Anticyclone Scipio turns up heat in Mediterranean and north Africa

Analysis: Andalucía in Spain could exceed 40C this week, with parts of Italy and Africa also affected

Searing heat in Cádiz, an ancient port city in Andalucía, south-western Spain. Photograph: Juan Carlos Toro/Getty Images


Alice Fowler (Metdesk)Mon 6 Jun 2022

Extreme and prolonged heat engulfing parts of Spain, Italy and north Africa shows no signs of easing this week. Anticyclone Scipio has been bringing hot air from Africa to the central Mediterranean, causing weeks of scorching temperatures.

An anticyclone – an area of high pressure – is the opposite of a cyclone. Some countries name anticyclones if they are likely to bring severe weather such as searing heat. This is similar to the way most countries, including the UK, name areas of low pressure, or cyclones, if they bring severe weather in the form of heavy rain or strong winds.

Temperatures are forecast to reach the high 30s Celsius across the Mediterranean, with some parts of Spain, Italy and north Africa in the low 40s. The Andalucía region of Spain is predicted to exceed 40C most days this week – about 4-5C above the climate average.

While anticyclonic heat is not unusual in the Mediterranean, the unrelenting nature of this event has brought an early and dramatic start to the summer, with healthcare centres in the Canary Islands and Balearics on high alert.

People cool off by a fountain in Piazza del Popolo, Rome, as Anticyclone Scipio raises temperatures in Italy. 

Photograph: Angelo Carconi/EPA

Meanwhile, low pressure across east Asia will bring high rainfall totals to parts of south-eastern China, Taiwan and Japan. At first, the downpours – more than 60mm on Tuesday – will hit Guangdong and Fujian in China as well as northern Taiwan. But as low pressure drifts north-eastwards, torrential rain will extend from northern Taiwan and up the East China Sea before reaching the Kagoshima region of Japan before the weekend. Daily rainfall could reach 65-80mm in these areas, bringing a significant risk of flooding.

Torrential rain in south-eastern China in the past two weeks has killed 15 people in landslides and building collapses. Heavy rain has also damaged roads, bridges and telecommunications facilities in Yunnan province and Guangxi.

Further south, significant rain is expected across South Island, also known as Te Waipounamu, in New Zealand. Its northern coastline including the Southern Alps could experience more than 50mm of rain a day between Tuesday and Thursday, with further downpours expected this weekend. Cumulative rainfall totals for the northern coastline could exceed 250-300mm this week.

Of course French police and politicians lied and smeared UK football fans. That’s what they do

In France, the violence meted out at the Champions League final and the cover-up that followed were tragically familiar

Riot police keep an eye on Liverpool fans at the Champions League final at the Stade de France.

 Photograph: Catherine Ivill/Getty Images

Fabrice Arfi

THE GUARDIAN

Mon 6 Jun 2022 

There is a proverb in French: “A quelque chose malheur est bon.” It roughly equates to “Every cloud has a silver lining.” In that sense – and I mean no offence, above all, not to Liverpool supporters – I think something positive emerged from the fiasco of the Champions League final in Paris on 28 May, when the club’s fans were unfairly blamed for chaotic and terrifying scenes outside the Stade de France.

It is that the world finally knows that there exists a country where people who cause no trouble – including children who had simply come to watch their idols play football – can be teargassed and abused by police for no justifiable reason. A country where those exercising the highest political office are able to peddle absolute nonsense in an attempt to extricate themselves from the controversy, without fear of consequence. That country is mine, France.

At last, amid continuing outrage, with British and Spanish officials and politicians, and thousands of fans and families, still calling for apologies and explanations, the world can perhaps understand what we French journalists have been trying to document for several years, most notably since Emmanuel Macron arrived in office in 2017. Here are but a few examples.

On 1 December 2018 in Marseille, 80-year-old Zineb Redouane was struck in the head by a teargas grenade when she went to shutter a window in her fourth-floor flat because of a demonstration taking place in the street below. Video images pointed to the firing of that grenade by a police officer. She died the next day in hospital. The police never identified the officer who fired the grenade, and the government did nothing.

On 23 March 2019, in Nice, 73-year-old Geneviève Legay, a feminist and anti-capitalist activist, was peacefully taking part in a demonstration against Macron and his government. When a police charge caused her to fall, she suffered serious head injuries, including bleeding on the brain. “This woman had had no contact with the forces of law and order,” declared Macron two days later. With contempt, he added: “I wish her a swift recovery and, perhaps, a sort of wisdom.” He had lied – a judicial investigation established she was indeed a victim of the police action. For having revealed details of the case, a journalist with the investigative team I co-lead at Mediapart was summoned for questioning by police. Again, the government did nothing.

On 21 June 2019 in Nantes, Steve Maia Caniço, 24, joined a dance party on a quay beside the River Loire during France’s yearly music festivities, the Fête de la musique. During the night, the police violently attempted to disperse the partygoers, causing 14 of them to fall into the river. The body of Maia Caniço was discovered in the water one month later and the initial police report concluded his death was unrelated to the police charge. A judicial investigation has since found to the contrary. The government, again, did nothing.


