazis

By MARK PRATTMarch 25, 2022

Ken Casey performs with Dropkick Murphys during the annual St. Patrick's Day Breakfast, Sunday, March 16, 2014, in Boston. The Dropkick Murphys are hitting back against a neo-Nazi group that used one of the band’s songs in a video posted on social media. The rowdy rockers from Boston condemned the use of the song “The Boys are Back” in a tweet, while the band’s attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter to the neo-Nazi group as well as to the platform that shared the video. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)


The Dropkick Murphys are hitting back against a neo-Nazi group that used one of the rock band’s songs in a video posted on social media.

The rowdy rockers from Boston condemned the use of the song “The Boys are Back” in a tweet, while the band’s attorneys sent a cease-and-desist letter to the group as well as to the platform that shared the video.

After calling them “losers,” the band wrote “Stop using our song for your little dress up party video. We will SMASH you,” in response to a tweet from a man who confronted the group at South Boston’s St. Patrick’s Day parade last weekend.

About a dozen masked members of the group, known as NSC 131 or the Nationalist Social Club, attended Sunday’s parade as spectators and held up a banner that said “Keep Boston Irish.” Their appearance was denounced by the parade’s organizers and Mayor Michelle Wu.

The video posted on the video-sharing platform Odysee documents the group’s appearance at the parade as the song containing the refrain “The boys are back, and they’re looking for trouble” plays.

“DKM has not (and would not, ever, in a million years) authorize or license to NSC 131 the right to use or exploit the Recording and/or Composition in the video in question or any similar video,” said the cease-and-desist letter dated Tuesday from the band’s Los Angeles-based attorneys. A publicist for the band confirmed the letter’s authenticity on Friday.

It went on to say: “We’ll take your immediate compliance as confirmation that you received this letter. If, however, you fail to immediately comply, then my client and their designees and assignees are prepared to take whatever legal action they deem necessary and appropriate to protect their rights in and to the Recording and Compensation, including, without limitation, seeking statutory and punitive damages for your copyright infringement.”

Odysee in an email to The Associated Press on Friday said it complies with copyright law, and the video was reviewed and subsequently taken down.

The Anti-Defamation League says NSC 131 is a New England-based neo-Nazi group founded in 2019 that “espouses racism, antisemitism and intolerance” and whose “membership is a collection of neo-Nazis and racist skinheads, many of whom have previous membership in other white supremacist groups.”

BREAD RIOTS LEAD TO REVOLUTION

Ukraine war threatens food supplies in fragile Arab world

By ZEINA KARAM

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A vendor balances a tray of Egyptian traditional "Baladi" flatbread as he cycles in Old Cairo district, Egypt, Tuesday, March 22, 2022. Experts say they are worried that food security concerns in the Middle East resulting from the war in Ukraine may fuel growing social unrest in countries already on the verge of meltdown. 

(AP Photo/Amr Nabil)


BEIRUT (AP) — Layal Aswad was already exhausted by Lebanon’s devastating two-year economic collapse. Now, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sends food and energy prices soaring even further, she finds herself struggling to put food on the table for her family of four.

“Even bread is not something we take for granted anymore,” said the 48-year-old housewife, standing recently in a supermarket aisle in front of gallons of cooking oil whose prices had risen to an all-time high.

From Lebanon, Iraq and Syria to Sudan and Yemen, millions of people in the Middle East whose lives were already upended by conflict, displacement and poverty are now wondering where their next meals will come from. Ukraine and Russia account for a third of global wheat and barley exports, which countries in the Middle East rely on to feed millions of people who subsist on subsidized bread and bargain noodles. They are also top exporters of other grains and the sunflower seed oil that is used for cooking.

Even before the war in Ukraine, people in countries across the Middle East and North Africa were not getting enough food to eat. Now with trade disruptions spurred by the conflict, more commodities are becoming either unaffordable or unavailable.

“Put simply, people cannot afford food of the quality or quantity that they need, with those in conflict- and crisis-affected countries ... at greatest risk,” said Lama Fakih, Middle East and North Africa Director at Human Rights Watch.

A similar set of circumstances led to a series of uprisings starting in late 2010 known as the Arab Spring, when skyrocketing bread prices fueled anti-government protests across the Middle East, noted Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

“When prices jump, and poor people cannot feed their families, they will be on the streets,” Georgieva remarked Sunday at the Doha Forum, a policy conference in Qatar.

In Iraq and Sudan, public frustration at food prices and a lack of government services erupted in street protests on several occasions over the past several weeks.

“People have a right to food, and governments should do everything in their power to protect that right, otherwise we risk not only food insecurity but the insecurity and instability that gross deprivation on this scale could trigger,” Fakih said.

The war also has sparked concern that much of the international aid upon which so many in the Arab world depend will be diverted to Ukraine, where more than 3.7 million people have fled the war, Europe’s largest exodus since World War II.

“For the millions of Palestinians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Syrians, and others who live in countries experiencing conflict, catastrophic economic meltdowns, and increasing humanitarian needs, this would be equivalent to shutting down critical life support,” states an analysis released by Carnegie Middle East experts last week.

In Syria, 14.6 million people will depend on assistance this year, 9% more than in 2021 and 32% more than in 2020, Joyce Msuya, the United Nations’ assistant secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and deputy emergency relief coordinator, told the U.N. Security Council in February.

In Yemen, basic needs are becoming even harder to meet for millions of impoverished people after seven years of war. A recent report by the U.N. and international aid groups estimated that more than 160,000 people in Yemen were likely to experience famine-like conditions in 2022. That number could climb much higher still because of the war in Ukraine. A U.N. appeal for the country earlier this month raised $1.3 billion, less than a third of what was sought.

“I have nothing,” said Ghalib al-Najjar, a 48-year-old Yemeni father of seven whose family has lived in a refugee camp outside the rebel-held capital of Sanaa since fleeing fighting in their middle-class neighborhood more than four years ago. “I need flour, a package of flour. I need rice. I need sugar. I need what people need (to survive).”

In Lebanon, which has been in the throes of economic collapse for the past two years, panic has set in among a population worn down by shortages of electricity, medicine and gasoline.

The country’s main grain silos were destroyed by a massive explosion at a Beirut port in 2020. Now, with just six weeks of wheat reserves, many fear even darker days ahead. Several large supermarkets were out of flour and corn oil this week.

