Embryo discovery shines light on dinosaur-era turtles: U of C researcher

The land tortoises, or nanhsiungchelyids, were the largest such creatures during the Cretaceous period with the fossilized egg dating back 75 to 90 million years

Author of the article: Bill Kaufmann
Publishing date: Aug 17, 2021 •

University of Calgary palaeontologist Darla Zelenitsky in a file photo from 2015. 

PHOTO BY LEAH HENNEL /Calgary Herald

They were giant turtles hunted by dinosaurs, but the lack of any embryo evidence limited our knowledge of them.

That changed in 2018 when a farmer in the central Chinese province of Henan discovered an egg between the size of a golf and tennis ball, and figured it should be analyzed by scientists.

Chinese researchers called on University of Calgary paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky and former Royal Tyrrell Museum researcher Dr. Don Brinkman to help determine the find’s significance.

“This is the first time a turtle embryo has been identified to belong to a specific type of turtle,” said Zelenitsky.

“They don’t usually have embryos encased in them.”

CT scans developed 3-D models of the egg’s contents — the skeleton of a baby turtle that would likely have grown to have a shell 1.6 metres in length.

The land tortoises, or nanhsiungchelyids, were the largest such creatures during the Cretaceous period, with the fossilized egg dating back 75 to 90 million years.

“These were giant, land-dwelling turtles that lived alongside the dinosaurs,” said Zelenitsky.

“The surprising part of this study was the size of these turtles.”

The tortoises also vanished with the dinosaurs, she noted.

But they managed to migrate from Asia to North America, though their cousins in places like Alberta seemed to have been smaller, said the paleontologist.

And discoveries of the significance of the ones made in China haven’t been replicated in Canada, said Zelenitsky, whose work along with that of Brinkman’s and Chinese researchers will be published next week in the Royal Society Journal.

“They lived in Alberta, too, but we just haven’t found those eggs yet,” she said, adding ancient turtle eggs have been unearthed in the Milk River area.

The find supplies a better glimpse of how the tortoises nested and reproduced — and how they might have survived the unwanted attention of hungry dinosaurs who would have been deterred by the turtles’ hard shell.

Their eggs wouldn’t have been easy to crack, with hard shells that were 1.88 mm thick and laid in considerable profusion — 15 to 30 at a time.

“But eggs and hatchlings were the worst off for predation,” said Zelenitsky.

Perhaps just as noteworthy as anything from the discovery is spreading awareness of the diversity of life that existed at that time on earth, said Zelenitsky.

“We’ve always known of dinosaurs as creatures living during the Cretaceous, but not many people know there were turtles as well,” she said.

Rare embryo from dinosaur age was laid by human-size turtle


By Laura Geggel - Editor 

The eggshell was incredibly thick.


An illustration of the Cretaceous period turtle (Yuchelys nanyangensis) hatching from its tennis ball-size egg. (Image credit: Masato Hattori)

About 90 million years ago, a giant turtle in what is now central China laid a clutch of tennis ball-size eggs with extremely thick eggshells. One egg never hatched, and it remained undisturbed for tens of millions of years, preserving the delicate bones of the embryonic turtle within it.

In 2018, a farmer discovered the egg and donated it to a university. Now, a new analysis of this egg and its rare embryo marks the first time that scientists have been able to identify the species of a dinosaur-age embryonic turtle.

This specimen also sheds light on why its species, the terrestrial turtle Yuchelys nanyangensis, went extinct 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaur-killing asteroid struck Earth. The thick eggshell allowed water to penetrate through, so clutches of eggs were likely buried in nests deep underground in moist soil to keep them from drying out in the arid environment of central China during the late Cretaceous, the researchers said.

While these turtles' unique terrestrial lifestyle, thick eggs and underground nesting strategy may have served them well during the Cretaceous, it's possible that these specialized turtles couldn't adapt to the cooler "climatic and environmental changes following the end-Cretaceous mass extinction," study co-researcher Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor of paleobiology at the University of Calgary in Canada, told Live Science.

Egg-cellent discovery

The farmer discovered the egg in Henan province, a region famous for the thousands of dinosaur eggs people have found there over the past 30 years, Zelenitsky said. But in comparison with dinosaur eggs, turtle eggs — especially those with preserved embryos — rarely fossilize because they're so small and fragile, she said.

The Y. nanyangensis egg, however, persisted because it's a tank of an egg.

At 2.1 by 2.3 inches (5.4 by 5.9 centimeters) in size, the nearly spherical egg is just a bit smaller than a tennis ball. That's larger than the eggs of most living turtles, and just a tad smaller than the eggs of Galápagos tortoises, Zelenitsky said.

The eggshell's 0.07 inch (1.8 millimeters) thickness is also remarkable. To put that in perspective, that's four times thicker than a Galápagos tortoise eggshell, and six times thicker than a chicken eggshell, which has an average thickness of 0.01 inch (0.3 mm). Larger eggs tend to be thicker, like the 0.08-inch-thick (2 mm) ostrich eggshell, but "this egg is much smaller than an ostrich egg," which average about 6 inches (15 cm) in length, Zelenitsky said.


An equation that uses egg size to predict the length of the carapace, or the top part of the turtle's shell, revealed that this thick egg was likely laid by a turtle with a 5.3-foot-long (1.6 meters) carapace, the researchers found. That measurement doesn't include the length of the neck or head, so the mother turtle was easily as long as some humans are tall.

Image 1 of 4

Other clutches from this turtle family had nests of 30 and 15 eggs. (Image credit: Masato Hattori)



An illustration of the turtle as a hatchling. (Image credit: Masato Hattori)



An illustration of what the turtle might have looked like after hatching. (Image credit: Masato Hattori)



Different views of what the turtle hatchling might have looked like. (Image credit: Masato Hattori)

Doomed egg

The researchers used a micro-CT scan to create virtual 3D images of the egg and its embryo. By comparing these images with a distantly related living turtle species, it appears that the embryo was nearly 85% developed, the researchers found.

Part of the eggshell is broken, Zelenitsky noted, so "maybe it tried to hatch," but failed. Apparently, it wasn't the only embryonic turtle that didn't make it; two previously discovered thick-shelled egg clutches from Henan province that date to the Cretaceous — one with 30 eggs and another with 15 eggs — likely also belong to this turtle's now-extinct family, known as Nanhsiungchelyid, the researchers said.

Image 1 of 2

The now-extinct nanhsiungchelyidae turtle family lived in North America and Asia. Here is a Nanhsiungchelyid turtle fossil that was found in Alberta, Canada. (Image credit: Royal Tyrrell Museum)

The fossil carapace of a turtle from the nanhsiungchelyidae family that was found in China. (Image credit: Don Brinkman)


Turtles in this family — relatives of today's river turtles — were very flat and evolved to live entirely on land, which was unique during that time, Zelenitsky said.


The study of the newfound egg is special for its virtual 3D analysis of the embryo, which helped lead to its species diagnosis, said Walter Joyce, a professor of paleontology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who was not involved in the study. Furthermore, this study offers evidence that Nanhsiungchelyid turtles were "adapted to living in harsh, terrestrial environments, but laid their large, thick-shelled eggs in covered nests in moist soil," Joyce told Live Science in an email.

The study will be published online Wednesday (Aug. 18) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

US lab stands on threshold of key nuclear fusion goal

By Paul Rincon
Science editor, BBC News website
Published1 hour ago

The research takes place at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California

A US science institute is on the verge of achieving a longstanding goal in nuclear fusion research.

The National Ignition Facility uses a powerful laser to heat and compress hydrogen fuel, initiating fusion.

An experiment suggests the goal of "ignition", where the energy released by fusion exceeds that delivered by the laser, is now within touching distance.

Harnessing fusion, the process that powers the Sun, could provide a limitless, clean energy source.

In a process called inertial confinement fusion, 192 beams from NIF's laser - the highest-energy example in the world - are directed towards a peppercorn-sized capsule containing deuterium and tritium, which are different forms of the element hydrogen.