Fury in France as Champions League final chaos tarnishes nation’s global image

I could also mention how police forced a group of school pupils protesting about education reforms to kneel on the ground with hands behind their heads like prisoners of war, or incidents of police hitting firefighters during a demonstration over working conditions, and dragging protesting nurses along the ground. Not forgetting the 30 people who lost an eye, and six others who lost a hand, during the “yellow vest” protests – and all those times when the government did and said nothing.

But when it does say something, this is what it sounds like. In March 2019, Macron, apparently inspired by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, said: “Don’t talk about police repression and violence, such words are unacceptable in a state of law.”

In February 2020, Macron’s then interior minister, Christophe Castaner, infamous for having once falsely claimed that May Day demonstrators “attacked” a Paris hospital, declared: “I like order in this country and I defend the police … And in my words there are no ‘buts’. I defend them, and that’s all.”

And what can be said of the comment by Castaner’s successor, Gérald Darmanin, who blamed the Champions League disturbances on “industrial-scale” ticket fraud and said more than 30-40,000 Liverpool fans had fake tickets or no tickets outside the stadium.

Speaking before parliament in July 2020, Darmanin pronounced: “When I hear talk of police violence, I choke.” The remark was particularly cynical, made just two months after the death of George Floyd in the US after his neck was compressed by a police officer, and six months after the death in Paris of deliveryman Cédric Chouviat who, in a roadside police check that got out of hand, cried out “I’m suffocating” seven times to officers lying on top of him.

The message I want to send here is that behind the loud controversy that continues to surround the Champions League final, the violence and the near disaster, lies the silence of a familiar, practised French strategy. It ensures wrongdoing is never punished, and police offenders are never brought to book.

Fabrice Arfi is a French journalist with co-responsiblity for investigations at the website Mediapart

From hunger striker to MP candidate: the rise of France’s ‘humanist baker’


Between 15 hours of baking and three hours’ sleep, Stéphane Ravacley is trying to knead a little faith back into French politics

Stephane Ravacley in 2021 during his campaign to save his Guinean apprentice from deportation. Photograph: Sébastien Bozon/AFP/Getty Images

Angelique Chrisafis in Besançon

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 7 Jun 2022 

After dark in a bakery kitchen, Stéphane Ravacley was bashing blocks of butter with a giant rolling pin as he prepared his croissant pastry. “A lot of French people have lost faith in politics,” he said, shaping the first of 500 croissants. “They’re not voting, they don’t feel listened to, and it’s my battle to win them back.”

The 53-year-old baker who hails from what he calls the “bottom rung of the social ladder” has captured France’s imagination as one of the most improbable newcomers in this weekend’s first round of the parliamentary elections.


Ravacley’s outsider challenge to Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party in the Doubs near the Swiss border in eastern France is focusing attention on the newly re-elected president’s image problem as being aloof, especially concerning people’s everyday worries.

Macron is seeking a centrist parliamentary majority in order to have a free hand for his policies, such as raising the pension age and overhauling the benefits system. But turnout on 12 and 19 June is expected to be at a record low of less than 48% amid a growing mistrust of the political class. Some voters feel that the real battle will take place with street demonstrations against Macron’s policies from the autumn, so there’s “not much point” in voting, as one unemployed man said on a housing estate in the eastern town of Besançon.

Stephane Ravacley (centre) delivers a speech during a campaign meeting in Besançon on 15 May.

 Photograph: Sébastien Bozon/AFP/Getty Images

A historic alliance of parties on the left, led by the radical Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is seeking to make big parliament gains, and is predicted by pollsters to triple its seats and become the main opposition to Macron’s centrists. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally is also seeking to increase its seats.

Ravacley, who does not belong to a political party, is running for parliament for the leftwing alliance, backed by the Greens. He argues that the French parliament, which is overwhelmingly middle-class with a high level of formal education, needs more working-class, manual labourers who understand the way French people think. He grew up in eastern France, in a poor family who worked the cereal fields. His mother died in a tractor accident when he was four, leaving his father with three children.

Ravacley is known as the “humanist baker of Besançon”. He became famous last year for going on hunger strike in defence of his Guinean bakery apprentice, Laye Fodé Traoré, an orphan who had arrived in France as an unaccompanied minor aged 16, but faced deportation when he turned 18. Ravacley’s protest tapped into national concern for unaccompanied minor migrants. Stars including the actors Omar Sy and Marion Cotillard signed an open letter to Macron on his behalf. Still, it took 11 days of hunger strike and Ravacley’s sudden hospitalisation for the authorities to make contact and begin processing Traoré’s paperwork, allowing him to stay.

“When I went on hunger strike, I was initially met with silence from the authorities and that changed me as a person,” Ravacley said. “I’ve become a monster now – a kind and gentle monster – I really understand that if you want to change things you have to fight for it.”

