'Keep looking forward' says Niyonsaba, barred from 800m

Isued on: 08/09/2021 - 

Burundi's Francine Niyonsaba was forced to move up to 5,000m due to controversial rules governing high testosterone levels

 Jonathan NACKSTRAND AFP/File


Zurich (AFP

Unusually for an athlete in her mid-20s, Francine Niyonsaba has been forced to recalibrate from an outstanding multiple medal-winning 800m runner to adopting the 5,000m as her new event.

The Burundian won an Olympic silver medal at 800m in Rio in 2016 and also came second at the London world championships a year later, and is also a two-time world indoor champion.

But Niyonsaba, like South Africa's gold medal winner in Rio, Caster Semenya, saw her hopes of continuing in the two-lap discipline dashed in May 2019 after World Athletics introduced controversial rules governing testosterone levels.

Female athletes like Niyonsaba and Semenya who have unusually high levels of testosterone, which gives them added strength, are prohibited from competing in races between 400m and a mile unless they undergo treatment to reduce the levels.

It left them looking around at what other events they might qualify in for the Tokyo Games. While Semenya failed to make the qualifying time amid a court battle, Niyonsaba made the cut for the 5000m in only her second competitive run over the distance.

"It was a long journey. I was blessed to be in the Olympics," Niyonsaba said ahead of the two-day Diamond League finale in Zurich on Wednesday and Thursday.

In Tokyo, Niyonsaba was disqualified in the heats of the 5,000m, but finished fifth in the 10,000m.

"I had many changes. I'm glad I never gave up."

Now 28, she said: "Since I was born, I have not had an easy life and I love challenges and I face them with a lot of determination and perserverance.

"To transform 800m into long-distance, it's not easy. In the Olympics it was new challenges, new experiences, so I was happy."

- 'Not going back' -

Niyonsaba had relocated for training to Eugene, Oregon, as an athlete affiliated to the US sportswear giant Nike.

But her change in distance on the track saw her decide on a different course, swapping Eugene for the foothills of Kenya shortly after she was barred from her favoured 800m in May 2019.

"It was the right decision to move from America to Kenya because I knew Kenya is home of champions in long distance," she said.

"To meet many athletes there... Meeting Kipchoge in the morning, it gives you motivation!" she said, referring to the dominant marathon runner in the world, Eliud Kipchoge.

Kipchoge's Kenyan teammate Hellen Obiri, the two-time world champion and Olympic silver medallist behind Sifan Hassan in Tokyo, will likely be Niyonsaba's main rival in Wednesday's race, run on an unorthodox 560-metre track on the shores of Lake Zurich.

"Every race is new for me. I think it's going to be a great race," the Burundi athlete said. "Running with Obiri is an honour."

Niyonsaba trumped Obiri when the two took to the track at last week's Diamond League meet in Brussels, just as Namibian teenager Christine Mboma triumphed in the 200m over Britain's reigning world champion Dina Asher-Smith.

Like Niyonsaba, Mboma has been barred from running her favoured 400m unless she takes the testosterone-reducing drugs.

The fact the pair beat current world champions after recent decisions to swap events out of necessity raised the contentious issue of whether regulations put in place by the sport's governing body to try to create a "level playing field" actually go far enough.

It is a delicate subject, but Niyonsaba was sanguine.

"I'm here and I'm doing well," she said. "I'm back because I want to make sports be in a better place and keep inspiring others.

"I will never go back, I'm going to keep looking forward.

"Today, every moment I enjoy to run. I'm going to keep training hard and perform well. I love to do my best."

© 2021 AFP

Niyonsaba, Crouser shine in opening Diamond League finals

Issued on: 08/09/2021 - 

Burundi's Francine Niyonsaba Fabrice COFFRINI AFP

Zurich (AFP)

Francine Niyonsaba again trumped Hellen Obiri in the women's 5000m while two-time Olympic champion Ryan Crouser won the men's shot put on the first of two days of Diamond League finals in Zurich on Wednesday.

In hot, sunny conditions at the Sechselaeutenplatz square on the shores of Lake Zurich, Niyonsaba best negotiated an unorthodox 560-metre track to win in 14:28.98, 0.70sec ahead of two-time world champion and Olympic silver medallist Obiri.

Niyonsaba's victory saw her bag $30,000 in prize money to cap a tremendous season in which she switched to the 5,000m after being barred from running her favoured 800m.


The former Olympic and world 800m silver medallist, like South African Caster Semenya, has fallen foul of World Athletics regulations that prohibit athletes who have unusually high levels of testosterone from competing in races between 400m and a mile unless they undergo treatment to reduce the levels.

"I love challenges. I have a lot of resilience and determination," said the 28-year-old.

"I stayed behind most of the race, this was my tactic, I am still learning after switching from 800m to longer distances.

"I did what I had to do. We love to see the people around here, cheering for us. This race was amazing."

The Burundi runner left it late, taking the lead at the bell for the last lap ahead of her Kenyan rival and comfortably keeping her nerve through to the line.

"This race was like a championship," said Obiri. "It was a new experience, we did not know where we can start to kick and to accelerate.

"The race was hard for me, I tried to kick and did my best, but Francine is a former 800m runner. She had a stronger kick."

- Cowboy Crouser -

Crouser was introduced to the crowd of 2,500 basking in the early evening sunshine in his customary cowboy hat, but quickly shelved that to take an early lead.