This compresses the fuel to 100 times the density of lead and heats it to 100 million degrees Celsius - hotter than the centre of the Sun. These conditions help kickstart thermonuclear fusion.

Fusion milestone passed at US lab

Giant laser experiment powers up

An experiment carried out on 8 August yielded 1.35 megajoules (MJ) of energy - around 70% of the laser energy delivered to the fuel capsule. Reaching ignition means getting a fusion yield that's greater than the 1.9 MJ put in by the laser.

"This is a huge advance for fusion and for the entire fusion community," Debbie Callahan, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which hosts NIF, told BBC News.

As a measure of progress, the yield from this month's experiment is eight times NIF's previous record, established in Spring 2021, and 25 times the yield from experiments carried out in 2018.

"The pace of improvement in energy output has been rapid, suggesting we may soon reach more energy milestones, such as exceeding the energy input from the lasers used to kick-start the process," said Prof Jeremy Chittenden, co-director of the Centre for Inertial Fusion Studies at Imperial College London.

Artwork showing a pellet of hydrogen fuel inside a container called the hohlraum

NIF scientists also believe they have now achieved something called "burning plasma", where the fusion reactions themselves provide the heat for more fusion. This is vital for making the process self-sustaining.

"Self-sustaining burn is essential to getting high yield," Dr Callahan explained. "The burn wave has to propagate into the high density fuel in order to get a lot of fusion energy out.

"We believe this experiment is in this regime, although we are still doing analysis and simulations to be sure that we understand the result."

As a next step, Dr Callahan said the experiments would be repeated. "That's fundamental to experimental science. We need to understand how reproducible and how sensitive the results are to small changes," she said.

"After that, we do have ideas for how to improve on this design and we will start working on those next year."

Prof Chittenden explained: "The mega-joule of energy released in the experiment is indeed impressive in fusion terms, but in practice this is equivalent to the energy require to boil a kettle."

He added: "Far higher fusion energies can be achieved through ignition if we can work out how to hold the fuel together for longer, to allow more of it to burn. This will be the next horizon for inertial confinement fusion."

Existing nuclear energy relies on a process called fission, where a heavy chemical element is split to produce lighter ones. Fusion works by combining two light elements to make a heavier one.

Interior of the target chamber, where fusion takes place

Construction on the National Ignition Facility began in 1997 and was complete by 2009. The first experiments to test the laser's power began in October 2010.

NIF's other function is to help ensure the safety and reliability of America's nuclear weapons stockpile. At times, scientists who want to use the huge laser for fusion have had their time squeezed by experiments geared towards national security.

But in 2013, the BBC reported that during experiments at NIF, the amount of energy released through fusion had exceeded the amount of energy absorbed by the fuel - a breakthrough and a first for any fusion facility in the world. Results from these tests were later published in the journal Nature.

NIF is one of several projects around the world geared towards advancing fusion research. They include the multi-billion-euro Iter facility, currently under construction in Cadarache, France.

Iter will take a different approach to the laser-driven fusion at NIF; the facility in southern France will use magnetic fields to contain hot plasma - electrically-charged gas. This concept is known as magnetic confinement fusion (MCF).

But building commercially viable fusion facilities that can provide energy to the grid will require another giant leap.

"Turning this concept into a renewable source of electrical energy is likely to be a long process and will involve overcoming substantial technical challenges, such as being able to re-create this experiment several times a second to produce a steady source of power," said Prof Chittenden.

Lawrence Livermore claims a milestone in laser fusion

A tiny pellet of deuterium and tritium released more energy than it absorbed from the National Ignition Facility’s bank of 192 lasers.

David Kramer

Preamplifiers at the National Ignition Facility boost the energy of the laser beams

 that ultimately irradiate hydrogen fuel. The photo is color-enhanced. 

Credit: Damien Jemison/LLNL

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced today that it has produced a fusion reaction in the laboratory that yielded more energy than was absorbed by the fuel to initiate it.

Zapping a BB-size capsule of fusion fuel with UV light from 192 lasers at the lab’s $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility (NIF), scientists say they sparked fusion reactions that released 1.3 megajoules of energy, about five times the 250 kilojoules that were absorbed by the capsule. That energy emission from the tiny blob of plasma—roughly a cube with sides measuring the width of a human hair—occurred within about 100 trillionths of a second to yield more than 1016 watts of power.

The shot, which occurred on 8 August, demolished the facility’s previous record yield of 170 kJ, observed in February, and was 25 times as high as the best results obtained just a year ago. “Everyone has a spring in their step,” says NIF director Mark Herrmann. The results have not yet been peer reviewed.

Although the achievement represents a milestone in fusion research, the laboratory stopped short of declaring ignition, the goal for which NIF was named and which it had planned to achieve by 2012. The fusion yield fell short of the 1.9 MJ that the NIF laser brought to bear on the hollow target, called a hohlraum, in which the fuel capsule was suspended. A 1997 National Academy of Sciences review of NIF’s design defined ignition as fusion yield equal to or more than the laser energy input. In NIF’s approach, known as indirect drive, 85% of the laser’s energy is lost in the conversion of UV to x rays that occurs inside the hohlraum.

Stephen Bodner, a former director of the laser fusion program at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and a persistent critic of NIF and the indirect drive approach, congratulated the lab on the achievement, saying it was close enough to ignition for him. “They made spectacular progress,” he says. “I’m surprised they found a way to minimize the laser–plasma problems,” he says. He added that “it demonstrates to the world that there’s no fundamental reason why laser fusion can’t work.”

But Bodner cautions that the NIF results won’t extrapolate to higher energy gains due to the inefficiency of the indirect drive process. “If you want to get to high gains, you have to directly illuminate the target,” he says, referring to an approach pursued at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) and NRL, where laser beams are symmetrically directed onto the fuel capsule.

A colorized image of a laser fusion shot conducted at the National Ignition Facility in 2016. Credit: Don Jedlovec/LLNL

Michael Campbell, director of the LLE at the University of Rochester in New York, says that ignition was attained by most scientific measures, including the extent to which alpha particles from fusion reactions heat the plasma and create more fusion. “It gives the US a lab capability to study burning plasmas and high-energy physics relevant for [nuclear weapons] stewardship,” he says. “It’s an enormous scientific achievement.” Like NIF, LLE and its Omega laser are funded by the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

Jill Hruby is the undersecretary for nuclear security at DOE and the NNSA administrator. “These extraordinary results from NIF advance the science that NNSA depends on to modernize our nuclear weapons and production. It also offers potential new avenues of research into alternative energy sources that could aid economic development and help fight climate change,” she said in a press release.

By most measures, the NIF results exceed the best results achieved in tokamaks, which bottle fusion plasmas in magnetic fields. In 1997 the Joint European Torus generated about 16 MW, roughly two-thirds of the power that it took to start the reaction.

Research on laser fusion, also known as inertial confinement fusion, was initiated at LLNL by John Nuckolls, who went on to become the lab’s director, soon after the invention of the laser in 1960. The goal has always been to create at laboratory scale what happens in the secondary stage of a thermonuclear weapon.

When NIF opened for experiments in 2009, five years behind schedule, LLNL scientists were confident they could reach ignition within two years. That concerted effort, known as the National Ignition Campaign, formally expired in 2012 (see Physics Today, October 2012, page 28), and the frequency of fusion shots was scaled back in favor of other research in support of the nuclear weapons program.

But experimenters continued to test a wide variety of compositions and different shapes of capsules and hohlraums, while also fine-tuning the timing and sequence of the laser pulses. Until now, they’d been unable to implode the fuel capsule with the precise degree of symmetry needed to prevent the plasma from squeezing out.

Over the years, the lab developed a suite of unique diagnostic tools that have provided a clearer picture of the reaction dynamics. Among the tools are 3D neutron and 2D x-ray imaging instruments and neutron time-of-flight detectors (see Physics Today, February 2017, page 33). Herrmann noted that in previous experiments, neutrons exiting the capsule on one side of the implosion arrived a few picoseconds earlier than did those flying off the opposite way. Those exquisitely sensitive measurements indicated that the plasmas were jetting off in one direction. The problem was traced to capsules that were a fraction of a micron out of round.