Stéphane Ravacley working with Guinean apprentice Laye Fode Traoré in January 2021 after the baker’s campaign to save him from deportation ended in victory. 

Photograph: Sébastien Bozon/AFP/Getty Images

The baker’s campaign schedule is gruelling. He works on his croissants until 10pm, sleeps three hours, rises at 1.30 am to bake bread for his shop until midday, briefly naps, then sets off in his old Renault Twingo full of flour-sacks as he canvasses in his eastern constituency that spreads from the housing estates of Besançon to the small villages outside.

Ravacley still supports migrants who arrived as unaccompanied minors, as well as French young people leaving the care system, which has opened him to far right attacks. Last week, one of his election posters was sprayed with the Nazi swastika and racist slurs. “I’ll never give in to hate,” he said.

In an election described by pollsters as lacklustre and dull, Ravacley has become a high-profile figure. During last month’s Cannes film festival, the Dardenne brothers directing-duo, whose latest film is about young migrants in Belgium, dedicated their film to Ravacley. They called his hunger strike a “great act of resistance in our era”.

Ravacley said: “I was rolling out my croissants, as usual at that time of night, the phone rang and someone said: ‘Put on the TV, they’re talking about you at Cannes.’ Incredible.”

The town of Besançon, run by a Green mayor since 2020, saw a high vote for the left’s Mélenchon in the presidential race – he topped the poll in the first round, beating Macron and Le Pen. Ravacley’s challenge is whether the new leftwing alliance can now persuade voters to turn out again in the parliamentary elections, particularly on housing estates where abstention is high.

On the estates of Besançon’s Clairs-Soleils neighbourhood, as Ravacley knocked on doors, people said their biggest concern was making ends meet, as well as the climate crisis, but that trust in politics was low.

Outside a primary school, Ahmed, 32, an accountant collecting his two daughters, said he recognised Ravacley from TV. “It’s important to have someone in parliament who understands people’s everyday concerns, and we’re really struggling with the cost of food and petrol,” he said. “If I vote, I’ll vote for him. But I’m not really sure if it’s worth voting any more, nothing ever changes.”

Nabia Hakkar-Boyer, a regional councillor for the Socialist party, and Ravacley’s runningmate, said: “He comes across as down to earth and different to other candidates. He looks like the voters themselves, and he understands their lives. He always has flour on his trousers and he works more than 15 hours a day.”

Since the gilets jaunes anti-government protests of Macron’s first term, there has been a demand for “ordinary citizens” to play more of a role in political decision-making. Under pressure, Macron promised this month that he would set up a vast democratic consultation with the French people, but he is yet to spell out in what form.

Ravacley is not the only citizen protester who has turned parliamentary candidate this year. Rachel Keke, a hotel housekeeper who led a two-year strike for better conditions for cleaners at a hotel on the edge of Paris, is running for the left alliance east of the capital.

Meanwhile, Ravacley has even made his flour-encrusted, worn-down work shoes a campaign argument. “I’ll go to the National Assembly in my magic shoes,” he said. “They keep my feet on the ground.”

Polio outbreak in Pakistan worsens as eighth child reported paralysed


Investigation launched as first cases in a year blamed on vaccine refusal fuelled by clerics and falsification of records by parents

A child’s finger is inked to show a polio dose has been given. Some health workers are said to be helping parents avoid vaccinations by falsely marking a child’s fingers. Photograph: K Chaudary/AP


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Haroon Janjua
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 7 Jun 2022 

Pakistan’s polio eradication campaign is in disarray after an alarming jump in cases last week. Eight polio cases have now been reported in children over the past month in North Waziristan district, bordering Afghanistan. They are the first cases in more than a year.

This new outbreak, officials believe, is due to parents falsely marking themselves and their children as vaccinated, and the government has launched an investigation into the outbreak.

North Waziristan is a former Taliban stronghold in north-west Pakistan, where high vaccine refusal rates are thought to be behind the new cases.

“Fake markings and refusals are two key reasons in the recent outbreak, with polio staff conspiring with parents to miss the vaccination,” said Zulfiqar Babakhel, of Pakistan’s polio eradication programme, referring to how parents suspicious of immunisation have got hold of special pens used by health workers to mark vaccinated children’s fingers.

Dr Shahzad Baig, national programme coordinator, said: “The cases are highlighting exactly where the challenges lie, and we are doing our utmost to ensure that the virus remains contained and we fight it till the end.”

Before this surge, the last case of child paralysis as a result of polio was reported in January last year.

The federal health minister, Abdul Qadir Patel, said: “Following the first two cases in April, the polio programme took immediate steps to ringfence this area and prevent the virus from spreading further, particularly in the historic reservoirs [of infection] of Karachi, Peshawar and Quetta.

“Pakistan has had tremendous success against polio over the past few years, and we are taking all steps to protect the gains made by the programme.”

It was crucial for parents to vaccinate their children every time it was due, said the minister, as every dose of polio vaccine built further immunity.

