Germany to assist Bolivia in protection of Amazon against illegal mining

Valentina Ruiz Leotaud | August 28, 2022 |

Germany’s Federal Development Minister Svenja Schulze and Bolivia’s Minister of Foreing Affairs Rogelio Mayta. (Image by Bolivia’s Ministry of Foreing Affairs, Twitter).

During a meeting with Bolivian authorities, Germany’s Federal Development Minister Svenja Schulze announced that her government will provide 20 million euros to the Andean country to work towards the protection of the Amazon against illegal mining.


“Half the remaining rainforests on our planet are in the Amazon region. Protecting them is a task for all of humanity because if the rainforests are not protected we have no way of protecting the climate either,” Schulze said. “It is our responsibility to support our partners in the riparian countries of the Amazon.”

During her visit, Schulze stopped at Madidi, a 19,000 square kilometre national park located in the upper Amazon river basin and which is part of one of the largest protected areas in the world. The park, however, is subject to unregulated extractive activities that threaten both the environment and Indigenous peoples.

The German official – who served as minister of environment during the Angela Merkel administration from 2018 to 2021 – also met with Indigenous leader Ruth Alipaz. During the encounter, Alipaz denounced local authorities have been granting oil exploration licenses within 21 out of Bolivia’s 22 national parks, while illegal miners are also making their way inside protected areas without any kind of state control.

According to the Associated Press, Alipaz also told Schulze that harassment against environmental activists continues to grow.

In addition to receiving information on the status of natural reserves, the minister was briefed on the situation in Bolivian regarding clean energy developments. She, thus, pointed out that part of the funds her government is providing should be used to boost the South American country’s energy transition towards renewables.

4 billion-year-old chunk of Earth's crust found below Australia

A 4-billion-year-old piece of Earth's crust the size of Ireland is lurking beneath Western Australia, new research finds.


map of Earth's crust in Australia© Provided by Space

Stephanie Pappas - 

This piece of crust is among the oldest on Earth, though not the oldest. That honor goes to rocks of the Canadian Shield on the eastern shore of the Hudson Bay, which have been dated to 4.3 billion years old. (The Earth is 4.54 billion years old.) Because Earth's crust is constantly being churned up and pushed back into the mantle by plate tectonics, most of the planet's rocky surface was formed within the last couple billion years.

However, the oldest crust that has been discovered, like the newly found chunk in Western Australia, tends to date back around 4 billion years. That suggests something special occurred in that era of Earth history, study coauthor Maximilian Droellner, a doctoral student at Curtin University in Australia, said in a statement.

"When comparing our findings to existing data, it appears many regions around the world experienced a similar timing of early crust formation and preservation," Droellner said. "This suggests a significant change in the evolution of the Earth some four billion years ago, as meteorite bombardment waned, crust stabilized and life on Earth began to establish."

Related: Earth's outer shell ballooned during a growth spurt 3 billion years ago

The hidden piece of ancient crust is near where the oldest minerals on Earth have previously been found. In Australia's Jack Hills, researchers have discovered tiny minerals called zircons dating back 4.4 billion years. These minerals have survived even as the rocks that once held them have eroded away. The rocks around the Jack Hills, known as the Narryer Terrane, are no newbies, either: Some date back 3.7 billion years.

Geochemical hints in the sediments near this region suggested that there might be even older crust buried under newer rocks and sediments at the surface. So Droellner and his colleagues decided to test the zircons in sediments from the Scott Coastal Plain, south of Perth. The sediments on this plain erode out of deeper rocks on the Australian continent.

To do this, the researchers vaporized the zircons with powerful lasers, then analyzed the composition of two pairs of radioactive elements that the lasers had freed, uranium and lead and lutetium and hafnium. The versions of these elements trapped in these zircons decay over billions of years. The relative amounts of each version, or isotope, tells researchers how long the elements have been decaying, providing a "clock" on the age of the zircons.

This dating revealed that the rocks holding these minerals formed between 3.8 billion and 4 billion years ago.

To learn about where these minerals came from, the researchers turned to data collected by Earth-orbiting satellites. Because Earth's crust varies in thickness, gravity varies slightly across the surface of the planet. By measuring these variations in gravity, scientists can figure out how thick the crust is in different locations. This gravity data revealed a thick segment of crust in the southwestern part of Western Australia, likely to be the site of the buried ancient crust.

The old crust covers an area of at least 38,610 square miles (100,000 square kilometers), the researchers wrote in their paper, published online June 17 in the journal Terra Nova. It is buried "tens of kilometers" below the surface, Droellner said. The boundary of the ancient crust is associated with gold and iron ore deposits, the researchers found, hinting at the importance of this very old crust in controlling the formation of rocks and minerals in the region.

Understanding the formation of crust 4 billion years ago can help researchers understand how the continents first formed, the researchers wrote. This period set the stage for the planet as it is today, but few hints of the earliest Earth have survived the constant upheaval of the planet's surface.