The lab hasn’t yet reproduced this month’s results, and Herrmann cautioned that doing so might not be straightforward. “We don’t know what variability will be in successive shots. It’s a nonlinear process where alpha heating heats up the fusion fuel and creates more fusion, which creates more heat.” Herrmann says the 3.5 MeV alpha particles, which remain in the plasma, produced 20% of the fusion yield, with 14 MeV neutrons accounting for most of the energy.

Further experiments will require the manufacture of additional fuel capsules and hohlraums. These may not be ready until at least October, Herrmann says. The nanocrystalline diamond-coated capsule that was imploded in this month’s event took six months to grow at General Atomics, which has long worked with LLNL on fabricating capsules. The spheres have to be polished and the core’s interior etched with tools inserted through a 2-micron-diameter hole drilled into it. The tritium–deuterium mixture is injected through a tiny fill tube just prior to the shot.

The lab is still analyzing the results from the shot. It’s not yet known which or what combination of advances to the targets, laser pulse lengths, or other variables led to the leap in performance. Some of the instruments were saturated by the unexpected yield of the reaction. A few that are used in the target chamber for other, non-ignition experiments will need repair.

Herrmann acknowledged that the announcement deviates from the standard practice of peer-reviewed publication. But the results, he says, were leaking, “so we wanted to put it out so people could discuss the facts.”

Editor’s note, 17 August: The first sentence was updated to clarify that the fusion reaction did not meet the National Academy’s definition of ignition.

À PARTIR DE LA DROITE

As millennials fall out of love with Trudeau, Liberals need to stop bleed towards the NDP

'With millennials, it's not just who they're supporting, but are they motivated?'

Author of the article: Christopher Nardi

POSTMEDIA

Publishing date: Aug 17, 2021 • 

Justin Trudeau greets supporters during a campaign stop in his Papineau riding in Montreal on Aug. 15, 2021. PHOTO BY CHRISTINNE MUSCHI /Reuters
Article content

OTTAWA — In 2015, millennials mobilized in droves to support the Justin TrudeauLiberals, but, six years and two elections later, experts say millennials have fallen out of love with the prime minister and his party will have to work hard to stop them from bleeding over to the emerging NDP.

“There’s a bit of disillusion or disappointment,” said Andrew Enns, executive vice-president at Leger polling firm. A far cry from 2015, where he says there was “shocking rise for the liberals in the 18- to 34-year-old bracket.”

David Coletto, CEO of Abacus Data which does a lot of work focused on millennials specifically, has reached the same conclusion. Whereas millennials — which is broadly defined as people born between 1980 and 2000 — were enamoured with 2015 Trudeau, that veneer has now washed away.

And polling numbers illustrate that fall eloquently. According to Leger polling, nearly half (46 per cent) of Canadians aged 18 to 34 supported the Liberal Party of Canada by the end of the 2015 campaign that led Trudeau from leader of the third opposition to prime minister of Canada.

There’s a bit of disillusion or disappointment

Fast forward to the end of his mandate in 2019, and that number had already fallen to around 30 per cent, both Coletto and Enns’ data shows. The Liberals remain the party favoured by millennials, but the gap with the NDP is closing.

Incidentally, 2019 is also the electoral year in which Trudeau’s government lost its majority status and became a minority government.

“I think they need millennials, certainly to win a majority,” Coletto said about the Liberals. “And these numbers probably aren’t as good as they’d like, though aren’t devastating.”

Liberal party spokesperson Braeden Caley says millennial Canadians and their younger counterparts known as “Gen X” are “absolutely” a key demographic for Trudeau because they care about issues that the party holds dear: “fighting climate change, making life more affordable and keeping our community safe.”

But two years after 2019, and as a new federal election begins, millennials’ support has barely risen for the Liberals, and is currently a far-cry from the record support they had back in 2015.

Canadian Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau and his wife Sophie wave on stage in Montreal after winning the election in 2015. 

PHOTO BY NICHOLAS KAMM / AFP, GETTY IMAGES

“It’s no longer love. I’d say it’s better than acceptance, but not as good as love is where I think most of them are,” said Coletto about millennials’ current feelings about the Liberals.

“This is not a generation anymore that looks at the prime minister and says, ‘He’s different, he’s one of us, he’s going to change politics,’” he continued.

When asked if he is concerned with millennials’ significantly dampened appreciation of the Liberals, Caley insisted that Trudeau has “very robust support” from young Canadians, though he did not provide any data contradicting polling numbers.

According to experts, the falling out of love between millennials and Trudeau began before the 2019 election, notably with the SNC-Lavalin scandal that shook the Trudeau government and led to the resignation of ministers Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott. The ethics commissioner later found that Trudeau had acted improperly by trying to push Wilson-Raybould to end criminal prosecution of SNC-Lavalin.

The government’s decision to purchase the Trans Mountain pipeline in order to facilitate its expansion in western Canada also dealt a heavy blow to millennials’ impressions of the Liberals, since they often rate the fight against climate change and environmental issues amongst their top political priorities when voting, experts say.

“There’s some disappointment, even significant disappointment. Electoral reform, Indigenous reconciliation, even climate change, I think the Liberals have really strengthened their brand around climate change, but there are many who would still say we haven’t done nearly enough in the six years that you’ve been in power to move this along,” Coletto said.

“I think SNC-Lavalin, and some of the other decisions they’ve made since they were elected, have really deteriorated that image of a prime minister and a leader who is different.”

I think SNC-Lavalin, and some of the other decisions they've made since they were elected, have really deteriorated that image of a prime minister and a leader who is different

But has millennials’ perception of the Liberals changed at all throughout the COVID-19 pandemic? And more specifically, have the Trudeau governments’ costly and generous financial aid benefits — which have led to record deficits and pushed Canada’s debt over the $1 trillion mark — swayed 20 to 40 year old Canadians’ whose top concern lately is affordability?

No, say both pollsters, who note that millennials seem mostly ambivalent about Liberal COVID-19 policy such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), possibly due to factors that aren’t always of the federal government’s purview (such as lockdowns imposed by the provinces).

“CERB for sure has been welcomed by that millennial group, they’ve appreciated it. But I also do think that some of the lockdown measures such as the closures of the bars, lounges, and gyms has really also been more negatively perceived by that age group as well,” Enns said.

“So the pandemic has kind of been a bit of a wash when it comes to their impression of the government,” he added.

Justin Trudeau gives a thumbs up to supporters, accompanied by his daughter Ella-Grace, before embarking on his first election campaign visit, in Ottawa, Aug. 15, 2021. PHOTO BY LARS HAGBERG /Reuters

If millennials aren’t voting for Liberals en masse like in 2015, then where is their vote going? In some cases, it has slowly shifted towards the NDP and its increasingly popular leader Jagmeet Singh.

But for the most part, experts agree that it stays home.

Elections Canada data shows that Canadians between 18 and 34 had the lowest turnout amongst all age groups in the 2019 federal election. For example, barely over half (54.2 per cent) of voters under the age of 25, and just over 58 per cent of Canadians aged 25 to 34, cast a ballot.

That is roughly 10 to 15 points under the national average of 67 per cent and shows how difficult it can be to mobilize millennial voters if they do not feel particularly compelled by one cause or party. In comparison, Enns says millennials voted “in record numbers” in 2015.

“With millennials, it’s not just who they’re supporting, but are they motivated?” Enns said. “In 2015, Justin Trudeau and the liberals, through a combination of his policies and who he was … created this buzz in this group that not only got their support, but actually got them out of their chair to vote.”

The pandemic has kind of been a bit of a wash when it comes to their impression of the government

But times have changed significantly since 2015, and this election is not gearing up to be anywhere as exciting to youth, the experts say. According to an Abacus poll released last week, millennials (59 per cent) were a whopping 20 per cent less likely to say they would “absolutely vote” compared to Canadians over 40 (79 per cent)

Liberals are not the only party courting millennials though. Singh’s NDP is aggressively pursuing the 20- to 40-year-old vote and pollsters say there are some initial signs of success that could be catalyzed by the current federal election.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, currently have little appeal to Canadians under 40, both pollsters’ data shows.

