Sunday, April 24, 2022

Argentina protests: Thousands of farmers stage anti-tax rally in Buenos Aires

Issued on: 24/04/2022 - 
01:35

Thousands of Argentine farmers protested in Buenos Aires on April 23 against President Alberto Fernandez, whose policies to contain food prices to curb rampant inflation have been criticized by the agricultural sector.


Indonesia's Anak Krakatoa volcano erupts, spews huge ash tower

Anak Krakatoa last erupted in 2018, generating a tsunami that killed 429 people and left thousands homeless.
 PHOTO: REUTERS

PUBLISHED
6 HOURS AGO

JAKARTA (AFP) - The offspring of Indonesia's infamous Krakatoa volcano erupted on Sunday (April 24), spewing a towering volcanic ash cloud about 3,000 metres into the sky.

Mount Anak Krakatoa, which means Child of Krakatoa, belched thick ash over the strait that separates the islands of Java and Sumatra, forcing authorities to warn nearby residents to wear masks outside.

"We are still recording continuous eruptions with thick clouds towering at between 500 to 3,000 metres from the peak," Deny Mardiono of Indonesia's Geological Agency told AFP.

Anak Krakatoa has erupted at least 21 times in recent weeks but Sunday's eruption was the largest yet, Mardiono said.

Authorities ordered people to stay out of a two-kilometre exclusion zone around the volcano, which is currently graded at level two of Indonesia's four-tiered volcanic alert system.

"People, including tourists, should adhere to the recommendation from the Geological Agency, which prohibits anyone to be within a two-kilometre radius from the crater," he added.


The volcano has been sporadically active since it emerged from the sea at the beginning of last century in the caldera formed after the 1883 eruption of Mount Krakatoa.

That disaster was one of the deadliest and most destructive in history with an estimated 35,000 people killed.

Anak Krakatoa last erupted in 2018, generating a tsunami that killed 429 people and left thousands homeless.

Indonesia sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire where the meeting of continental plates causes high volcanic and seismic activity.

The country has nearly 130 active volcanoes.


http://www.simonwinchester.com/krakatoa

Simon Winchester's long experience in the world wandering as well as his knowledge of history and geology give us an entirely new perspective on this ...

http://files.harpercollins.com/PDF/TeachingGuides/0061239828.pdf

ABouT The Book. The explosion of the volcanoes on the Indonesian island of Krakatau (Krakatoa) in the Sunda Strait on. August 27, 1883, remains to this day ...




 

Earthquake occurred off northern coast of Vancouver Island Saturday

EARTHQUAKE OFF B.C. COAST

An earthquake occurred off the coast of Vancouver Island Saturday.

The 5.0-magnitude quake occurred off the northwest coast of Vancouver Island at 2:22 p.m., at a depth of about 10 kilometres.

According to Earthquakes Canada, the quake was not felt, and no tsunami was created as a result.

Biden again describes past Armenian massacres as genocide


US President Joe Biden has described the massacre of Armenians beginning in 1915 as a genocide
(AFP/MANDEL NGAN) (MANDEL NGAN)

Sun, April 24, 2022,

US President Joe Biden used Sunday's occasion of Armenian remembrance day to describe past mass atrocities by Ottomans as genocide, repeating his controversial description from a year ago when he ended decades of American equivocation.

The categorization infuriates Turkey, which refuses to recognise the 1915-16 killings of more than a million Armenians as genocide.

But Biden, who earlier this month said Russia's atrocities committed during its invasion of Ukraine amounted to genocide, again used the precise term to describe the massacres of Armenians during World War I.

"On April 24, 1915, Ottoman authorities arrested Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Constantinople. Thus began the Armenian genocide -- one of the worst mass atrocities of the 20th century," the president said in a statement.

"Today, we remember the one and a half million Armenians who were deported, massacred, or marched to their deaths in a campaign of extermination, and mourn the tragic loss of so many lives."

Biden said people should remain "vigilant against the corrosive influence of hate in all forms," and urged Americans to "recommit ourselves to speaking out and stopping atrocities that leave lasting scars on the world."

As many as 1.5 million Armenians are estimated to have been killed from 1915 to 1917 during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, which suspected the Christian minority of conspiring with adversary Russia in World War I.

Armenian populations were rounded up and deported into the desert of Syria on death marches in which many were shot, poisoned or fell victim to disease, according to accounts at the time by foreign diplomats.

Turkey, which emerged as a secular republic from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, acknowledges that 300,000 Armenians may have died but strongly rejects that it was genocide.