“Whatever is put on shelves is being bought,” said Hani Bohsali, head of the food importers syndicate. He said 60% of the cooking oil consumed in Lebanon comes from Ukraine and the rest comes mostly from Russia.

“This is not a small problem,” he said. Bohsali noted that a search is underway for alternative places from which to import needed products, but he said other countries have either banned food exports or significantly raised prices.

Meanwhile, 5 liters (1 gallon) of cooking oil in Lebanon now costs around the same as the monthly minimum wage, which is still fixed at 675,000 Lebanese pounds, or $29, despite the currency having lost around 90% of its value since October 2019. Families, including Aswad’s, also are spending ever larger portions of their monthly income on neighborhood generators that light up their homes for most of the day in the absence of state-supplied electricity. Even those are threatening to shut down now, saying they can no longer afford to buy fuel on the market.

“We are back to the Stone Age, stocking up on candles and things like toast and Picon (a processed cheese brand) in case we run out of everything,” Aswad said.

In Syria, where more than 11 years of brutal war has left more than 90% of the country’s population living in poverty, products such as cooking oil — when they can be found — have doubled in price in the month since the war began in Ukraine. On a recent day at one government cooperative in the capital of Damascus, shelves were almost empty except for sugar and napkins.

Egypt, the world’s top importer of wheat, is among the most vulnerable. Economic pressures, including rising inflation, are mounting in the country, where about a third of the population of more than 103 million lives below the poverty line, according to official figures.

An Associated Press journalist who toured markets in three different middle-class neighborhoods in Cairo earlier this month found that the price of food staples such as bread — items that Egyptians refer to as “eish,” or life — have increased by up to 50%. Inflation is likely to swell further due to the upcoming Muslim holy month of Ramadan, typically a time of increased demand.

Consumers have accused merchants of exploiting the war in Ukraine to raise prices even though they have not yet been affected.

“They make profits from our pain,” lamented Doaa el-Sayed, an Egyptian elementary school teacher and mother of three. “I have to reduce the amount of everything I used to buy,” she said.

In Libya, a country wracked by a yearslong civil war, the latest spike in the price of food staples has people worried that tough times are ahead. And in Gaza, prices that had already started to rise skyrocketed after the war in Ukraine erupted, adding an extra challenge to the 2 million residents of the impoverished Palestinian enclave who have endured years of blockade and conflict.

Fayeq Abu Aker, a Gaza businessman, imports staples such as cooking oil, lentils, and pasta from a Turkish company. When the company canceled the cooking oil contract after the war began, Aker turned to Egypt. But despite the country’s proximity to Gaza, prices there were even higher. A box of four bottles of cooking oil now costs $26, double the price before the war.

“In 40 years of my business, I have never seen a crisis like this,” he said.

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Associated Press writers Bassem Mroue in Beirut; Sammy Magdy in Cairo; Wafaa Shurafa in Gaza City; and Rami Musa in Benghazi, Libya, contributed to this report.

Florida: When sexual orientation is taboo in schools

Schools in the United States are increasingly becoming the scene of politically charged debates. In Florida, the state is set to ban teaching sexual orientation and gender identity to children under the age of 10.


Students in Tampa came out to protest the 'don't say gay' bill in February

Earlier in March, the Florida state senate passed a controversial bill banning the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity to children through third grade. Teachers are also not allowed to speak about such topics in any manner "inappropriate to the age of students" with older children and teens.

Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has already indicated he will sign the bill into law. Republican lawmakers have said they want to protect children from subjects they cannot handle, while also strengthening parental rights. Parents would be able to sue schools that do not comply with the Parental Rights in Education Act.
LGBTQ community fears marginalization

The controversial law is being called "don't say gay" by opponents and activists. US President Joe Biden has called it "hateful."

"It's always appropriate to acknowledge the existence and validity and value of LGBTQ families, that we are a normal, healthy part of society," Brandon Wolf of Equality Florida, a nongovernmental organization that advocates for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people, told DW.

President Joe Biden has criticized the Florida bill, calling it 'hateful'

The legislation is about more than a lack of acknowledgement. Many people are concerned that making alternative gender identities and nonheterosexual orientations taboo will lead to even more discrimination and violence. That's just one reason why thousands of students and members of the LGBTQ community have been taking to the streets in protest.
Sex education as early as kindergarten

"Comprehensive sex education should include discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten," said Eva Goldfarb, a professor of public health at Montclair State University in New Jersey and co-author of a US standards program on sex education.

Goldfarb, who has worked in sex education for 25 years and trained teachers all over the country, told DW it's important to have age- and developmentally appropriate conversations.

Children are by nature inquisitive, she pointed out — "different people have different family structures, some people have two daddies and some people have two mommies. They see pregnant people. A lot of 3- to 4-year-olds will have younger siblings being born, and they're curious," she said.

'Kids are already exposed to this in the world,' said Eva Goldfarb

It's a teacher's job to help children understand, said Goldfarb, "so that it's not scary, so that it's not taboo, so that they don't feel afraid to raise these issues."

She stressed that a basis needs to be set for more complex discussions later on. "No one would ever think to say, 'We're going to teach algebra in eighth grade, but we're not going to teach any math concepts before that,'" she said.

How teachers should talk about sexual orientation and gender identity is not just an issue in Florida; similar bills have also been proposed in other states. In Arizona, teachers might be required to inform parents when their children bring up the topic of gender identity. In Indiana, schools might have to ask parents' consent to talk about sexual orientation; while Oklahoma has filed a bill to ban books on the subject from school libraries.

The topic of sex education is part of a comprehensive culture war in the field of education, which also includes controversies over how history, slavery and racism are taught at school.
Right to shape the curriculum

In that context, it's worth noting that critical race theory — an academic concept centered on the idea that racism is systemic in US institutions — is not necessarily explicitly taught in most places. Likewise, sexual orientation and gender identity have never been part of the curriculum in kindergarten and elementary school in Florida. What, then, are conservative forces in the state fighting to protect?

Protesters in St. Petersburg, Florida, demonstrated against the bill on March 12

Many people suspect Governor DeSantis wants to make a name for himself within the Republican Party and among voters.

