AUTOPSY TV

UK

Woman prepares to have her corpse dissected on live television in 'world first'

Story by Stella Akinwumi • 6h ago

Channel 4’s upcoming documentary will document the life, death and autopsy of Toni Crews, who donated her body to medical science.

The mother-of-two died in August 2020 at the age of 30, after being diagnosed with a rare cancer of the tear gland in 2016 and losing an eye.

In the special, Crews’ social media posts and letters to her children have been recreated with her voice by using replicating technology.

It will also see her body be dissected, which Channel 4 says is a world-first for television.

The promo begins with a voiceover, which is believed to be Crews’ words saying: ‘I believe tough times bring lessons.

‘And I believe this is the lesson I have learnt this time around. Everything is temporary. I always wanted to work in healthcare, I wanted to be a doctor or a nurse, or work in a nursery with children. Life has a strange way of working things out.’


Toni was just 30 when she died from a rare form of cancer (Picture: Instagram @nlingkofaneye_)© Provided by Metro

It is later revealed that Crews applied to donate her body with the hopes of people learning more about her illness.


Head of Anatomy, Professor Claire Smith said: ‘I’ve never like Toni’s before and I am excited that we’ll be able to start on this journey.

Crews became the first public display cadaver in the UK since records began 180 years ago, and the first British cadaver to be seen being dissected in such a way, for almost 200 years, according to the broadcaster.

The documentary will also see Crews’ family give an insight into her brave, funny and resilient character.

Crews’ mum Jo also shared that she was trying hard not to think about what the medical team were going to do with her late daughter’s body.

‘If you think and analyse what they’re going to do….. is a bit of a mind game as a mum.

Macmillan cancer support

If you or someone you care about has been diagnosed with cancer, Macmillan can offer support and information.

You can contact their helpline on 0808 808 00 00 (7 days a week from 8am to 8pm), use their webchat service, or visit their site for more information.

My Dead Body airs tonight at 10pm on Channel 4.

He's the Bad Boy of Chess. But Did He Cheat?

LONG READ

David Segal and Dylan Loeb McClain
Sun, December 4, 2022 

American teenager Hans Niemann defeated Magnus Carlsen, the world's best chess player, this fall. Then Carlsen accused his opponent of cheating. It's either overdue justice or paranoia. (Sean Dong/The New York Times)

The day before he beat the greatest chess player in the world, Hans Niemann was a curly-haired 19-year-old American known only to serious fans of the game and mostly as an abrasive jerk. Everyone, it seems, has a story. Like that time in June, when he’d lost in the finals of a tournament in Prague, then stood in the ballroom of the hotel where the event was held and ranted against the city and the accommodations.

“I tried to talk to him about it,” said Jacob Aagaard, a Danish grandmaster who has taught Niemann and known him for years. The talk did not help. Niemann brushed off all advice, predicting he’d soon play at such an exceptional level that he’d get invited to tournaments no matter how boorishly he behaved.

On Sept. 4, Niemann defeated Magnus Carlsen, an even-tempered, 32-year-old Norwegian who had become a grandmaster at 13, earning him the nickname “the Mozart of chess.” Carlsen went on to win five world championships as well as mainstream celebrity, including a stint as a spokesmodel for fashion brand G-Star Raw.

The loss to Niemann occurred at the Sinquefield Cup, a prestigious round-robin tournament in St. Louis with a $350,000 purse. Carlsen did not take this setback quietly. Instead, he accused his opponent of cheating, though he didn’t say so outright. He announced in a tweet that he was quitting the Cup and appended a video clip of a well-known professional soccer coach saying, “If I speak, I am in big trouble.”

The cheating implication was so obvious that Sinquefield organizers quickly added a 15-minute delay to the online broadcast of games, and players were checked with a radio-frequency scanner. This fueled speculation that Niemann was getting help from some kind of electronic device, secreted on, or maybe in, his body.

By the time that Niemann sat for a post-match interview with a Sinquefield commentator two days later, he was livid. Yes, he had confessed to cheating on Chess.com, the largest online playing platform, once when he was 12 and again at 16, to expand his online following and compete against better players. But he had learned his lesson and toiled for redemption.

He had never, he stated emphatically, cheated in a live match. With the internet filled with theories that he’d used a sex toy rigged to receive signals from a confederate, he was ready to take dramatic measures to prove his innocence.

“They want me to strip fully naked, I’ll do it,” he told the interviewer. “I don’t care, because I know that I’m clean. You want me to play in a closed box with zero electronic transmission? I don’t care, you know? Name whatever you guys want.”

It was the bizarro start of a ruckus still rattling the echo chamber of podcasts, Twitch streams and YouTube channels devoted to chess — which is now surprisingly vast. Like bicycles and pet adoption, chess soared in popularity with the pandemic and the Netflix hit “The Queen’s Gambit.” Since the start of 2020, daily user figures have quintupled to 5 million at Chess.com, and memberships have tripled to 94 million, according to the platform.

The site has become the virtual hangout, spectator viewing stands and venue of choice for players at every level. So the scarlet “C” on Niemann burned even brighter after Chess.com released a 72-page report in early October concluding that he had cheated in more than 100 games on its platform. Then it went further. Niemann’s rise in the ranks of over-the-board chess, as the in-person version of the game is known, was “uncharacteristic,” the report stated, implying that he’d cheated at live tournaments.

In sum, the game’s most gifted player, never known as a sore loser, had called out a confessed cheater. And the game’s most powerful and popular platform then said, in effect, “We stand with Magnus.”

An uproar ensued. Beneath it, facts that complicated the narrative were easy to miss. A week and a half before Carlsen lost in St. Louis, Chess.com made public an $82 million offer for his online chess training company, Play Magnus, a takeover that will essentially turn him into Chess.com’s most valuable asset. And as more grandmasters studied the epochal game, a consensus formed. Niemann appeared to simply outplay Carlsen, with moves that appeared perfectly human.

Someone was wronged in St. Louis on Sept. 4. But who?

“Here’s the caveat: I really don’t like Hans at all, and I’ve not liked him for a long time,” said Ben Finegold, a grandmaster who has taught Niemann. “But obviously the truth is more important than whether you like someone.”

The Trash Talker

This entire melee will be fought out in a $100 million defamation suit that Niemann filed in a district court in Missouri in late October against Carlsen, Chess.com and Hikaru Nakamura, one of the top players in the world and the game’s most influential streamer, who, the suit claims, amplified the cheating charge on his very popular Twitch channel. The point of the litigation, lawyers wrote in their complaint, is to “recover from the devastating damages that defendants have inflicted upon his reputation, career and life by egregiously defaming him.”

On Friday, lawyers for Chess.com filed a motion to dismiss Niemann’s case and called it a “public relations stunt.”

None of the players who are party to this suit would discuss it for this article.

The lawsuit suggests that Niemann will deal with the shadow over his name the same way he plays chess — by attacking. From the start, he has favored a poke-in-chest, trash-talking approach to the game.