Nationwide vaccination drives have been carried out door-to-door for the past 25 years. The teams are mostly female health workers, often volunteers, who have to be escorted by security guards.

Three such campaigns have been carried out in January, March and May this year. During the March campaign in north-western Pakistan, gunmen shot and killed a female polio worker. In January, also in the north-west, assailants shot and killed a police officer providing security to the polio team.

Militant groups in Pakistan have killed more than 100 health workers and their security guards since 2012.

According to the World Health Organization, Pakistan is one of only two countries, with Afghanistan, where the wild polio virus is still endemic.


Spectre of polio returns to haunt Pakistan as baby boy is left paralysed

Anti-vaccination sentiment in Pakistan is deeply rooted. Clerics and others have spread myths that vaccines are a conspiracy by the west to sterilise Muslim children, and a husband was allowed to divorce his wife for vaccinating their children against polio.

In April 2019, more than 25,000 children were rushed to hospital during a mass panic in north-west Pakistan after the spread of unfounded rumours about polio vaccines causing fainting and vomiting.

Funding needed for climate disasters has risen ‘more than 800%’ in 20 years

Only about half the funds required are being provided by rich countries, according to a report by Oxfam

Women drink water at a distribution point at Muuri, one of 500 camps for the half a million-plus people who have abandoned their homes in Somalia’s worst drought for 40 years.

 Photograph: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images

Arthur Neslen

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 7 Jun 2022 

The funding needed by UN climate disaster appeals has soared by more than 800% in 20 years as global heating takes hold. But only about half of it is being met by rich countries, according to a new report by Oxfam.

Last year was the third costliest on record for extreme weather events such as droughts, floods and wildfires with total economic costs estimated at $329bn, nearly double the total aid given by donor nations.

While poor countries appealed for $63-75bn in emergency humanitarian aid over the last five years, they only received $35-42bn, leaving a shortfall that Oxfam condemned as “piecemeal and painfully inadequate”.

As diplomats sit down in Bonn on Tuesday for the first session of climate talks on “loss and damage” – costs related to all climate destruction – Danny Sriskandarajah, Oxfam GB’s chief executive, described the finance gap as “unacceptable”.

He said: “Rich countries are not only failing to provide sufficient humanitarian aid when weather-related disasters hit. They are also failing to keep their promise to provide $100bn a year to help developing countries adapt to the changing climate, and blocking calls for finance to help them recover from impacts such as land that’s become unfarmable and infrastructure that’s been damaged.

“Wealthy countries like the UK need to take full responsibility for the harm their emissions are causing and provide new funding for loss and damage caused by climate change in the poorest countries.”

Campaigners point out that the UK actually cut aid to climate disaster-struck countries before last autumn’s Cop26 conference in Glasgow. Rich nations blocked attempts at the Cop to set up a financial mechanism to cover claims for loss and damage, an issue that will resurface in the Bonn talks.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change chief, Patricia Espinosa, said on Monday that the time had come to address loss and damage issue “in an open, constructive and respectful manner”.

The Cop president, Alok Sharma, declined to comment but a British government spokesperson said: “Cop26 marked a significant advance in action on loss and damage, we look forward to this momentum being maintained.”

In a sign that the issue has risen up the global agenda, a G7 foreign ministers’ statement last month nodded to loss and damage for the first time, while Germany’s new climate envoy, Jennifer Morgan, suggested a new “global shield” for climate as a possible solution.

The percentage of official development assistance (ODA) moneys used for climate spending barely changed last decade, even as the sums required by catastrophe-hit countries were rocketing.



In 2017, extreme weather was cited as a “major” factor in the majority of UN humanitarian appeals for the first time, the Oxfam report said. By 2021, it was a “major” or “contributing” factor in 78% of all such appeals, up from 35.7% in 2000. The UN expects a further 40% increase in climate disasters by 2030 but the human and financial cost from extreme weather is already mounting.

More than half a million people have abandoned their homes in Somalia’s worst drought for 40 years, Save the Children said on Monday. A quarter of a million people died during the country’s last famine in 2011 – half of them children under five years old. Severe climate-related droughts are also continuing to spread in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, while South Sudan suffers a fifth year of extreme flooding.

The four countries are collectively responsible for just 0.1% of current global emissions, compared with the 37% emitted by rich and industrialised countries, Oxfam said.

“The report’s findings are stark,” said Madeleine Diouf Sarr, the chair of the Least Developed Countries bloc at the UN climate talks. “We emit almost nothing, but in our group of countries there are islands sinking, landslides burying homes, hospitals being washed away by catastrophic weather events. Rich countries have historic[al] responsibility for this crisis, why shouldn’t they contribute to cleaning up the mess?”

Asad Rehman, the director of War on Want, added that the report showed “the brutal reality of a climate apartheid that is unfolding before our eyes”.