USA's Ryan Crouser Fabrice COFFRINI AFP

The 28-year-old, who set a world record of 23.37m in the pre-Tokyo US Olympic trials in June, managed a best of 22.67m on his third attempt.

Tokyo silver medallist Joe Kovacs finished second with 22.29m, with Serbia's Armin Sinancevic claiming third spot (21.86).

Crouser also beat by 7cm the meet record set in 2018 by Tokyo bronze medallist Tom Walsh, the New Zealander -- who sports "Space for rent" on the front of his all-black vest after losing sponsorship -- finishing fourth (21.61).

"This meeting record is a big one for me," said Crouser. "This is my first Diamond League victory. I am honoured to be here and come out with a victory.

"I love great events like this, you can see and feel the energy of the crowd. This is a perfect evening."

Crouser was joined on the winners' podium by teammate Maggie Ewen, who won the women's shot with a best of 19.41m, having failed to even make the Olympics.

Olympic champion Mariya Lasitskene of Russia won the women's high jump in a meet record of 2.05m.

Russia's Mariya Lasitskene STEFAN WERMUTH AFP

"The venue here is difficult and fantastic at the same time - difficult because of the track and fantastic because of the spectators," said the three-time world gold medallist.

There was no such luck, however, for Germany's Malaika Mihambo, another Tokyo champion, who could only finish fifth in the women's long jump, which was won by Serbia's Ivana Spanovic in 6.96m.

Sweden's Thobias Montler won the men's long jump with a last-gasp 8.17m, while Ethiopian Berihu Aregawi topped the podium in the men's 5,000m in 12:58.65.

All 25 other Diamond League finals are scheduled for Thursday at the iconic Letzigrund Stadium, where more than 20,000 spectators traditionally create a raucous atmosphere.

© 2021 AFP

Protests as France sends last nuclear shipment to Japan

Issued on: 08/09/2021 - 

The container of highly radioactive Mox was loaded aboard a ship at harbour in Cherbourg in northern France.

 Sameer Al-DOUMY AFP

Cherbourg (France) (AFP)

Activists from environmental group Greenpeace protested against a shipment of reprocessed nuclear fuel that was set to leave France for Japan on Wednesday for use in a power plant.

The load of highly radioactive Mox, a mixture of reprocessed plutonium and uranium, was escorted by police from a plant near the port of Cherbourg to the dockyard in the early hours of the morning.

A handful of Greenpeace activists waved flags and signs with anti-nuclear logos as they camped out on Tuesday night to wait for the heavy-goods truck transporting the high-security cargo.

The Mox from French nuclear technology group Orano is destined for a nuclear plant in Takahama in Japan and is the seventh such shipment from France since 1999.

Greenpeace activists wait for the convoy.

 Sameer Al-DOUMY AFP

Japan lacks facilities to process waste from its own nuclear reactors and sends most of it overseas, particularly to France.

The country is building a long-delayed reprocessing plant in Aomori in northern Japan.

"Orano and its partners have a longstanding experience in the transport of nuclear materials between Europe and Japan, in line with international regulations with the best safety and security records," Orano said in a September 3 statement.

The fuel is being shipped by two specially designed ships from British company PNTL.

© 2021 AFP

PUTIN 💓GLOBAL WARMING OPENING THE ARCTIC
Russian minister dies trying to save filmmaker in Arctic drills

Issued on: 08/09/2021 - 

Zinichev previously served in President Vladimir Putin's security detail 

Alexey NIKOLSKY SPUTNIK/AFP

Moscow (AFP)

Russia's emergencies minister has died trying to save a filmmaker who slipped from a cliff during training exercises in the Arctic, officials said Wednesday.

Yevgeny Zinichev, who previously served in President Vladimir Putin's security detail, is the first Russian cabinet member to die on duty.

He was lauded by senior government officials and the Russian leader as a loyal civil servant and a "hero". The UK's ambassador in Russia also offered condolences.

The 55-year-old "tragically died trying to save a person's life" near the city of Norilsk, the ministry said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies.

The ministry identified the filmmaker as 63-year-old Alexander Melnik who produced several films set in the Arctic region. It said he also died in the incident that took place earlier Wednesday.

Margarita Simonyan, the well-connected editor-in-chief of the state-funded news outlet RT, said the minister had fallen to his death trying to save the man later identified as Melnik.

"He and the cameraman were standing at the edge of a cliff," she said.

"The cameraman slipped and fell... Before anyone even figured out what happened, Zinichev jumped into the water after the fallen person and crashed against a protruding rock."

- Personal tribute from Putin -

Zinichev's deputy Andrei Gurovich said in televised remarks: "Without thinking for a second he acted not like a minister, but like a rescuer.

"This is how he lived all his life," Gurovich added.

In an usually personal note to Zinichev's family published by the Kremlin, Putin said he was "shocked by the tragic news" of his death.

"We have lost a true military officer, a comrade, a person of great inner strength and courage and bravery close to all of us. For me, this is an irreparable personal loss," Putin said.

Zinichev was a member of the KGB security service in the last years of the USSR and his career took off after he served in Putin's security detail between 2006 and 2015.

He held a number of high-profile jobs, briefly serving as acting governor of Russia's exclave region of Kaliningrad and then as deputy head of the Federal Security Service (FSB).