A Russian grandmaster and former coach named Maxim Dlugy first encountered him at the 2014 Youth Championships in Durban, South Africa, and remembers an 11-year-old winning just-for-fun games against coaches from Belgium. The boy mocked them so viciously that they wanted to pummel him.

“One of the guys from the family that had hired me had to step in and say: ‘Hey, guys, take it easy. He’s a kid; he’s a kid,’” Dlugy recalls. “That’s how bad it was.”

Niemann was born in San Francisco in 2003 and started playing chess as an 8-year-old in the Netherlands, where his family had relocated for a few years. When the Niemanns — his parents, David and Mary, and three younger sisters — returned to the Bay Area, Dlugy gave him lessons over Skype.

“He was one of the most talented kids I’ve met,” Dlugy recalled. “Just incredible. Give him the right information and he immediately integrates it. Like a sponge.”

Niemann wrote about this period of his life in an essay for Chess Life published last year. He played his first US Chess-rated tournament in middle school in 2012 and a 100-tournament spree his first year back in the United States.

“I simply loved the game,” he said. “If it were possible, I would have played multiple tournaments every day.” He was soon ranked third nationally in his age group.

By the time Niemann was in eighth grade, his family had moved to Connecticut, and he’d achieved a rating of 2,400, 100 points shy of the level to qualify for grandmaster. (The game’s governing body, the International Chess Federation, known by its French acronym, FIDE, manages the game’s ratings.)

When Niemann’s quest for 2,500 stalled for more than two years, the love-hate phase of his relationship with chess began. He still toggles between extreme cockiness after good results and deep despair after bad ones.

“The fact that I’m alive is a miracle,” he said, half-seriously, in a postgame chat with a tournament interviewer in May. “After I lost this first game, I think I was really just ready to just go into the ocean and never come back.”

He was an indifferent student in middle and high school, until earning a scholarship to Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. To attend, he moved at 16 into a studio apartment near the school and became financially independent, supporting himself by working up to 30 hours a week as a chess teacher.

In his biographical essay, he framed this unusual decision in purely economic terms. (“You try finding an apartment in New York for a family of six!”) But several friends said there was tension between Niemann and his father, which the friends would not describe. The elder Niemann is a building contractor who declared bankruptcy when he and his family lived in California.

COVID struck midway through Niemann’s first year at Columbia Prep, and he started attending classes online. He also played virtual chess in marathon jags, stopping only to eat Chipotle, Popeye’s and a variety of junk food. He built a following for his Twitch channel, a riveting spectacle whether he won or lost. He would shout obscenities in a frenzy and pound on the table, causing his laptop camera to jump as if an earthquake had struck.

“How am I this good at this game?” he asked, rhetorically, on the verge of a victory. (This is the printable version.) “Oh. My. God! Get down and bow!”

There was a warm and vulnerable side to Niemann, familiar to acquaintances. Soon after he moved to the Upper West Side, he went to work for Shernaz Kennedy, 68, a woman international master and confidant of former world champion Bobby Fischer. She hired Niemann to teach at her chess school, Top Level, which operated out of the basement of a church.

“I had, like, 30 kids from all different schools and all different levels, and he had them wrapped around his finger,” she said. “He would sit with them, giving 100% of himself.”

In gatherings of other strong players, though, the brash and peacocking Niemann came to the fore — interrupting his peers, cracking wise, asking jokey questions of teachers.

“It was constant,” said Aagaard, the Danish grandmaster. “He was hiding, in a strange way, by making a public spectacle of himself. He was hiding from failure by pretending not to care.”

Then he stopped pretending. It happened after he was rejected by Harvard University and decided to bet his entire future on chess. He quit his teaching jobs, packed a small bag and began roughly two years of nonstop world travel to play tournaments and exhibitions — in Turkey, Spain, Latvia, Portugal, Poland, Cuba, Croatia, Norway, Italy, Serbia, anywhere with boards, clocks and players. He graduated from Columbia Prep in 2021 but had been strictly an online presence.

“I was in an English class with him, and he tuned in from about 20 countries,” said Daniel Levkov, a longtime friend and fellow chess player. “He was in a different country every week. By then he knew that school wasn’t his route.”

Chess was his route, and the world championship his ultimate destination.

“Anything else,” Niemann said in an interview with Chess Life in April last year, “and I’ll be disappointed.”

Social Media Stars of Chess

By the time Niemann started his trek, Carlsen had already evolved from prodigy to phenomenon to brand and institution. He has the highest rating in history (2,882), surpassing Garry Kasparov (2,851), who had dominated for years. “He doesn’t have a weakness,” is a common refrain among rivals.

He’s also funny and personable and has parlayed his skills and charisma into fame that is rare in the game. He’s appeared on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people and a Norwegian reality TV show called “Don’t Laugh in the Cabin.” Mastercard is one of his corporate sponsors. His net worth has been estimated at $50 million.

A portion of that comes from his 9% stake in Play Magnus. The company markets lessons, training and artificial intelligence that can mimic play at 30 levels. But it has struggled since going public in 2020. When Chess.com made its August bid, Play Magnus shares traded at less than half their initial public offering price.

Once regulators approve the deal, Play Magnus will be folded into Chess.com, an American company that started as an underdog and has turned into a giant. It was founded in 2007 by Erik Allebest and Jay Severson, friends who’d met at Brigham Young University and bought the domain name for $56,000 out of a bankruptcy auction.

For years, its subscriber base and profits rose gradually and steadily. Then the pandemic struck.

“You could track it by country,” Allebest said. “India locked down; registrations from India went through the roof. Italy locked down; registrations went through the roof. Literally our team went to 24/7, white-knuckling to scale our service.”

A few months after the pandemic influx to chess began, Netflix released “The Queen’s Gambit,” a fictional account of a young woman’s journey from orphanage to global chess supremacy. It would become a cultural touchstone and the most-watched show on the streaming service in more than 60 countries.

“It was like someone poured gasoline on the same fire,” Allebest said.

Chess players became social media stars. Nakamura, one of the defendants in the defamation case, has 1.5 million Twitch followers, a feat he’s achieved through celestial play — he’s ranked fifth in the world — and iron-man verbosity. In June, he signed with Misfits Gaming Group, an esports and entertainment company that is dreaming up shows to sell to places like CNN and Netflix.

Today, chess tournaments have pretty high production values — swooshing graphics, on-scene interviews, play-by-play commentators seated at newscaster desks. The model is based on coverage of professional sports games, with a big difference: There’s no action, at least not in the conventional sense. The game has hardly changed in 1,500 years. It’s still hour upon hour of two people staring at a board and cogitating. If a sentence like, “He blundered queen d8, queen d3!” doesn’t quicken your pulse, there isn’t much to watch.

If it does, these games are thrilling, cerebral contests that have elegance, aggression, subterfuge, brilliance and suspense — “Game of Thrones” boiled down to its regicidal essence. Unlike the HBO show, this one never stops. There are tournaments nearly every weekend around the world.

Graduating into the class of aspiring professionals playing these tournaments didn’t cause Niemann to grow up and behave. He pounded his fist when he lost a game in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and dropped F-bombs in a postgame interview in Miami, complaining about a technical failure. He looked opponents in the eyes a little too long, another no-no.