“Rich countries are committing arson on a planetary scale and refusing to stop pouring more oil and gas on the fire they started. But when faced with the bill for the damage they have caused they claim to have empty pockets,” he said. “It’s a deadly response shaped by a colonial mentality that for 500 years inflicted injustice and inequity, with the lives of those with black or brown skins in poorer countries deemed less valuable to those of western citizens.”

Comedian John Oliver offers to buy Melbourne’s ‘demonic’ banana statue

Artwork by Adam Stone provoked a public backlash, culminating in its attempted decapitation and removal from a Fitzroy street

Melbourne’s $22,000 traffic-calming and public-enraging banana sculpture before its attempted decapitation and subsequent removal, and the man who wants to buy it from Yarra city council, US comedian John Oliver. Composite: The Guardian


Calla Wahlquist
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 7 Jun 2022 

Comedian John Oliver has offered to buy a controversial banana statue that was pulled off the streets of Melbourne after being attacked by vandals

The $22,000, 1.8m tall anthropomorphic fibreglass banana was commissioned from artist Adam Stone by the City of Yarra. Stone said it was a representation of hubris and climate change.

It was erected on Rose Street, Fitzroy, and intended to slow traffic, but within weeks it had been put into indefinite storage after a strong public backlash that culminated in someone trying to decapitate it with a saw.

The artwork was paid for out of a $100,000 grant from the Transport Accident Commission.

The council has refused to say whether it would ever release the statue from storage.

The mayor, Sophie Wade, said it was not prepared to part with the statue, but offered Oliver a private viewing.

“We are so excited to hear John Oliver loves our banana sculpture as much as we do, but I am sad to say the City of Yarra is not ready to part with it just yet,” she said.

A giant yellow flower pot has replaced the $22,000 vandalised fibreglass banana statue on Rose St in Fitzroy, Melbourne. Photograph: Sam Strutt/The Guardian

On Sunday, Oliver offered to buy the statue for $10 and exchange it for a similarly sized statue of an alligator with a raised middle finger, which his production company developed as part of a proposal to replace all confederacy statues in Florida with statues of the belligerent reptile.

In addition to the alligator, which is named Herman, Oliver offered to sweeten the deal by donating $10,000 to Foodbank in Melbourne and $5,000 to Australia Zoo.

The Australia Zoo donation would be directed toward the John Oliver Koala Chlamydia Ward, which was established by actor Russell Crowe, who donated almost $80,000 that Oliver spent on various film memorabilia at Crowe’s divorce auction.

“Since the citizens of Melbourne seem to think that their money has been wasted, I might have a solution for you,” Oliver said in his show Last Week Tonight on Sunday. “I would gladly take that banana off your hands.”

Oliver said that Herman the alligator could fulfil the banana’s traffic-slowing duties.

“If you take us up on our deal, we will make those donations and, as a sweetener, send you this magnificent creature on a ship,” he said.


John Oliver: ‘Your basic rights could become crimes tomorrow’

“And frankly, I think it would fit right in there. What could be more Australian than a dangerous animal telling anyone who comes near it to go fuck themselves. So if you take us up on our offer, this guy is yours Melbourne. You have exactly one week to get back to us. Send us your banana.”

Oliver said the “demonic fucking banana” was “simply amazing”.

“It’s basically the Cate Blanchett of banana sculptures, in that it is a hauntingly pale Australian creature with a very striking bone structure.”

Wade said the council recognised the artwork’s value.

“I would like to officially extend an invitation to John Oliver to come down under and visit Yarra,” she said. “I would be happy to take him on a tour of our wonderful city and organise a private viewing of the banana so they can get acquainted.”

“We would also like to thank everyone who has expressed concern over the banana’s wellbeing. I am pleased to advise the banana is currently recuperating after the traumatic experience late last year and we will keep the community updated on how the banana is travelling.”

‘Every second counts’: wife of British journalist missing in Amazon urges action

Alessandra Sampaio, wife of Dom Phillips, tells Brazilian authorities: ‘Please answer the urgency of the moment with urgent actions’


Dom Phillips' sister makes emotional plea to help find journalist missing in Amazon – video


Tom Phillips in Rio de JaneiroTue 7 Jun 2022

The wife of a British journalist who has gone missing in a remote corner of the Brazilian Amazon notorious for illegal mining and drug trafficking has urged authorities to intensify their search efforts.

Dom Phillips, a longtime Guardian contributor, vanished on Sunday morning while journeying by boat through the Javari region of Amazonas state where he was reporting for a book he is writing about conservation.


Brazilian Alessandra Sampaio, who lives with her husband in the north-eastern city of Salvador, said in statement: “Brazilian authorities, our families are in despair. Please answer the urgency of the moment with urgent actions.


Fears for safety of British journalist missing in Brazilian Amazon

“As I make this appeal they have been missing for more than 30 hours … [and] in the forest every second counts, every second could be the difference between life and death,” Sampaio added.

“All I can do is pray that Dom and Bruno [Araújo Pereira] are well, somewhere, and unable to continue with their journey because of some mechanical problem, and that all this will end up being just another story in these full lives of theirs.”