He was appointed head of the emergencies ministry in May, 2018. He was also a member of Russia's Security Council.

As head of the emergencies ministry, he held one of the highest-profile cabinet jobs, dealing with natural and man-made disasters and other rapid-response situations across the vast country.

The two-day drills he was participating in across several Arctic cities including Norilsk, kicked off on Tuesday involving over 6,000 people.

- 'Big loss for Russia' -

Condolences poured in from top officials and even foreign dignitaries including Serbia's President Aleksandar Vucic.

Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin praised Zinichev as a "true Russian officer" and Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov said the minister "died like a hero."

"I knew him personally. We worked together closely and fruitfully," said the head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin.

FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov called his passing "a big loss for Russia."

The British Ambassador to Russia, Deborah Bronnert, said on Twitter she was "saddened" by Zinichev's death and expressed her condolences to his family.

Melnik was an award-winning film director and had travelled to Norilsk to work on a new film about the development of the Arctic and the Northern Sea Route.

Opening up the Arctic is a strategic priority for Moscow and it has huge projects to exploit the vast region's natural resources.

© 2021 AFP

Priceless historical Dutch artefacts get new lease of life

Issued on: 08/09/2021 - 

RESTORATION

The new building has the same floor area as almost four-and-a-half football fields, uses solar power as well as rain water to flush its toilets, and sustains its own climate 

Clemence OVEREEM AFP


Amersfoort (Netherlands) (AFP)

Prized paintings, an ornate throne and a barrel organ that survived the great 1953 flood are some of the thousands of artefacts plucked from obscurity to be showcased in a new Dutch 'physical memory' centre.

Dutch culture minister Ingrid van Engelshoven will on Monday unveil the new Netherlands Collection Centre (CC NL), a state-of-the-art, tailor-made building housing a myriad of objects which previously gathered dust in storages at four of the country's most influential museums and institutions.

While not a museum, the combined collection will be available on appointment for people expressing a specific interest or for research purposes.

The CC NL "brings to light thrilling collections that were previously hidden from view," said Taco Dibbits, director of Amsterdam's famous Rijksmuseum where some of the artefacts were previously stored.

"Combining the collections means that royal carriages now stand alongside farm carts. This gives rise to a more complete picture of the Netherlands, both in a chronological and social sense," Dibbits said in a statement.

"The four national collections together under a single roof form the physical memory of the Netherlands," the Rijksmuseum statement added.

Building the high-tech centre, which features the country's first dedicated quarantine chamber to clear museum pieces of mould and insects, started in the central city of Amersfoort in 2018.

The building has the same floor area as almost four-and-a-half football fields, uses solar power as well as rain water to flush its toilets, "and sustains its own climate," CC NL location manager Wim Hoeben told AFP.

A veritable Aladdin's cave, it houses some 500,000 objects from the four collections, from King William II of the Netherlands' ornate throne to a large traditional barrel-organ called De Blue Mortier, which at 5.4 metres (17.7 feet) tall is the largest object.

Built in 1913, the organ was severely damaged in the Netherlands' infamous, deadly 1953 floods, before it was eventually restored.

An ancient steam engine weighing over seven tonnes and the restoration of a 350-year-old painting by Dutch still life master Matthias Withoos are also among the artefacts.

Moving all the pieces from across the Netherlands was a mammoth task: it took some 869 truckloads to get all of them to their new home.

"It was quite an adventure," Hoeben told AFP.

The storage depots previously used by the Rijksmuseum, Open Air Museum, Het Loo Palace and Cultural Heritage Agency "did not meet the needs of modern collection management," the Rijksmuseum said.

Hoeben added they needed a lot of energy to be heated or cooled and were not always easily accessible.

© 2021 AFP

ISRAEL APARTHEID PRISON NATION 

Israel arrests relatives of Palestinian fugitives after jailbreak

Issued on: 08/09/2021 - 
A protester in the Gaza Strip holds a spoon, reportedly the tool six Palestinian prisoners used to dig their way out of Israel's Gilboa prison SAID KHATIB AFP
2 min
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Ramallah (Palestinian Territories) (AFP)

Israeli troops have arrested at least six relatives of Palestinians who broke out of a high-security jail, a local watchdog said on Wednesday amid protests in support of the escapees.

The six Palestinians staged their jailbreak on Monday through a hole they had dug under a sink in a Gilboa prison cell in northern Israel -- reportedly using a spoon.

Israel has deployed drones, road checkpoints and an army mission to Jenin, the home town in the occupied West Bank of many of the men locked up for their roles in attacks on the Jewish state.


The Palestinian Prisoners' Club said two brothers of Mahmud Ardah, described in local media as the mastermind of the escape, have been arrested.

The army has also taken into custody four other people -- fellow family member Dr Nidal Ardah, two brothers of Mahmud's cousin and fellow fugitive Mohammad Ardah and the father of Munadel Infeiat, another escapee.

All three of these escapees are members of the Islamic Jihad armed group.

Amani Sarahneh, a spokeswoman for the prisoners' group, told AFP that others could also have been arrested, while some had been only briefly detained.

Asked by AFP, the Israeli army -- which has occupied the West Bank since 1967 -- said "several arrests were made overnight", without elaborating.