Some chess watchers were delighted. A norm-busting rascal, at long last.

“I was like, this is what we need in chess,” said Levy Rozman, the face and voice of Gotham Chess, a popular YouTube channel. “We don’t have a Conor McGregor,” he added, referring to the mixed martial arts champion known for altercations and arrests.

Niemann’s peers were not as pleased.

“He’s pretty much disrespected everybody in the chess world at this stage,” said Wesley So, an American player ranked in the top 10, during an interview in October at the U.S. Chess Championship. “Calling other players idiots and stuff.”

‘Something Fishy’

The cheating saga starts a few weeks before the Sinquefield Cup, in August at the FTX Crypto Cup in Miami, one of the now-bankrupt exchange’s forays into corporate sponsorship. Niemann was the lowest-ranked player in the tournament, and he did something improbable: He beat Carlsen with the black pieces, which have the disadvantage of moving second.

It was a career-making victory, and it would have caused most players to celebrate as if they had just hit the Powerball. Niemann instead gazed blankly at the tournament’s interviewer, who approached with a microphone immediately after the game and asked for his thoughts.

“Chess speaks for itself,” Niemann said, deadpan. Then he walked away.

If the loss or that response threw Carlsen, he hid it well. He won the next three games against Niemann and then the whole tournament.

The Sinquefield Cup began Sept. 1. The two met in the third round and played what is now one of the most closely dissected games in chess history — not just the moves, but the behavior of the players. Early on, with his clock running, Niemann glances absently around the room as he sips water, the picture of ease. He chews gum. At one point, he glowers at Carlsen like a cannibal trying to stare down his dinner. Carlsen covers his entire face except for his eyes, trying to tune out the universe.

On YouTube and podcasts, grandmasters studying the game said the champ’s opening had lacked oomph and failed as an effort to throw his opponent off balance. Niemann carefully conserved an early advantage that he never surrendered. Carlsen has long been known for his mental stamina and as a genius for turning around even dire-looking predicaments. Not this time. An unbeaten streak of more than 50 games of over-the-board chess had ended.

Niemann gave a sit-down interview to a tournament commentator, and it quickly became Exhibit A for skeptics. He said that “by some miracle,” before the game, he’d studied how to counter the opening that Carlsen had deployed, even though, observers later claimed, Carlsen had rarely used it. Or had never used it, by the reckoning of others.

And for reasons that baffled everyone, Niemann spoke now and then in the interview with an unplaceable European accent, adding to the overall sense of imposture. It didn’t help that he came across as obnoxious. Gone was the curt, affectless Hans of Miami, and in his place was a puckish man-child who insulted Carlsen, and himself, at the same time.

“Even if there was a draw, I think he was just so demoralized because he was losing to such an idiot like me, you know?” he said, sounding both sheepish and elated. “It must be embarrassing for the world champion to lose to me. I feel bad for him.”

Players knew that Niemann was good. He was officially awarded grandmaster status in January 2021 and by May of this year he stood among the top 50 players in the world. But was he defeat-Magnus-with-the-black-pieces good?

Grandmaster Fabiano Caruana framed the matter succinctly.

“It’s either the game of a genius,” he said on a podcast, “or something fishy.”

An Online Version of Steroids

It’s been 25 years since Deep Blue, a 1.4-ton computer programmed by IBM, defeated Kasparov, the reigning world champion, marking the first time a computer bested the most accomplished player on the planet.

Since then, computer chess programs — known collectively as “engines” — have slimmed down and now easily fit on smartphones.

Today, the most popular chess engine is Stockfish, an open-source program that hoovers up data from millions of top-level games and translates this monumental library of information into tactical calculations that can “see” a dozen or more moves ahead.

To Danny Rensch, chief chess officer of Chess.com, chess engine abuse is the game’s version of steroids.

“We’re actually looking at what esport industries have done, what every international sporting community has done, from the NBA to the NFL, to attack performance-enhancing situations,” he said. “We have to address this head on.”

To ferret out cheaters, Chess.com uses an algorithm to determine how closely moves mirror those recommended by an engine. At lower skill levels this is straightforward, like noticing that a fifth grade tennis player is serving like Rafael Nadal.

At higher skill levels, it gets trickier. (A top-50 tennis player might serve very much like Nadal.) So Chess.com looks at other factors, including a player’s past performances. It also studies browser behavior because the most inept cheaters simply keep two screens open on a web browser, with the game on one and an engine on another, toggling between moves. It is a popular enough stratagem to acquire its own name, second screening.

Busting cheaters with statistics is not like catching a baseball player with a corked bat, which will result in an instant ejection. Chess.com’s Fair Play team, as it’s called, acts after the fact, to the deep frustration of top players.

“During COVID there were so many cheaters, and it kind of made everything a huge mess,” said Andrew Tang, an American grandmaster, from his dorm room at Princeton. “I’m playing a tournament for $1,000, and I lose to some guy who cheated. Really frustrating.”

A Childish Mistake

If Niemann had cheated at the Sinquefield Cup, nobody knew how. But by the time he sat for another postgame interview, on Sept. 9, Chess.com had emailed to tell him that his account had been suspended again and that his invitation to the Chess.com Global Championship, which would start Sept. 14 and offer a total purse of $1 million, had been rescinded.

Enraged, Niemann called Carlsen’s cryptic tweet and Chess.com’s suspension a “targeted attack.” If the leaders of the company thought he would be too embarrassed to publicly admit his past transgressions and defend himself, they were wrong.

He explained that he had cheated, years ago: at the age of 12 at a single event with prize money. At 16, he cheated again, this time to attract subscribers to his Twitch stream.

“I made a childish mistake, and I will have to live with that,” he said, straining to control his emotions. Since then, he said, he had not cheated and had thrown himself into chess, for redemption and to demonstrate to himself and everyone else that he did not need artificial intelligence to compete with the greatest players in the world.

“That has been my mission,” he said, “and that is why I’ve lived in a suitcase for two years, that is why I have played 260 games in one year, that is why I’m training 12 hours a day — because I have something to prove.”

The controversy had only begun. On Sept. 19, Carlsen had a rematch against Niemann at the Julius Baer Generation Cup, an online tournament that opened with a round robin. Carlsen played one move, then forfeited. He lost that game but remained in the tournament, which he won, and Sept. 26 released a statement, via Twitter, explaining himself.

“I believe that Niemann has cheated more — and more recently — than he has publicly admitted,” Carlsen wrote on Twitter. “His over the board progress has been unusual, and throughout our game in the Sinquefield Cup I had the impression that he wasn’t tense or even fully concentrating on the game in critical positions, while outplaying me as black in a way I think only a handful of players can do.”

From any other player, this might have been considered self-flattery and very weak tea. But the body language of Carlsen’s opponents invariably reflects total focus and stress. Also, he’d never leveled a charge like this before. Prominent voices offered support.

“@MagnusCarlsen has done everything right so far, and with class,” tweeted Romain Edouard, a French grandmaster, on the 27th.