According to Coletto, millennials’ appreciation of Singh has boomed over the course of the pandemic and now exceeds Trudeau’s, with 46 per cent of them saying they have a positive view of the NDP leader compared to 39 per cent for Trudeau.

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh visits the East Village Beer Garden before meeting with the Calgary and District Labour Council on July 17, 2021. 

PHOTO BY BRENDAN MILLER / POSTMEDIA

“Jagmeet Singh’s popularity has improved with this cohort. And as a result, their willingness and openness to considering the NDP has grown, but that hasn’t converted yet into hard support for the New Democrats,” Coletto said.

“If Singh and the New Democrats can engage and mobilize young people, he’s a wild card among the under 40 crowd and could foil the Liberals’ plans for a majority.”

NDP spokesperson Mélanie Richer says the party has noticed that young Canadians are more and more attracted to Singh’s message of “hope and change” — the same message that was so effective in 2015 for Trudeau and in 2008 for American presidential candidate Barack Obama, for example.

But both the NDP and the Liberals recognize that their main challenge will not only be to win over the youth vote, but then get them out to polls and fill out a ballot. The struggle will likely be compounded by the fact the election is occurring in the middle of a pandemic and during the fourth wave driven by the more contagious Delta variant.

So, each party says they’ve set up specific strategies to mobilize millennials, and even Gen Xers who are of voting age, to make sure they cast a ballot.

Instead of waiting until the last two weeks to do your ‘get out the vote’ efforts, we’re starting on day one

For example, Richer says that NDP candidates will be spending significantly less money on physical promotional items like pamphlets or cards or even big offices capable of hosting many people due to the pandemic. Instead, that money will go towards ads on digital platforms or improving their volunteer program.

The NDP will also be pushing young supporters to get out and vote as soon as possible instead of waiting for election day on Sept. 20.

“Instead of waiting until the last two weeks to do your ‘get out the vote’ efforts, we’re starting on day one,” Richer said. “By making sure people show up for advanced voting, people don’t have to wait until the day of, which by that point is going to be square in the middle of a fourth wave.”

The Liberals say a lot of their mobilization strategy will rely on groundwork being done by young Liberal groups and associations, as well as a series of digital communication tools focused on millennials’ favourite tools: cellphones and social media.

One new tool is Greenfly, an app used by various political parties, entertainment companies and sports teams and leagues to create online content on the fly and share it near-instantly with supporters on any number of social media websites.

The party will also be aggressively promoting a new short code telephone number — generally a five-digit phone number that is used by groups to send out mass text messages quickly — that potential supporters can text to interact with the party and receive Liberal alerts (text “forward” to 54222).

“If you looked at the American campaigns, if you saw just about any event with Joe Biden, you would see a short code mentioned everywhere. You would even see him mention it in debates. It’s an important way of people getting involved in politics,” Caley said.

Carbon dioxide can be 'captured from the air with 97% efficiency', study finds

Rob Waugh
·Contributor
Mon., August 16, 2021

The researchers analysed carbon-capture technology from Swiss firm Climeworks. (Reuters)

New technologies can capture carbon dioxide directly from the air with up to 97% efficiency, a study has shown.

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI and ETH Zurich investigated different technologies to remove CO2 directly from the air.

The researchers cautioned that such technology would not remove the need to cut carbon emissions, but would instead work alongside carbon reduction to help countries hit their climate goals.

Direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) is a fairly new technology for removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Read more: Why economists worry that reversing climate change is hopeless

The research was published in Environmental Science and Technology.

Carbon dioxide is absorbed from the atmosphere and then either buried or used in carbon-based fuels.

The researchers analysed five different ways to capture CO2 from the air and their use at eight different locations around the world.

Read more: Melting snow in Himalayas drives growth of green sea slime visible from space

To separate CO2 from the atmosphere, air is first passed over a so-called absorbent with the help of fans. This binds CO2 until its capacity to absorb the greenhouse gas is exhausted.

Then, in the second, so-called desorption step, the CO2 is released from the absorbent again – but the technology requires large amounts of heat (and therefore energy).

"The use of this technology only makes sense if these emissions are significantly lower than the amounts of CO2 it helps to store," said Tom Terlouw, who conducts research at PSI's Laboratory for Energy Systems Analysis and is first author of the study.

The researchers focused their examination on a system from Swiss company Climeworks.

Read more: A 1988 warning about climate change was mostly right

The PSI team analysed the use of the technology at eight locations worldwide: Chile, Greece, Jordan, Mexico, Spain, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland.

For each location, they calculated the overall greenhouse gas emissions over the entire life cycle of a plant.

The researchers found a huge variation in efficiency (from 9 to 97 percent) in terms of actual greenhouse-gas removal through the use of DACCS.

"The technologies for CO2 capture are merely complementary to an overall decarbonisation strategy – that is, for the reduction of CO2 emissions – and cannot replace it," said Christian Bauer, a scientist at the Laboratory for Energy Systems Analysis and a co-author of the study.

"However, they can be helpful in achieving the goals defined in the Paris Agreement on climate change, because certain emissions, for example from agriculture, cannot be avoided."

The researchers believe that the net-zero emissions target can only be achieved with the help of suitable negative-emissions technologies.

Would you let a robot lawyer defend you?

By Padraig Belton
Business reporter
BBC

AI is increasingly being used by the legal industry

Could your next lawyer be a robot? It sounds far fetched, but artificial intelligence (AI) software systems - computer programs that can update and "think" by themselves - are increasingly being used by the legal community.

Joshua Browder describes his app DoNotPay as "the world's first robot lawyer".

It helps users draft legal letters. You tell its chatbot what your problem is, such as appealing against a parking fine, and it will suggest what it thinks is the best legal language to use.

"People can type in their side of an argument using their own words, and software with a machine learning model matches that with a legally correct way of saying it," he says.

The 24-year-old and his company are based in Silicon Valley in California, but the firm's origins go back to London in 2015, when Mr Browder was 18.

Joshua Browder developed DoNotPay to solve his own need - contesting parking tickets

"As a late teenager in Hendon, north London, I was a horrible driver," he says. "I got a lot of expensive parking tickets - which, since I was still in secondary school, I couldn't afford."

Through lots of research and freedom of information requests Mr Browder says he found the best ways to contest the tickets. "If you know the right things to say, you can save a lot of time and money."

Rather than copy and paste the same document each time, he says it seemed "the perfect job for software". So he created the first version of DoNotPay in a few weeks in 2015, "really just to impress my family".

Since then the app has spread across the UK and US, and it can now help the user write letters dealing with a range of issues; insurance claims, applying for tourist visas, complaint letters to a business or local authority, getting your money back for a holiday you can no longer go on or cancelling gym membership. Mr Browder says the last two uses soared during the pandemic.

DoNotPay now claims to have 150,000 paying subscribers. And while it has its critics, with some saying its legal advice is not accurate enough, last year it won an award from the American Bar Association for increasing legal access.

Mr Browder claims an 80% overall success rate, down to 65% for parking tickets, because "'some people are guilty".

Lawyers using AI is "becoming the norm" says legal software boss Eleanor Weaver

You might think human lawyers would fear AI encroaching on their turf. But some are pleased, as the software can be used to quickly trawl through and sort vast quantities of case documents.

One such lawyer is Sally Hobson, a barrister at London-based law firm The 36 Group, who works on criminal cases. She recently used AI in a complex murder trial. The case involved needing to quickly analyse more than 10,000 documents.

The software did the task four weeks faster than it would have taken humans, saving £50,000 in the process.

Lawyers using AI for assistance is "becoming the norm and no longer a thing that's nice to have", says Eleanor Weaver, chief executive of Luminance, which makes the software Ms Hobson uses.

More than 300 other law firms in 55 countries also use it, working in 80 languages.