"This piece of crust has survived multiple mountain-building events between Australia, India and Antarctica," Droellner said.

Originally published on Live Science.

SHE IS FROM EDMONTON

Politicians condemn harassment of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland

Man approaches Freeland hurling profanities, tells her to get out of Alberta

Brenna Owen / The Canadian Pressabout 19 hours agoabout 16 hours ago

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland is shown at the ICF Canoe Sprint and Paracanoe World Championships in Dartmouth, N.S. on Wednesday, August 4, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese

Current and former politicians from across the Canadian political spectrum have condemned an incident in Alberta during which a man verbally accosted Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland on Friday.

A 14-second video posted on Twitter by an account that voices opposition to COVID-19 public health measures shows Freeland entering an elevator while a large man approaches her, hurling profanities and calling her a “traitor.”

The man in the video looms in front of the open elevator doors and tells Freeland to get out of Alberta, while a woman tells her, “you don’t belong here.”

Another, longer clip shows the man being asked to leave the building and walking outside to a parking lot, where he says “that was perfect timing.”

Freeland, who is also the finance minister, had posted photos on social media Friday showing her meeting with Jackie Clayton, the mayor of Grande Prairie, Alta., northwest of Edmonton.

The first video shows the man calling Freeland by her first name and the deputy prime minister turning to face him, saying “yes,” before he begins yelling.

Freeland addressed the incident with a post on social media Saturday, saying what happened was wrong and “nobody, anywhere, should have to put up with threats and intimidation.”

She wrote that she is proud to be from Alberta, and she was grateful for the warm welcomes she had received while visiting Edmonton, Grande Prairie and Peace River, Alta., over the past few days. “One unpleasant incident yesterday doesn’t change that,” she wrote.

Former deputy Conservative leader Lisa Raitt posted on Twitter saying she felt a knot in her stomach when she watched the video, worried that the man would follow Freeland.

“She hears her name (and) turns … because she is open to engaging with people. He becomes abusive (and) she heads into the elevator,” Raitt wrote, adding, “physical intimidation is not a form of democratic expression.”

Former Liberal environment minister Catherine McKenna replied to Raitt, saying she felt the same way while watching the video.

McKenna, who had received additional security for certain events during her time in office, called on “all party leaders” to hold a joint press conference to condemn what she described as an “attack” on Freeland and commit to enhanced security for elected officials.

Cabinet ministers do not generally receive protection from the RCMP, but it can be arranged if circumstances warrant. A number of politicians and pundits took to social media after the incident in Grande Prairie to question whether additional security should become more common.

Michelle Rempel Garner, a former federal cabinet minister in Stephen Harper’s government and a current Conservative Member of Parliament from Calgary, also replied to Raitt, describing “the hot, sick feeling of being trapped … of not knowing where to run if it escalates, of being confronted by someone hostile and physically larger than you.”

Many Liberal MPs have voiced support for Freeland, including Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, who tweeted that harassment, intimidation and threatening behaviour must be “condemned by everyone, regardless of political affiliation.”

Defence Minister Anita Anand, meanwhile, wrote on Twitter that she was “appalled by the threats and intimidation” directed at her cabinet colleague.

“This behaviour has no place in Canada. We’ve all run for office to promote dialogue on important public policy issues, and harassment like this cannot be tolerated,” she wrote.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney also spoke out on Twitter, saying the “verbal harassment and threats” directed at Freeland were “reprehensible.”

“You know that our governments have a lot of serious ­disagreements. But you’re always more than welcome to come and visit us here in the province where you grew up (and) your family lives,” Kenney wrote to Freeland.

Jean Charest, the former premier of Quebec who is vying to become the next federal Conservative leader, condemned the incident as “gross intimidation.” He issued a tweet calling it “dangerous behaviour” that “cannot be normalized.”

Edmonton New Democrat MP Heather McPherson also posted a tweet directed at Freeland, saying she doesn’t always agree with the Liberal government’s decisions, “but on behalf of the vast majority of Albertans who are kind, generous and decent, you are welcome here.”

Deputy PM Freeland responds to harassment incident in Alberta


PreviousNext

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland speaks to reporters before heading to Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Thursday, June 23, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang

Tom Yun
CTVNews.ca writer
Follow | Contact
Updated Aug. 27, 2022 

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland has responded to an incident of verbal harassment in Alberta after video of the encounter was widely circulated on social media.

The video, which was shared on Twitter, shows a man and two women waiting at the lobby of Grande Prairie, Alta.'s city hall when Freeland and her staffers enter the building and approach the elevator.

"Chrystia!" the man yells.

"Yes!" Freeland responds.

What follows is a barrage of insults and swearing from the man, calling Freeland a "traitor" and a "f---ing b----" as she steps into the elevator.