“Immense respect for the world champion for taking a principled stand on an important issue,” tweeted R.B. Ramesh, a popular chess coach, the same day.

Others had misgivings. FIDE weighed in, pointing out the “moral responsibility” of the world champion in a statement. “We strongly believe,” the organization wrote, “that there were better ways to handle this situation.”

The next week, Chess.com released its report about Niemann, and it was withering. Not only had Niemann cheated in more than 100 games on the site, he was untruthful about his past. He’d cheated at events with money at stake four times, not once, as he’d stated in St. Louis.

“Given his history on our site,” the report said, “we did not believe that we could ensure that he would play fairly in our online events until we could re-evaluate the evidence and our protocols.”

To reach its conclusions, the company conferred with the leading authority on cheating and chess, Kenneth Regan, a professor of computer science at New York’s University at Buffalo and a computational complexity theorist. On one essential point, though, he dissented.

Chess.com described Niemann as “the fastest-rising top player in Classical OTB chess in modern history.” Specifically, the company found that the amount of time it took him to climb from just below a rating of 2,500 to nearly 2,700 — the velvet rope separating the world’s elite players from everyone else — was faster than all of his contemporaries. It took him about 18 months.

“That’s just wrong,” Regan said.

No Red Flags

Chess.com didn’t account for what he called the pandemic lag. Over-the-board tournaments ceased as COVID infections raged, so for months, Niemann was playing nearly manic amounts of chess matches online, which do not affect one’s FIDE rating. When live tournaments resumed, he was like a student who had been cramming nonstop without an exam to show off what he’d learned.

Add the downtime imposed by the pandemic and the climb to nearly 2,700 from 2,500 actually took him 27 months — the same as many other gifted players. Also, Niemann played 259 official games last year. (By contrast, Carlsen played 41.) As a number of grandmasters have noted, factor in the sheer number of games Niemann played and his progress seems impressive but not extraordinary.

As for Niemann’s over-the-board games, Regan has studied many of them, and not one showed evidence of cheating.

“Over-the-board allegations, completely unfair,” he said.

Chess.com’s report lands in the same place. Though it clearly stated Niemann had cheated in online play earlier in his career, after many charts and graphs that look askance at what happened when Niemann sat down to compete at in-person tournaments, the report comes to this conclusion: “There is nothing in our statistical investigation to raise any red flags regarding Hans’ OTB play and rise.”

Which raises the question of why the report was necessary. The company does not cite any examples of Niemann cheating on Chess.com since 2020 and ultimately exonerates his over-the-board play. About the worst it can say on the subject is that “certain aspects” of the Sept. 4 game against Carlsen “were suspicious,” though it does not say what those aspects were. By barring him from the site again, and from the Chess.com Global Championships tournament in October, it appears that he was sentenced twice for the same pre-2022 crimes.

“There’s no evidence in the report that Hans cheated recently, so it’s very strange,” said Finegold, the grandmaster who lives in suburban Atlanta. “It just seems like they want to back up what Magnus is saying for business reasons.”

The company did this, Finegold and other critics say, for a very mundane purpose. Any taint left on Carlsen would tarnish the $82 million just spent to acquire Play Magnus.

False, say Chess.com’s executives. The company wanted to keep its ban on Niemann private, but he made it public in that Sinquefield interview and was dishonest about his cheating in the past on the site. (Niemann and his attorneys declined to comment.)

“We had to defend ourselves,” Allebest wrote in an email, “and we wanted to do it in as thorough a way as possible.”

Finegold is one of the few notables in the game willing to publicly chastise Chess.com. The company’s owners are friendly and forthcoming, authentic fans of the game who have won the admiration of many players. They are also feared, at least by some. One grandmaster said he worried about getting bounced from the site if he criticized it in print, which could cost him dearly because it’s where his fee-paying students play and learn.

Maybe this grandmaster’s concerns are irrational. But Finegold says that after he lambasted Chess.com’s handling of the Niemann affair on his Twitch stream, Danny Rensch sent an email that sounded like a not very subtle threat.

“He suggested to me that maybe because of all the negative things I’d said about them, that maybe I didn’t want to be on Chess.com any more,” Finegold said. “They would deny ever doing anything retaliatory, but I don’t believe that.”

(Rensch described his discussion with Finegold as “a good, healthy email exchange.”)

The point made by Finegold is that Carlsen made an egregious error by tagging Niemann as a cheater — “He’s a big crybaby,” as Finegold put it — and that Chess.com blunted criticism of the reigning champion by turning everyone’s attention from the accuser back to the accused.

Carlsen has not elaborated on his own motivations. But there’s no reason to doubt his original explanation: He thinks Niemann cheats. Maybe he heard the same murmurs about Niemann that Caruana described in a podcast in September.

“On half a dozen occasions over the past year, people asked me: ‘What do you think about him? Do you think he’s cheating?’” Caruana said.

Carlsen wrote in his Sept. 26 tweet that he had thought about quitting the Sinquefield Cup as soon as he learned Niemann, a last-minute addition, would compete there. This suggests he’d decided Niemann was cheating before arriving in St. Louis. This might explain Carlsen’s subpar performance against Niemann. Nothing will psych out a player quite like the sense that he’s secretly battling an unbeatable computer.

“I thought Carlsen literally cracked at the end,” said Viswanathan Anand, a five-time world champion from India. He was also astonished to learn that Carlsen and others believed that Niemann had cheated.

“Am I naive,” Anand asked, “or are my colleagues paranoid?”

An Existential Threat

At the 46th Guernsey Chess Festival in mid-October paranoia was a popular topic. The tournament is played on one of the Channel Islands near France, best known for its hospitable approach to corporate taxes, and first prize was a modest 1,600 pounds, about $1,900. It was mostly men, many of them in chess-themed hoodies, and a kind of camaraderie was part of the atmosphere. The games were played in a stately old church, and once they were over, competitors headed to an adjacent room to offer each other tips on every move they’d just made.

Many were eager to discuss the fallout of the Carlsen-Niemann kerfuffle.

“Because of Magnus, everyone I’ve been around is accused of cheating,” said Jon Hafthorsson, a Swede who’d flown in for the tournament.

“Everyone is suspicious,” said Thomas Villiers, a British chess teacher. “A girl got ejected from the World Junior Championships because they found an earphone in her jacket that she forgot to take out.”

Phones were prohibited in the room where games were played, which was about the extent of the anti-cheating measures in Guernsey. As Carlsen noted, more will be needed.

He described cheating as “an existential threat to the game,” and he surely has a point. It doesn’t take a fervid imagination to imagine receiver technology that is easier and easier to hide at over-the-board tournaments, or that players in online tournaments could still cheat even with three cameras trained on them, as Chess.com sometimes requires.

Niemann may have kick-started this discussion, but by any sober reckoning he is an improbable catalyst. To achieve his current rating of 2,698, he would have needed to cheat habitually for years and somehow avoided detection, from physical checks as well as Regan’s pitiless algorithm.

That feat would require a canny cheater, which, apparently, Niemann is not. Chess.com’s report includes an email sent to Niemann in September, referring to clear evidence that after appraising his earlier play it found that “you perform much better when toggling to a different screen during your moves.”