Eleanor Weaver says that document-checking software is now a lot better than it used to be

"Historically you had a lot of [document checking] technologies that were no better than keyword searches, like hitting Control-F on your laptop," says Ms Weaver. By contrast, she says that today's sophisticated software can connect associated words and phrases.

AI is, however, not just helping lawyers sort through documentary evidence. It can also now help them prepare and structure their case, and search for any relevant legal precedents.

Laurence Lieberman, who heads London law firm Taylor Wessing's digitising disputes programme, uses such software, which has been developed by an Israeli firm called Litigate.

"You upload your case summary and your pleadings, and it will go in and work out who the key players are," he says. "And then the AI will link them together, and pull together a chronology of the key events and explanation of what happens on what dates."

Some countries, such as Brazil, have a huge backlog of court cases that the use of AI lawyers and judges could help solve

Meanwhile, Bruce Braude, chief technology officer of Deloitte Legal, the legal arm of accountancy giant Deloitte, says that its TAX-I software system can analyse historical court data for similar tax appeal cases.

The firm claims it can correctly predict how appeals will be determined 70% of the time. "It provides a more quantifiable way of what is your likelihood of success, which you can use to determine if you should proceed," adds Mr Braude.

Yet while AI can help write legal letters, or assist human lawyers, will we ever see a time of robot solicitors and barristers, or even robot judges?

"I think, really in reality, we're nowhere near that," says Ms Weaver.

But others, like Prof Richard Susskind, who chairs the Lord Chief Justice of England's advisory group on AI, aren't so sure.

Prof Richard Susskind says that AI systems are increasingly accurate in how they predict the results of court cases

Prof Susskind says in the 1980s he was genuinely horrified by the idea of a computer judge, but that he isn't now.

He points out that ven before coronavirus, "Brazil had a court backlog of more than 100 million court cases, and that there is no chance of human judges and lawyers disposing of a caseload of that size".

So if an AI system can very accurately (say with 95% probability) predict the outcome of court decisions, he says that maybe we might start thinking about treating these predictions as binding determinations, especially in countries that have impossibly large backlogs.

HOMOPHOBIC HATE CRIME; MURDER

Peter Karlsson: The painful verdict on Swedish ice hockey player's 1995 killing
By Trygve Skogseth

BBC Sport
Last updated on34 minutes ago

Ice hockey

Peter Karlsson was 29 years old when he was stabbed to death

When Leif Rohlin walked into the locker room for a Saturday training session, the police were there. They told him that his friend and former team-mate had been killed in the street, not far from where he lived.

Rohlin, who had won Olympic ice hockey gold with Sweden the year before and would later play in the NHL, says he can't remember the exact words officers used on that March morning in 1995.

He can't remember whether it was there in the locker room that he learned just how brutal the killing had been, that his friend had been stabbed 64 times.

He can't remember where he was when he first heard that it was a man with ties to a neo-Nazi group who had been arrested, or that police suspected his friend had been killed after making a pass at the man.

What Rohlin does remember is that training got pushed back an hour.

Vasteras had a decisive play-off game the following day. He remembers that there was a minute of silence before the whistle, and that they were soundly beaten.

"It was completely absurd," Rohlin says now. "There were a couple of us out on the ice that knew him well. I think playing the game wouldn't be on the table had it happened today. We would have been given some breathing space."

More than two decades have passed since the tragic death of 29-year-old ice hockey player Peter Karlsson. Friends and activists are still angered by the events that followed.

Karlsson never made it home from a Friday night out in spring 1995.

According to court documents, the 19-year-old man who confessed to killing him was a member of a local skinhead group with ties to the neo-Nazi movement. In the three rounds of court cases that followed Karlsson's death - eventually it went all the way to Sweden's supreme court - the defendant maintained that what happened was not premeditated, that he had been "provoked".

He claimed that he bumped into Karlsson on his way back from a night out in Vasteras, a town about an hour's drive west of Stockholm. He said they walked in the same direction for a while, before Karlsson told him he thought he was attractive and forced himself on him by grabbing his head.

In the minutes that followed, the man stabbed Karlsson in his chest, head, face and back. He was left so brutally injured that one of the first police officers on the scene, a man who had coached him as a youth player, didn't recognise him.

There were no witnesses to what happened that night. The court had to rely heavily on the testimony of the defendant, who said that he was stricken by rage and panic. When searching his home, the police had found pamphlets with anti-gay propaganda.

But despite this, and the brutal use of force, the supreme court upheld the original verdict; it was manslaughter, rather than murder. The killer was sentenced to eight years in prison

.

Karlsson belonged to a talented generation of players from Vasteras

The morning after Karlsson's death, the phone rang at the home of Sweden's national ice hockey team manager, Curt Lundmark. He took the call sitting at his kitchen table, just up the road from where Karlsson had grown up.

Lundmark had led Sweden to their legendary first Olympic gold medal at the Lillehammer Winter Olympics of 1994. Before that, he had coached Karlsson as a youth player in Vasteras for the better part of a decade.

"I just sat there in shock, trying to process what I had heard," he says.

"Peter was the kind of guy who, if he saw you were home, he'd stop by and take the time to strike up a conversation. The type who made everyone around him smile."

Lundmark followed the case closely as it made its way through the Swedish justice system. To this day, the way Karlsson was portrayed in the courtroom bothers him. He has always believed that the verdict was wrong.

"I don't think the courts got to hear enough about what type of guy Peter actually was," he says, adding that they would have a hard time finding anyone in Vasteras who wouldn't describe him as harmless.

"They just relied on the story that his killer told them."

Dennis Martinsson, an assistant professor and expert in criminal law at Stockholm University, is of the same opinion. In his view, details such as the anti-gay literature found at the killer's home were not given proper consideration either.

But he says that there has been real progress in recognising hate crimes against minorities in Sweden

.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the country saw a series of killings of gay men. Facundo Unia, a gay rights activist in Stockholm, covered some of these as a journalist. He believes that the so-called 'gay panic' defence proved an effective way for many defendants to get more lenient sentencing for what he considers to have been hate crimes.

That legal strategy - where defendants argue they were provoked by an unwanted same-sex sexual advance - is still admissible in many parts of the world. According to a 2021 report by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law in the United States, "gay and trans panic defences remain available in most states".

In the UK, the tactic is thought to have declined since 2003, when the Crown Prosecution Service published guidance on its "proactive approach" towards "homophobic or transphobic crime".

In Unia's opinion, the general sentiment towards gay people in the '90s meant there was less sympathy for the victims in these cases, leading the court to go easier on the perpetrators.

"There is an attitude of 'that gay guy came on to me, I just had to get rid of him' in these defences," Unia says.

Walking up the quiet residential street where Karlsson was killed, not far from Vasteras city centre, his former team-mate Rohlin points towards an empty spot in front of one of the houses.

"There used to be a plaque commemorating what happened right here. I don't know why they took it down," he sighs.

Karlsson belonged to a generation of young players from Vasteras who would go on to make a big impact on Swedish ice hockey. Three of those who claimed Olympic gold at the Lillehammer Games of 1994 were friends and former team-mates.

"It was a terrible call to get," says Patrick Juhlin, who learned the news of Karlsson's death while playing for the Philadelphia Flyers in the NHL.

"The first question is just why and how such a thing could have happened. It ended up being quite a few phone calls."

Karlsson was a couple of years older than both Juhlin and Rohlin. When they joined the youth development team in Vasteras, he was one of the players they looked up to.

"He was the first guy you'd invite to a party," Rohlin says. "There was never even an inch of bad intention in that guy. He was just joy and cheer all the way through."

Former team-mate Rohlin, pictured by Karlsson's grave outside Vasteras

In the months following Karlsson's death, Rohlin kept himself busy preparing for the World Championship that Sweden was about to host. Lundmark, the coach, instructed his team to not read the evening papers or watch the extensive coverage the killing was getting.

"I figured it was best to try to put it behind us and focus on the game as best we could," he says. In the middle of the team's preparations, he left with three of his players to attend Karlsson's funeral in a packed church in Vasteras.