Subhiyeh al-Ardah, the mother of escaped prisoner Mohammad Qassem Ardah, prays for him at her home in Arraba village south of Jenin on September 8, 2021 

JAAFAR ASHTIYEH AFP

"Holding someone in order to coerce a relative to do something is a mafia-style tactic," tweeted Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine director for Human Rights Watch, on Wednesday.

An Israeli injunction is in effect against publishing details of the jailbreak investigation, even as local media report on the scramble to recover from the embarrassing lapse and prevent any possible attack by the fugitives.

The group on the run includes Zakaria Zubeidi, a former militant leader from Jenin.

The Palestinian Prisoners' Club reported "tensions" in Israeli prisons on Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for the Israeli prison authorities confirmed to AFP that fires had been lit in Ktziot and Ramon jails.

"The situation is now under control, the fires have been extinguished," she said as Palestinian groups called for rallies later Wednesday in Nablus, Ramallah and Jenin in support of the men on the run.

Many people in the Gaza Strip and in Jenin took to the streets to celebrate when news of the escape broke on Monday.

Gilboa prison -- which opened in 2004 during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising -- is a high security site where hundreds of Palestinians are detained among other inmates.

The prison service said all those held at Gilboa over "security offences" were being relocated in case more escape tunnels have been dug beneath the facility.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has called the breakout "a serious event that required a comprehensive effort by all of the security services".

His Palestinian counterpart, Mohammed Shtayyeh, said on Tuesday he was "happy" about the jailbreak.

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© 2021 AFP

WHO IGNORED BY G7
WHO urges Covid vaccine booster moratorium until 2022

'We don't want any more promises,' said Tedros.'We just want the vaccines.'

Issued on: 08/09/2021 -

 Christopher Black World Health Organization/AFP

Geneva (AFP)

The World Health Organization called Wednesday for countries to avoid giving out extra Covid jabs until year-end, pointing to the millions worldwide who have yet to receive a single dose.

"I will not stay silent when the companies and countries that control the global supply of vaccines think the world's poor should be satisfied with leftovers," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists.

Speaking from WHO's headquarters in Geneva, Tedros urged wealthy countries and vaccine makers to prioritise getting the first jabs to health workers and vulnerable populations in poorer nations over boosters.


"We do not want to see widespread use of boosters for healthy people who are fully vaccinated," he said.

The WHO called last month for a moratorium on Covid-19 vaccine booster shots until the end of September to address the drastic inequity in dose distribution between rich and poor nations.

But Tedros acknowledged Wednesday that there had "been little change in the global situations since then.

"So today I am calling for an extension of the moratorium until at least the end of the year," he said.

High-income countries had promised to donate more than one billion vaccine doses to poorer countries, he said -- "but less than 15 percent of those doses have materialised.

"We don't want any more promises," he said. "We just want the vaccines."

- 'Appalled' -

Despite the call for a moratorium, some countries have been arguing for booster jabs not only for vulnerable people but also for the wider population, citing signs of waning vaccine effectiveness against the highly transmissive Delta variant.

The WHO has acknowledged that an additional dose could be needed for immunocompromised people, but stresses that for healthy people, the vaccines still seem very effective, especially in preventing severe disease.

"There is not a compelling case to move forward with a generalised recommendation for booster doses," Kate O'Brien, the WHO's vaccines chief, told Wednesday's news conference.

The UN health agency has set a global target of seeing every country vaccinate at least 10 percent of its population by the end of this month, and at least 40 percent by the end of this year.

It wants to see at least 70 percent of the world's population vaccinated by the middle of next year.

But Tedros lamented that while 90 percent of wealthy countries have hit the 10-percent mark, and more than 70 percent have already reached 40-percent, "not a single low-income country has reached either target".

He expressed outrage at a statement by a pharmaceutical industry organisation that the world's seven wealthiest nations, known as the G7, now had enough vaccines for all adults and teenagers -- and to offer boosters to at-risk groups -- and so the focus should shift to dose sharing.

"When I read this, I was appalled," he said.

"In reality, manufacturers and high-income countries have long had the capacity to not only vaccinate their own priority groups, but to simultaneously support the vaccination of those same groups in all countries."

© 2021 AFP

Venice films expose horrific Ukraine war, man's brutality

Issued on: 08/09/2021 - 

'I was deeply affected by the fact that in modern Europe nowadays these cruel, totally inhumane things can happen,' Vasyanovych told AFP 

Marco BERTORELLO AFP

Venice (AFP)

The ongoing conflict in Ukraine's east is the subject of two films at the Venice Film Festival this year, underscoring the horror and futility of the simmering -- and largely forgotten -- war.

The festival also premieres Oleh Sentsov's "Rhino" about corruption in 1990s Ukraine, two years after the Ukrainian director was released from a Russian prison after being arrested for protesting the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

"Reflection", from Ukranian director Valentyn Vasyanovych, portrays the gruesome torture inflicted in secret detention centres by pro-Russian separatists in occupied Ukraine.

A documentary by France's Loup Bureau, "Trenches", follows Ukranian soldiers inside their tunnelled defences as they deal with anxiety, monotony, and unpredictable artillery attacks.

Since 2014, Ukraine's army has been locked in a protracted battle in the east with pro-Russian breakaway fighters, a conflict that has killed more than 13,000 people.

"I was deeply affected by the fact that in modern Europe nowadays these cruel, totally inhumane things can happen," Vasyanovych told AFP Wednesday.