Some mastermind. Niemann was apparently second screening.

A full investigation into Niemann’s play at the Sinquefield Cup, and Carlsen’s reaction to it, is underway at FIDE, and a report is imminent. As for the defamation case, without a quick settlement it could take years to resolve. To prevail, Niemann will have to prove damages, and his lawyers seem to believe this will be a cinch. Channeling the bluster of their client, they contend in the complaint that the defendants have “destroyed Niemann’s remarkable career in its prime and ruined his life.”

That seems a stretch. True, he might have trouble getting invited to events where Carlsen is competing, given that the guy refuses to play him, but the cheating charge elevated his profile and won him new fans.

This includes the handful of young women who turned up outside the Sinquefield Cup venue during the tournament, wearing dark sunglasses and black cocktail dresses. They waved signs that read, “Gen Z’s Love Hans!” and “Hans has cool hair!”

“Just out here to show our support,” one woman said. “We love him.”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

'If I committed suicide, it's not real': 

Elon Musk reassures the public he's 

not suicidal for a second time this year

Jordan Hart

Sun, December 4, 2022 

• Elon Musk attended a Twitter Space Q&A with more than 100,000 listeners on Saturday.

• When asked if he was suicidal, Musk gave a clear 'no.'

• This is the second time in 2022 that Musk has alluded to his mysterious death.

During a live Q&A session, Twitter's "chief twit" Elon Musk assured listeners he had no thoughts of suicide despite questions about the billionaire's mental state and safety.

Musk, 51, let everyone know that a mysterious sudden death would not be his own doing after fears for his safety arose. In a Saturday Twitter Space, Musk hosted a live Q&A on the "Twitter Files" bombshell dropped on Friday. 

During the session, one of the 100,000 listeners at the time asked Musk if he was "suicidal."

"I do not have any suicidal thoughts. If I committed suicide, it's not real," Musk replied.

According to Twitter, 1.8 million total tuned in to the Twitter Space interview.

Speculation about Musk's safety and mental state comes amid the self-proclaimed free speech absolutist's promises to expose Twitter's alleged "free speech suppression" with the release of the Twitter Files.

The files contained internal communications between Twitter employees about a New York Post report on President Biden's son Hunter, according to the report from Insider's Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert.

In the Q&A, Musk also suggested Twitter favored Democrats over Republicans in its censorship. According to the Epoch Times, he said treatment of the opposing political groups "was not even-handed."

"I'm not saying this is definitely the case. There appears to have been a double standard where Democrats were not censored and left causes were not censored but right causes and Republicans were," Musk said.

Former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner shared her concern for Musk's safety and commended his bravery in a Friday tweet: "@elonmusk I hope you are surrounded by massive security and in an extremely safe undisclosed location - you just became public enemy number one to some very very bad people, I pray for your safety and thank you for your bravery! We need more @elonmusk in our society!!!"

This isn't the first time Musk has hinted at his own potentially mysterious death. In May, a Tweet from the billionaire caused much speculation online.

"If I die under mysterious circumstances, it's been nice knowin ya," he wrote.

The cryptic tweet sparked a swirl of theories on exactly what the SpaceX CEO meant. Users discussed a potential threat from the Clinton family or even Russia, according to Fox 7.

The message also prompted Musk's mother, Maye, to chime in. "That's not funny," she tweeted.

Musk replied: "Sorry! I will do my best to stay alive."

Iran morality police status unclear after 'closure' comment

JACK JEFFERY
Sun, December 4, 2022


In this photo taken by an individual not employed by the Associated Press and obtained by the AP outside Iran, Iranians protests the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was detained by the morality police, in Tehran, Oct. 1, 2022. In a report published by The Iranian student news agency, Nezamoddin Mousavi, an Iranian lawmaker said Sunday, Dec. 4, 2022, that Iran’s government was ‘‘paying attention to the people’s real demands,’’ a day after another key official announced that the country’s religious police force had been closed following months of deadly anti-government protests. 

(AP Photo/Middle East Images, File)

CAIRO (AP) — An Iranian lawmaker said Sunday that Iran's government is “paying attention to the people’s real demands,” state media reported, a day after a top official suggested that the country’s morality police whose conduct helped trigger months of protests has been shut down.

The role of the morality police, which enforces veiling laws, came under scrutiny after a detainee, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, died in its custody in mid-September. Amini had been held for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress codes. Her death unleashed a wave of unrest that has grown into calls for the downfall of Iran's clerical rulers.

Iran's chief prosecutor Mohamed Jafar Montazeri said on Saturday the morality police “had been closed," the semi-official news agency ISNA reported. The agency did not provide details, and state media hasn't reported such a purported decision.

In a report carried by ISNA on Sunday, lawmaker Nezamoddin Mousavi signaled a less confrontational approach toward the protests.

“Both the administration and parliament insisted that paying attention to the people’s demand that is mainly economic is the best way for achieving stability and confronting the riots,” he said, following a closed meeting with several senior Iranian officials, including President Ebrahim Raisi.

Mousavi did not address the reported closure of the morality police.

The Associated Press has been unable to confirm the current status of the force, established in 2005 with the task of arresting people who violate the country’s Islamic dress code.

Since September, there has been a reported decline in the number of morality police officers across Iranian cities and an increase in women walking in public without headscarves, contrary to Iranian law.

Montazeri, the chief prosecutor, provided no further details about the future of the morality police or if its closure was nationwide and permanent. However he added that Iran’s judiciary will ‘‘continue to monitor behavior at the community level.’’

In a report by ISNA on Friday, Montazeri was quoted as saying that the government was reviewing the mandatory hijab law. “We are working fast on the issue of hijab and we are doing our best to come up with a thoughtful solution to deal with this phenomenon that hurts everyone’s heart,” said Montazeri, without offering details.

Saturday's announcement could signal an attempt to appease the public and find a way to end the protests in which, according to rights groups, at least 470 people were killed. More than 18,000 people have been arrested in the protests and the violent security force crackdown that followed, according to Human Rights Activists in Iran, a group monitoring the demonstrations.

Ali Alfoneh, a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, said Montazeri’s statement about closing the morality police could be an attempt to pacify domestic unrest without making real concessions to protesters.

‘‘The secular middle class loathes the organization (morality police) for restricting personal freedoms," said Alfoneh. On the other hand, the “underprivileged and socially conservative class resents how they conveniently keep away from enforcing the hijab legislation” in wealthier areas of Iran's cities.

When asked about Montazeri's statement, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian gave no direct answer. ‘‘Be sure that in Iran, within the framework of democracy and freedom, which very clearly exists in Iran, everything is going very well,’’ Amirabdollahian said, speaking during a visit to Belgrade, Serbia.

The anti-government demonstrations, now in their third month, have shown no sign of stopping despite a violent crackdown. Protesters say they are fed up after decades of social and political repression, including a strict dress code imposed on women. Young women continue to play a leading role in the protests, stripping off the mandatory Islamic headscarf to express their rejection of clerical rule.