"All of this is designed to help whip up right-wing fervor, to help him bypass Donald Trump to the right of the party, to win reelection in 2022 and go off and run for president in 2024," said Wolf.

In a recent survey by polling firm Ipsos, nearly two out of three US respondents opposed laws like the one in Florida that ban the teaching of sexual orientation or gender identity in elementary schools.

The many thousands of people who took to the streets to protest the bill, including many students, certainly do not want the law. Parents, who are being promised they will have more of a say, actually appreciate having someone who will teach such subjects, said Goldfarb, adding that most parents are not experts, and they value having sex education in schools.

"Every state probably has an opt-out option for sex education, so if you don't want your child to participate in sex education, they don't have to," she said.

In fact, some states — including Arizona — since last year is among five states that only offer an opt-in, meaning parents must actively elect for their child to take part in sex education classes.
'It doesn't work that way'

Even if sexual orientation and gender identity are openly discussed in kindergartens and elementary schools, the fear conservatives harbor that it would encourage children to become gay, lesbian, transgender or queer is utter nonsense, Goldfarb pointed out.

"There is zero evidence that what you learn in school can change your sexual orientation or change your gender identity," she said. "It doesn't work that way. So they're basing it on really scary scenarios that don't really exist."

In fact, not addressing sexual orientation with this generation of kids is bizarre — "like it's not even a thing to be gay, to be straight, to be trans," Goldfarb said. "We're going backwards by decades and decades and decades."

While some states seem to be moving in that direction, others are moving in a decidedly different direction. Legislation in Colorado requires public schools to provide "comprehensive human sexuality education," and California and New Jersey have similar statutes.

Goldfarb hopes the current reactionary mood will die down in view of real existing social problem such as high abortion rates, discrimination and violence against sexual minorities.

"These bills may give Republican politicians political benefits in the short term," asserted Wolf. "But that's not the direction the country is headed in the long run."

This article was originally written in German.


TENACIOUS UNICORN RANCH: SANCTUARY AND TARGET
An alpaca ranch as refuge
In 2018, Peggy Logue founded the Tenacious Unicorn Ranch as a sanctuary for the LGBTI+ community. Logan, transgender herself, founded the alpaca farm to provide a home and work for those still marginalized by society. Here they are free to love who they want and be who they are.
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Robert Koch's dubious legacy in Africa

Scientist Robert Koch tried to cure to tuberculosis and sleeping sickness while working with African patients in what he called "concentration camps." His 19th-century techniques still fuel debates about his fame.

The scientist Robert Koch (with tropical helmet) on his East African expedition around 1906

Who was Robert Koch — a revered top researcher or a colonial physician without a conscience?

A winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine and one of the most important microbiologists of the 19th century, Germany's renowned federal institute for infectious diseases bears his name.

But during the coronavirus pandemic — throughout which the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) reports daily COVID-19 infection figures and calls its namesake to mind — critical voices have piled up, even more than 110 years after Koch's death.

Some are even calling for the RKI to be renamed. 

What's Robert Koch accused of?

The celebrated physician of infectious disease not only did good in Germany's African colonies, but also conducted research at the expense of human lives. Critics say more focus is needed on the subjects of his work, while others say he should be held to the standards of his day.

Medical historian Christoph Gradmann at the University of Oslo thinks the debates about Robert Koch's legacy in Africa go too far, although they do need to take place.

"You have to place Robert Koch's actions in their time. I find the condemnation of his person — representative of colonial medicine — in 2022 banal," he told DW.

Former chancellor Angela Merkel pays the president of the Robert Koch Institute, 

Lothar Wieler (left) a visit in 2021.

Robert Koch's 'darkest chapter'

His colleague Jürgen Zimmerer, Professor of Global History at the University of Hamburg, takes a different position.

Zimmerer has emphasized in reports the "unscrupulous" side of Koch, who was commissioned by the German colonial administration to research sleeping sickness in Africa.

The illness is caused by microscopic parasites transmitted by the tsetse fly and spread in Africa around 1900.

Koch was responsible for numerous health experiments in what are now Tanzania, Togo and Cameroon to find a cure for sleeping sickness. 

Most of Koch's patients were housed in what he himself called "concentration camps," a model he borrowed from the British administration in South Africa, and treated with atoxyl, a substance containing arsenic and already known to be highly toxic in large doses.

Koch accepted the pain and agony of thousands of patients, even to the point of death, say his critics, including the Haitian-American historian of science Edna Bonhomme.

His intentions probably cannot be conclusively clarified, Bonhomme conceded in an October 2020 commentary for the Arabic news network Al-Jazeera. 

"What we do know is that Koch's actions directly contributed to the colonial oppression of African populations," wrote Bonhomme.

The research camps he founded, she said, solidified inhumane treatment and hierarchies in medical experiments.

Robert Koch at his microscope in his laboratory in Kimberley, South Africa, in 1896

What does the Robert Koch Institute say?

The agency, founded in 1891 as the Royal Prussian Institute for Infectious Diseases and headed by Koch until 1904, declined to be interviewed by DW.

However, its website has references to Koch's use of atoxyl.

It describes his last major research trip from 1906–1907 to East Africa as the "darkest chapter" in Koch's career.

By using atoxyl, Koch "initially achieves successful results in the treatment of the sleeping sickness," the RKI states.

But the parasite could only be suppressed in the blood of the patients for a short time.

"Koch doubles the dose — even though he is aware of the risks of the drug," according to the RKI's website.

"Many patients begin to suffer from pain and colic, some even go blind. Nevertheless, Koch remains convinced of the benefits of atoxyl in principle."

Pressure to succeed and fame

Koch held on to the medicine atoxyl for too long; he was under pressure to succeed, Gradmann commented.

But the historian doesn't believe Koch's practices at the time influenced today's skepticism about drug trials and vaccinations — not in Africa, and not in the Global North.

Tanzania is very open to Western medicine, he said, and that medicine cannot be reduced to one of its representatives.

Koch experimented with Atoxyl to find cure against the sleeping sickness transmitted by the tsetse fly

In 1880, Koch identified the pathogen of tuberculosis in 1882 — a discovery that established his worldwide fame and earned him the 1905 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his discovery.

