Hazara Shias flee Afghanistan fearing Taliban persecution

Attacks on religious minority prompt exodus of thousands across border to Pakistan to seek safety

THEY ARE PERSECUTED IN PAKISTAN AS WELL
Afghanistan – live updates

Sher Ali with his wife and small baby who fled Kabul and reached Chaman, Pakistan on Thursday. Photograph: Shah Meer Baloch

Shah Meer Baloch in Chaman
Sun 29 Aug 2021 

As word of Kabul’s fall to the Taliban spread across Afghanistan, there were few who greeted the news with as much fear as the Hazara Shias. The religious minority in this Sunni majority country were among the most persecuted groups when the Taliban last ruled Afghanistan, and the memories of the killings, torture and mass executions have not faded.

Signs point to Hazaras once again finding themselves a target of the Taliban. A recent Amnesty report found that Taliban militants were responsible for the murder of nine Hazaras in July, in the village of Mundarakht. Six of the men were shot and three were tortured to death, including one man who was strangled with his own scarf and had his arm muscles sliced off.

Attacks such as these have prompted a mass exodus of Hazara people over the border to Pakistan, and activists say that about 10,000 have arrived in the Pakistan city of Quetta, in Balochistan, where they are living in mosques and wedding halls, and renting rooms. Several Hazaras told the Guardian they had paid traffickers from £50 to £350 to get them across the border.

Among those sheltering in Quetta was Sher Ali, 24, a shopkeeper, who had escaped with his wife and baby. Ali reached Chaman on the Pakistan side of the frontier on Thursday. The journey, through territory controlled by the Taliban, had taken three days. They had driven along roads decimated by bomb blasts, passing burnt-out cars and destroyed bridges.

Ali had decided to leave after he witnessed his friend Mohammad Hussain, 23, being shot dead by the Taliban 10 days ago in Kabul. Hussain had been passing through a Taliban security checkpoint on a motorbike. He refused to stop and they fired at him with an assault rifle.

“When I went to the spot, Hussain’s dead body was lying on the road in a pool of blood. They emptied the AK-47 on him,” said Ali. “It was the moment I decided to leave. It is like a do or die situation for Hazara Shia; whether to leave and live, or stay and die.”

In recent days, there have been chaotic scenes at the Chaman border crossing, as tens of thousands of Afghans have attempted to make it across. Only those with Pakistan residency papers or people travelling to Pakistan for medical treatment are officially allowed in, but some of the Hazaras said traffickers would bribe authorities at the border to get Afghans across illegally.


‘Everyone is afraid’: Afghans fleeing Taliban push for exit into Pakistan

Ali said his remaining family members would be leaving for Pakistan within a few days. “We can’t live in the Taliban’s Afghanistan,” he said.

Mohammed Sharif Tahmasi, 21, a computer science student from Ghazni province, reached Chaman along with his two sisters and brother on Thursday. After making the border crossing, they waited in a muddy corner near the border fence for some more Hazara families so they could travel to Quetta together.

Tahmasi’s family has never been to Pakistan but his parents had given the children some money and instructed them to urgently get over the border as soon as they could.

left to right Mohammad Sharif Tahmasi, Ashmatullah Tahmasi, Nahid Tahmasi and Umaira Tahmasi who fled Kabul. Photograph: Shah Meer Baloch

“All Hazara parents are asking their children to leave Afghanistan and be safe,” said Tahmasi. “I don’t know how my parents and the other siblings are, but I hope my siblings are fine and they will cross soon.”

Sharif’s sister Nahid Tahmasi, 15, a student in an elementary school, said she did not want to abandon her parents but, before she had left Ghazni, Taliban restrictions on women had already begun to be enforced.

“I feel terrible,” she said. “I can’t go to school and I miss my city and friends. I miss my parents. I miss my school. When the Taliban took control of Ghazni province they banned girls’ entry into public parks and schools. They did not want girls to study. We could not roam outside, visit our neighbours and dress the way we want.”

Gulalai Haideri, a Hazara who worked as a teacher at the Women for Afghan Women NGO, in Faryab province, reached Quetta five days ago. She is pregnant and sold her jewellery to pay for the journey and to be smuggled across the border.

“We were rejected twice for entry but then I begged the guards to allow me to enter as I am pregnant and I can’t live in Afghanistan. I am a woman, I will be killed,” she said. “They had mercy and allowed my family to enter.”

Haideri said that after her province fell to the insurgents, the Taliban had been going door to door to find unmarried girls, orphaned girls, divorced women and widows to get married to their fighters.

Mohammad Fahim Arvin, 21, a student at the Kabul Polytechnic University, was told by his parents to leave and save his life. But he spoke of his sadness at having to leave his parents behind.

“The Taliban hate us and want us to join them and fight for them, but we can’t,” said Arvin. “It is not my fault I was born as a Hazara; it was God’s decision. It was not in my hands. Why do they [Taliban] want to kill us for being Hazara?”

Yet even in Pakistan, the Hazaras are not in safe territory. Here too they have been persecuted for three decades by the Sunni militant groups. Earlier this year, 10 Hazara miners working in Balochistan were murdered by members of Islamic State. According to a 2019 report by Pakistan’s National Commission for Human Rights, at least 509 Hazara have been murdered for their faith since 2013.

For many of Afghanistan’s Hazara community arriving into Pakistan with little money and no connections, they have had to rely on the kindness of the local community.

Syed Nadir was among those hosting five Hazara families, including Haideri’s family in Quetta who had arrived in recent days.

“I don’t know any of them, but all Hazara are going through one of the worst times,” he said. “They are leaving their homes and we should host them. All countries should play their part for the Hazaras and the Afghans.”

Being You by Professor Anil Seth review – the exhilarating new science of consciousness

Our world and the self are constructions of the brain, a pioneering neuroscientist argues

The world is a ‘big lie’ … Jim Carrey in The Truman Show. 