After the outbreak of the protests, the Iranian government hadn't appeared willing to heed the protesters' demands. It has continued to crack down on protesters, including sentencing at least seven arrested protesters to death. Authorities continue to blame the unrest on hostile foreign powers, without providing evidence.

But in recent days, Iranian state media platforms seemed to be adopting a more conciliatory tone, expressing a desire to engage with the problems of the Iranian people.

IT WAS WOMEN WHO LED THE REVOLUTION IN 1979

Iran Feels the Wrath of a Movement Held Down For Too Long

The death of Mahsa Amini unleashed outrage at the government's treatment of women that had long been simmering beneath the surface.

A newspaper with a cover picture of Mahsa Amini, a woman who died after being arrested by the Islamic republic's "morality police" is seen in Tehran, Iran September 18, 2022. Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS/File Photo

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WOMENWORLD

22/NOV/2022

When Mahsa Zhina Amini — a young Kurdish-Iranian woman — was arrested by Iranian police for not wearing a hijab her brother was told she’d be detained for a few hours and released. Three days later she was dead.

Iran’s notorious ‘morality police’ — whose job it is to make sure women wear veils in public — have been accused of beating Amini, 22, so badly she went into a coma within hours of her arrest and had to be taken to hospital, where she died.

Amini’s death sparked the largest protests seen in Iran since the foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hundreds were killed as thousands marched through the streets telling Iran’s supreme leader and the regime itself to ‘get lost’.

The Iranian government has long been accused of perpetuating gender-based violence. The compulsory veiling mandate, suppression of gender and sexual minority groups, patriarchal family laws, legalisation of child marriage and the lack of laws against domestic violence are only a few examples of the authorities’ general attitude toward women. These countries’ laws have also contributed to vigilante and police violence against women.

As protests about Amini’s death and the treatment of women raged through Iran, a petition to expel Iran from the United Nations Women’s Commission was posted on Change.org, receiving more than 143,000 signatures. It continues to grow. Advocacy bodies have also called on the UN Economic and Social Council to expel Iran from the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

Iran is one of six UN member states that have not signed the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women. Following arduous years of debate and campaigning by Iranian women’s rights activists, the Iranian parliament passed a bill to join the Convention in May 2003, but conservatives in the government blocked it.

Also read: Why the Iran Demonstrations of 2022 Are Different

The regime’s strict interpretation of Islamic law has been blamed for the lack of action on violence against women. Iran’s laws have enshrined discrimination against women in employment, marriage and citizenship. Still, the fight to recognise violence against women has continued.

In 2021, a new bill on the elimination of violence against women was proposed but has yet to be passed. The bill would make it legally possible to prosecute men who commit violence against women and children, specifically in domestic situations. But conservatives are actively blocking the bill because they interpret it as Western and incompatible with the country’s patriarchal views on gender and family.

While violence against women has no specific legal status, it doesn’t mean that it goes unpunished. It does, however, make it difficult to charge a perpetrator in an Iranian court. This lack of recognition means reporting violence against women, including domestic violence, is rare and official support for victimised women is scarce. The situation is made more difficult by the lack of official statistics. The numbers that are reported by government officials are widely believed to be inaccurate.

The lack of legal and formal recognition also does not mean violence against women is not discussed. It has, in fact, attracted a lot of scholarship, activism and public attention. While organised activism against violence against women in Iran has remained risky, it does exist.

Organised and publicly visible activism to end violence against women has been part of the Iranian women’s movement’s agenda but has largely remained unorganised. By remaining scattered and disorganised, the women’s movement is less vulnerable to attack and suppression. The atmosphere of risk and fear has given rise to different forms of implicit and grassroots activism. Social media and #MeToo activism have specifically been grassroots initiatives and reliant mostly on ordinary Iranians.

On the other hand, social media campaigns and cultural productions are forms of resistance and disobedience that can create a smaller scale societal impact, called implicit activism. Implicit activism is a less public form of activism and is common in countries where political or human rights activism is risky and the identities of activists must remain hidden.

There are signs of activism having a nationwide impact. While state-run Iranian TV mostly offers homogeneous and traditional portrayals of women on screen, and normalises discrimination, Iranian cinema has addressed the issue in more depth. Violence against women and the problems of gender-based discrimination have been recurring themes in Iranian post-revolutionary cinema.

Also read: Interview With Iranian Artist Parastou Forouhar: ‘The Regime Is Anti-Women’

In 2022, 800 women working in the film industry, including well-known actors and movie directors, signed an open letter known as the “800-signature campaign,” in which they condemned what they considered systematic and structural sexual violence and harassment against women working in the film industry, from within the industry.

Substantial attention has also been given to violence against women in academic scholarship. The number of master’s and doctorate-level dissertations written on women’s issues, including violence against women, has been so overwhelming that universities have discouraged students from researching the topic, especially as the findings and policy implications are rarely taken up by authorities. Studies conducted by prominent Iranian researchers such as sociologist Shahla Ezazi and legal scholar Mehangiz Kar have been influential to a new generation of scholars who continue to form a vast body of work on the topic.

As Shahla Ezazi says, much attention has been given to individual factors and interpersonal relations as the underlying cause of violence against women. This approach depoliticises the problem and is essentially a survival strategy. Researchers often use individual and family-oriented analysis that often finds social factors like addiction, unemployment, lack of and education to be correlated with committing violence against women, allowing them to discuss the issue without upsetting the state.

While tackling violence against women in Iran requires extensive social and cultural reform, there seems to be a growing consensus among activists and ordinary Iranians that the most prominent obstacle to progress is the nation’s traditionalist view on gender.

Gender politics, such as the compulsory veiling law, are a fundamental part of the national identity. Reform has been impossible, leading many Iranians to believe that fundamental changes will not be possible unless the regime collapses — a central demand in the ongoing uprising.

Ladan Rahbari is an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam and a senior researcher at the International Migration Institute (IMI). She is a member of Amsterdam Young Academy and a board member of the Amsterdam Research Centre for Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS).

The author declares no coflict of interest.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

Food delivery robots hit Canadian sidewalks, but many challenges delay mass adoption

Sun, December 4, 2022 


TORONTO — When customers in downtown Vancouver placed orders with Pizza Hut in September, many of the pies landed on their doorsteps without a courier in sight.

Instead, diners were met by Angie, Hugo or Raja — autonomous robots resembling a cooler on four wheels with eyelike lights. They travelled by sidewalk to customers, who used unique codes to open their lids and reveal their food.

The value proposition for Serve Robotics — a spinoff of Uber's 2020 food delivery acquisition Postmates that created the trio and a fleet of zero-emission robots — is simple: with slim restaurant margins, a labour crunch and climate change worries '"why move a two-pound burrito in a two-ton car?"

A handful of other robotic delivery companies have the same ethos, but their paths to ubiquity are facing several roadblocks.

Delivery robots have been banned from some major cities like Toronto, which argued they are a hazard for people with low mobility or vision, as well as seniors and children. Cyclists already gripe about e-scooters in bike lanes and don't want robots there either.