Phillips, 57, was travelling with Bruno Araújo Pereira, a celebrated Indigenous expert who has spent years working to protect the more than two dozen tribes who call the rainforests their home.

As a second day of searches came to an end without any sign of the two men, the journalist’s sister, Sian Phillips, said in a video statement on Monday night: “We knew it was a dangerous place but Dom really believed it’s possible to safeguard the nature and the livelihood of the Indigenous people.

“We are really worried about him and urge the authorities in Brazil to do all they can to search the routes he was following. If anyone can help scale up resources for the search that would be great because time is crucial.

“We love our brother and want him and his Brazilian guide found ... every minute counts,” she added.

Security forces and members of the Indigenous agency Funai reportedly spent most of Monday searching for the men on a stretch of river near the town of Atalaia do Norte – the main entry point to the Javari region.

A navy search team was expected to arrive later, amid a growing public outcry.

The two missing men had been due to reach Atalaia do Norte on Sunday morning, having entered the reserve by river the previous week, but never made it to their destination.

Phillips and Pereira had travelled to the region around a Funai monitoring base, and reached Jaburu lake Friday evening, the Union of Indigenous Organizations of the Javari Valley and the Observatory for the Human Rights of Isolated and Recently Contacted Indigenous Peoples said.

The pair started the return trip early Sunday, stopping in the community of Sao Rafael, where Pereira had scheduled a meeting with a local leader to discuss Indigenous patrols to fight the “intense invasions” that have been taking place on their lands, the groups said.

When the community leader did not arrive, the men decided to continue to Atalaia do Norte, about a two-hour trip, they said.

They were last sighted shortly after near the community of Sao Gabriel, just downstream from Sao Rafael.

The pair were travelling in a new boat with 70 litres of gasoline – “sufficient for the trip” – and were using satellite communications equipment, the groups said.

According to the newspaper O Globo, two fishermen in the area were arrested by the police on Monday night. It remains unclear why they were arrested and they have since been released.

Beto Marubo, a prominent Indigenous leader from the region who knows both of the missing men, said: “We need an urgent search mission. We need the police, we need the army, we need firefighters, we need civil defence forces. We have no time to lose.”

Phillips, a freelance journalist who has reported on Brazil for more than 15 years, had travelled to the Javari, which is thought to be home to the greatest concentration of uncontacted people on Earth, with Pereira before. In 2018, the British reporter joined the Indigenous protection official on a rare and gruelling expedition through the Austria-sized Indigenous reserve, which he reported on for the Guardian.

“I want you to know that Dom Phillips, my husband, loves Brazil and he loves the Amazon. He could have chosen to live anywhere in the world but he chose here,” his wife said on Monday.

Marubo voiced admiration for the journalist, who has reported extensively on the growing crisis facing Brazil’s environment and Indigenous communities in recent years, as deforestation has soared.

“I feel huge affection for Dom … he has written several extraordinarily important articles about the Javari valley that have helped draw attention to our problems,” the Indigenous leader said, adding that the region had become increasingly dangerous in recent years as gangs of illegal hunters and miners had swarmed into its forests.

“These are systematically organised gangs that are plundering the Javari region,” he said. “They are veritable gangs and they are very violent.”

With Agence France-Presse

PHILLIPE NOT TONY

Starck unveils new Dior chair, predicts end of design

Brigitte HAGEMANN
Tue, June 7, 2022, 


Philippe Starck made his name making everyday objects extraordinary, but the French designer and architect believes the "dematerialisation" of modern life will soon make such talents redundant.

"What is the future of design? Well, there isn't one, because you must understand that everything has a birth, a life and a death and for design it is the same," he told AFP on the sidelines of the Milan Furniture Fair.

He is here to present a new chair created for fashion house Dior, an update on Christian Dior's iconic 1947 version of the Louis XVI medallion chair.

Starck, 73, is one of the most prolific inventors of his generation, designing everything from top hotels, luxury yachts and best-selling furniture to juicers and toothbrushes.

He believes, however, that the advance of technology means talents such as his may one day become redundant.

"We make everything disappear," he said, adding: "Look at your iPhone -- the number of products it replaces, it's extraordinary.

"Before, the size of a computer -- it was a building, a suburban house, now it is embedded under the skin."

The process will reach its end, he says with a smile, when "man is naked on the beach, ultra-powerful, ultra-calculating, ultra-communicative".

- 'Say no' -

The new Miss Dior chair is made entirely in aluminium, available in black chrome, pink copper or gold, while one of the three models rather whimsically has just one armrest.

It comes two decades after Starck launched his best-selling ultra-modern plastic Louis Ghost model, also inspired by the 18th-century Louis XVI medallion chair with its distinctive oval back.

Unlike the plastic chair, however, which retailed around 350 euros (around $370), the Miss Dior costs between 1,700 and 5,000 euros.

"Chairs are an interesting exercise because they are very difficult, despite appearances... slightly easier than going to the moon but not far off," Starck quipped.