The torture -- which the United Nations said in July was occurring daily -- is "not less important than the war itself that's going on".

Using bleak, single-frame tableaus reminiscent of chiaroscuro paintings, Vasyanovych lays bare the torture inflicted on captured Ukrainian soldiers, and one former prisoner's journey towards healing and salvation.

After surgeon Serhiy (Roman Lutskyi) enlists in the war, he is soon taken prisoner. After first subjecting him to torture, his captors rely on him to tell them whether other mutilated and barely recognisable victims of their torture are dead, or still alive.

In one powerful scene, Ukranian soldiers who have been tortured to death are burned in a mobile incinerator inside a truck labelled "Humanitarian Aid from the Russian Federation."

- Spies and saboteurs -

In Bureau's documentary shot mostly in black and white, front-line soldiers spend much of their time digging with pickaxes, carrying sandbags, waiting and worrying -- all between moments of fire from enemy trenches within eyesight.

The trenches' lone female soldier -- nicknamed Persephone, for the queen of the underworld -- says her fellow soldiers, the same age as her children, "look like grown-ups, but some of them are just kids.

"They simply don't understand that it's no picnic," she says. "They're on a frontline, there are bombardments, people die and others are seriously injured."

Man's brutality is also a theme of the powerful period drama "Captain Volkonogov Escaped", by Russian directors Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov.

Like "Reflection", it is competing for the festival's top prize, the Golden Lion.

A captain, played by Yuriy Borisov, escapes from the state security services in 1938 Leningrad where he and his colleagues have been charged with killing "terrorists, spies and saboteurs".

"You know the times we're living in," the captain's superior tells him, to justify the gruesome torture used to exact confessions.

"Yes, they're innocent now -- but they'll be guilty later on."

© 2021 AFP

9/11: Remembering the irredeemable

• 
  
  Hamid Dabashi

  Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

5 Sep 2021

Smoke pours from the former site of the World Trade Center in Manhattan September 12, 2001 from a vantage point in Hoboken, NJ [Chris Hondros/Getty Images]

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I woke up habitually early. I started reading and writing while still in bed, blissfully unaware of what was happening just a few kilometres away in downtown Manhattan. Our Upper West Side apartment on the Columbia University campus in New York is quietly tucked away from the rambunctious downtown and commercial midtown in a pleasant residential area that might as well be in rural Scandinavia.

My landline rang (back then, cell phones were just a bizarre oddity and we still used old-fashioned landlines to communicate). It was a friend with worry in his voice. He asked if I was OK, and when I told him I was fine, he instructed me to turn on my TV.

When the TV screen lit up, I saw that our city was under attack. The magnificent Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had been hit by aeroplanes and were crumbling. People were running for their lives. I don’t remember the hour – time had stood still.

My thoughts immediately went back to April 15 of the same year, when I had taken my eldest daughter Pardis to the Windows on the World restaurant on top of the North Tower for her birthday. I remembered how we watched aeroplanes land on and take off from the nearby Newark airport. I remembered telling her,  “Isn’t that bizarre, we watch planes landing and taking off under our feet!”

Half in disbelief half in despair, I got dressed and, along with a few other scared souls, started walking towards downtown where the attack had occurred. The streets were eerily empty. There was a bizarre hush about the city. We, New Yorkers, are noise addicts. Too much quiet gives us anxiety. That morning, there was too much quiet about the city. I started looking at the buildings on Broadway as if they were children who had just lost their parents downtown but were still unaware of it.

The small crowd of bewildered people I was part of stopped at Houston Street.

I saw some Japanese tourists collecting the dust of the collapsed Twin Towers from the cars parked in the street as souvenirs. Strange, I thought – the dust of bricks, cement, flesh, coffee cups, and the dreams of those who had perished.

I began reciting Omar Khayyam to myself:

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and – sans End!

The nobility of mourning

The following day, Wednesday, was a teaching day for me. When I went down to our campus, I saw that our students had been given coloured chalk and were drawing their fears and anxieties, their mourning, on the steps of the Low Library.

Mourning is not for the dead. Mourning is for the living. It is the virtuous art of living a noble life – the sacred ceremony of marking precious lives passing into eternity. It is when we mortals feel the immortality of our souls. What happens to cultures that have lost the civilising solemnity of mourning?

Only for the span of a day or two did people have the quiet canopy of their inner souls where they could sit and mourn the terror that had been visited upon our city. After that, Americans were hurriedly denied that noble space of mourning as they were rushed to take revenge against an amorphous enemy that was quickly manufactured for them. Before revenge, people need peace, they need time to sit still and quietly feel the fear of our troubled world. But war drums rose rapidly and silenced those quiet meditations.

On the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I wrote a piece for Al Jazeera, in which I shared with my readers a brief exchange I had with the eminent French philosopher Jacque Derrida during a public lecture he delivered at Columbia soon after the horrid event. On that day, Derrida was talking about the “the mourning of the political” – explaining to his audience that what we were witnessing in the US was not just the mourning of those who perished on 9/11, but that in fact, we were mourning the very notion of “the political” as we have known it. At the end of his speech, I asked him if he thought “the politics of mourning” we were witnessing in the city would perhaps preempt “the mourning of the political”. He pondered the question, but could not come up with a straight answer. He said he had no crystal ball.