Photograph: Allstar/Paramount


Gaia Vince
Wed 25 Aug 2021 

For every stoner who has been overcome with profound insight and drawled, “Reality is a construct, maaan,” here is the astonishing affirmation. Reality – or, at least, our perception of it – is a “controlled hallucination”, according to the neuroscientist Anil Seth. Everything we see, hear and perceive around us, our whole beautiful world, is a big lie created by our deceptive brains, like a forever version of The Truman Show, to placate us into living our lives.

Our minds invent for us a universe of colours, sounds, shapes and feelings through which we interact with our world and relate to each other, Seth argues. We even invent ourselves. Our reality, then, is an illusion, and understanding this involves tackling the thorny issue of consciousness: what it means to, well, be.




Consciousness has long been the preserve of philosophers and priests, poets and artists; now neuroscientists are investigating the mysterious quality and trying to answer the hard question of how consciousness arises in the first place. If this all sounds a bit hard going, it’s actually not at all in the masterly hands of Seth, who deftly weaves the philosophical, biological and personal with a lucid clarity and coherence that is thrilling to read.

Consciousness, which Seth defines as “any kind of subjective experience whatsoever”, is central to our being and identity as animate sentient creatures. What does it mean for you to be you, as opposed to being a stone or a bat? And how does this feeling of being you emerge from the squishy conglomeration of cells we keep in our skulls? Science has shied away from these sorts of intrinsically experiential questions, partly because it’s not obvious how science’s tools could explore them. Scientists are fond of pursuing “objective” truths and realities, not probing the perspectival realms of subjectivity to seek the truth of nostalgia, joy or the perfect blueness of an Yves Klein canvas. Also, it’s hard. Seth might use other words, but essentially, he is exploring the science of people’s souls – a daunting task.

Yves Klein blue paintings hanging in Tate Liverpool. Scientists like to pursue objective truths and realities, rather than, say, probe the perspectival realms of subjectivity to seek the truth of the perfect blueness of a Klein canvas 

Photograph: Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images

All of this, of course, makes consciousness one of the most exciting scientific frontiers, and nobody is better placed to guide us there. Seth has been researching the cognitive basis of consciousness for more than two decades and is an established leader in the field. He has pioneered new ways of analysing the inscrutable and measuring the incalculable in his quest to deduce the constituents of our feelings down to their atomic basis. This much-anticipated book lays out his radical theory of our invented reality with accessible and compelling writing.

We take for granted the idea that we journey through life, inhabiting a world that’s really out there, as the starring character in our own biopic. But this hallucination is generated by our minds, Seth explains. The brain is a “prediction machine” that is constantly generating best-guess causes of its sensory inputs. The mind generates our “reality” based on the predictions it makes from visual, auditory and other sensory information, and then constantly verifies and modulates it through sensory information updates. “Perception happens through a continual process of prediction error minimisation,” he writes.

These perceptual expectations shape our conscious experience. When we agree with each other about our hallucinations we call it “reality”; when we don’t we’re described as “delusional”.

Sometimes these disagreements can help us to peek past what William Blake called the “doors of perception”. One of these discombobulating events that you may have experienced was #TheDress: an overexposed photo posted on social media in 2015, in which a striped dress looked blue and black to some people, and white and gold to others. The version that people saw depended on whether their brain had taken into account an adjustment for ambient lighting when generating their reality. People who spent more time indoors were more likely to see the dress as blue and black, because their prediction machine was primed to factor in yellowish lighting when preparing the hallucination. Those who spend more time outside have brains primed to adjust for the bluer spectrum of sunlight.

The dress phenomenon, Seth argues, is “compelling evidence that our perceptual experiences of the world are internal constructions, shaped by the idiosyncrasies of our personal biology and history”. In objective, non-hallucinated reality, though, the dress doesn’t have physical properties of blueness, blackness, whiteness or goldness. Colour is not a physical property of things in the way that mass is. Rather, objects have particular ways that they reflect light that our brains include in their complex Technicolor production of “reality”.

“We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us,” Seth writes. In other words, we evolved this generated reality because operating through our hallucinated world improves our survival, by helping us avoid danger and recognise food, for example.

This is still an emerging science and Seth is generous to his fellow navigators, including those with competing theories, as he gently and persuasively walks us through the optical illusions, magic tricks and fascinating experiments that build his case.

We are, his research shows, much more likely to perceive things we expect. In a study in which people were shown brief flashes of different images in their left and right eyes, hearing a cue for an image meant they were much more likely to “see” that image yet be unconscious of the competing image shown to the other eye. Sometimes, our hallucinated world is wildly out of sync with everyone else’s – we lose our grip on reality. “What we call a ‘hallucination’ is what happens when perceptual priors are unusually strong, overwhelming the sensory data so that the brain’s grip on their causes in the world starts to slide.”

Seth has experimented with shifting his own reality – he describes using virtual reality headsets and taking LSD. I learn to my surprise that hallucinogens really do take you to a higher level of consciousness – your amount of consciousness can now be measured independently from wakefulness. This has had life-changing consequences, Seth explains, enabling “locked-in” patients to be recognised as conscious, despite their apparently inert state.
I learn to my surprise that hallucinogens really do take you to a higher level of consciousness

What then is the ground zero of consciousness in a living being – or indeed, an artificial one? At its most fundamental, it’s an awareness of self, knowing where you end and the rest of the world’s matter begins, and Seth explores a diversity of self-perception from parrots to octopuses – whose suckers attach to almost everything but their own skin, because they can taste themselves. He interrogates self-knowledge from inside out, dismantling the idea that our emotions produce bodily expressions, such as tears. Instead, Seth argues, our emotions are a response to the mind’s perception of our bodily reactions: we are sad because we perceive ourselves to be crying. Likewise, we are fearful because we perceive our heart is beating faster – a survival mechanism to ready us to respond to a threat picked up by the visual cortex, for instance. Our feelings, even much of our experience of free will, are also hallucinations issued by the mind to control ourselves.