"If we apply these standards of today to historical persons without circumstance, then just about everyone comes off badly. But that would be wrong in the case of Robert Koch. Because he is also regarded in Africa and by Africans as the discoverer of the tuberculosis bacterium and in this sense is seen as a role model," Gradmann told DW.

No connection to vaccination skepticism

In Tanzania, Richard Shaba can confirm this, at least for a small part of the people: the experts.

"Koch's research on malaria and tuberculosis is well known in the circles of scientists, but it is not an issue among ordinary citizens," Shaba said in the DW interview. He represents the German office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Dodoma.

Health care in Tanzania: a COVID-19 vaccination is given to prevent virus infection

"It would be wrong to try to make a connection between the dark side of his experiments and the resistance of Tanzanians and Africans to COVID vaccination," Shaba said. There are other reasons for this that have nothing to do with Koch's work.

There's more skepticism there, he said, because people are getting sick after the vaccines are developed quickly, so they believe they are not safe. "It's a luxury today to look critically at Koch's behavior, but what researcher at the time did not do bad experiments in the name of science in Africa?" asked Shaba.

Koch, according to the ideology of the time, would likely have considered himself — like many others — some kind of superhero to Africans.

Edited by: Keith Walker 

Huawei reports record net profit as exec Meng makes public return


Huawei chief financial officer Meng Wanzhou made her first public appearance since returning to China from Canadian custody (AFP/STR) (STR)


Beiyi SEOW
Mon, March 28, 2022

Chinese telecoms giant Huawei on Monday reported record profit for 2021, defying the US sanctions aimed at it as executive Meng Wanzhou made her first public appearance since returning to China from Canadian custody.

The company has been caught in the crosshairs of a US-China trade and technology rivalry, with the administration of former President Donald Trump moving to cripple it over cybersecurity and espionage concerns.

The results, announced in Chinese tech hub Shenzhen, also marked the first return to the limelight of Meng since her high-profile return to China after nearly three years under house arrest in Canada.

Meng, daughter of CEO and founder Ren Zhengfei, spent the years in Canada fighting extradition to the US, as Washington accused her of defrauding HSBC bank by trying to hide alleged violations of US sanctions on Iran.

She returned home shortly after two Canadians were released from prison in China, ending a diplomatic row that poisoned ties between Beijing and Ottawa for years.

Huawei's revenue fell by around 29 percent last year to 636.8 billion yuan ($100 billion), as it grappled with US sanctions aimed at blocking access to key technology and supplies.

But the slump under US sanctions appears to be slowing, and the company said its net profits hit a new record -- surging 75.9 percent on-year to 113.7 billion yuan.

"Despite a revenue decline in 2021, our ability to make a profit and generate cash flows is increasing, and we are more capable of dealing with uncertainty," Meng said in Monday's statement.

The company attributes its profitability to "improved product portfolios and more efficient internal operations", with a rise in net profit margin even with gains from the sale of its budget phone brand Honor excluded.

The company is not publicly listed and its accounts are not subject to the same audits as companies traded on the stock market.

Huawei, a supplier of telecom networking gear and smartphone brand, has been struggling since Trump launched a campaign to contain the company in 2018.

Smartphone sales stalled after the US cut Huawei off from key parts and barred it from using Google's Android services.

Last year Huawei logged 243 billion yuan in consumer business sales -- almost 50 percent down from 2020.

Huawei has instead tried to shore up other parts of its business, refocusing on the Chinese market and diversifying to encompass enterprise and cloud computing, along with other business segments related to 5G networks.

Rotating chairman Guo Ping said in a speech at the event that Huawei's ability to “survive and thrive" depends on ongoing investment in development.

"Our fight to survive is not over yet," Guo said.

"No matter what comes our way, we will keep investing. That is the only way forward."

The company's research and development investment amounted to 142.7 billion yuan last year, around 22 percent of its total revenue.

bys/rox/apj/jfx

Hypersonic missiles – hype or hyperdangerous?
Kinzhal carried on a Tu22 Backfire bomber


By Gav Don March 27, 2022


Russia claimed that it had used hypersonic weapons to attack arms depots in western Ukraine on 18 March. Is this a qualitative up-step in Russia’s campaign, a sign of stress, or just a capability demonstration?

“Hypersonic” is generally accepted to mean a missile faster than 5,000 km/h (though there is nothing magical about that speed). Intercontinental ballistic missiles have always been hypersonic, exceeding 20,000 km/h, but they spend most of their journey from launcher to target in the near-vacuum of space, and only a few seconds passing through the atmosphere. The hard part is sustaining hypersonic speed inside the earth’s atmosphere, where atmospheric gases create friction, heating the missile to 1,000 centigrade.

At high altitude the atmosphere is thin and generates less friction and heat. But targets are at ground or sea level, so to remain hypersonic the missile must be constructed from materials which can withstand that heat. Heat is not the only problem. The air around a hypersonic missile becomes so energised that molecules lose their electrons and become ionised plasma, which makes terminal guidance difficult to achieve. Most of the investment in hypersonic missiles ends up in designing new alloys and in expensive and extensive testing.

Why bother? High speed offers three big wins. The first win is to reduce the time your opponent has in which to react to the threat. A low-level missile becomes visible to airborne radar at around 500 km. Flying at 900 kph a subsonic cruise missile provides about half an hour’s notice of its threat. In that time a ship can move 30 km, either off the missile’s incoming vector (leaving the missile’s pre-programmed search area) or away from the missile, potentially taking it out of range completely.

Targets are typically protected by layers of defensive equipment placed at progressively greater distances up-threat. The warning time of a subsonic missile allows the protective screen to manoeuvre to allow optimal engagement, to choose which defensive layers will engage which threats, to add air assets in the missile’s path which can attack the missile, and to deploy decoys and multiple active jamming solutions to force a soft kill – one in which the missile misses and splashes harmlessly.

With multiple layers of defence and multiple defensive options available, a well-equipped target force has a high chance of either forcing a miss or getting a hard kill on an incoming subsonic missile. That means the attacker must launch many missiles, preferably from many directions, carefully timed to arrive simultaneously and so to overwhelm the defensive layers. So subsonic missiles come with a high cost in units fired and firing platforms, and a demand a high threshold of accurate target data.