"Get the f--- out of this province!" the man can be heard yelling, while another woman tells her, "You don't belong here."

Freeland responded to the incident Saturday.

"What happened yesterday was wrong," she said in a statement posted to Twitter. "Nobody, anywhere, should have to put up with threats and intimidation."

Freeland, who represents a downtown Toronto riding, was born in Peace River, Alta. and attended high school in Edmonton.

"I'm proud to be from Alberta," she said. "I'm going to keep coming back because Alberta is home."

A longer video of the incident, which appeared to be originally posted to TikTok, shows the man subsequently being escorted out of the building.

According to her official itinerary, Freeland had been in Grande Prairie on Friday meeting with local farmers and skilled tradespeople. She was at city hall to meet with the city’s mayor, Jackie Clayton.

Current and former politicians across various parties took to social media to show their support for Freeland and denounce the verbal harassment.

Employment Minister Carla Qualtrough tweeted she was "disgusted by what my brilliant colleague @cafreeland faced yesterday," while Defence Minister Anita Anand said she was "appalled by the threats and intimidation" directed at Freeland.

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino also condemned the incident.

"This kind of behaviour needs to be called out and condemned by everyone, regardless of political affiliation,” he said in a tweet.

Across the aisle, B.C. Conservative MP Dan Albas called the video "alarming" and said this type of behaviour "has no place here in Canada.” Conservative leadership candidate Jean Charest called it "dangerous behaviour" and "gross intimidation."

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney also called the harassment "reprehensible."

"If you disagree with a politician, by all means exercise your right to protest. But screaming threatening language & physical intimidation cross the line," Kenney said in a tweet.

Heather McPhereson, an NDP MP from Edmonton, also expressed support for Freeland, tweeting, "I don’t always agree on the decisions made by your government, but on behalf of the vast majority of Albertans who are kind, generous and decent, you are welcome here."

Aside from the Prime Minister, federal cabinet ministers typically aren't provided a security detail except in rare circumstances. Back in 2019, then-Environment Minister Catherine McKenna revealed she had to get a security detail after receiving repeated threats and vitriolic messages, both online and in person.

With files from The Canadian Press

 

• Editorial standards & policies

Half a million dollars worth of equipment destroyed at illegal mining hotspot in Peru
Valentina Ruiz Leotaud | August 28, 2022 | 

Devastation caused by illegal gold mining operations in Madre de Dios. (Image by Peru’s Interior Ministry).

Peru’s National Police seized and destroyed half a million dollars worth of equipment and supplies used in illegal mining operations in the Madre de Dios region.


According to the Interior Ministry, the police operation was carried out at the Buffer Zone of the Tambopata National Reserve, specifically in the “Barrial”, “Mangote” and “La Y” sectors which are known for hosting unregulated activities.

A recent report by USAID revealed that over 46,000 artisanal miners are extracting minerals illegally in Madre de Dios, located in southeastern Peru’s Amazon Basin, bordering Brazil and Bolivia. Of those, over 9,000 conduct their activities in protected areas.

Overall, it is estimated that as of 2017, illegal gold mining in the region has been responsible for the deforestation of more than 100,000 hectares of the Peruvian Amazon.

In the recent operation, police agents found and destroyed rafts, hoppers and engines commonly employed to extract gold using techniques that are harmful to the environment.

Following the operation, hundreds of people likely to be engaged in illegal mining held protests on the Interoceanic Highway and attacked the police base located in the community of Nuevo Arequipa. As a result of these incidents, one person died and eight demonstrators were arrested.

A few days after these events, the National Police Command sent 45 troops from Lima’s Directorate of Special Operations. Another, 20 law enforcement officers from Arequipa arrived at each police facility located at kilometres 98 and 117 of the Interoceanic highway.

In this regard, the director of the Environment Directorate, Colonel Luis Guillén Polo, said that, despite the resistance from illegal miners, the authorities will continue to work and carry out joint operations against the unregulated exploitation of Madre de Dios’ natural resources.

Peru lowers 2022 growth forecast and abandons mining tax hike plan
Reuters | August 25, 2022 |

Quellaveco mining camp. Photo by Anglo American Peru.

Peru on Thursday lowered the country’s economic growth forecast to 3.3% this year, the finance minister said, and officially abandoned a plan to hike taxes on the mining industry amid falling metal prices, high inflation and slowing growth.


The new forecast is significantly higher than the Refinitiv average of 2.6% but is lower than the 3.6% the ministry had last forecast in May.

Finance minister Kurt Burneo said the government would soon launch a package to boost the economy, although he declined to give details.

“The economy is growing at lower levels than what we need,” Burneo told reporters. “If we don’t do anything, we will only aspire to low growth levels.”

Still, the downward revision came on the back of “transitory supply shocks” that affected the primary sector in the first half of the year, including social unrest against the mining sector, and less favorable external conditions, the ministry said in a report.