“The politics of mourning”, and the drums of war, however, did soon overwhelm this moment when Americans might have been brought to the bosom of humanity at large and feel the pain of loss in places farthest removed from their sentiments but still within the range of their fighter jets.

The so-called “war on terror” so quickly and violently took over the politics of mourning 9/11 that this nation was denied any sense of tragic interiority. All was external, all was violent revenge – nothing was left for any meaningful reflection on what had actually happened.

Five years later, on the 15th anniversary of the events of 9/11, I revisited this idea in another article for Al Jazeera. I detailed how the triumphalist politics of mourning had preempted the possibilities of a mourning of the political.

Indeed, on each landmark anniversary of the event, cries of anger and revenge have overwhelmed the whispers of a much quieter space necessary to internalise the pain of others. As others have become more others, the soul of this nation has remained wondering where in this world it can cast its whereabouts.

From Cannes to Kandahar

Afghans and Iraqis have suffered for years the consequences of what Americans suffered on 9/11. They still suffer the consequences of that fateful day today. But who remembers 10/7 (the day the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001) or 3/20 (the day the US invaded Iraq in 2003) as they do 9/11? Imagining the pain of others is where the noble act of mourning your own loss begins.

There is one simple work of art that connected the worlds of the US and Afghanistan together at the time.

In May 2001, Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf premiered his film, Kandahar, in Cannes. Despite receiving critical acclaim, the film initially did not make much of an impact in the US. In September of the same year, however, it assumed an entirely unanticipated importance. Soon after 9/11, I solicited the permission of Makhmalbaf and screened Kandahar at Columbia to widespread reception.

My purpose at the time was to place the tragic events in New York in the larger context of the region by seeking to form proximity and solidarity between the two cities of Kandahar and New York. But it was mostly a lost cause. The country was getting ready to declare war on Afghanistan – a war that even the most liberal and progressive Americans, like Richard Falk, considered just.

“I have never since my childhood supported a shooting war in which the United States was involved, although in retrospect I think the NATO war in Kosovo achieved beneficial results,” he wrote in an article for the Nation in October 2001. “The war in Afghanistan against apocalyptic terrorism qualifies in my understanding as the first truly just war since World War II.”

But the spectacle of violence staged on 9/11 was not apocalyptic, and the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan would not remain limited in its vengeful disposition, as indeed Richard Falk himself feared and recognised. Wars generate and sustain their own militaristic logic and apocalyptic ends.

National tragedies abound in American history. From the Civil War to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln to the equally traumatic assassinations of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X, all the way to the tragic events of 9/11, Americans had much occasion for grief and self-reflection throughout their country’s history.

The triumphalist militarism of the “war on terror”, the wanton cruelty of destroying two countries in revenge for the 9/11 attacks does not eradicate the empty hole that fateful day has left behind. It just conceals it. This country will never become a nation unless it learns the wisdom and the solace of mourning a national tragedy before reaching for its guns and fighter jets. That will never happen unless and until the life of an Afghan or Iraqi child becomes indistinguishable from that of an American child. Revenge does not heal a tragic hole in a people’s soul. It just denies it.

Downtown Manhattan is back to its crowded and busy self. 9/11 has become part of an iconic history people scarce remember. It has become like December 7, marking the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. All the memorable American holidays like Memorial Day or Labor Day are those that can be adjusted to a Monday and thus transformed into a long weekend occasioned for people to take a break from their backbreaking routines. 9/11 will always remain a forgettable, irredeemable, working Tuesday, when for a brief moment the soul of this people feared what the world fears all the time.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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  Hamid Dabashi

  Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

  Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He received a dual PhD in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University. He wrote his dissertation on Max Weber's theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time. Professor Dabashi has taught and delivered lectures in many North American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. Professor Dabashi has written twenty-five books, edited four, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, and comparative literature to world cinema and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). His books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Danish, Russian, Hebrew, Italian, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan. His books include Authority in Islam [1989]; Theology of Discontent [1993]; Truth and Narrative [1999]; Close Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, Future [2001]; Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran [2000]; Masters and Masterpieces of Iranian Cinema [2007]; Iran: A People Interrupted [2007]; and an edited volume, Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema[2006]. His most recent work includes Shi’ism: A Religion of Protest (2011), The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (2012), Corpus Anarchicum: Political Protest, Suicidal Violence, and the Making of the Posthuman Body (2012), The World of Persian Literary Humanism (2012) and Being A Muslim in the World (2013).

The 'megacomet' Bernardinelli-Bernstein is the find of a decade. Here's the discovery explained.


By Meghan Bartels 

SPACE.COM

1 day ago

The scientists that found Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein are an unlikely pair

An image taken by the Dark Energy Survey shows Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein in October 2017. (Image credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Bernardinelli & G. Bernstein (UPenn)/DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys. Acknowledgments: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab)/M. Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab)/J. Miller (NSF’s NOIRLab))


Even Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein admit they're an unlikely pair of scientists to end up with a record-breaking comet named in their honor.

Scientists briefly estimated that Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein, as it's now known, was the largest such icy body identified to date, perhaps more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) across. Additional observations have cast that into doubt, but given the "megacomet" a new distinction: it sprouted a tail remarkably far from the sun, suggesting more revelations to come. All told, the object offers astronomers an unprecedented opportunity to watch the antics of a comet.