Biden infuriated Ankara one year ago when he became the first sitting US president to describe the massacres as genocide. He had informed Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the decision the day before, in a move seeking to limit fury from the NATO ally.

Erdogan in the aftermath denounced the genocide recognition as "groundless" and "destructive," and warned Washington could lose a friend in a key region.

The strained relations gradually steadied, with the two leaders meeting last June and Erdogan hailing a "new era" of constructive ties with Washington.

They spoke last month about Turkey's mediation over the Russia-Ukraine war.

mlm/jv
Russia blocks chess website over Ukraine

AFP Moscow
Published: 24 Apr 2022

Two men play chess in a park, amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, April 7, 2022.

Reuters
The popular website Chess.com has been blocked in Russia after publishing two critical articles on the situation in Ukraine branded "false information" by the authorities.

The site, which boasts 50 million members worldwide, is now on a list of blocked sources drawn up by Russia's telecom watchdog Roskomnadzor.


The general prosecutor's office requested that access to just two pages of the Chess.com critical of Russia's "special operation" in Ukraine be restricted, domestic agencies and media reported.

But because Chess.com uses the HTTPS protocol, the whole site has become unavailable, the media said.

Chess.com could not be opened in Russia on Sunday afternoon.

The articles allegedly condemned the offensive Russia unleashed in Ukraine on February 24, according to Russian media reports.

Chess.com has already banned Russian grandmaster Sergey Karjakin, who has publicly supported the offensive, from playing games on the site.

Karjakin, who played Norway's Magnus Carlsen in 2016 for the world title, has also been suspended for six months by world chess governing body FIDE.


This month he called for Chess.com to be blocked, accusing it of "anti-Russian choices" and "insulting propaganda".

Karjakin took to the Telegram messaging service to praise the move against Chess.com by the Russian government.

"Is it really a great loss for Russian-speaking users?" he asked, adding, "Not in my opinion."

"Once again we are witness to a situation where Western platforms lose their Russian public because of their own phobia of Russia."

Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have already been blocked in Russia, as have dozens of media websites over Ukraine.

Since President Vladimir Putin sent troops to Ukraine, authorities have stepped up measures to silence critics of the military operation in Russia's pro-Western neighbour.

New legislation imposes prison terms of up to 15 years for spreading information about the Russian military deemed false by the government.

Shaken by war, Ukrainian artists 'fight with images'

Some of Ukrainian artist Vlodko Kaufman's soldier portraits
 (AFP/Yuriy Dyachyshyn)


Alice Hackman
Sun, April 24, 2022

Ukrainian artist Vlodko Kaufman hopes one day he will be able to stop scribbling portraits of troops killed by Russia on utility bills and old tram tickets.

"Every day I keep track of what is happening at the front, how many are killed, wounded, missing or captured," the 65-year-old said.

He matches each grim report with a quick biro headshot of the same brooding soldier on whatever paper is lying around.

On a table in his gallery in western Ukraine, Kaufman spread out hundreds of identical images of the combatant in a helmet. The most recent stretched out in rows on furniture assembly instructions, a photocopy of his passport, or a plane ticket.

"This work is a requiem that will be performed as long as the war lasts," he said.

"I will only stop drawing when the conflict is over, so who knows how many more there will be."

The artist started his project in 2014, when fighting first flared between Ukraine and Russia-backed separatists in the country's east.

But since Moscow launched a full-scale invasion of his country on February 24, he has been drawing with increasing regularity, he says.

Kaufman is only one of many Ukrainian artists in the relatively sheltered western city of Lviv employing their talent to record the horrors of war, call for the world's attention, or simply support those affected.



- 'We have to win' -

A short walk away, at the top of a winding wooden staircase, 49-year-old Serhiy Savchenko stood in his paint-splotched studio next to one of the few paintings he has managed to create in recent weeks.

"It's called 'Green'," he said, after the military shade that has pervaded daily life.

Dozens of tiny abstract figures representing the civilians who have signed up to fight parade across the canvas.

Savchenko said he needed to paint so he could "breathe", but these days art had taken a backseat. Requests for paintings and exhibitions would have to wait.

"We are at the top of Western interest, but we have to use it to get more aid," he said.

The established artist has transformed his gallery in Poland into a logistics centre to ship in supplies.

He spends much of his day on the phone, and his new profession sometimes involves stuffing tactical boots with medical supplies and chocolate.

"I try to invest all my artistic knowledge, all my contacts, all my time, all my health into the situation," said Savchenko, one of many improvised go-betweens hooking up donors with Ukrainians in need.



"We have to win."