He wanted to ensure his new creation would last, so chose an "extremely solid, extremely technical material, a very ecological and totally recyclable aluminium".

Starck is a keen advocate of ecological design, dreaming up electric bikes, intelligent thermostats and personal wind turbines among his many creations.

"Ecology, above all, is saying: I want to buy this, but do I need it? If you are honest with yourself, 80 percent of the time you would say no," he said.

- 'Every 16 seconds' -

It also means buying something "for always -- it must last".

Starck traces his pursuit of industrial minimalism to his father, who designed airplanes.

"To make a plane fly, it must be light, you have to remove everything that serves no use," he said.

He added: "All my life I've tried to find the centre of things, the sense of things, the soul of things."

He says concern for the environment can be met "by not producing" -- but he is not giving up yet.

"I have an idea every 16 seconds," he says.

He justifies making something by asking "if the object is right, if it deserves to exist, if it was made with the minimum of material and energy, if it is accessible to the maximum number of people, if it brings... happiness, laughter".

If it also allows someone to "sit down, wash, eat -- then in that case it is useful and I am proud of it," he said.

bh/ar/jm

Arrival of Israeli gas installation reignites Lebanon maritime border dispute

Marc DAOU 

An Israeli floating gas production unit arrived in the maritime zone disputed between Israel and Lebanon on Sunday – prompting the anger of the Lebanese government, especially as negotiations between the two countries on this dispute are at a standstill.

© Suez Canal Authority, AFP

In abeyance for more than a decade, the dispute between Israel and Lebanon over the two countries’ maritime borders resurfaced on June 5. The Lebanese presidency warned the Israeli government against any “aggressive actions” in the disputed maritime area.

After a floating production, storage and offloading unit belonging to the company Energean (listed in both Tel Aviv and London) arrived on Sunday, the problem was obvious: Israel and Lebanon have never drawn their borders. The Karish gas field where Israel is exploring is located in a disputed area of 860 km2 in the middle of the eastern Mediterranean where huge gas reserves have been found in recent years.

The Lebanese government even invited the US envoy Amos Hochstein – charged by President Joe Biden with mediating between the two countries – asking him to help restart talks with Israel over the issue.

Any exploration, drilling or extraction work Israel carries out in the disputed areas would constitute a “provocation and act of aggression”, said a joint statement by Lebanese President Michel Aoun and outgoing Prime Minister Najib Mikati.

However, the Israeli government sees the Karish gas field as part of its exclusive economic zone and therefore believes that it’s not relevant to its maritime dispute.

‘Everything will go very quickly for the Israelis’

Custom-built for the Karish field, the platform is expected to deliver gas to Israel later this year, according to Energean.

“With the arrival of this platform, everything will go very quickly for the Israelis – the production and sale of gas will be able to start in three or four months, since contracts have already been signed with Israeli companies,” said Laury Haytayan, a Lebanese expert in the geopolitics of hydrocarbons and director of the Middle East programme of the Natural Resource Governance Institute in New York.

The timing of this gas project could make it especially lucrative for Israel, as the Russian invasion of Ukraine has left Europe scrambling for non-Russian sources of gas.

While Lebanon has been aware that the gas project was on the horizon since last year, Haytayan pointed out – but its problem has been that its fractious ruling class lacks a unified position on the maritime border issue, meaning talks have been unable to proceed.

Resolving this dispute is crucial for Lebanon – mired in an intractable economic crisis since 2019 – to be able to carry out its own exploration for hydrocarbons in the disputed area, where Block 9 of the Lebanese Exclusive Economic Zone is located. Found just off the shore of southern Lebanon, this area is considered one of the most promising in terms of natural gas resources.

Israeli-Lebanese talks aimed at resolving the maritime dispute started in October 2020, under the aegis of the UN and the US.

US diplomat and mediator Frederic Hof, Washington’s point man on the issue from 2010 to 2012, divided the area into two parts. The “Hof line” attributed 55 percent of the area to Lebanon and 45 percent to Israel. The Lebanese side has not accepted this demarcation.

‘Thinking about their own survival’

Dialogue restarted at the headquarters of the UN Interim Force in southern Lebanon in October 2020 after the two countries agreed on a framework for talks. But two months later they reached an impasse again because the Lebanese delegation claimed an extra 860 km2 in the south.

Beirut has nevertheless not made this claim official at the UN, because while President Michel Aoun initially supported his country’s bid for the additional maritime territory, he feared it could “end” negotiations with Israel – whose government said in October 2021 it was ready to resolve its dispute with Lebanon while refusing to let Beirut dictate the terms of the talks.

When the US’s Hochstein visited the region earlier this year, Tel Aviv and Beirut both expressed their willingness to resume direct talks. But to no avail.

At the end of a two-day visit to Beirut in February, Hochstein called on the Lebanese government to adopt a united position on the maritime dispute with Israel to allow it to move forward. He also dismissed Lebanon’s maximalist Line 29 proposal – thus implicitly giving Israel the green light to exploit the Karish gas field.