For Karlsson's friends, the press reports that he had been killed after making a pass at another man came as a shock. Karlsson was not openly gay. According to court documents, he had discussed being gay with a couple of guests at the nightclub he had been at the night before he was stabbed. As for his friends, it was not something he ever brought up.

"If he was gay, and he just never felt able to talk to us about it, that pains me," Rohlin says.

"It's tragic in and of itself. We would have pretty deep conversations. That he wouldn't have told us feels unbelievable, given the way we knew each other."

Karlsson's team-mates have now long retired from professional ice hockey. Standing in front of a small grey tombstone in a graveyard outside Vasteras, Rohlin says his friend's death still troubles him enormously, 26 years on.

He adds: "If the verdict had been 12 or 24 years in prison, it wouldn't really matter much either way.

"It won't bring Peter back."

STALINISM 2.0

Top Chinese internet censor who ‘lost faith in party’ facing trial for corruption

Peng Bo, who was responsible for regulating the internet industry, is accused of failing in his post and using his authority for gain

Peng, whose former boss Lu Wei was jailed two years ago, is said to have played a key role in preventing an outright ban on platforms such as Weibo


William Zheng
Published: 9:00am, 18 Aug, 2021
SCMP

Peng Bo was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party. Photo: Sina

A former top Chinese internet censor has been expelled from the Communist Party and will face trial for corruption, the party’s top anti-graft body said on Tuesday.

The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection accused Peng Bo, 64, of disloyalty to the party and failing to supervise the internet industry when he was the deputy chief of the Cyberspace Administration of China.

“Investigations have found that Peng Bo has lost his faith and was disloyal to the party,” the commission said in a statement.

“He strayed from the decisions and plans laid down by the Party Central about the propaganda struggle over the internet.

“He also used his authority for his personal gain, sought benefits from internet companies, resisted investigations by the party and engaged in superstitious activities.

China to put former top anti-corruption inspector on trial for graft
27 Apr 2021


“He violated the eight-point requirements on frugal living, visited private clubs frequently, and accepted invitations to extravagant banquets and dinners,” it added.

In March the CCDI announced that Peng was under investigation. His case has now been referred to state prosecutors, the statement said.

Peng had direct responsibility for regulating the internet industry as deputy head of the cyberspace administration.

He was later transferred to the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission which was responsible for the online monitoring and policing of cult religions in 2015. He retired three years later and taught new media studies at Peking University after retirement.

China's former cybersecurity tsar Lu Wei is serving a 14-year jail sentence. Photo: Handout

He also played a key role in establishing the Chang An Jian social media platform of the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, the Communist Party’s top law enforcement agency.

Peng also worked under Lu Wei, the disgraced internet tsar,
who was jailed for 14 years for corruption in 2019.

Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, said the charges against Peng served as “another sound reminder to all party propagandists that they must strictly toe the party’s line”.

“The commission’s statement showed that [Peng] had failed in the propaganda struggle and this is essential for all party propagandists,” Wu said.

“It is clear that party leaders expect the propagandists to be firm and disciplined in performing their functions especially on [internet] censorship.

“They need to show that they are capable and tough in the struggle and can execute the party’s firm control over the media.”

Former head of China’s cyber police caught in Xi’s anti-corruption drive
12 Apr 2021


A government source in Beijing said Peng played a key role in 2013 in persuading the party leadership to take a more lenient view about regulating booming microblogging platforms such as Weibo.

“Some party leaders were anxious about stepping up control over the fast expanding online community especially Weibo,” said the source who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

“[Because of these platforms, China] has seen the rise of a large number of key opinion leaders who have become very influential after 2010.”

While some critics had called for these platforms to be shut, Peng proposed that they should be subject to tighter control instead.

AFGHAN NEWS

CRONY CAPITALI$M

Ashraf Ghani fled with cars and helicopter full of cash: Russia

Reuters

Published August 17, 2021 - 

This file photo shows Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. — AP/File

GOSH HE LOOKS LIKE THE OTHER PRES.

MOSCOW: Russia’s emba­ssy in Kabul said on Monday that Afghan President Ash­raf Ghani had fled the country with four cars and a helicopter full of cash and had to leave some money behind as it would not all fit in, the RIA news agency reported.

Ghani, whose current whereabouts are unknown, said he left Afghanistan on Sunday as the Taliban entered Kabul virtually unopposed. He said he wanted to avoid bloodshed.

Russia has said it will retain a diplomatic presence in Kabul and hopes to develop ties with the Taliban even as it says it is no rush to recognise them as the country’s rulers and will closely observe their behaviour.

“As for the collapse of the (outgoing) regime, it is most eloquently characterised by the way Ghani fled Afghanistan,” Nikita Ishche­nko, a spokesman for the Russian embassy in Kabul, was quoted as saying by RIA.

“Four cars were full of money, they tried to stuff another part of the money into a helicopter, but not all of it fit. And some of the money was left lying on the tarmac,” he was quoted as saying.

Ischenko, the Russian embassy spokesman, confirmed his comments to this news agency.

President Vladimir Putin’s special representative on Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov said earlier it was unclear how much money the fleeing government would leave behind.

Published in Dawn, August 17th, 2021

Costs of the Afghanistan war, in lives and dollars

By ELLEN KNICKMEYER

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FALL OF SAIGON, FALL OF CAMBODIA DEJA VU
Hundreds of people run alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane, some climbing on the plane, as it moves down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug.16. 2021. Thousands of Afghans have rushed onto the tarmac at the airport, some so desperate to escape the Taliban capture of their country that they held onto the American military jet as it took off and plunged to death. 

(Verified UGC via AP)

At just short of 20 years, the now-ending U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan was America’s longest war. Ordinary Americans tended to forget about it, and it received measurably less oversight from Congress than the Vietnam War did. But its death toll is in the many tens of thousands. And because the U.S. borrowed most of the money to pay for it, generations of Americans will be burdened by the cost of paying it off.

Here’s a look at the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, by the numbers, as the Taliban in a lightning offensive take over much of the country before the United States’ Aug. 31 deadline for ending its combat role and as the U.S. speeds up American and Afghan evacuations.

Much of the data below is from Linda Bilmes of Harvard University’s Kennedy School and from the Brown University Costs of War project. Because the United States between 2003 and 2011 fought the Afghanistan and Iraq wars simultaneously, and many American troops served tours in both wars, some figures as noted cover both post-9/11 U.S. wars.

THE LONGEST WAR:

Percentage of U.S. population born since the 2001 attacks plotted by al-Qaida leaders who were sheltering in Afghanistan: Roughly one out of every four.

THE HUMAN COST:

American service members killed in Afghanistan through April: 2,448.

U.S. contractors: 3,846.

Afghan national military and police: 66,000.

Other allied service members, including from other NATO member states: 1,144.

Afghan civilians: 47,245.

Taliban and other opposition fighters: 51,191.

Aid workers: 444.

Journalists: 72.

AFGHANISTAN AFTER NEARLY 20 YEARS OF U.S. OCCUPATION:

Percentage drop in infant mortality rate since U.S., Afghan and other allied forces overthrew the Taliban government, which had sought to restrict women and girls to the home: About 50.

Percentage of Afghan teenage girls able to read today: 37.

OVERSIGHT BY CONGRESS:

Date Congress authorized U.S. forces to go after culprits in Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: Sept. 18, 2001.

Number of times U.S. lawmakers have voted to declare war in Afghanistan: 0.
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Number of times lawmakers on Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee addressed costs of Vietnam War, during that conflict: 42

Number of times lawmakers in same subcommittee have mentioned costs of Afghanistan and Iraq wars, through mid-summer 2021: 5.

Number of times lawmakers on Senate Finance Committee have mentioned costs of Afghanistan and Iraq wars since Sept. 11, 2001, through mid-summer 2021: 1.

PAYING FOR A WAR ON CREDIT, NOT IN CASH:

Amount President Harry Truman temporarily raised top tax rates to pay for Korean War: 92%.