But Bernardinelli spotted the object only a week or so before defending his dissertation, which focused on finding an entirely different type of outer solar system object, trans-Neptunian objects. And Bernstein's primary scientific interest lies in another topic: looking for distortions caused by dark matter. Yet here Bernardinelli and Bernstein are, with one of the largest known comets to date named for them. They seem a little dazed by the turn of events — although they both said their parents are quite pleased with unexpected development.

"This is an unusual honor for a cosmologist," Bernstein, an astronomer at the University of Pennsylvania, told Space.com, "but my mother's very happy."

A different quest

Bernardinelli's doctoral thesis focused on identifying a class of objects called trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), of which Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is distinctly not one, although his research discovered more than 800 of those as well.


TNOs are hunks of rock that, as the name implies, circle the sun but remain out beyond Neptune's orbit. That's about 30 times the Earth's average distance from the sun, which is about 93 million miles (150 million km) and which scientists call an astronomical unit, or an AU. But most TNOs never stray farther from the sun than a few hundred astronomical units.

So when Bernardinelli's analysis pulled up an object and declared that its most distant point from the sun was tens of thousands of astronomical units from the sun, he noticed.


"It immediately popped out in my eye," Bernardinelli, who completed his doctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania this summer and is now starting a postdoc at the University of Washington, told Space.com. He remembers thinking, "'This is weird — what is this thing?'"


The detection was so weird, in fact, that he thought it was a mistake and went looking for errors. But that quest came up empty, so he brought the find to Bernstein, his advisor. "I didn't see anything, everything looked real," Bernardinelli said. "It looked more real than most of the things we find."
A lucky find


The researchers spotted Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein in data called the Dark Energy Survey (DES), which ran on a telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile from 2013 to 2019.


("It's not like this is the Pedro and Gary show at all," Bernstein said. "In fact, we wanted the comet to be called Comet DES, but apparently that's against the rules.")


The Dark Energy Survey was, as its name implies, a survey designed to help scientists understand dark energy, a mysterious substance that scientists have not yet seen directly but is believed to make up 68% of the universe and warps our view of other galaxies. The project captured more than 80,000 images of the sky, revisiting specific patches about every two weeks. In each image are tens of thousands of cosmic objects of all shapes and sizes.


"When you take an image of the sky, you're not taking just an image of the galaxies, you're taking an image of everything that is between you and them, essentially," Bernardinelli said. "So you get things like stars, you get airplanes, you get asteroids, and everything else in between."


So Bernardinelli and Bernstein reserved time on a supercomputer and set about designing a way to spot TNOs within the Dark Energy Survey images. Using the time and location of each image to stack up solar system views, the researchers set the algorithm to identify when at least seven different images lined up to show a speck moving according to the laws that govern the movement of solar system objects.


"It's a massive connect-the-dots." Bernardinelli said.

An artist's depiction of Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein plowing through the solar system. (Image credit: NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. da Silva (Spaceengine))


"We knew it was real right away."— Gary Bernstein, astronomer


Although seven different images was the minimum setting, the massive comet turned up in 20 or 30 separate images, Bernstein said. "There's absolutely no way you could get that by accident," he said. "We knew it was real right away."


But in fact, the algorithm still shouldn't have flagged the object, he noted. Bernardinelli and Bernstein had set the program to look for objects located at least 30 AU from the sun, around where Neptune orbits. That setting was a matter of convenience — it matches the location of the TNOs that were the researchers' main goal and closer images are tricky to identify with two weeks often stretching between images.


When the survey was operating, however, the comet was already closer — only 25 AU from the sun by 2017. (According to the orbital calculations, the closest Bernardinelli-Bernstein will come to the sun is about 11 AU — still more distant than Saturn's orbit — in 2031.)


"It was a little bit of luck that we caught it," Bernstein said, adding that the luck likely was a result of the object being so easy to see.

Cause for excitement


Although what initially stood out to Bernardinelli was the comet's weird orbital characteristics, the discovery made such a splash because of a different trait, the comet's estimated size. Based on the object's brightness and distance, the scientists initially estimated that the comet's nucleus — the icy rock at its core — was 60 to 120 miles (100 to 200 kilometers) wide.


Ironically, if the detection had turned out to be one of the TNOs the study was really targeting, it would have been unremarkable, since scientists know of plenty of TNOs of that size. But as far as comets go, that size estimate is truly massive. Among the comets scientists have studied in detail, only two are in the same class: Comet Hale-Bopp, which made a close approach to Earth in 1997, and Comet C/2002 VQ94 (LINEAR), which came no deeper into the solar system than Jupiter's orbit.


Large comets are rare because the same vaporizing ice that makes them so spectacular to see robs them of their being, so every pass by the sun leaves the comet a little bit smaller than before.


"It's very rare to see big comets basically because unless you're catching it in its first or second passage, most of its material would already be gone," Bernardinelli said.

However, scientists have always expected objects like Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein to exist, wandering the frigid edges of the solar system for eons. And outside experts say that not only is the discovery not surprising, but it's also a sign that scientists are on the right track in piecing together the history of the solar system.


"It's neat but not that unexpected," Meg Schwamb, a planetary astronomer at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland who specializes in the outer solar system and wasn't involved in the discovery, told Space.com. "It fits in with the story we know."