In February 2022, Aoun ended up saying that the more limited Line 23 was indeed the Lebanese maritime border, Haytayan noted, backtracking from his original position as a proponent of the maximalist Line 29. “This presidential reversal was a gesture of goodwill the American negotiator expected as a means of allowing the negotiations to restart,” Haytayan said.

But negotiations remain stalled. “The Lebanese political class isn’t thinking about the interests of the people or the country’s financial well-being; they’re thinking about their own survival,” Haytayan said.

‘Time to decide!’

That explains why they didn’t think it was important to settle the maritime border issue – even though Israel has been keen to do so.

“It remains to be seen whether the American envoy will be interested in negotiating with them,” Haytayan said. “Do the Lebanese leaders want to negotiate from Line 23, the official position adopted in 2011, or do they want to go as far as line 29, a position they claimed in 2020 but never formalised with the UN?”

“It’s time to decide!” Haytayan said. “If Lebanon wants to negotiate from Line 23, then the Karish field falls outside of the disputed area [putting it in the Israeli zone].”

Making a decision about what Lebanon wants is the “only way to ensure that the people in the region can bolster their development” through natural resource extraction, Haytayan continued.

“Lebanon has no more time to lose; it needs to resume negotiations and conclude them by getting a favourable result,” Haytayan added.

Both parties have a further incentive to resolve the maritime border conflict: It risks interacting dangerously with the ongoing tensions between the Jewish state and Hezbollah – the Shia military pollical movement that has proclaimed itself the defender of Lebanese hydrocarbon resources, with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah repeatedly threatening Israel with bombing its installations in the event of unilateral exploration in disputed maritime areas.

ICYMI
Israel Mainly To Blame For Conflict: UN Report


By Nina LARSON
06/07/22

Israel's occupation and discrimination against Palestinians are the main causes of the endless cycles of violence, UN investigators said Tuesday, prompting angry Israeli protests.

A high-level team of investigators, appointed last year by the United Nations Human Rights Council to probe "all underlying root causes" in the decades-long conflict, pointed the finger squarely at Israel.

"Ending the occupation of lands by Israel... remains essential in ending the persistent cycles of violence," they said in a report, decrying ample evidence that Israel has "no intention" of doing so.

The 18-page report mainly focuses on evaluating a long line of past UN investigations, reports and rulings on the situation, and how and if those findings were implemented.

Recommendations in past reports were "overwhelmingly directed towards Israel," lead investigator Navi Pillay, a former UN rights chief from South Africa, said in a statement.

This, she said, was "an indicator of the asymmetrical nature of the conflict and the reality of one state occupying the other".

The investigators also determined that those recommendations "have overwhelmingly not been implemented", she said, pointing to calls to ensure accountability for Israel's violations of international law but also "indiscriminate firing of rockets" by Palestinian armed groups into Israel.

"It is this lack of implementation coupled with a sense of impunity, clear evidence that Israel has no intention of ending the occupation, and the persistent discrimination against Palestinians that lies at the heart of the systematic recurrence of violations in both the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel."

Dozens of Israeli reserve soldiers and students -- some of them dressed like Palestinian Hamas militants -- protested outside the UN headquarters in Geneva 

Photo: AFP / Fabrice COFFRINI

Israel has refused to cooperate with the Commission of Inquiry (COI) created last year following the 11-day Hamas-Israel war in May 2021, which killed 260 Palestinians and 13 people on the Israeli side.

Israel has in the past loudly criticised Pillay for "championing an anti-Israel agenda", and on Tuesday the foreign ministry slammed the entire investigation as "a witch hunt".

The report, it said, was "one-sided" and "tainted with hatred for the State of Israel and based on a long series of previous one-sided and biased reports."

It had been published, it said, as "the result of the Human Rights Council's extreme anti-Israel bias."

The United States, a staunch ally of Israel -- which rejoined the Council under President Joe Biden, after Donald Trump withdrew from the body -- reiterated that it "firmly" opposes the "open-ended and vaguely defined nature" of the COI.

"The existence of this COI in its current form is a continuation of a long-standing pattern of unfairly singling out Israel," State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement.

In Geneva, dozens of Israeli reserve soldiers and students -- some of them dressed like Palestinian Hamas militants -- marched Tuesday outside the UN headquarters in protest.

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, who heads the Israeli NGO Shurat Hadin that organised the protest, slammed the rights council as "the most anti-Semitic body in the world."

Israel and its allies have long accused the top UN rights body of anti-Israel bias, pointing among other things to the fact that Israel is the only country that is systematically discussed at every regular council session, with a dedicated special agenda item.

The COI, which is the highest-level investigation that can be ordered by the council, is the ninth probe it has ordered into rights violations in Palestinian territories.

It is the first, however, tasked with looking at systematic abuses committed within Israel, the first open-ended probe, and the first to examine "root causes" in the drawn-out conflict.