Consciousness: Eight questions science must answer
Anil Seth

The self, then, is another perception, a controlled hallucination built up from an assemblage of perceptual best-guesses, prior beliefs and memories. Seth writes movingly of his mother’s episodes of hospital-induced delirium and delusions, and recounts the story of a talented musicologist who suffered catastrophic memory loss. The loss of memory, Seth explains, disrupted the continuity of his self perception – his “narrative self” – eroding his personal identity.

We perceive ourselves to control ourselves, is Seth’s often counterintuitive but nevertheless convincing argument in this meticulously researched book. However, we are just as importantly the perception of others. Seth mentions just briefly that we modulate our behaviour in response to our perceptions of what others may be thinking about us, but the social context of our “self” is far more important than that. We are to a great extent the invention of others’ minds.

Being you, after all, is not just about the sentience you experience, but also the youness of you. By the time my beloved grandfather died of a stroke in 2012, I’d already grieved for him for two years. Dementia had taken a smart, funny, gentle man and left us with a stranger, who lashed out or spoke inappropriately and unkindly. He was clearly somebody – he was fully conscious – but he was not himself. It is we who, bereft of his advice and conversation, knew who we’d lost – and with it, something of ourselves.

That said, Being You is an exhilarating book: a vast-ranging, phenomenal achievement that will undoubtedly become a seminal text.

Gaia Vince is the author of Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty and Time (Allen Lane)

 

Perceptions of supernatural beings reveal feelings about good and bad in humans

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO

What transpires in comedies and cartoons when a character has a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is not far off from people’s perceptions of the real world, finds a new study from the University of Waterloo.

Intended to illustrate the characters’ decision-making dilemma with comedic results, the moral character and motives of the supernatural beings are obvious. And people have similar expectations when it comes to individuals they see as good or bad.  

The researchers explored expectations about how good and evil individuals respond to requests. The researchers were interested in understanding why movies and folktales often depict the devil and demons as eager to grant accidental requests, whereas angels are not depicted this way. 

Their study indicates that people’s beliefs about good and evil characters are influenced by their views of ordinary humans.

“Our results suggest people expect good agents will be sensitive to intentions behind requests whereas they expect evil individuals will be relatively insensitive to these intentions,” said Ori Friedman, developmental psychology professor at Waterloo and lead author of the study. “These findings shape people’s expectations about requests directed both to regular humans and to supernatural agents.

The study shows that people have distinct ideas of how being good or bad influences the decisions of others. People assume that evil individuals are indifferent about anything that doesn’t directly impact their own aims. 

These findings support previous research in suggesting that at least some of people’s everyday beliefs about supernatural beings could be based on their views of humans.

“One aspect of seeing someone as evil might be that we expect that person to put less emphasis on the intentions of others, and instead focus more on the outcome of people's actions,” says Brandon Goulding, a PhD candidate in developmental psychology and co-author of the study. “Whereas we think that a good person will also consider what someone meant to do, and weigh that against what they actually did.” 

Researchers investigated people’s expectations about good and evil agents with five experiments. In the study, 2,231 participants read short stories about a protagonist’s request to either a human or supernatural being and rated the likelihood the request would be granted.   When the request was directed to someone good, ratings depended on whether the requester actually understood what they were requesting. Evil individuals were expected to grant requests just as often when they were confused and didn’t reflect the requester’s intentions.

“This research tells us something very interesting about how people view good and evil, which is that people don’t just think that evil agents focus exclusively on causing harm. Instead, people relate evil to being indifference and to not caring about what people want,” Friedman said. “It also suggests that people think moral goodness is about more than producing good outcomes. People also see moral goodness as being connected with caring about what people want and intend.”

The study, Butt-dialing the devil: Evil agents are expected to disregard intentions behind requests, by Goulding, Friedman, Rebecca Dunk and Jonathan Fugelsang appears in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 

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JOURNAL

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

 

Eating walnuts daily lowered bad cholesterol and may reduce cardiovascular disease risk

Circulation Journal Report

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN HEART ASSOCIATION

DALLAS, Aug. 30,2021 — Eating about ½ cup of walnuts every day for two years modestly lowered levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol, known as “bad cholesterol,” and reduced the number of total LDL particles and small LDL particles in healthy, older adults, according to new research published today in the American Heart Association’s flagship journal Circulation.

Walnuts are a rich source of omega-3 fatty acids (alpha-linolenic acid), which have been shown to have a beneficial effect on cardiovascular health.

“Prior studies have shown that nuts in general, and walnuts in particular, are associated with lower rates of heart disease and stroke. One of the reasons is that they lower LDL-cholesterol levels, and now we have another reason: they improve the quality of LDL particles,” said study co-author Emilio Ros, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Lipid Clinic at the Endocrinology and Nutrition Service of the Hospital Clínic of Barcelona in Spain. “LDL particles come in various sizes. Research has shown that small, dense LDL particles are more often associated with atherosclerosis, the plaque or fatty deposits that build up in the arteries. Our study goes beyond LDL cholesterol levels to get a complete picture of all of the lipoproteins and the impact of eating walnuts daily on their potential to improve cardiovascular risk.”

In a sub-study of the Walnuts and Healthy Aging study, a large, two-year randomized controlled trial examining whether walnuts contribute to healthy aging, researchers evaluated if regular walnut consumption, regardless of a person’s diet or where they live, has beneficial effects on lipoproteins.

This study was conducted from May 2012 to May 2016 and involved 708 participants between the ages of 63 and 79 (68% women) who were healthy, independent-living adults residing in Barcelona, Spain, and Loma Linda, California.

Participants were randomly divided into two groups: active intervention and control. Those allocated to the intervention group added about a half cup of walnuts to their usual daily diet, while participants in the control group abstained from eating any walnuts. After two years, participants’ cholesterol levels were tested, and the concentration and size of lipoproteins were analyzed by nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. This advanced test enables physicians to more accurately identify lipoprotein features known to relate to the risk of cardiovascular disease.