Hypersonic weapons fly at an average speed (from launch to impact) of around 3,500 kph. Detected at the same 500 km they cut the available reaction time from 30 minutes to about eight. That reduces target manoeuvre to +/- 8 km. Seen from the missile’s perspective the terminal seeker needs to scan an azimuth of only a couple of degrees either side of its track to gain a final target solution and a hit. Within that narrow arc there will be fewer false targets, fewer decoys and fewer SAM launches. The missile also conserves energy because it need only manoeuvre a degree or two off its base track, and that helps preserve both speed and range.

If the targeted force does not have airborne early warning cover the hypersonic’s win is much bigger. A warship with a radar antenna at 60 feet (18 metres) above sea level has a radar horizon to a sea-skimming missile (at 12 feet above sea level) of only 26 km (the high scanner of the UK’s Type 45 adds 10 km to that). A subsonic cruise missile takes 100-150 seconds to fly from its detection point at the horizon to the target. That is just enough time for the target to calculate the missile’s track, decide whether to engage it, to fire one or two surface to air missiles and for those to reach the incoming missile before it is close enough to do damage to the target ship. It also just allows time for decoys to be fired and to deploy, and for active jamming of the missile seeker to be programmed, aimed and used. An efficient well-worked-up ship should be able to counter most subsonic missile strikes.

A hypersonic cruise missile, even one whose terminal velocity has been reduced by drag and some evasive manoeuvring to perhaps 3,000 kph, covers the same distance in 30-40 seconds. If the target is quick enough to get a hard kill it must be obtained at sufficient distance that incoming missile debris falls into the sea instead of hitting the target ship at supersonic speed: three tonnes of missile fragments arriving at 3,000 kph can do almost as much damage as the explosive power of the warhead. Time is so short that there is barely time to deploy decoys and jammers.

While a well-prepared target warship has some chance of hitting a single incoming hypersonic missile, a salvo of two or three has a high chance of overwhelming the defence. If the target is not a modern air defence ship then it must rely on its own close-in weapon systems (chain guns or small short-range missiles) to get a hard kill, which will be at a range close enough for high velocity missile fragments to do damage.

When attacked by a subsonic missile a target can manoeuvre itself to present a smaller target aspect (turning towards or away from the missile at speed) or to change speed (and so throw off the missile’s predictive targeting algorithm) because there is just time to do that. With a hypersonic missile there is no time to use manoeuvre as a defence.

In sum, in a ship-killing role the use of hypersonic speed substantially reduces the number of missiles an attacker must fire to obtain a hit and, because of the kinetic energy of hypersonic speed, increases the damage caused by a hit.

At a strategic level the presence of hypersonic missiles forces one’s opponent to keep his naval forces concentrated and within constant airborne early warning coverage. That in turn means he must operate close to a friendly coastline, or within a Carrier Strike Group. Operations at a distance by ships sailing alone or in small task groups become borderline suicidal if a hypersonic threat is present.

Hypersonic missiles offer a third advantage, both at sea and on land. The target may well be covered by surface-to-air missiles located at some distance from the target itself. So at sea, an aircraft carrier is covered by air defence ships placed in a screen at several miles distance, and on land a target may be covered by a SAM battery located dozens of miles away at right angles to the incoming missile’s track.

If the defence unit is located off-track to the incoming missile its own weapon must close from the side of that track, which takes time. Surface-to-air missiles fly at twice the speed of a subsonic cruise missile, so can make up the ground from some way off. But they fly at half as fast as a hypersonic missile. Fired from several miles off the threat track, and literally at the last minute, they are more or less guaranteed to reach the hypersonic missile’s track after it has passed. The tactical result is that hypersonic missiles dilute air defence assets, by limiting the effective arc of fire of a given asset. In consequence some targets must be left undefended, or the number of targets must be reduced by concentrating one’s forces – both strategic wins for the owner of a hypersonic missile system.

There are major technical obstacles to getting a hard kill on a hypersonic missile. The defending missile is not designed to make a direct impact on the threat, as both are small and closing at extreme speed. The challenge is to make the 50-litre body of the defending missile get close enough to the 200-litre body of the threat missile so that a fragmentation warhead can get a hit.

The problem comes in two parts. First, one must design a guidance system that brings the two bodies together in time and space. Guidance (and radar tracking) systems use proportional geometry tailored to the speed of the threat – traditionally subsonic, but up to 2,000 kph for the well-established Moskit sea-skimming missile deployed by Russia since the 1980s – to steer the defending missile into the same few metres of space as the threat missile. A threat moving at two to four times the normal expected speed may render a tracking and guidance system’s parameters ineffective.

The second challenge is to detonate the SAM’s warhead close enough to the threat missile to get a hard kill. The kill is achieved by hitting the threat missile with one or more high energy metal fragments, either thrown in front of the incoming missile or from its side. Collision with a single metal fragment at that speed will break the threat missile up. To obtain that result the defending missile’s warhead fuse must be tailored to within a precise part of a millisecond. Detonate the warhead a millisecond too soon and the incoming missile will fly through a hole in the shrapnel field. Fire it a millisecond too late and the fragment field will bloom behind the incoming missile. Hypersonic missiles close at two to four times the relative closing speed of a subsonic cruise missile, which may allow them to outpace the fusing algorithm of the defending missile, even one detonated by a proximity radar system.

These two problems are solvable (THAAD has solved them) but a SAM system designed and built for a subsonic or low supersonic threat may need a substantial upgrade to beat a hypersonic threat missile. Some older systems will not be upgradeable at all.

Russia operates two tactical hypersonic missile systems and one strategic system.

Kinzhal (“Dagger”) is a re-purposed Iskander tactical ballistic missile (DoB 1980). The missile has kept its solid-fuelled rocket motor but is fired from an aircraft instead of from the ground. Starting high and fast, more of the missile’s fuel can be converted into range. Reports of range are ambiguous (varying from 500 to 2,000 km) and probably include the range of the launch aircraft. Russia is claiming that Kinzhal is both manoeuvrable and has terminal guidance (additional to its original inertial guidance system). Photographs of the missile in the public domain challenge both of those assertions, since the missile lacks wings and a visible seeker head.