Amount President Lyndon Johnson temporarily raised top tax rates to pay for Vietnam War: 77%.

Amount President George W. Bush cut tax rates for the wealthiest, rather than raise them, at outset of Afghanistan and Iraq wars: At least 8%.

Estimated amount of direct Afghanistan and Iraq war costs that the United States has debt-financed as of 2020: $2 trillion.

Estimated interest costs by 2050: Up to $6.5 trillion.

THE WARS END. THE COSTS DON’T:

Amount Bilmes estimates the United States has committed to pay in health care, disability, burial and other costs for roughly 4 million Afghanistan and Iraq veterans: more than $2 trillion.

Period those costs will peak: after 2048.

Billions spent on Afghan army ultimately benefited Taliban

By ROBERT BURN

1 of 3
Taliban fighters stand guard in front of the Hamid Karzai International Airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. Thousands of people packed into the Afghan capital's airport on Monday, rushing the tarmac and pushing onto planes in desperate attempts to flee the country after the Taliban overthrew the Western-backed government. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Built and trained at a two-decade cost of $83 billion, Afghan security forces collapsed so quickly and completely — in some cases without a shot fired — that the ultimate beneficiary of the American investment turned out to be the Taliban. They grabbed not only political power but also U.S.-supplied firepower — guns, ammunition, helicopters and more.

The Taliban captured an array of modern military equipment when they overran Afghan forces who failed to defend district centers. Bigger gains followed, including combat aircraft, when the Taliban rolled up provincial capitals and military bases with stunning speed, topped by capturing the biggest prize, Kabul, over the weekend.

A U.S. defense official on Monday confirmed the Taliban’s sudden accumulation of U.S.-supplied Afghan equipment is enormous. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and so spoke on condition of anonymity. The reversal is an embarrassing consequence of misjudging the viability of Afghan government forces — by the U.S. military as well as intelligence agencies — which in some cases chose to surrender their vehicles and weapons rather than fight.

The U.S. failure to produce a sustainable Afghan army and police force, and the reasons for their collapse, will be studied for years by military analysts. The basic dimensions, however, are clear and are not unlike what happened in Iraq. The forces turned out to be hollow, equipped with superior arms but largely missing the crucial ingredient of combat motivation.

“Money can’t buy will. You cannot purchase leadership,” John Kirby, chief spokesman for Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, said Monday.

Doug Lute, a retired Army lieutenant general who help direct Afghan war strategy during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said that what the Afghans received in tangible resources they lacked in the more important intangibles.

“The principle of war stands — moral factors dominate material factors,” he said. “Morale, discipline, leadership, unit cohesion are more decisive than numbers of forces and equipment. As outsiders in Afghanistan, we can provide materiel, but only Afghans can provide the intangible moral factors.”

By contrast, Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, with smaller numbers, less sophisticated weaponry and no air power, proved a superior force. U.S. intelligence agencies largely underestimated the scope of that superiority, and even after President Joe Biden announced in April he was withdrawing all U.S. troops, the intelligence agencies did not foresee a Taliban final offensive that would succeed so spectacularly.

“If we wouldn’t have used hope as a course of action, ... we would have realized the rapid drawdown of U.S. forces sent a signal to the Afghan national forces that they were being abandoned,” said Chris Miller, who saw combat in Afghanistan in 2001 and was acting secretary of defense at the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

Stephen Biddle, a professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University and a former adviser to U.S. commanders in Afghanistan, said Biden’s announcement set the final collapse in motion.

“The problem of the U.S. withdrawal is that it sent a nationwide signal that the jig is up — a sudden, nationwide signal that everyone read the same way,” Biddle said. Before April, the Afghan government troops were slowly but steadily losing the war, he said. When they learned that their American partners were going home, an impulse to give up without a fight “spread like wildfire.”

The failures, however, go back much further and run much deeper. The United States tried to develop a credible Afghan defense establishment on the fly, even as it was fighting the Taliban, attempting to widen the political foundations of the government in Kabul and seeking to establish democracy in a country rife with corruption and cronyism.

Year after year, U.S. military leaders downplayed the problems and insisted success was coming. Others saw the handwriting on the wall. In 2015 a professor at the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute wrote about the military’s failure to learn lessons from past wars; he subtitled his book, “Why the Afghan National Security Forces Will Not Hold.”

“Regarding the future of Afghanistan, in blunt terms, the United States has been down this road at the strategic level twice before, in Vietnam and Iraq, and there is no viable rationale for why the results will be any different in Afghanistan,” Chris Mason wrote. He added, presciently: “Slow decay is inevitable, and state failure is a matter of time.”

Some elements of the Afghan army did fight hard, including commandos whose heroic efforts are yet to be fully documented. But as a whole the security forces created by the United States and its NATO allies amounted to a “house of cards” whose collapse was driven as much by failures of U.S. civilian leaders as their military partners, according to Anthony Cordesman, a longtime Afghanistan war analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Afghan force-building exercise was so completely dependent on American largesse that the Pentagon even paid the Afghan troops’ salaries. Too often that money, and untold amounts of fuel, were siphoned off by corrupt officers and government overseers who cooked the books, creating “ghost soldiers” to keep the misspent dollars coming.

Of the approximately $145 billion the U.S. government spent trying to rebuild Afghanistan, about $83 billion went to developing and sustaining its army and police forces, according to the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a congressionally created watchdog that has tracked the war since 2008. The $145 billion is in addition to $837 billion the United States spent fighting the war, which began with an invasion in October 2001.

The $83 billion invested in Afghan forces over 20 years is nearly double last year’s budget for the entire U.S. Marine Corps and is slightly more than what Washington budgeted last year for food stamp assistance for about 40 million Americans.

In his book, “The Afghanistan Papers,” journalist Craig Whitlock wrote that U.S. trainers tried to force Western ways on Afghan recruits and gave scant thought to whether U.S. taxpayers dollars were investing in a truly viable army.

“Given that the U.S. war strategy depended on the Afghan army’s performance, however, the Pentagon paid surprisingly little attention to the question of whether Afghans were willing to die for their government,” he wrote.

___

Associated Press writers Nomaan Merchant, Lorne Cook in Brussels and James LaPorta in Boca Raton, Florida, contributed to this report.

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Pakistan soldiers check documents of travelers crossing the border to Afghanistan through a crossing point in Chaman, Pakistan, Monday, Aug. 16, 2021. A special flight of Pakistan’s national airline PIA has arrived in Islamabad carrying 329 passengers from Kabul, and another carrying 170 people will arrive later today. A spokesman for the airline said Saturday that the airline will operate three flights tomorrow to transport Pakistanis and other nationalities looking to leave Kabul. (AP Photo/Jafar Khan)

SLIPPERY SNAKE
Afghan president was isolated before slipping into exile

By KATHY GANNON

August 15, 2021

FILE - In this March 6, 2021 file photo, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, center, inspects an honor guard during the opening ceremony of the new legislative session of the Parliament, in Kabul, Afghanistan. Afghanistan’s embattled president left the country Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021, joining his fellow citizens and foreigners in a stampede fleeing the advancing Taliban and signaling the end of a 20-year Western experiment aimed at remaking Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File)

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani slipped out of his country Sunday in the same way he had led it in recent years — a lonely and isolated figure.

Ghani quietly left the sprawling presidential palace with a small coterie of confidants — and didn’t even tell other political leaders who had been negotiating a peaceful transition of power with the Taliban that he was heading for the exit.

Abdullah Abdullah, his long-time rival who had twice buried his animosity to partner with Ghani in government, said that “God will hold him accountable” for abandoning the capital.

Ghani’s destination was not immediately known. In a social media post from an unknown location, he wrote that he left to save lives. “If I had stayed, countless of my countrymen would be martyred and Kabul would face destruction and turn into ruins that could result to a human catastrophe for its six million residents” Ghani wrote.