The two-year study had a 90% retention rate (632 participants completed the study). Complete lipoprotein analyses were available in 628.

Among key findings of all study participants:

• At 2 years, participants in the walnut group had lower LDL cholesterol levels - by an average of 4.3 mg/dL, and total cholesterol was lowered by an average of 8.5 mg/dL.
• Daily consumption of walnuts reduced the number of total LDL particles by 4.3% and small LDL particles by 6.1%. These changes in LDL particle concentration and composition are associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease.
• Intermediate Density Lipoprotein (IDL) cholesterol also decreased. It is known that IDL cholesterol is a precursor to LDL and refers to a density between that of low-density and very-low-density lipoproteins. In the last decade, IDL cholesterol has emerged as a relevant lipid cardiovascular risk factor independent of LDL cholesterol.
• LDL cholesterol changes among the walnut group differed by sex; in men, LDL cholesterol fell by 7.9% and in women by 2.6%.

“While this is not a tremendous decrease in LDL cholesterol, it’s important to note that at the start of the study all our participants were quite healthy, free of major non-communicable diseases. However, as expected in an elderly population, close to 50% of participants were being treated for both high blood pressure and hypercholesterolemia. Thanks in part to statin treatment in 32%, the average cholesterol levels of all the people in our study were normal,” Ros said. “For individuals with high blood cholesterol levels, the LDL cholesterol reduction after a nut-enriched diet may be much greater.”

“Eating a handful of walnuts every day is a simple way to promote cardiovascular health. Many people are worried about unwanted weight gain when they include nuts in their diet,” Ros said. “Our study found that the healthy fats in walnuts did not cause participants to gain weight.”

The major limitation of this investigation is that both participants and researchers knew who was and was not eating walnuts. However, the study did involve two very different populations with distinct diets. “The outcomes were similar in both groups, so we can safely apply the results of this study to other populations,” Ros said. More research is also needed to clarify the different LDL results in men and women.

According to the American Heart Association, walnuts are especially high in omega-3 fatty acids, the same heart-healthy fat found in oily fish. A serving size is a small handful or 1.5 ounces of whole nuts or 2 tablespoons of nut butter.

Co-authors are Sujatha Rajaram, Ph.D.; Montserrat Cofán, D.Pharm., Ph.D.; Aleix Sala-Vila, D.Pharm., Ph.D.; Ella Haddad, R.D., Dr.P.H.; Mercè Serra-Mir, R.D.; Edward Bitok, R.D., Dr.P.H.; Irene Roth, R.D., Ph.D.; Tania M. Freitas-Simoes, R.D.; Amandeep Kaur, M.P.H.; Cinta Valls-Pedret, M.Sc.; Mónica Doménech, M.D., Ph.D.; Keiji Oda, M.P.H.; Dolores Corella, Ph.D.; and Joan Sabaté, M.D., Dr.P.H. Authors’ disclosures are listed in the manuscript.

The study was funded by the California Walnut Commission.

Additional Resources:

• Available multimedia is on right column of release link - https://newsroom.heart.org/news/eating-walnuts-daily-lowered-bad-cholesterol-and-may-reduce-cardiovascular-disease-risk?preview=d2ab0062d11501f8e9ec084dd2f70456
• After Aug. 30, view the manuscript online.
• Eating nuts may reduce cardiovascular disease risk for people with diabetes
• Nuts for nuts? Daily serving may help control weight and benefit health
• What Is a Serving?
• Eat Smart
• Follow AHA/ASA news on Twitter @HeartNews
• Follow news from the AHA’s flagship journal Circulation @CircAHA

Statements and conclusions of studies published in the American Heart Association’s scientific journals are solely those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect the Association’s policy or position. The Association makes no representation or guarantee as to their accuracy or reliability. The Association receives funding primarily from individuals; foundations and corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations and fund specific Association programs and events. The Association has strict policies to prevent these relationships from influencing the science content. Revenues from pharmaceutical and biotech companies, device manufacturers and health insurance providers and the Association’s overall financial information are available here.

About the American Heart Association

The American Heart Association is a relentless force for a world of longer, healthier lives. We are dedicated to ensuring equitable health in all communities. Through collaboration with numerous organizations, and powered by millions of volunteers, we fund innovative research, advocate for the public's health and share lifesaving resources. The Dallas-based organization has been a leading source of health information for nearly a century. Connect with us on heart.org, Facebook, Twitter or by calling 1-800-AHA-USA1.

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JOURNAL

Circulation

DOI

10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.054051 

ARTICLE TITLE

Effects of Walnut Consumption for 2 Years on Lipoprotein Subclasses Among Healthy Elders

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

30-Aug-2021

 

Staying home, having access to primary care, and limiting contagion hubs may curb COVID-19 deaths

New study uses novel statistics to understand why some regions in Italy were hit harder than others during the first wave of the pandemic

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PENN STATE

 

IMAGE: A NEW STUDY EXPLORES WHY THE FIRST WAVE OF THE COVID-19 EPIDEMIC WAS SO MUCH MORE INTENSE IN SOME REGIONS OF ITALY THAN OTHERS. THE GRAPH DEPICTS MORTALITY IN EACH OF 20 ITALIAN REGIONS OVER TIME, ALIGNED TO ACCOUNT FOR OUTBREAKS BEGINNING ON DIFFERENT DATES. view more 

CREDIT: PENN STATE

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Staying home and limiting local travel, supporting access to primary care, and limiting contacts in contagion hubs — including hospitals, schools, and workplaces — are strategies that might help reduce COVID-19-related deaths, according to new research. The research team, by statisticians at Penn State, the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy, and Université Laval in Quebec, Canada, used novel statistical approaches to compare the first wave of the epidemic across 20 regions in Italy and identify factors that contributed to mortality.