Some steering will be provided by the small fins located in Kinzhal’s rocket exhaust, but these will only operate while the rocket motor is burning, at the start of the ballistic flight. Kinzhal may well not have the ability to carry out evasive manoeuvres in flight. Kinzhal’s most probable guidance system is inertial, to a pre-programmed target, aided by a satellite receiver but not by sophisticated manoeuvring systems. If that is true then it has no naval application unless fitted with a nuclear warhead. Kinzhal’s win over its ground-based sibling is that it can be fired from a much wider arc (in practice any air space that is safe for the launch aircraft) which forces an enemy to place more SAM systems around a given target, and so dilute air defence capability.

After leaving its launch aircraft the missile’s speed rapidly increases to high hypersonic. The missile’s trajectory is probably a low ballistic curve, in which the initial launch probably has a substantial “up” component. After motor burnout the missile will follow a ballistic flight path.

As its flight path descends through thickening atmosphere to ground or sea level the missile will slow down under friction. To maximise range the missile must spend as much time as possible as high as possible, where it is detectable at great ranges, and where it provides more time in which it can be engaged by defending missiles.

A high-altitude hypersonic missile is very like an incoming ballistic missile. The US has spent a substantial time and money equipping ships and shore-based units with THAAD – “Terminal High Altitude Area Defence” systems – which are capable of destroying high ballistic missiles at ranges of 100 km plus so long as they are flying more or less directly towards the THAAD launcher.

THAAD is not capable of hitting a missile on a crossing track, so each THAAD launcher is effectively locked to a target down-range and a threat up-range, both on a narrow arc. If the missile’s launch vehicle can fly around at will to change the threat bearing by 350 degrees THAAD risks becoming ineffective (unless the defender saturates the target’s defence with multiple THAAD systems or co-locates THAAD with the target. That increases the number of THAAD systems needed to protect a set of targets.

Russia’s second tactical hypersonic missile is Tsirkon (sometimes transliterated to Zirkon). Tsirkon has an air-breathing supersonic compressed air ramjet engine, usually abbreviated to Scramjet. A scramjet only starts to work well above supersonic speeds, so when Tsirkon is fired the missile must be boosted by a large solid-fuelled rocket motor. Designed to be fired at sea-level, Tsirkon has a shorter range than Kinzhal – 500 km has been demonstrated, and 1,000 km claimed.

Range is traded off against manoeuvring potential. Range is also a trade-off against average altitude. Tsirkon can climb to height for greater range and speed (at height it flies through thinner air) but at the expense of earlier detection. Exact range/height profiles are unknown but Tsirkon is designed to fly as a sea-skimming missile, reducing target reaction times to 40 seconds.

Tsirkon is reputed to have the ability to evade counter-missile fire. Two approaches are available. The first is to use conventional aerodynamic control surfaces to alter course. Tsirkon appears to have these but their use comes at a cost in speed, and the weight of actuators reduces the explosive payload.

A second approach is to use small manoeuvring thrusters which can bodily move the missile up, down or sideways in flight. If used at the precisely correct moment these can force incoming hard-kill warheads to miss by jumping Tsirkon out of the shrapnel path. A side-skip will also move Tsirkon out of the narrow beam of a targeted jammer. Lateral thrusters don’t slow a missile down and are lighter than aerodynamic actuators, which make it more likely that Tsirkon employs these than guidance surfaces. Videos of Tsirkon firings (and also of S400 firings) show such lateral thrusters in action, to orient missiles from vertical launch attitudes to horizontal flight attitudes.

A third type of hypersonic weapon, a hypersonic glide vehicle, has also been tested by both Russia and China. This is an unpowered gliding body which is carried into low earth orbit on a conventional ballistic missile. Once in orbit and at high hypersonic speed, either its on-board guidance system or a ground-based command trigger braking rockets, which bring it out of orbit to head for its target at high hypersonic speeds. Russia’s version is called Avangard, and has been tested several times. China tested its own version – the DF17 – last year to considerable Western consternation.

There is no public domain evidence that either weapon has terminal guidance, though claims exist that they can be guided towards a moving target, such as an aircraft carrier, using lateral and vertical thrusters.

Hypersonic glide vehicles could be used to attack critical ground-based infrastructure at continental ranges – imagine a US attack on a Russia/China oil pipeline in Mongolia. The US has invested several billion dollars in hypersonic weapon and glide vehicle development aimed at creating a weapon which can strike ground targets anywhere on the planet at very short notice, but so far nothing has been brought into service. US programmes include Conventional Prompt Global Strike, the Long Range Hypersonic Weapon and the Air Launched Rapid Response Weapon programmes. The US has also collaborated on hypersonics with Australia.

To summarise, so far only Russia has a working hypersonic anti-ship capability, and Russia and China working land attack capabilities. Russia’s (claimed) use of a hypersonic missile in Ukraine is probably largely symbolic, and possibly nothing more than an opportunistic operational test.

There are serious question marks over whether the reported Kinzhal strike in west Ukraine was actually in West Ukraine, or even a Kinzhal. Planetlabs has geolocated the target we see in Russia’s video as a farm in East Ukraine about 100 km south-east of Kharkiv, and has dated its destruction to a week before the date of the apparent strike. After the strike we see no secondary detonations, and the resulting fire has a single hotspot, consistent with unburnt fuel combusting, but not with burning ammunition stocks. The video does show (at two seconds in) a munition of some sort descending vertically onto the target at high speed. The weapon’s size is consistent with a Kinzhal – 4 metres long – but equally consistent with its ground-launched cousin the Iskander tactical ballistic missile. The blast, on the other hand, is inconsistent with a 500-kg high explosive warhead detonation.

With no maritime dimension to the Ukraine war Russia’s Tsirkon ship-killing missile is of little tactical relevance, though we may see symbolic firings of these too against land targets. Successful use of a Tsirkon against a warship would be a completely different matter, and a game-changer to compare with the destruction of the Israeli ship Eilat by a missile in 1967 – the first missile kill in modern warfare.

UK
Anoosheh Ashoori Accuses Johnson of 'Opportunism' after Release from Iran Prison

Saturday, 26 March, 2022 - 06:15

Sherry Izadi, Elika Ashoori and Aryan Ashoori, the family of Anoosheh Ashoori stage an 'empty chair' protest opposite Downing Street, on the 4th anniversary of his imprisonment, in London, Britain, August 13, 2021. 