Peru, the world’s No. 2 copper producer, is also expecting prices of the red metal to fall in 2023. It plans for higher production to offset the fall in tax revenue.

Leftist President Pedro Castillo came to office a year ago promising to hike taxes on the mining industry to fund social programs, although Congress shelved the initiative.

Burneo is the administration’s third finance minister and was appointed just three weeks ago. He said hiking mining taxes would amount to “shooting ourselves in the foot” but has insisted public spending needs to grow.

He added Peru’s budget should grow 4% in real terms in 2023.

For 2023, the Andean country forecasts growth of 3.5%, higher than the Refinitiv average of 2.8%, boosted by a larger mining supply and the normalization of economic activities hurt by the covid-19 pandemic.

Peru expects Anglo American’s Quellaveco copper mine to come online in 2023 and boost copper output that has fallen 10% so far this year due to community protests that affected two large mines owned by MMG Ltd and Southern Copper Corp.

Earlier this year, it also faced a wave of anti-government protests sparked by rising fuel and fertilizer prices in the wake of the Ukrainian war, while Castillo has reshuffled his cabinet several times as prosecutors investigate his close allies and family members.

The South American country has also been grappling with inflation, which reached the highest level in a quarter of a century in June.

(By Marco Aquino, Gabriel Araujo and Marcelo Rochabrun; Editing by Kim Coghill and Lisa Shumaker)

Commodity prices influence development of climate change mitigation technology in mining industry
Staff Writer | August 28, 2022 |

(Reference image from Pxhere).

The development of climate change mitigation technology (CCMT) in the mining industry has been influenced by both the Paris Agreement and commodity price trends. However, the degree of influence varies by country and how much the sector contributes to the country’s economy, new research has found.


Such a conclusion followed a thorough analysis carried out by scientists at Japan’s Kyushu University and Sweden’s Luleå University, who looked at the trends in global patent applications from the mining and minerals sector to unearth strategies for promoting R&D in CCMT.

“The goal of CCMT development is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the impact we have on the environment,” Hidemichi Fujii, lead author of the report, said in a media statement. “A good way to analyze how an industry’s technology is developing is to look at patents filed over time. Our team looked at patent data from 2001 to 2016 from seven regions to calculate three major indicators of CCMT development in the industry for each region: Priority, mining, and scale.”

Fujii explained that the ‘priority’ indicator is the number of mining-CCMT-related patents divided by the number of patents in the whole mining industry. That ratio would increase if inventors were prioritizing research into CCMTs.

Although the number of mining patents (orange) and CCMT patents (blue) increased in resource-consuming and resource-producing regions, the increase was not uniform. (Image courtesy of Kyushu University/Fujii Lab/Science Graphics).

‘Mining’ was defined as the number of patents related to the mining industry divided by the total number of patents across the board. This number indicates how much inventors are concentrating their efforts on developing technology for the mining industry itself.

Finally, ‘scale’ was defined as the total number of patents, representing the overall amount of research and development.

“We used these indicators to analyze the mining industry in seven major countries and regions: China, Japan, USA, Europe, Latin America, Australia, and South Africa. The first four have major patent offices, whereas the latter three are major mining regions,” Fuji said. “Through our analysis, we found several interesting trends.”

For example, while both overall mining patents and mining CCMT patents grew across the board, the rate and pattern of those trends differ if a country is resource-consuming or resource-producing. The latter exhibited larger changes in R&D priorities in response to surges in commodity prices such as rare earth metals and oil.

Further analysis showed that the development of mining CCMT patents in the US, Europe, Latin America, and Australia was facilitated by a relative increase in R&D related to mining technology. Japan and South Africa have increased their focus on R&D for both mining itself and related CCMTs while shrinking the overall scale of their R&D. On the other hand, China and the rest of the world have increased the scale of their R&D, which in turn drives invention of more green technology.

“The year-by-year analysis showed that the Paris Agreement contributed to an overall increase in green technology in the mining sector. Increases in metal prices contributed to the number of patents for the industry as well,” Fujii said.

Following these findings, the team hopes that both countries and the mining industry implement effective policies that promote the development of CCMTs for the industry.

“The differences and similarities in R&D strategies can be used as a starting point to formulate country-specific science and technology policies that can combat the climate crisis,” Fujii noted. “At the same time, they can make the most effective use of capital, and promote regulations that guarantee fair wages based on experience and skill.”

US Census director is a Chicano who photographed bands at SXSW and used tortilla dough to fish

Robert Santos, the first Latino to lead the Census Bureau, is out to repair America's trust after Trump tried, in his words, to "sabotage" the census.

Anjali Nair / NBC News; Getty Images; Family photos

Aug. 28, 2022, 
By Suzanne Gamboa


SAN ANTONIO — As a young boy, Robert Santos would snatch bits of his mom's tortilla masa (dough) and use it instead of worms to fish at Woodlawn Lake, near his family's home here.