“The first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic took very different paths in different regions, with some areas being hit especially hard while others fared much better,” said Francesca Chiaromonte, leader of the research team, who is a professor of statistics and the holder of the Lloyd and Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair in Statistics for the Life Sciences at Penn State, and the scientific coordinator of the EMbeDS department of excellence at the Sant’Anna School. “We wanted to understand why some regions were hit so much harder than others, so we used both vetted and newly developed techniques in a field of statistics called functional data analysis to compare how the first wave progressed in different regions in Italy.”

Rather than focusing on models for predicting epidemic trajectories, the study used functional data analysis techniques to gather information from the shapes of mortality curves over time, providing a sensitive way to capture associations and patterns from data. The researchers compared mortality curves during the first wave of the epidemic across 20 regions in Italy. After clustering and aligning the curves, to characterize their shapes and account for outbreaks beginning on different dates, the researchers could evaluate factors that might contribute to their differences. Their results appear Aug. 30 in the journal Scientific Reports. 

The researchers found that local mobility — how much people moved around their local areas — was strongly associated with COVID mortality. Specifically, they used data from Google’s “grocery and pharmacy” category, which reflects mobility linked to acquiring necessities such as food and medicine. During a national lock-down which started in March 2020, these mobility levels dropped drastically in Italy, roughly by 30% just in the first week of lockdown and then further by as much as 60% during weekdays and almost 100% during weekends in March and April.

“Early on in the epidemic, there were a lot of questions about whether mobility restrictions would really work; our results add to the mounting evidence that they do,” said Chiaromonte. “We see the effect with a lag, but when people reduced their mobility, we saw fewer COVID-related deaths. And we aren’t the only ones to document this, so when we’re told to stay home as a mitigation measure, we should stay home!”

The rates of positive COVID tests and mortality were also associated with each other with a lag, according to the study, reaffirming that positivity is a useful measure to include in disease models. 

The research team also investigated several demographic, socio-economic, infrastructural, and environmental factors one at a time to see if they could further explain patterns in mortality. These included factors such as the percent of the population over 65, prevalence of pre-existing conditions such as diabetes and allergies, accessibility of primary care and ICU beds, and factors that might increase contact rates, such as the number of beds in a hospital or nursing home and the number of students per classroom. 

“Based on the associations captured by our statistical techniques, what reduces mortality may not be so much having big fancy hospitals with lots of ICU beds, but rather having good access to primary care doctors,” said Chiaromonte. “In fact, having big hospitals may have backfired because they acted as contagion hubs. The places where you have more beds per hospital, more beds per nursing home, more pupils per classroom, and more employees per firm are where epidemics were the strongest.” 

With additional research to confirm these trends, these results could inform decision making, for example encouraging short- and medium-term investments to boost distributed primary health care and to limit contacts in contagion hubs. Schools and workplaces could encourage pods, where students and employees see only a limited group of individuals, and hospitals could segment sections to reduce contacts. 

“Importantly though, even controlling for these factors in our statistical analyses, mobility still remains a very strong lagged predictor of mortality,” said Chiaromonte. “And even accounting for mobility, positivity rates, and the other factors we considered, we still can’t fully explain why the epidemic was so much more intense in Lombardia, a northern industrialized region that includes Milan, compared to the rest of the country. They are still an outlier relative to what our models can explain. Increasing access to accurate, timely and high geographic resolution data might allow us and other researchers to validate results and improve our ability to explain the most extreme trajectories — such as those observed in Lombardia during the first wave of COVID-19.”

Limited data availability and accuracy posed several challenges for this study. For example, official death counts reflected serious underreporting early in the epidemic, so the research team also integrated information on differential mortality—differences in overall deaths in 2020 compared to the average death rate over the previous five years. However, more accurate information on deaths, as well as cases and hospitalizations, at a finer geographic scale, and possibly partitioned by sex, age, pre-existing conditions, and other characteristics would allow the team to improve their models. Additionally, demographic, socio-economic, infrastructural and environmental data are frequently reported at coarse geographic scale and are often multiple years out of date.

“Some progress has been made since the beginning of the pandemic, but we hope that going forward governmental agencies, statistical offices and other groups will really prioritize data collection, integration and availability to qualified researchers,” said Chiaromonte. “All the ambiguity and questions we had early on, and still have in some cases, about where contagions occur, whether the virus is spreading in restaurants or gyms or on public transport, or if certain mitigation measures work—we could answer these questions much more effectively with good data. We are already trying to capitalize on the progress — for instance, Google has made their measures for mobility available at a finer geographic resolution, and we are using them to analyze the second wave of the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy. But we cannot stress enough how important it is to have access to accurate, fine-grained and current information on the epidemic and on the many variables that may contribute to aggravating or mitigating it.”

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In addition to Chiaromonte, the research team includes Tobia Boschi, a graduate student in statistics at Penn State; Jacopo Di Iorio, who was a postdoc at the Sant’Anna School and will soon become an Eberly Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Penn State; Lorenzo Testa, a graduate student at the Sant’Anna School who is currently a Penn State visiting scholar; and Marzia Cremona, a former Bruce Lindsay Visiting Assistant Professor in the statistics department at Penn State, who is now an assistant professor in Data Science at the Université Laval in Quebec, Canada.

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JOURNAL

Scientific Reports

DOI

10.1038/s41598-021-95866-y 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Functional data analysis characterizes the shapes of the COVID‐19 epidemics in Italy

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

30-Aug-2021

ANALYSIS
Five Afghanistan myths that unleashed a disaster foretold

Issued on: 30/08/2021 - 

A Taliban fighter stands guard at the site of the August 26 suicide attack at Kabul airport on August 27, 2021. © Wakil Kohsar, AFP

Text by: Leela JACINTO

The devastating scenes of thousands of Afghans desperately trying to flee the Taliban takeover and deadly August 26 Kabul airport attack have highlighted the humanitarian and security threats following the hasty US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The disaster was slowly brewing, but alarm bells were muffled by the spin to bring an instant end to America’s “forever war”.