REUTERS/Henry Nicholls

London - Asharq Al-Awsat

Anoosheh Ashoori, a former detainee in Iran, has accused Boris Johnson of ‘opportunism’, claiming the prime minister only reached out to him after his release from detention.

The 67-year-old British-Iranian was held in Tehran’s Evin prison for five years after a visit to Iran in August 2017 to see his elderly mother.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a dual British-Iranian citizen who went to Tehran in 2016 to visit her parents when her daughter was a toddler, was released last week along with Ashoori, who is a retired civil engineer.

Iran, which doesn’t recognize dual citizenship, has charged the detainees with crimes such as espionage and sentenced them to long prison terms under harsh conditions.

Speaking exclusively on Sky News program Beth Rigby Interviews, Ashoori said he felt let down by Britain's leader but praised the "fantastic job" civil servants have done behind-the-scenes.

Johnson did not respond to the family's requests for assistance, nor did he reply to a direct plea from Ashoori.

The detained Briton managed to record an audio message while inside the prison asking for Johnson's help. It was published by Sky News in 2020.

The retired engineer said: "I risked my safety but I managed to convey that message to him.

"Unfortunately he did not expend even five minutes to give a telephone call to my family."

However, on Monday, Ashoori received an invitation to meet with the prime minister.

He told Sky News: "Now he's eager to see us. How would you interpret that?

"I think that there's a bit of opportunism involved in it."

Asked if he would meet with the prime minister, Ashoori said: "I'm not sure."

Why Biden hasn't scored a political win from canceling $17 billion in student loans

By Katie Lobosco, CNN
Sun March 27, 2022

President Joe Biden walks on the South Lawn of the White House before boarding Marine One in Washington, DC, on March 18, 2022.

Washington (CNN)Joe Biden has canceled more student loan debt than any other President -- a notable fact that's flown under the radar.

Taking a piecemeal approach, the Biden administration has expanded existing loan forgiveness programs for borrowers who work in the public sector, those who were defrauded by for-profit colleges and borrowers who are now permanently disabled.

Those moves have delivered significant relief to more than 700,000 borrowers, totaling more than $17 billion.

Yet some voters feel misled by the President, who had supported canceling $10,000 for each of the 43 million federal student loan borrowers while on the campaign trail.

"He's not delivering on his promise," said Jennifer Lewis, a 57-year-old nurse practitioner in Washington state who has about $80,000 in student loan debt.

"If he were to run again, I would think twice about voting for president at all," added Lewis, a self-described "super progressive."

Biden is also facing a drumbeat of pressure from some key Democratic lawmakers who are urging him to do more and cancel $50,000 per borrower.

That puts Biden in a tough political spot as federal student loan payments are set to resume May 1 after a two-year, pandemic-related pause. Biden could decide to extend the pause again, a move that could please borrowers in a midterm election year who are struggling with rising inflation.

But not every Democrat thinks it's a good idea to broadly cancel student debt, and some economists warn that extending the payment pause could make inflation worse.

"I think it's important to keep in mind that there is far from a consensus viewpoint among Democratic members of Congress and Democratic voters that large sums of debt should be canceled," said Michelle Dimino, an education senior policy adviser at Third Way, a think tank that promotes center-left ideas.

Pandemic, inflation set back some borrowers

Sandeep and Tom Berry were hoping Biden would cancel some of their student debt but have lost hope of that pledge coming to fruition.

The North Carolina couple, who both identify as moderates, have $160,000 in student loan debt borrowed to pay for Tom's MBA.

"We knew what we signed up for. Tom and I made a decision to take on these loans," said Sandeep, 39.

But the pandemic threw a wrench into their financial plans. Sandeep, a consultant, planned to return to work once both of their children were in school. But she put those plans on hold when schools shut down and both kids were home for remote learning. She now hopes to reenter the workforce next year.

"I'm not one to ask the government to give away money, but given Covid -- a once-in-a-lifetime situation -- I feel like forgiving student loans as a one-time thing would really help," she said.

When payments resume, the Berry family will be on the hook for $1,000 a month -- a payment the couple says will be hard to make since inflation has made their everyday expenses higher.

"To be honest, the loans have been paused for so long I don't know what we're going to do when they are put back into effect," said Tom, 43, noting that he thinks an unprecedented response is needed to meet the current situation, but realizes canceling debt won't be a lasting solution.

"If he (Biden) waved a magic wand and all my debt went away, my life would get exponentially better. But I know it doesn't solve the larger problem," he added.

How a fringe issue became mainstream

The progressive wing of the Democratic party was pushing for student debt cancellation long before the pandemic. Born out of the Occupy Wall Street movement, a grassroots organization known as the Debt Collective organized its first "student debt strike" in 2015.

But it was still a fringe issue until 2019 when Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, soon followed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, put forth proposals to broadly cancel student debt.

About a year ago, a Monmouth University poll found that 61% of adults supported canceling $10,000 in college debt for anyone with an outstanding federal loan. Fewer people, 45%, supported canceling $50,000 in debt per borrower.

Biden has never been all-in on broadly canceling student debt. But he made it clear during the presidential campaign, after the Covid-19 pandemic began, that he was in support of some federal student debt cancellation. He outlined specific policy proposals in April 2020 in an olive branch to supporters of Sanders, who had just dropped out of the race.

Those proposals called for immediately canceling a minimum of $10,000 of student debt per person as a response to the pandemic, as well as forgiving all undergraduate tuition-related federal student debt from two- and four-year public colleges and universities for those borrowers earning up to $125,000 a year.

RELATED: Youth turnout could save, or sink, Democrats in 2022

Since taking office, Biden has resisted pressure to cancel debt on his own with an executive order. It's not totally clear that he has the authority to do so. Last year, Biden directed lawyers at the Department of Education and the Department of Justice to evaluate whether he does, in fact, have the power to broadly cancel federal student loans -- but the administration has not disclosed those findings.

Instead, Biden has urged Congress to pass legislation that cancels $10,000 per borrower. He also suggested that cancellation should exclude high-income borrowers, arguing last year that the government shouldn't forgive debt for people who went to "Harvard and Yale and Penn."