Later on, when he saw photographers shooting photos of bands at an Austin City Limits Festival concert, he found a way to get closer to the music as a part-time South by Southwest photographer.


Now Santos is the first Latino — he identifies as a Chicano and writes in mestizo on census forms — to head the U.S. Census Bureau. Having just passed the halfway point in the first year of his five-year appointment, he has set about introducing himself to America as the "face of the census."

Roberto Santos as a photographer for SXSW.Courtesy Roberto Santos

With wire-frame glasses, silver-and-black hair pulled into a pony tail and an often gleeful smile, Santos looks more like a poet or a Chicano studies professor than a nationally renowned statistician who is setting up the bureau for the next decennial census, in 2030.

“I made a deliberate decision not to go out and get sort of the New York business suit and cut-my-hair type of thing. It was critical for me to be who I am and present myself as pure as I am,” Santos told NBC News in an interview at Diana’s Burgers, not far from where he’d use the masa to fish for catfish and perch.

His everyman persona and Latino background may be what is needed after the Trump administration was accused of trying to use the 2020 census for political gain.

The administration tried to add a citizenship question to the census, which was seen as an attempt to suppress Latino and other votes by making people afraid to respond and prevent noncitizens from being counted in redrawing of voting maps.

Roberto Santos outside Diana’s Burgers.Suzanne Gamboa for NBC News

The Supreme Court kept the citizenship question off the census, but Trump tried other ways for the bureau to get citizenship information. He also stopped the census headcount early. Those efforts left a number of Latinos and others nervous about filling out the census and skeptical of its results.

When the Trump interference was happening, Santos was chief methodologist at the Urban Institute and president-elect of the American Statistical Association. He publicly said that he expected the 2020 census to be “one of the most flawed censuses in history” and that it was being “sabotaged.”

Santos said his criticism was rooted in his own respect for the census and for numbers. Throughout much of his lifetime, he has worked with census data and its people.

“It’s an issue of scientific integrity, transparency and independence," he said.

He also credited the Census Bureau for doing its job during that time.

"And it so happened that the career staff … actually did what they needed to do to make sure that the scientific integrity of the census was preserved," he said.

Roberto performs a folklorico dance with his wife, Adella.

Courtesy Roberto Santos

In the 2020 census, 4.99 of every 100 Hispanics were not counted, the bureau has said. There were high undercount rates for Native Americans (5.64%) and Blacks (3.3%), too. Even putting aside those not counted, Latinos are considered to have driven about 51 percent of the nation's growth in the past decade.

Santos’ 40-year career has included forming his own social science firm, NuStats, in Austin, Texas; serving as a vice president of the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago; and working as a senior study director at Temple University’s Institute for Survey Research.

Before he became president of the American Statistical Association in 2021, Santos was also president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in 2013-14.

He had to give up the photography side gig with SXSW when he joined the administration, he said.

For just about all of his career, Santos has been marrying his statistical and data knowledge with helping underrepresented communities.

His approach to steering the census post-Trump is to cultivate relationships and do as much outreach to communities and different people as possible to move beyond the upheaval of the 2020 census.

The bureau is currently working on an economic census it plans to launch in January with all sorts of data on about 4 million businesses, from revenue to output issues, to help with supply chain assessments, he said.

Santos said he doesn't want to put a personal stamp on the bureau, but rather to be a catalyst for excellence from a staff of varying races, ethnicities and backgrounds. He wants to see them collect data and return to communities with relevant information so they can use it for their benefit.

“I know the Census Bureau, I know the culture and I know how things work," Santos said. "I also know it would be a waste of time to go in as a bull in a china shop."

As war drags, Syrian women enter the job market

By DW News
| Updated: Sunday, August 28, 2022, 

Syria, Aug 28: About six weeks ago, Moufida Rahmon started seeing her neighborhood with different eyes. Ever since the 38-year-old opened her own small dairy business at the refugee camp Maarat Misrin, just north of Idlib, her neighbors became her customers — and potential customers.

"I was able to make $40 during the first month, which was enough to feed my sons and me," the mother of two told DW.



Her eyes tell how proud she is. "It's the first time that I feel hope for a better life after everything that happened in the past years," she said.

On August 29, 2012, just over a year into the war, Rahmon's husband became one of the many people disappeared.

Initially, she had decided to stay in the family's house in Al-Tah, but, after Russia entered the war on behalf of Syria's government in 2015, her place went up in flames following Russian shelling.



"I lost my home, everything we owned, and we had to flee overnight when Syrian regime forces seized the town," she said.

Since then, she and her children had been living in absolute poverty in a small tent in the refugee camp Maarat Misrin.

Rahmon and her family had depended on international aid for support as she had neither studied nor trained for a job.