Abdullah, as well as former President Hamid Karzai, who had beaten a path to Ghani’s door on numerous occasions to plead with him to put compromise above retaining power, were blindsided by the hasty departure. They said they had still been hoping to negotiate a peaceful transition with the Taliban, said Saad Mohseni, the owner of Afghanistan’s popular TOLO TV.

“He left them in them lurch,” he said. Earlier Sunday, Karzai had posted a message to the nation on his Facebook page, surrounded by his three daughters, to reassure Kabul residents that the leadership had a plan and was negotiating with the Taliban.

Just hours later, he discovered the presidential palace had been abandoned.

“Ghani’s inability to unite the country and his proclivity to surround himself with his cadre of Western-educated intellectuals brought Afghanistan to this point,” said Bill Roggio, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a U.S.-based research institute. “As Afghanistan collapsed, he refused to deal with the problems and further isolated himself from the power brokers he needed to deal with the problem, and the Afghan people as well.”

Ghani’s style of rule was often characterized as cantankerous and arrogant, rarely heeding the advice of his government and often publicly berating those who challenged him.

He was accused by ethnic minorities of championing the ethnic Pashtuns, like himself, seeing himself as a counter to the Taliban, who are mostly from the same ethnic group. He alienated other ethnic minorities and the gap between Afghanistan’s ethnic groups grew ever wider.

As he campaigned for the presidency in 2014, Ghani was taking an anger management course. It seemed to have faltered as multiple tribal elders in meetings with the president have spoken of his verbal lashings.

HEY, I GOT MINE; OK

Ghani’s critics say his heavy-handed leadership style is to blame, to some degree, for the rapid disintegration of the Afghan army and an anti-Taliban alliance of warlords who fled or surrendered to the insurgents rather than fight for a widely unpopular president.

“His downfall was his insistence on centralizing power at all costs and a stubborn refusal to bring more people under his tent,” said Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the U.S.-based Wilson Center. “Later on, his inability to develop a clear strategy to address the Taliban insurgency and perceptions that he was obstructing the peace process hurt him as well.”

Ghani, 72, spent most of his career overseas as a student and academic before returning to Afghanistan in 2002.

He arrived with a powerful set of economic credentials. He was attractive to the West with his World Bank background and was seen as a possible solution to Afghanistan’s crumbling and corrupt economy. He was finance minister for two years until 2004. He survived cancer.

In 2014 he fought his first presidential race. It was criticized as deeply flawed and allegations of widespread fraud threatened to destabilize the still fragile nation. Both Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah claimed victory. In the end, the United States brokered a compromise and divided power between the two men and even created a new position of chief executive.

The next election in 2019 fared the same. Again, accusations swirled of deep corruption and both Ghani and Abdullah declared themselves president. They eventually ended months of bickering and Abdullah became head of the National Reconciliation Council that was to bring Afghanistan’s warlords and political leaders together to put a united face before the Taliban.

But Ghani’s belligerent operating style undermined him again.

“He worked with a very small circle of ‘yes’ men and got filtered news about the country from them,” said Torek Farhadi, a former adviser to the Afghan government. “Others didn’t dare talk truth to him. He replaced all experienced people in the army and the government with junior people beholden to him. In a traditional country, Ghani was the guy who governed upside down.”

As the Trump administration opened negotiations with the Taliban in 2016, Ghani was asked by U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad to cobble together a strong united team __ one that could conduct tough negotiations with the Taliban. Efforts quickly faltered.

In April a frustrated U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken urged Ghani to forge a united stand. He warned the president that he had to expand his circle and be inclusive.

“Unity and inclusivity .... I believe is essential for the difficult work ahead,” Blinken wrote.

“Even with the continuation of financial assistance to your forces from the United States after an American military withdrawal, I am concerned the security situation will worsen and that the Taliban could make rapid territorial gains,” Blinken warned.

Roggio, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said there are many reasons for the government’s collapse, but “Ghani was not the man to lead Afghanistan during its darkest hour.”

TRUMP HOPES NO ONE REMEMBERS HE PUSHED FOR A FULL AFGHANISTAN WITHDRAWAL IN JUNE

The 45th president is desperately trying to rewrite his own Afghanistan history.

BY BESS LEVIN

AUGUST 16, 2021

Outgoing US President Donald Trump waves as he boards Marine One at the White House in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2021.BY MANDEL NGAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES


As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the Biden administration’s decision to leave Afghanistan has become an unmitigated disaster thanks to the shocking speed with which the Taliban have taken control of the country. Obviously the situation isn’t solely the fault of Joe Biden; rather, it’s a 20-year scene in the making, started by a guy who would prefer to be associated with his painting career than with the deaths of thousands of Americans and two unending wars. As my colleague Eric Lutz noted earlier, though, it is the case that “what is happening in Afghanistan is precisely what Biden said, in no uncertain terms, would not happen,” from his insistence that the Afghan government would be able to hold the line against the Taliban to his claim that under no circumstances would we see “people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States from Afghanistan,” which was almost exactly the case. Most heartbreaking, the administration had sworn it would protect Afghan nationals and other partners on the ground, but many have been left in a terrifying state of limbo.

Still, Biden’s three presidential predecessors aren’t exactly in a position to criticize. Of course, understanding why they should keep their thoughts on the matter to themselves at this time requires self-awareness—something Donald Trump was born without, hence his absurd call over the weekend for Biden to resign:


Former president Donald Trump Sunday called on President Biden to “resign in disgrace” over his handling of the Afghanistan withdrawal and other issues. “It is time for Joe Biden to resign in disgrace for what he has allowed to happen to Afghanistan, along with the tremendous surge in COVID, the border catastrophe, the destruction of energy independence, and our crippled economy,” the former president wrote in a statement.

Weirdly, Trump did not note in his statement that less than two months ago, he was bragging about how he started the Afghanistan-withdrawal process and claiming the Biden administration was powerless to stop it.

Or that someone on his team decided to delete from his website an April statement in which he said, “Getting out of Afghanistan is a wonderful and positive thing to do,” chastising Biden for not doing it sooner than September 11.

In related news, the Republican Party, whose members have been trashing Biden around the clock and going so far as to suggest he should be removed from office via 25th Amendment, have similarly been in damage control mode.

 

Biden referenced the deal Trump struck with the Taliban—which the GOP hopes people will forget—in his statement over the weekend, saying: “When I came to office, I inherited a deal cut by my predecessor—which he invited the Taliban to discuss at Camp David on the eve of 9/11 of 2019—that left the Taliban in the strongest position militarily since 2001 and imposed a May 1, 2021, deadline on U.S. forces. Shortly before he left office, he also drew U.S. forces down to a bare minimum of 2,500. Therefore, when I became president, I faced a choice—follow through on the deal, with a brief extension to get our forces and our allies’ forces out safely, or ramp up our presence and send more American troops to fight once again in another country’s civil conflict. I was the fourth president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan—two Republicans, two Democrats. I would not, and will not, pass this war on to a fifth.”

Human remains found in landing gear of military flight from Kabul, says US Air Force

A scrseenshot from a video which went viral online showing Afghan civilians surrounding a US military jet at Kabul's airport.SCREENSHOT: TWITTER

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WASHINGTON (REUTERS) - The US Air Force said on Tuesday (Aug 17) that it was investigating the circumstances surrounding human remains that were found in the wheel well of one of its C-17s that flew out of Kabul amid the chaos of the Taleban taking over the Afghan capital.

Images circulated on social media earlier this week of Afghans desperate to leave Kabul rushing towards a C-17 and clinging to its side.

A separate video showed what appeared to be two people falling from a military plane as it flew out of Kabul.

In a statement, the Air Force said that a C-17 aircraft landed at Kabul’s airport on Monday and was surrounded by hundreds of Afghan civilians.

“Faced with a rapidly deteriorating security situation around the aircraft, the C-17 crew decided to depart the airfield as quickly as possible,” the statement said.

It added that the Air Force’s office of Special Investigation was reviewing information about the aircraft and the “loss of civilian lives- to include video documentation and the source of social media posts.

 

MEANWHILE THIS IS WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE INSIDE FILLED WITH 700 REFUGEES