As he spoke, he awaited the wife of a musician friend deployed to Mykolaiv in the embattled south of the country. She was going to pick up two sleeping bags that someone brave would drive down to him.

If nothing is done, "everybody will die," Savchenko said, eyes glistening as he recalled the thousands of lives already lost.

"We have to build the future -- a future where there will be art."




- For the children -

In another part of the city, 28-year-old Mikhailo Skop also hopes for a new dawn in which Ukraine will emerge victorious.

At the bustling Lviv Art Centre, he held up a poster from a series of war-inspired Tarot card images he has created to voice the country's woes abroad.

In "The Sun", a child on a horse waves a Ukrainian flag above a field of sunflowers. Skulls, one marked with the letter "Z" associated with the invading Russian forces, lie at their feet.

"All of us are fighting but in different ways," said Skop, who also goes by the street artist name neivanmade.

"I'm fighting with my images."

For "Temperance", he had drawn an angel distributing food to forlorn characters who appear to be some of the millions the fighting has displaced.

In "Strength", a woman twists a Russian tank's gun out of action -- a jab at the Russian state's "toxic masculinity", he said.

His Tarot cards are selling online as posters and t-shirts in Europe and the United States, and all proceeds will go towards helping Ukrainian children overcome the trauma of conflict.

"They will grow up and become this country," he said.

ah/oc
FREE PEASANTS
Ukraine's Poorest Sow Seeds Under The Bombs
By Joris FIORITI and Antoine DEMAISON
04/24/22 AT 1:15 PM

Standing in front of the home of his boss recently hit by a bomb in southern Ukraine, Vassili Kushch never wavers in his commitment to the land, picking up his shovel and getting to work.

"I must work. I don't have anywhere else to go," labourer Kushch, 63, says in the village of Mala Tokmachka, 70 kilometres (43 miles) southeast of Zaporizhzhia.

The village, only a few kilometres from the invisible line separating Moscow's troops from Kyiv's forces, wakes up every night to Russian rockets splitting the sky and discovers the disastrous consequences every morning.

Russian strikes mangled the metal fence belonging to Kushch's boss. Several windows in his old tractors, parked in the garden, have shattered.

Rubble litters the ground. The small bomb responsible for the damage has gouged a hole in the ground, right in front of the home.

Vassili Kushch is one of hundreds of residents who decided to stay in the Ukrainian village of Mala Tokmachka 
Photo: AFP / Ed JONES

Kushch doesn't hold his words back for the "Russian bastards" who destroy his village but soon lifts his shovel once more.

On the other side of the road, another bomb destroyed a red-brick building.

"The neighbour was in the kitchen. She left to hide in the fields," Kushch says, before adding: "Thank God, the cow is still alive."

Kushch is one of hundreds of residents who decided to stay in the village, though many others fled after two months of war.

The last ones to remain are the poorest and most vulnerable, often the oldest, and those whose only riches come from the earth.

Kushch doesn't have much. The army jacket he wears was "given by a prison guard", his loose trousers "date back to the Soviet era" and he lives in a small room, which "shakes" every time Russians strike.

Olga Tus wants to believe that the war 'will end soon'
 Photo: AFP / Ed JONES

"It's like I'm naked," sighs the former driver, who has been doing odd jobs for 30 years. "I don't have money to buy anything."

Kushch, a divorced father of five who is not in contact with his children, would like to "bury alive" the "katsap", a pejorative term used to refer to Russians.

But he knows he doesn't have any chance against Moscow's forces with just his shovel and so he remains in Mala Tokmachka.

"If we don't sow the potatoes, we will have none to harvest. Same for onions. And so the cows will die of hunger," he says with evident fear, rolling a cigarette with tobacco he has grown himself.

Vera Dounda wishes to die in the village where she was born 
Photo: AFP / Ed JONES

It would be a similar tragedy for a man whose parents, born in 1927, experienced the great famine of 1932-33, and another in 1946-47.

Kyiv has vigorously campaigned for the Stalin-era famines on its territory in the 1930s -- known as the Holodomor -- to be recognised as genocide.

These tragedies taught him one thing: "You can't just live on water, but you can survive with milk."


Olga Tus, who hosts Kushch, accuses him of being "a drunkard", adding: "When he drinks, we don't approach him. Otherwise, it's OK."


But the 60-something hardy woman, who ties her hair under a magenta scarf, shares two cardinal values in rural Ukraine with Kushch.

The first is a hatred of Russians -- Tus worked in Moscow for 20 years and described Russians as "swines".


The second is the commitment to the land and to sow seeds because, as the local saying goes, "when the flowers start to bloom, everything ends".