Earlier this year, the camp management approached Rahmon with an idea. "They offered me a vocational training in the dairy business," she said. "Other women encouraged me and promised to buy my products," she added.




After a 15-day intensive course and a $800 project grant from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which enabled her to buy products and tools, she set up shop in her tent.

So far, her neighbors have kept their word and are buying her milk products, as well as ordering milk and cheese. "I really hope that this business will expand and will enable me to change our situation for good," she said.

As a consequence of the deteriorated economic conditions, the ongoing armed conflict and the lack of male breadwinners, Rahmon is by far not the only Syrian woman who entered the labor market for the first time.

According to this year's Syria Economic Monitor report by the World Bank, women's workforce participation doubled from 13% in 2010 to 26% in 2021. In comparison, the proportion of men increased only slightly, from 72% to 76%, over the same period.



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New directions

Since 2017, the UN's Syria Cross-Border Humanitarian Fund has invested $76 million into 67 small scale businesses, vocational trainings and seed grants in Syria's northwest. "Fifty-one percent of the people supported by these interventions are women," Madevi Sun-Suon, spokeswoman of the Turkish United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told DW.

One of these projects is the Spark of Hope organization in downtown Idlib, which is run by Sawsan Saeed. "I support women at thinking out of the box," the energetic 48-year-old told DW.

One of her most recent ideas was to train women to repair mobile phones — a business in Syria that used to be entirely in the hands of men.

And yet it didn't take her long to find an instructor and enough interested women to start the course. "The women excelled in it and are very busy now," Saeed said.

Twenty-three-year-old Enas Manna applied for UN-financed vocational training as photographer. "Since I didn't have the money to complete my studies at the University of Idlib, I felt lost for about a year," she told DW. However, following the training, she opened her own photo studio and even employed a couple of women. "This opportunity helped me to make enough money to return to university despite the ongoing war," she said.

Changing face of Idlib

Over 11 years of civil war, life has become increasingly precarious in the region surrounding Idlib, formerly an agriculturally rich part of Syria.

According to the UN, 2.8 million displaced people live in 1,500 refugee camps in this region, one of the last strongholds of resistance against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his allies.

"These civilians in and around Idlib are still resisting the Assad-regime, just like the various armed groups who found shelter in this area. In turn, the social structure of this region has changed significantly," Anna Fleischer, head of the Beirut office of the Heinrich Böll foundation, told DW.

It is fair to say that this situation hasn't improved the lives of women either.


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"On the one hand, women in Idlib fear the Syrian military and the Russian forces, and on the other hand, the Islamist militias like Hayat Tahrir Sham and others are also not the biggest fans of the idea that women read, work and are financially independent," Fleischer said.

Fleischer, who previously worked for the Women Now for Development organization also knows firsthand about many projects that continue in the Idlib region after activists are forced out of cities that have fallen back into the hands of Syria's regime. "However, in Idlib, they have to work under the radar," she said.

Libya clashes death toll rises to 32, and 159 wounded: ministry

ANOTHER NATO NATION BUILDING SUCCESS

By AFP
Published August 28, 2022

Damaged vehicles are pictured on a street in the Libyan capital Tripoli on August 27, 2022, following clashes between rival Libyan groups - Copyright US NAVY/AFP Justin Stack

Clashes between backers of Libya’s rival governments killed at least 32 people, the health ministry said Sunday in a new toll, after a battle that sparked fears of major new conflict.

Armed groups had exchanged fire that damaged several hospitals and set buildings on fire starting Friday evening, the worst fighting in the Libyan capital since a landmark 2020 ceasefire.

A cautious calm had set in by Saturday evening, an AFP correspondent said.

The fighting came after months of mounting tensions between backers of Abdulhamid Dbeibah and Fathi Bashagha, whose rival administrations are vying for control of the North African country which has seen more than a decade of violence since a 2011 uprising.

Dbeibah’s administration, installed in the capital as part of a United Nations-led peace process after the end of the last major battle in 2020, has so far prevented Bashagha from taking office there, arguing that the next administration should be the product of elections.

Bashagha was appointed by Libya’s eastern-based parliament earlier this year and is backed by powerful eastern military chief Khalifa Haftar, whose 2019 attempt to seize the capital by force turned into a year-long civil war.

Bashagha, a former interior minister, had initially ruled out the use of violence to take power in Tripoli but had since hinted that he could resort to force.

Libya plunged into chaos following the 2011 overthrow and killing of dictator Moamer Kadhafi in a Western-backed uprising, with myriad armed groups and foreign powers moving to fill the power vacuum.

Certain armed groups seen as neutral in the latest crisis had moved to back Dbeibah this weekend to push back Bashagha’s second attempt to enter the capital.

Both sides exchanged blame on Saturday while world powers appealed for calm.