Former US national security advisor, H. R. McMaster, was not mincing his words as he took to the airwaves last Thursday, shortly after a suicide blast ripped through crowds outside the Kabul airport, killing more than 100 Afghans and 13 US soldiers.

“This is only the beginning. This is what happens when you surrender to a terrorist organisation,” McMaster told the BBC.

McMaster’s detractors promptly pushed back, noting the retired US Army lieutenant general had been national security advisor to former US president Donald Trump. His arguments, they explained, was another example of Republicans clamouring for US President Joe Biden’s resignation following the Afghanistan debacle.

While the toxic partisanship of US politics has long refracted the realities on the ground in Afghanistan, the fact remains that both Trump and Biden promised voters a rapid end to the “forever war”.

In the race to proclaim the war is over, several myths and misconceptions dominated the political discourse over the past few years. FRANCE 24 examines some of them.

Taliban 2.0

The Taliban 2.0 moniker gained traction around 2018, when the Trump administration appointed former US ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, as new US special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation.

The upgraded Taliban had learned lessons from their disastrous 1990s reign and had swapped Kalashnikovs for Twitter, cricket gear and selfies with children, according to news reports.

Taliban fighter poses for selfies during a June 2018 ceasefire marking the Eid ul-Fitr religious festival. © Reuters

The upgrade had style and content. While the UN designated the Taliban a terrorist organisation two years before the 9/11 attacks, the US never did the same, although the group met the criteria for a US State Department listing. In 2002, then US president George W. Bush signed an executive order (13224) labeling the Taliban a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity". But that designation is narrowly focused on financial transactions, lacking the teeth of a State Department Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) listing.

Moves to designate the Taliban a foreign terrorist organisation were shelved since it was acknowledged that negotiations with an FTO group would be complicated. And so, even though the Haqqani Network, a branch of the Taliban, was (and remains) on the FTO list, its parent body evaded a designation.

Despite the headlines, the new Taliban stuck with much of its old discourse. Their statements focused on ending the American “invasion” and celebrating the bravery of their mujahideen fighters against the “foreign invaders”. They never bothered addressing human – particularly women’s – rights concerns. When pushed, the Taliban adopted a “women’s rights within an Islamic framework” fudge. They were clear about their views on the democratic system though. It was a Western imperialist system which had no place in their yet to be detailed version of sharia law.

But the Taliban started putting out statements in English – on Twitter, which was an upgrade.

Taliban has nothing to do with al Qaeda

“For the first time, they [Taliban] have announced that they're prepared to break with their historic ally, al Qaeda,” said then US secretary of state Mike Pompeo in a March 1, 2020 interview. “You can see, go read the document, the Taliban have now made the break,” he added.

Pompeo was speaking a day after the US signed a withdrawal deal with the Taliban cumbersomely titled, “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan between the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban and the United States of America”.

A wall painted with images of US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad (L) and Taliban co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar (R), in Kabul April 5, 2020. AFP - WAKIL KOHSAR

Part Two of the four-page agreement states the Taliban “will not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qai’da, [sic] to use the soil of Afghanistan to threaten the security of the United States and its allies”.

Military and security experts however warned that the links between the Taliban and al Qaeda were deep and included intermarriages, making the two groups effectively one family.

“Relations between the Taliban, especially the Haqqani Network and al-Qaeda remain close, based on friendship, a history of shared struggle, ideological sympathy and intermarriage,” said a UN report to the Security Council.

While the Taliban was officially throwing their jihadist brothers in arms under the bus, al Qaeda “has reacted positively to the agreement [with the US], with statements from its acolytes celebrating it as a victory for the Taliban’s cause and thus for global militancy”, said the report.

Following the August 15 Taliban takeover of Kabul, al Qaeda’s North Africa branch, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), celebrated the “victory” in Afghanistan while al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based largely in Yemen, heralded the “beginning of a pivotal transformation” worldwide.

While the Taliban publicly attempts to distance itself from the global jihadist group that conducted the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda has no qualms stating its fate is tied to Taliban gains in Afghanistan as it proceeds with its core goal of threatening the US and its allies.

The Taliban is solely an Afghan nationalist group

Portraying the Taliban solely as a nationalist movement was necessary for the US to engage with the group as a strictly Afghan political player.

But the Taliban leadership survived the US war on terror by basing themselves in Pakistan, where they were able to pursue their strategic plans “with considerable support from the Pakistani Inter-Service intelligence (ISI) agency and military”, warned the Atlantic Council in just one of many reports noting the Taliban’s dependence on Pakistan.

“How would they decrease and eventually cut a dependency on the Pakistani military and political establishment in order to act as a nationalist movement ready to govern?” the report asked, providing no answers.

Afghanistan has long been the playing field for India-Pakistan strategic rivalries. The US presence in Afghanistan maintained a status quo in a region that has seen China flex its expansionist muscles under President Xi Jinping. The stability is now floundering in a zone that has three nuclear powered nations – China, India and Pakistan – vying for influence.

The Taliban stress their independence from Pakistan, but with their reliance on Islamabad’s military intelligence network and resources, they are unable to cut the link.

Meanwhile, foreign fighters – including Pakistanis, Uzbeks, Chechens and other Central Asian nationals – have swelled Taliban ranks and enabled their lightening sweep across Afghanistan.

US negotiators hoped the war between the Taliban and the Islamic State group – Khorasan (IS-K) would result in the Taliban rooting out the global jihadist threat in Afghanistan.

But the August 26 Kabul airport attack underscored the security challenges confronting the Taliban in their fight against the group.

In an interview with FRANCE 24 two days after the attack, Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid blamed the “infidel” American army for the security failure even as he admitted his group controlled "93 or 94 percent" of Kabul.

The Taliban’s anti-IS group fight since it came to power has not impressed strategists. At a press conference a day after the Kabul airport attack, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby confirmed the Taliban had released “thousands” of prisoners during their sweep through Afghanistan and that the unvetted releases included IS-K members.