Tus wants to believe that the war "will end soon" and doesn't "even consider for a second" that Russian troops can take Mala Tokmachka, despite the sounds of rockets rumbling above.

A bet that the "rich" clearly did not believe in, having fled the village, in contrast with the "poor" who stayed, according to Tus.


For several days, AFP observed many convoys of combine harvesters and other gleaming tractors on the secondary roads leading to Zaporizhzhia, a large city still under Kyiv's control.


Yuri, head of the territorial defence of Mala Tokmachka, says "it's to prevent these machines being looted by Russians".

Natalia Bouinitskaia and her husband, Guennady, have other concerns.

The couple cannot leave because of Natalia's mother, Vera Dounda, who wishes to die in the village where she was born.

"I'm scared when it shakes too strongly. So, I lie down and I look at the window," the 84-year-old says, who can no longer walk "not because of an illness but because of age".

Dounda thinks of a future without war, or of her glorious past, when she could "run, run, run", without any bombs to flee.
Egypt releases 41 political prisoners, says negotiator

Those released were all being held on political charges and charges related to freedom of thought and expression

a policeman opening the gate to al-Qanatir women's prison, at the tip of the Nile delta in Qalyoubiya province, about 30 kilometres north of Egypt's capital on 27 December 2020

By MEE and agencies
Published date: 24 April 2022 

Egypt on Sunday released 41 political prisoners from pre-trial detention, according to a politician-turned-negotiator.

"Forty-one of those held on remand detention on political charges and (charges related to) freedom of thought and expression" have been released, Mohamed al-Sadat said.

Long a fixture of Egypt's political scene, Sadat is a nephew of former president Anwar al-Sadat and has recently emerged as an unofficial negotiator for political prisoners.

Egypt: Rights groups demand whereabouts of journalist arrested by security services   
Read More »

Rights groups estimate that tens of thousands of such prisoners are being held in Egypt.

Among those freed Sunday, prominent lawyer Khaled Ali told AFP, were journalist Mohamed Salah, researcher Abdo Fayed and activists Walid Shawky, Haitham al-Banna and Hassan al-Barbary.

Activist Radwa Mohamed, who was arrested in 2019 for criticising the regime amid rare protests calling for Sisi's removal from office, was another of those released, according to her lawyer Nabeeh al-Ganadi.

All six were charged with "belonging to a terrorist organisation and spreading false news" – an accusation frequently levelled against dissidents in Egypt.

Shawky had begun a hunger strike in February. Both he and Salah had previously been ordered released before new charges were levied against them - a common tactic used to circumvent Egypt's two-year maximum pretrial detention period, according to rights groups.

More detainees will be released, Sadat hinted, as "legal and humanitarian reviews" will very likely leave some eligible for "presidential pardons" that are conventionally handed down around Eid, set for the first week of May.

In an interview with AFP, Egyptian-Palestinian activist Ramy Shaath, who was released in January, detailed brutal conditions and treatment in prison, describing inmates as "rotting in hell".

This week, four social media comedians were arrested on charges of terrorism and spreading false news for a song posted online that satirised the authorities' failure to rein in rampant inflation.

In November, Human Rights Watch accused the international community of "rewarding repressive rule" by selecting the North African country to host the next climate summit - the COP27, scheduled for November.
Rio's flamboyant Carnival parade returns after pandemic hiatus

01:43  A performer from the Beija Flor samba school parades during Carnival celebrations at the Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on April 23, 2022. 
© Silvia Izquierdo, AP


Issued on: 24/04/2022

Video by: Solange MOUGIN

Colorful floats and flamboyant dancers are delighting tens of thousands jammed into Rio de Janeiro's iconic Sambadrome, putting on a delayed Carnival celebration after the pandemic halted the dazzling displays.
FRENCH ELECTION: WHERE IS THE LEFT?

French presidential election: Abstention rate estimated to be the highest in 50 years


Issued on: 24/04/2022

01:41 Video by: Selina SYKES

The final rate of abstention is set to reach 28%, up 2.5% from 2017, according to our partners Ipsos-Sopra Steria. That would be the highest level for a presidential run-off since 1969, when two centre-right candidates faced off in a somewhat inconsequential clash. FRANCE 24's Selina Sykes reports from a polling station.

Mid-day turnout in French presidential run-off at 26.41 percent

Shirli SITBON

Turnout for the French presidential run-off stood at 26.4 percent at noon on Sunday. FRANCE 24's Shirli Sitbon reports from a polling station in the 19th arrondissement of Paris.