The UN’s Libya mission called for “an immediate cessation of hostilities”, citing “ongoing armed clashes including indiscriminate medium and heavy shelling in civilian-populated neighbourhoods”.

On Saturday evening, Dbeibah posted a video of himself surrounded by bodyguards and greeting fighters supporting his administration.

Dbeibah’s Government of National Unity said fighting had broken out after negotiations to avoid bloodshed in the western city collapsed.

Bashagha denied such talks had taken place, and accused Dbeibah’s “illegitimate” administration of “clinging to power”.

Local media reported later Saturday that a group of pro-Bashagha militias that had been making their way to the capital from Misrata later turned back.

Analyst Wolfram Lacher wrote on Twitter that Libya’s shifting alliances were “a never-ending story”.

“The armed groups that found themselves on the same side in yesterday’s Tripoli fighting will tomorrow clash over turf, positions and budgets,” he wrote.

“The factions that were pro-Dbeibah yesterday will challenge him tomorrow.”

How History Will Remember the Fauci Era
Sunday, 28 August, 2022 - 
Gregg Gonsalves

AIDS. SARS. H1N1 influenza. Ebola. Covid-19. Monkeypox. Infectious disease outbreaks often come and go, though some persist over the long haul, much like the man who has occupied the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984: Dr. Anthony Stephen Fauci.

I came of age in the 1980s — the age of AIDS — but in a way, this was the beginning of the age of Tony, as many call him, because he’d be there through all of it, for each and every one of the nation’s adventures with infectious diseases. The telegenic, calm guide with the unmistakably Brooklyn accent took heat from AIDS activists as they descended on the National Institutes of Health’s Building 31 in 1990. He hugged Nina Pham, a Dallas nurse, in front of cameras after she recovered from Ebola, to soothe a nation’s fears about the virus in 2014. He was a deadpan presence in the background of President Donald Trump’s news conferences on Covid-19. He has advised presidents since Ronald Reagan on what to do in the face of these scourges.

As the Yale historian Frank Snowden has noted, from the middle of the 20th century until the advent of AIDS — during what he called “an age of hubris” — scientists had largely declared mission accomplished in terms of the battle against infectious diseases, as antibiotics put microbial threats distinctly into the past. If AIDS was the comeuppance for our arrogance as scientists, over the years, rightly or wrongly, Dr. Fauci gave the impression that science could handle these challenges eventually through the methodological, step-by-step work of research and the application of what we learned expeditiously into the clinic, into the field.

This wasn’t the Pollyannaish scientism of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s — a notion that science would conquer infectious diseases once and for all — but the idea that at least there could be progress. When protease inhibitors arrived in the mid-1990s to change the course of the AIDS epidemic, giving life to many people who faced certain death, this optimism seemed borne out, at least to many of my friends and colleagues who had watched a generation perish from the disease.

As Dr. Fauci prepares to retire at the end of this year, one has to wonder if this is the end of an era as well. Don’t get me wrong: No one I know thinks that our gains on AIDS and the progress we’ve made in other areas of infectious disease control — particularly on vaccine-preventable diseases — are trivial accomplishments.

But with Covid-19, something has changed. It tested a fundamental equilibrium among science, public health and politics in America. Most administrations, I argue, simply don’t care much about science and public health; it’s not a priority for them. On AIDS, Mr. Reagan ignored it, and Bill Clinton paid lip service to it. George W. Bush came the closest to making it a priority, with the establishment of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, but by the time of Barack Obama, activists were protesting again about an administration’s neglect.

But Covid-19 caught the attention of politicians, and not in a good way. For decades, Dr. Fauci and other scientists could advise presidents, even sway them for good on occasion, because so little was at stake politically for these leaders. But with Mr. Trump and President Biden, too much was riding on their short-term political fortunes to indulge scientific and public health evidence and advice too much or for too long.

I’ll never forget an email I sent to Dr. Fauci and other health leaders during the Trump administration at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, begging them to speak up and provide scientific leadership in the chaos and mismanagement that scientists and the public saw happening around us. But there was little the good doctor could do, and he even acknowledged this was a unique situation.

With the election of Mr. Biden, many in public health had hoped for someone to lead with the science, but soon pollsters were urging his administration to take the win over Covid-19, declare the crisis over, stop talking about mitigation efforts and get people to understand that Covid-19 would simply be with us for a long time.

If the age of Dr. Fauci was one in which we looked forward to progress, even if always piecemeal, the current era is the age of “We have the tools.” It is a distinct new pessimism of spirit, cynicism of the will, born of the hubris of some physicians but mostly of the political calculations of others that doing more on this pandemic is untenable. The sound you hear is the thud of resignation in the face of the suffering of so many over the past two and a half years and a summer in which we add hundreds to the dead every day in the United States.