The costly ‘forever war’ must end – now means now

That the forever war has cost the lives of more than 2,400 US troops and nearly $2 trillion are statistics often quoted in justifications for an immediate end to the war.

The realities however are more nuanced. Following a 2014 drawdown, the US military had a much smaller footprint in Afghanistan than during the early years, resulting in reduced costs and casualties. According to US Department of Defense figures, as of August 23, 2021, fewer than 100 US troops died in combat in Afghanistan over the past five years – “roughly the equivalent of the number of Americans currently dying from Covid-19 every two hours”, noted the New York Times.

The amount of Afghanistan funding going right back to Americans is well documented. This includes military contractors and salaries of US civilian and reconstruction personnel who were “often unqualified and poorly trained”, according to the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a US government oversight authority.

Afghanistan’s major socio-economic gains, including female education and health services, since the 2001 fall of the Taliban were consistently overlooked under the “it bleeds, it leads” imperatives of news coverage, which focused on maps displaying geographic areas under Taliban control without examining population densities concentrated in the cities.

The lost cause narrative enabled Khalilzad, the US special representative for Afghanistan reconciliation since 2018, to agree to withdrawal timetables that included a US commitment to withdraw all military personnel “within 14 months” under the 2020 deal.

When Biden came to office earlier this year, he undid several Trump era policies, but the US-Taliban deal was not among them. Khalilzad, a Republican appointee, also retained his post.

In the disastrous aftermath of the Taliban takeover, several US diplomats and experts have discussed America’s lack of “strategic patience”. In a New York Times column, Ryan Crocker, who served as US ambassador to Afghanistan under Obama, noted, “Our lack of strategic patience at critical moments…has damaged our alliances, emboldened our adversaries and increased the risk to our own security.”

Afghan political and military institutions are weak, can be sidelined

Afghanistan’s democratically elected government, under a constitution ratified in 2004, was not party to the negotiations over the country’s future.

The irony of the US, which has promoted democratic values as its main foreign policy plank, withdrawing without a credible peace process while sidelining Afghanistan’s elected government has shocked America’s allies and delighted her foes.

The justification for this omission was the perennial US problem with the occupant of Afghanistan’s Arg presidential palace. The country’s first elected president, Hamid Karzai, was viewed as corrupt, inefficient and so intransigent that US media reports openly speculated if he was on meds.

His successor Ashraf Ghani didn’t fair much better. Afghanistan’s parliament, which included more female representatives than in the US Congress or British parliament, was rarely, if ever, mentioned.

Corruption was certainly a problem. “When vast resources are poured into a country without established institutions and rule of law, corruption is likely to be a significant byproduct,” wrote Crocker, the Obama-appointed former US ambassador to Afghanistan.

But, Crocker noted, “corruption was endemic in New York, Boston and Chicago through much of the 19th and into the 20th centuries. It took us time to grow the institutions and legal structures that would eventually make corruption the exception rather than the norm”.

Tackling the problem, though, requires time and patience and the US has none of it, Crocker pointed out.

In the aftermath of the Taliban’s takeover, blame was laid at the door of another Afghan institution – the country’s military.

The Afghan National Army, which bore the brunt of the casualties against the Taliban, was faulted for collapsing in the wake of a Taliban sweep. But the US had already undermined the Afghan armed services by crushing what top military generals and strategist have long said is the most important ingredient of an effective fighting force: morale.

When US troops abandoned the Bagram base in the middle of the night without informing their Afghan counterparts, it served a death blow to an army facing an enemy that everybody had declared the winner. “When the Americans left in middle of the night without informing their Afghan counterparts, that also meant the American contractors that were so critical had left,” explained veteran journalist Bilal Sarwary. “Afghanistan’s elite forces saw that as a signal and they were confused. They thought, What is happening? America is abandoning us, the Taliban are coming, the political class is divided.”

The ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu famously noted, “Every battle is won before it’s even fought”. His book “The Art of War” is studied in military academies across the world. The commander in chief of the world’s mightiest military, though, wanted nothing to do with that primer.

 Calgary

12-year-old's friends didn't celebrate after he came out as gay. So a park full of strangers did.

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'It's outrageously amazing that this little kid, even with all this adversity, can still be out here'

Sarah Rieger · CBC News · Posted: Aug 29, 2021 5:00 AM MT | Last Updated: August 29

Friends and strangers met in a Calgary park to celebrate 12-year-old Brody Neville's birthday. (Terri Trembath/CBC)

A crowd full of strangers filled a northwest Calgary park to celebrate a boy's rainbow-themed birthday during Pride Week.

Leah O'Donnell says when her son Brody Neville came out as gay this spring, the 12-year-old lost many of his friends.

That made the prospect of celebrating his birthday this year a sad one.

"I was asking him what he wanted to do for his birthday and he was in tears and said since he came out as gay he lost all his friends, so he didn't even have people who could come," O'Donnell said. 

So, she put a call out to the community to show him love, posting about his situation on Facebook. And turn out they did.

Dozens of friends, family, strangers — and yes, some drag performers strutting to Born This Way — filled the park near Ranchlands Community Centre on Saturday.

When Neville arrived in the park, he initially thought it was an unusually large crowd waiting for the ice cream truck. When he realized he was the guest of honour, he wrapped his mom into a giant hug.

"Thank you everybody for this, this is the best day of my life," a grinning Neville told the crowd.

Drag performers put on a show and presents were exchanged during the celebration. (Terri Trembath/CBC)

O'Donnell said it was an opportunity to show her son that there's a supportive community waiting for him outside of the schoolyard bullies. 

"I just wanted him to feel support," she said. 

Drag queen Avanna Kedvra came out at 19. She said she can't imagine the bravery it took for Neville to speak his truth.