"They're drawing a lot of attention from pedestrians while they're out on the sidewalk because they're not seeing them that often and people are excited to see them, but as usage continues to increase, this can cause a lot of congestion on already narrow sidewalks," said Prabhjot Gill, a McKinsey & Co. associate partner focused on retail.

There's also worries autonomous robots or ones manned by staff overseas will take jobs away from couriers.

Ali Kashani, Serve's Vancouver-bred chief executive, considers the criticism to be a natural part of innovation that even the bicycle experienced, when it was invented and many thought it would cause divorce.

He's tried to quiet concerns by ensuring his robots (Kashani won't say how many there are) chime and flash their lights to alert people they are around. They are equipped with automatic crash prevention, vehicle collision avoidance and emergency braking.

Ultimately, he thinks they are "a win-win for everybody" because they reduce traffic, boost local commerce and help merchants get food to consumers in a less expensive way.

The environment benefits too because Serve replaces delivery vehicles. Kashani estimates roughly half the deliveries made in the country cover less than 2.5 miles and 90 per cent are completed by car. About two per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide are attributable to people using personal cars for local shopping and errands.

"There's a lot of reasons to replace our cars with these robots as quickly as we really can, but there's no reason for us to make anyone an enemy," Kashani said.

Knowing how much opposition new ideas can face, Serve is careful to engage with governments and authorities before launching in a city, even if it has no legislation allowing or banning robots.

However, David Lepofsky, chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, said there's no way for such robots and humans to coexist because they will always present a tripping hazard and worse, they could be used to transport contraband or explosives.

He insists the fight he and others have waged to keep robots off sidewalks is not an attack on innovation.

"It's not like we're denying people a service," he said. "We've got a way to deliver pizzas that we've had since we've had pizza delivery. It's called human beings."

Manish Dhankher, Pizza Hut Canada's chief customer officer, agrees no pizza delivery is worth risking somebody's safety, but said his company only partnered with Serve once the robots had made thousands of injury-free trips.

Serve robots only made nearby deliveries for Pizza Hut's 1725 Robson St. location for two weeks, but the pilot generated "childlike excitement" from customers and had a 95 per cent satisfaction rate.

Dhankher stresses the goal was modernizing pizza deliveries, not cost reduction. Couriers made the same number of deliveries they did before the robots were in use.

But Pizza Hut isn't ready to roll out robots permanently.

"We want to learn more," he said. "What happens when you put this in the snowy areas of Saskatchewan and what happens when there is freezing rain?"

Another question: what happens when cities won't welcome the robots?

Tiny Mile, a company behind a series of pink, heart-eyed robots named Geoffrey, knows the answer.

Years after Geoffrey started making Toronto deliveries for delivery services like Foodora, Lepofsky and others argued people may be impeded by stopped or stalled devices or unable to quickly detect their presence.

Toronto's city council voted last December to prohibit the devices that run on anything but muscle power from sidewalks, bike paths and pedestrian ways until the province implements a pilot project for such devices.

Geoffrey was then spotted in Ottawa before the city confirmed such robots aren't permitted there either and Tiny Mile decamped from Canada completely.

"We almost went bankrupt," said Ignacio Tartavull, Tiny Mile's chief executive.

"It was basically a miracle we survived."

To keep Geoffrey alive, Tiny Mile headed to Florida and North Carolina.

"It was love at first sight," Tartavull said. "We spoke with cities and they were basically competing for us to go there."

He believes that adoration will spread as the cost of robot deliveries — now roughly $1 — sink to 10 cents in the next seven years.

"It's likely going to take a few years before we have it in the big cities but in the long term, it's kind of undoubtable because the technology is here, it works and we can deliver on time and at a much lower cost," he said.

As for Serve, it's focused on Los Angeles right now, but Kashani said its mission is to get five per cent of delivery vehicles off the road in the next five years.

"But I definitely hope that if you fast forward one or two decades, these robots would be doing more local transportation of goods... so that we can not rely on cars."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 4, 2022.

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press

What is COP15? Why it matters and what's at stake at the Montreal summit

Sun, December 4, 2022 

Boreal woodland caribou are threatened in Canada, where much of their habitat has been altered by human activity such as mining and forestry. Land and habitat preservation is one of the goals of the COP15 summit. (Submitted by Jean-Simon Bégin - image credit)

Thousands of delegates representing 192 countries will spend the next two weeks in Montreal, hammering out a once-in-a-decade agreement that will aim to build a more sustainable relationship between humans and nature.

The UN biodiversity summit, known as COP15, officially kicks off Dec. 7 in Montreal. If all goes according to plan, the conference will produce a new agreement outlining global biodiversity goals for the next 10 years.

The conference is supposed to wrap up on Dec. 19, but negotiations may run into overtime.

Here's what you need to know.

What's the difference between COP15 and COP27?

COP, in United Nations jargon, simply means Conference of Parties. It is a decision-making body made up of countries that have signed a convention.

COP15 is different from the climate change summit, COP27, which was recently held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. That conference was under the umbrella of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The Montreal summit, COP15, is a meeting under the Convention on Biological Diversity. In 1992, 150 government leaders first signed that convention at the Rio Earth Summit.

While biodiversity and climate change are related issues, the two conventions are separate.

This meeting marks the second part of COP15, sometimes referred to as the Nature COP or the UN biodiversity summit. The first part was held last year as a mostly virtual conference based in Kunming, China.

Though it's being hosted in Montreal, the summit is chaired under the presidency of China.

Why should you care?

Georgia Department of Natural Resources/The Associated Press

The biodiversity summit is a big deal, because it's likely to result in a new framework or agreement, outlining goals for how the world should protect nature and use it more sustainably and equitably.

"The food we eat comes from biodiversity, the water we drink comes from biodiversity. The air we breathe [comes from biodiversity]," said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

The ultimate goal is to stop biodiversity loss and build a sustainable relationship with nature in response to unprecedented rates of declining nature and species extinction.

Why do we need a new plan?

The pressure is on to create a new agreement with better monitoring and financing built in after countries, including Canada, failed to meet the 2020 goals of the last biodiversity plan, known as the Aichi targets.

Basile Van Havre helps to mediate negotiations as co-chair of the Convention on Biological Diversity's Open-Ended Working Group for a Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.

"The lesson from the Aichi system is that, when you put easy to understand numerical targets, they get attention," he said. "We need to put in place a much more robust system that enables progress to be measured as we go."

A key goal of the former Aichi plan was to conserve at least 17 per cent of terrestrial and inland water and 10 per cent of coastal and marine areas by 2020.

The new target under the draft agreement is the much-talked about 30 by 30 goal: preserving 30 per cent of land, freshwater and oceans by 2030.

Canada has already committed to that pledge. The latest figures show Canada has conserved 13.5 per cent of its land and freshwater and 13.9 per cent of marine territory.

What are the key goals and challenges?

The draft agreement is still littered with items that need to be negotiated and finalized, but generally speaking the key points include halting nature loss, preventing human-caused species extinction, reducing pollution, sustainable management of agriculture and forestry industries and sharing the benefits of genetic resources fairly and equitably.