In the darkest days of the AIDS epidemic, Dr. Fauci never gave up. We didn’t sit with the mounting dead and our pitiful armamentarium of weak drugs and suggest we had the tools. We fought, and we argued, for sure, but we moved ahead together, never satisfied with the status quo. If he weren’t retiring in December, I’d imagine him working to his very last breath until there was a cure for AIDS.

We should all have his resolve and commitment, even if Dr. Fauci lives in a world of dire constraints, of the men and women of politics, who dream small and think about the next election always, rather than the nature and qualities of their legacies, of which Dr. Fauci’s is assuredly great.

The New York Times

How to Avoid a Nuclear Disaster in Ukraine

Sunday, 28 August, 2022 - 

Serge Schmemann

There were reports on Saturday that the International Atomic Energy Agency has a team of experts ready to visit Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant within days. It would not be a minute too soon: Artillery shells are landing with chilling regularity in and around the facility, Europe’s largest nuclear power station.

In the latest scare, shelling on Thursday damaged external power lines, threatening a critical power supply to the facility. Ukrainian technicians were able to reconnect the plant to the national power grid on Friday, averting disaster.

Sanity is a hard sell in a war in which Russia is waging a scorched-earth campaign to bring Ukraine to its knees, and Ukraine is fighting for its survival. Yet the recent agreement to allow grain shipments out of Ukraine demonstrated that international pressure on Russia to prevent the conflict from spreading beyond the battlefields can work. And with Chernobyl as a shared traumatic memory, Russians and Ukrainians know better than most nations the horror of a nuclear catastrophe.

I was the Times bureau chief in Moscow when Chernobyl erupted in April 1986, and remember well the eerie fear of an invisible, deadly threat permeating the clear spring air. Thirty-six years later, about 1,000 square miles around the wounded plant are still sealed off as a Zone of Alienation. No doubt those memories are behind reports that Ukraine is preparing evacuation plans for about 400,000 people living near the Zaporizhzhia plant.

Zaporizhzhia is a more modern and far safer model than Chernobyl, theoretically capable of withstanding far greater damage. But the potential for a massive disaster when lethal shells land among the nuclear reactors, cooling towers, machine rooms and radioactive waste storage sites is real and present.

Seized by the Russians shortly after they invaded Ukraine six months ago, the sprawling plant on the Dnipro River is now on the front line of the war. A Times report on Tuesday detailed what that means: artillery shells exploding and tracer rounds streaking through the complex, while a skeletal crew of Ukrainian technicians maintains the plant under the guns of an estimated 500 Russian soldiers.

The Times reported that during the initial Russian invasion, a large-caliber bullet pierced an outer wall of one of the six reactors, while an artillery shell struck an electrical transformer filled with flammable cooling oil at another. Loss of electrical power to the plant could have led to a meltdown. Fortunately, it did not ignite.

The director general of the I.A.E.A., Rafael Mariano Grossi, recently outlined seven indispensable conditions critical for nuclear safety and security, which included the physical integrity of the plant, off-site power supply, cooling systems and emergency preparedness. “All these pillars have been compromised, if not entirely violated, at one point or another during this crisis,” he warned.

The plant — and all other Ukrainian nuclear stations, and all nuclear stations the world round — should ideally be regarded as demilitarized zones. That is essentially what UN officials have called for. But that is a tall order in a war of attrition and survival. A more immediate, urgent and achievable goal is for the experts assembled by the International Atomic Energy Agency to enter the plant.

The I.A.E.A., the United Nations and Western leaders have arranged just such a mission. Ukraine and Russia claim they’re for it. But getting mortal enemies to stand back has not proved easy. Instead, the shelling has intensified this month, along with a war of words.

The Ukrainians, joined by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have accused the Russians of using the plant as a “nuclear shield” for troops, weapons and ammunition, and of firing in and around it. The Russians have accused the Ukrainians of shooting at a plant that they say Russia’s soldiers are protecting.

In an act of unsurprising chutzpah, Russia called for a meeting of the United Nations Security Council this week to broadcast its claims, which prompted the Ukrainian ambassador to deplore wasting “more than an hour to listen to a slew of fictitious sound bites.”

It is all but impossible to determine who is doing the shooting. But the fact of the matter is that there would be no threat of a nuclear catastrophe had Russia not invaded Ukraine, and the danger would promptly end if the Russians left.

After weeks of disagreement between Russia and Ukraine over how the I.A.E.A. would enter the plant, experts are set to check on its operation and to propose how to make it as secure as possible.

Ukraine has called for international military and nuclear experts to be stationed permanently at the site to ensure that the power plant and its immediate surroundings are secure and free of heavy weapons. These are legitimate concerns and just demands; Russia, however, has rejected the creation of a demilitarized zone around the power plant.

But these are differences that can be resolved, ‌through quiet negotiations, ‌if both sides agree on the larger imperative of avoiding a nuclear disaster, which be as disastrous for Russia as for Ukraine or any other territory the radiation might reach.

The New York Times