"It's kind of ridiculous that in 2021 a 12-year-old can't be who they are … it's a very sad reality in this day and age," she said. "[But] it's outrageously amazing that this little kid, even with all this adversity, can still be out here and feeling joy."

Jessica Tailfeathers said seeing Saturday's turnout was inspiring.

"Showing up here today and seeing how many people in solidarity love him … it brought my faith back in humanity during such a tumultuous time in society."

Neville said the crowd was a lot to process. 

"That's the greatest present of all, support and people in it together with you," he said. 

With files from Terri Trembath

Ethiopia's economy battered by Tigray war

By Vivienne Nunis
BBC News, Africa correspondent
Published10 hours ago
Tigray crisis

 Many Ethiopians are living in refugee camps in neighbouring Sudan because of conflict in their country

Ethiopia's 10-month internal war has come at a huge human cost, with thousands killed, millions displaced and many in desperate need of assistance.

But that's not the only damage being done to Africa's second most populous nation - the war has incurred a huge economic cost, too, that could take years to repair.

In the capital Addis Ababa, 26-year-old Tigist, who didn't want her full name to be used, says her monthly expenses have doubled for two reasons: the war that broke out in the northern region of Tigray in November and the coronavirus pandemic.

"Before Covid and the conflict, I would pay 1,000 birr [about $22; £16] each month for groceries. Now I spend 2,000 birr," she says. "Things are more expensive now - phones, food and clothes."

Official statistics show the cost of basic consumer goods has indeed gone up in Ethiopia -they were on average around a quarter more expensive in July than a year earlier.

Tigist is working as a supermarket cashier to support her family. She's responsible for the food shopping while her brother covers the rent.

"Also, the dollar exchange has not been good," she adds. "Last year, for $1 you would get 35 birr, now you get 45."

Faisal Roble, a US-based analyst who specialises in the Horn of Africa, says that spending on the war effort "has really negatively impacted Ethiopia's capacity to access dollars", and has caused the exchange rate to deteriorate.

It is not clear how much the war has cost but Trading Economics forecasts military expenditure will reach $502m (£365m) by the end of the year, up from $460m last year.

Last week, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres said the conflict had "drained over a billion dollars from the country's coffers".

Prior to the global pandemic and the war, Ethiopia's economy was one of the fastest-growing in the region, expanding by an average of 10% a year in the decade to 2019, according to the World Bank.

The cost of living has risen sharply

While Tigist is referring to the official rate available in banks, the birr has fallen even further in the informal market, Mr Roble says, and has now reached 67 birr against the dollar.

He adds that business owners in the country are nervous about the worsening security situation as the war spreads beyond Tigray and into the neighbouring regions of Afar and Amhara.

Many are draining their accounts and taking their cash to money traders on the border with the self-declared republic of Somaliland, and that's forcing the birr's value to drop even lower, Mr Roble says.

Banks shut in Tigray

The civil war started when the party in power in Tigray, the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) attacked federal military bases in November, amidst an escalating feud with Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed over the dissolution of the ruling coalition and the postponement of elections.

Since then, Ethiopia's military - as well as its Eritrean allies, state police forces and local militias - have fought a bloody war against Tigrayan fighters.

Both sides have been accused of committing atrocities, including rape and mass civilian killings.

Tigray has been without basic services, including telecommunications and banks, since the federal government instigated a blockade on it in June, after the rebels recaptured the regional capital Mekelle.

War has led to the destruction of many schools and health centres in Tigray

More than 400,000 people in Tigray are already living in famine-like conditions, while aid distribution has been stifled and electricity and fuel supplies are dwindling, pushing prices up.

Mekelle resident Filmon Berhane told BBC Tigrinya that food and rent have recently skyrocketed.

"There is no money as all the banks are closed and government offices are not paying salaries," he said.

Mobile phone auction hit

Internationally, the war is having a huge impact on Ethiopia's reputation as a place to invest, says economist Irmgard Erasmus from the NKC African Economics consultancy group.

"If your consumers are under severe pressure from high inflation, you don't see consumer-driven growth as we see in the US or the Eurozone," she says.

"Generally, that leaves foreign investment to really drive growth, and it's exactly this that's being attacked by reputational risk."

Ms Erasmus points to the recent liberalisation of Ethiopia's telecoms sector, which originally attracted interest from a number of providers, including South African telecoms giant MTN.

In the end though, only one company successfully bid for either of the two telecoms licences on offer, a consortium led by Kenya's Safaricom which pledged $850m.

While rules that initially restricted new license holders from operating a mobile money system dampened investor interest, industry sources say the Tigray conflict also weighed heavily on investors' minds.

Pressure to end war

Ethiopia's overall economic growth for this year is forecast to slow significantly from 6% in 2020 to just 2% in 2021 - the lowest level in almost two decades, according to the IMF.

The country imports about $14bn of goods per year, while it exports just $3.4bn.

Also worrying economic observers is Ethiopia's national debt, which some expect to reach $60bn this year, or nearly 70% of GDP.

"This is a conservative estimate," says Ms Erasmus, adding Ethiopia's military spend could be higher than forecast, and it has taken on unreported debt in the past.

Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's supporters have rallied behind his military campaign against the Tigray rebels

While the US has imposed some visa restrictions on Ethiopians involved in the war, and withheld some spending, so far, the international community has been reluctant to exert maximum economic pressure on the government, or cut generous aid programmes. Around a quarter of the population live below the national poverty line, and the average yearly income is just $850 per person.

"There is clearly scope for ratcheting up the sanctions if Prime Minister Abiy, who won the Nobel Peace prize in 2019, does not deescalate the conflict," says Witney Schneidman a non-resident fellow with the Brookings think-tank in Washington.

The Biden administration's dilemma, says Mr Schneidman, is to put enough pressure on Mr Abiy to end the war without isolating Ethiopia completely.

"All tools are on the table, but you've got 110m people, you can't make the nation a pariah, it's too important, too strategic," he says.

Additional reporting by Eva Artesona in Addis Ababa.