But key Democratic lawmakers, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, continue to call on Biden to cancel $50,000 for every borrower. Hundreds of advocacy groups, including the nation's two biggest teachers' unions and the NAACP, have also urged the administration to broadly cancel student debt. And former Education Secretary John King, a Democrat who is now running for governor of Maryland, has called on Biden to cancel student debt through executive action.

"I get it, I talk to people who have student debt and it's real for them," current Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told CNN earlier this year.

"But the President takes this seriously," he said, noting that the administration is working to fix the system to help future students, too, as they weigh borrowing to pay for school. The department has started rewriting a federal rule, known as gainful employment, that aims to prevent students from taking on too much debt to attend predatory for-profit colleges. The rule was revoked by the previous administration.

Targeted debt relief for 700,000-plus people

More than 700,000 people have seen their student debt wiped away under Biden, some of whom had been waiting months, if not years, for the Department of Education to process their forgiveness claims under existing relief programs.

Last year, the Biden administration overhauled the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that cancels outstanding federal student loan debt for those who work in the government and nonprofit sectors after they've made 10 years of payments.

The administration temporarily expanded the eligibility criteria until October 31, 2022, so that the forgiveness applies to borrowers who have older loans that didn't originally qualify as well as those who were in the wrong repayment plan but met the other requirements. So far, the Department of Education has identified 100,000 borrowers with about $6.2 billion in loans who are eligible for student debt cancellation due to the waiver, though not all of them have seen their debt wiped away yet.

The department has been chipping away at a backlog of forgiveness claims filed under a policy known as borrower defense to repayment that allows former students who were defrauded by their colleges to seek federal debt relief. Under that policy, the Biden administration has canceled about $2 billion in debt held by more than 107,000 individuals who attended for-profit colleges like ITT Technical Institute and DeVry University.

The department also improved efforts to reach borrowers eligible for debt relief because of permanent disabilities.

But there were still more than 200,000 unresolved borrower defense claims as of September, the latest data available, according to the Project on Predatory Student Lending, a group that represents borrowers in an ongoing lawsuit over unprocessed borrower defense claims.

The Biden administration's efforts have yet to deliver debt relief for Lionel Siongco. He filed a borrower defense claim last year, arguing he was misled by the Art Institute of California in Hollywood, a campus that was part of a for-profit chain that abruptly shuttered in 2019 after losing its accreditation. In his claim, which is pending, he's arguing the school inflated graduation rates and job placement numbers.

Siongco, now 30 and living in California, earned an associate degree in fashion design from the school about eight years before it closed. He later earned a bachelor's degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology, a public college in Manhattan, but he said the institution did not accept any of his previous credits.

He hopes the Department of Education will cancel the loans he borrowed to attend the Art Institute and said he is "so disappointed" that Biden hasn't broadly canceled student debt.

Lionel Siongco, a student loan borrower, is disappointed that Biden hasn't canceled more student debt.

"If we can bail out banks and corporations in this country, why can't we invest in the future and the education of its citizens?" he asked.

Siongco, a progressive who has more than $20,000 in student debt remaining, said that he'll be voting for a Democrat for president. But he's concerned that broad student loan forgiveness won't remain a point of discussion for lawmakers.

Payment pause delivered more relief, without a political boost

In addition to Biden's actions to expand existing forgiveness programs, he has also extended the pandemic-related pause on federal student loan payments and interest three times. Congress initially provided an automatic pause on payments and interest for most federal student loans in March 2020, which was then extended by the Trump administration.

A recent analysis from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that the pause on interest and payments -- from March 2020 through the scheduled end date of May 1, 2022 -- will result in debt relief equivalent to an average of $5,500 per borrower. The analysis notes this relief is largely due to the halt on interest accumulation and has benefited doctors and lawyers -- who tend to borrow huge amounts of money for their graduate degrees -- the most.

The analysis may underestimate the relief because it doesn't take into account the added benefit that those pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness receive from the payment pause. They are still receiving credit toward the 10 years of required payments as if they had continued to make them during the pandemic, as long as they are still working full time for qualifying employers.

Federal borrowers who didn't make any payments during the pandemic will owe the same amount when payments resume as they did in March 2020. But they will have saved money thanks to the interest accumulation pause. Those savings are in addition to the $17 billion canceled by the Biden administration for defrauded borrowers, public sector workers and those permanently disabled.

"I don't think, unfortunately, that's going to give Democrats the political win they are looking for," said Marcela Mulholland, political director at Data for Progress, a think tank and polling firm that supports progressive causes.

"I think canceling student debt or extending the pause are examples of things Democrats should be doing ahead of the midterms. There are very obvious adverse political consequences to restarting payments in an election year," she added.
Administration officials have recently said they are considering another extension before payments are set to resume on May 1.

The pause costs the government roughly $4 billion a month, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Economic impacts

Advocates for student debt cancellation argue that it would help close the racial wealth gap because Black students are more likely to take on student debt, borrow larger amounts and take longer paying them off than their White peers.

But some economists criticize student debt cancellation proposals as regressive, using taxpayer dollars to disproportionately benefit higher-wealth households because they tend to have more student debt. While it would have a big financial benefit for many, partial student loan cancellation is expected to have a only a modest effect on immediately boosting the economy since it would do little to increase the amount of cash households have to spend.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that canceling all federal student loan debt would cost roughly $1.6 trillion, canceling $50,000 per borrower would cost between $675 billion to $1 trillion, and canceling $10,000 per borrower would cost between $210 billion and $280 billion.

Canceling existing student debt would also do little to help future college students, borrowers who have already paid off their loans and those who never went to college in the first place.

Biden also campaigned on making community colleges free, a move that would require an act of Congress, but that proposal was cut from his Build Back Better agenda.
Joseph Steinfels, a public defender in Illinois, sees student loan debt cancellation as something that would increase the economic disparity in the US.

"I can't get past the fact that this would not help my clients, the ones truly suffering, or the millions of others who never set foot in college," said Steinfels, a former Marine.
"It's taking taxpayer dollars and creating unjust enrichment," he said.

Steinfels, now 45, fully paid off the loans he borrowed for his undergraduate degree. He used a combination of military benefits and his own funds to pay for his three graduate degrees and a certificate.

"I personally had a unique path, and I'm just so grateful," he said.
Steinfels, who has four children, considers himself an independent and said student loan policy wouldn't be a "make-or-break" issue for him next time he goes to the polls.