There have been many calls from various environmental and Indigenous groups for the framework to also recognize the leadership of Indigenous communities as stewards of nature.

"The global community, in looking to protect 30 per cent of lands and waters, is in some ways catching up to Indigenous ambitions of conservation," said Valérie Courtois, director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative and a member of the Innu community of Mashteuiatsh, Quebec.

"We understand that our very survival is dependent on the health of these landscapes … we know that if we take care of the land, it will take care of us."

Submitted by Claire Farrell

As far as sticking points in negotiations, Van Havre said there are three key ones: how ambitious the plan should be, how it will be financed and how to ensure progress is measured and reported transparently.

"The negotiation will be difficult, no doubt. There is a huge change at play," he said. "But I have not seen anybody saying they don't want an agreement."

Asked how likely he thinks there will be an agreement by Dec. 19, he said it's possible talks will go into overtime.

"Will we be done by 6 p.m. on the 19th? Maybe not. Will I have granola bars in my pocket that day? A lot."

Who is attending?

A total 15,723 people, including government representatives, NGO members and journalists, have registered to attend the UN biodiversity summit in person, though the actual number of people who show up may be less.

While the summit is being hosted in Montreal, it's chaired by China. The only head of state expected to attend is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. China will be represented by its minister of environment and COP 15 president Huang Runqiu.

Traditionally, world leaders do not attend the biodiversity summits, but instead send ministerial representatives to negotiations.

Mrema said state leaders don't need to attend, as long as they signal they are committed to the process.

"Hopefully at the end of the day there will be an agreement, a consensus … which is transformative and ambitious," she said.

Shania Twain felt 'exploited' about her body as a young singer: 'What was so natural for other people was so scary for me'


Megan Johnson
Sun, December 4, 2022 

Canadian country star Shania Twain discussed her complex relationship with her body. 

(Photo: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images for ZFF)

Shania Twain may be a queen of country music these days, but the Canadian singer struggled tremendously in her younger years.

Twain, 57, spoke candidly with the Sunday Times about the lengths she would go to in her pre-pubescent years in order to hide her changing body. Growing up with a physically and sexually abusive stepfather, Twain saw her eventual aging into her teenage years as a threat.

“I hid myself and I would flatten my boobs. I would wear bras that were too small for me, and I’d wear two, play it down until there was nothing girl about me. Make it easier to go unnoticed. Because, oh my gosh, it was terrible — you didn’t want to be a girl in my house,” Twain explained to the newspaper. “But then you go into society and you’re a girl and you’re getting the normal other unpleasant stuff too, and that reinforces it. So then you think, ‘Oh, I guess it’s just s****y to be a girl. Oh, it’s so s****y to have boobs.’ I was ashamed of being a girl.”

By age 22, her parents had died in a car accident, and Twain was left to raise her three younger siblings. However, her relationship with her body didn't improve, and she continued to feel "exploited."

“All of a sudden it was like, well, what’s your problem? You know, you’re a woman and you have this beautiful body? What was so natural for other people was so scary for me. I felt exploited, but I didn’t have a choice now. I had to play the glamorous singer, had to wear my femininity more openly or more freely. And work out how I’m not gonna get groped, or raped by someone’s eyes, you know, and feel so degraded," the singer said.

In her 20s, Twain gained a sense of confidence, using her body language to send the message "don’t even get any closer" when she walked into the room. But she found she liked her body, and “wanted to grow into it, appreciate it.”

"I was never an exhibitionist for the sake of, like, saying, you know, ‘Look at my tits.’ It was really me coming into myself. It was a metamorphosis of sorts," said Twain, who hopes younger girls can learn to exude that same confidence.

These days, Twain says she's "celebrating" her own sense of confidence in her songs, fashion choices, body language, and performances.

“I am celebrating escaping this horrible state of not wanting to be who I am. And I’m so confident. Now that I discovered that it’s OK to be a girl," she shared. "The unapologetic woman is a very powerful person indeed.”

In recent years, Twain has done her best to speak out about body positivity. Last month, she teamed up with singer Jax to share a video of the two lip-syncing to Jax's hit song "Victoria's Secret," Yahoo previously reported. The song calls out the infamous lingerie company and inspires women to love their bodies.

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, help is available. RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline is here for survivors 24/7 with free, anonymous help. 800.656.HOPE (4673) and online.rainn.org.

For anyone affected by abuse and needing support, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, or if you're unable to speak safely, you can log onto thehotline.org or text LOVEIS to 22522.

Love it but leave it: Foreign PhD students call for changes to let them stay in N.L.

Sun, December 4, 2022 

St. John's has become home for Foroogh Mohammadi and Pouya Morshedi over the five years that they've been PhD candidates at Memorial University. (Peter Cowan/CBC - image credit)

It took Foroogh Mohammadi a while to get used to the Newfoundland weather.

Five years ago she traded the hot temperatures of Iran for cool and blustery St. John's

"I got used to it because the warmth of the people and the culture and and everything in the city warm our hearts," she said.

Mohammadi, along with her husband Pouya Morshedi, are doing their PhDs in sociology at Memorial University.

They came for an education, but now it's home.

"I love St. John's and as I said, I love the people. So I definitely would love to stay here," she said.

"Unfortunately because of very different challenges we face, we have to leave the province. We have no other choice than leaving the province."

For Mohammadi, after graduation an academic job is one likely path, but it's almost impossible for her to get in Canada; Memorial University, like other Canadian universities, looks at applications for citizens and permanent residents first — but in order to get permanent residency she needs to have a job.

Peter Cowan/CBC

She's not alone in her struggle.

Sanaz Nabavian is facing the same predicament. She's also from Iran, completing her PhD in management information systems.

She's started a petition to try to change the rules.

"I'm not calling it discrimination, but it's like a a problem. It's a barrier," she said.

Nabavian is starting a business, developing a software tool to help companies like contractors compare pricing on products they need for projects.

She wants to build the business here instead of getting a job with a company, making it harder for her to get permanent residency.

Atlantic [Canada] is investing in these people and then these people leave the these provinces, which is very, very sad. - Foroogh Mohammadi

Until 2015 the federal government had a program to help PhD students get permanent residency after two years of study but now they have to apply under the general Express Entry program.

But students say that process takes a long time, and can only be started after completing their PhD.

Students say it's frustrating to see Newfoundland and Labrador working hard to recruit immigrants from elsewhere, while immigrants already in the province have to leave.

"Atlantic [Canada] is investing in these people and then these people leave the these provinces, which is very, very sad in my personal experience," said Mohammadi.

Peter Cowan/CBC

The provincial minister responsible for immigration, Gerry Byrne said he hopes Memorial University will change the rules.

"If international students are good enough to study and graduate under Memorial University's rigorous academic standards, they should be good enough to be hired for full-time academic jobs at Memorial University," he said in a statement to CBC News.

But Memorial University insists it's only following federal rules.

In a statement to CBC News, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada says PhD candidates could receive high scores in its Express Entry system for their language skills and education but can also apply for work through the provincial nominee program and the Atlantic immigration program.

Read more from CBC Newfoundland and Labrador