That story goes like so: The young solar system sported a ring of small, icy rubble surrounding the massive planets. But when the planets migrated through the solar system, their huge gravity kicked the frozen rubble around.


Some flew out into interstellar space; some ended up in what scientists call the Kuiper Belt, where Pluto orbits; some ended up in the much more distant Oort Cloud where comets like Bernardinelli-Bernstein lurk. From there, as tides flow through the Milky Way and neighboring stars pass our solar system, gravity occasionally kicks a snowball inward on a planetary adventure.


And there are plenty of Kuiper Belt objects that look like the new comet, Schwamb said, so finding a similar object coming in from the Oort Cloud suggests scientists have been on the right path, and that more discoveries are still to come.


"Finding one large object like this probably means there's a few more out there to be found," Schwamb said.

Unexpectedly active


As more eyes spotted the new comet, its story changed a little.


Scientists turned their telescopes to the object's modern location and combed through archival data to rescue sightings that were missed in original analysis. And in those objects, it was clear that Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein wasn't fully frozen and had already woken up a little by the time it first appeared in scientists' images.


Comets grow their distinctive fuzzy comas when their ices warm up enough to vaporize away into a gaseous cloud surrounding the nucleus. The phenomena obscures the nucleus and brightens the comet — which means that if Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein was active in even the earliest sightings, scientists had overestimated its size.


"Comets like to surprise us."— Rosita Kokotanekova, comet scientist

It's a common challenge for scientists who focus on studying a comet's nucleus proper, Rosita Kokotanekova, a cometary scientist at the European Southern Observatory who was not involved in the discovery of the new comet, told Space.com. "Comets like to surprise us," she said. "You make the assumption that you're studying the nucleus, but you might be tricked by the surrounding coma."




Observations of Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein gathered by an outpost of the Las Cumbres Observatory in South Africa in June 2021 show activity on the comet despite its huge distance from the sun. (Image credit: LOOK/LCO)


Calculating the size of an active comet is much more complicated than measuring a bare nucleus, it turns out, so Kokotanekova said she couldn't offer a new size estimate for the comet, beyond that it would be somewhat smaller than the original calculations.


But despite the slightly less superlative size, Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein remains a stunner, she said — for the very same activity that invalidated the original size estimate. Scientists have only spotted a handful of comets active so far from the sun, where temperatures are still too cold for, say, water ice to turn to vapor, a typical type of cometary activity. Good observations of an active comet so far away could teach scientists about unknown types of cometary antics, she said.


"Usually there we have very few objects that are active, and we catch even fewer," Kokotanekova said. "What's really unique about this object is not its size but how active it is at these large distances and what a great opportunity it gives us to characterize distant activity."

A gift for years to come


Regardless of size and activity, all the scientists agreed that the most exciting aspect of Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is how well scientists will be able to study it.


A few different factors make the comet particularly promising. First, given a 2021 discovery and a 2031 close approach to the sun — plus old observations from as early as 2010 — gives scientists a decades-long look at the object that's rare for this class of comet that makes such long journeys.


"Studying long-period comets is more complicated," Kokotanekova said, compared to short-period comets that never stray so far from the sun. "They just pass through the solar system, we catch them quite late on, and then we study them for a brief period. And then they're gone forever."


And much of Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein's journey, scientists will have practically continuous views, thanks to the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile scheduled to begin observing in 2023. That facility will survey the southern sky once every three days, offering astronomers an impeccably detailed view of how the comet changes as it approaches the sun.


"We're going to get an entire movie of this object as it evolves and comes inward," Schwamb said. Kokotanekova hopes that, in particular, the movie will teach astronomers what types of activity turn on and at what distances from the sun.


Although they didn't set out to find such an important comet, both Bernardinelli and Bernstein said that their unexpected discovery this summer has given them a new appreciation for the dirty iceballs rattling around the outer solar system.


"I will still have my day job, I think, of cosmology," Bernstein said. But still, "it's been enjoyable, I've really learned a lot about comets."


For Bernardinelli, however, the chance encounter with the comet that now carries his name may change his own scientific trajectory, he said. "I had never thought too hard about comets before, and as I move on to the postdoc stage I get to expand the types of things that I do, so I'm definitely considering branching into comets more."
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Email Meghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com or follow her on Twitter @meghanbartels. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

Singh promises to double funding, make public transit fully electric by 2030


The Canadian PressStaff
 Tuesday, September 7, 2021 

NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is seen during an election campaign stop in Toronto, Tuesday, September 7, 2021. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward

TORONTO -- NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is promising to double funding for public transit projects to help municipalities make their public transit fleets fully electric by 2030.

Singh said Tuesday the impacts of the climate crisis are already hurting communities across Canada with wildfires and drought. Public transit would be an investment priority for an NDP government because transportation is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, he said.

"We know the impacts of climate change are hurting us right now," Singh said while standing outside a streetcar loop in Toronto's historic Distillery District.

He pointed to Lytton, B.C., which was burned down by a wildfire in early July, as an example of the pressing need to address climate change.

Singh said that if elected in the upcoming federal election the NDP would increase the funding given to municipalities to electrify public transit from $2.2 billion to $4.4 billion.

"Our plan is to fight this climate crisis like we really want to win it," he said.

Singh said Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau continues to break his own promises to fight climate change and Canada has become the worst emitter in the G7 under his leadership.

Trudeau's climate promises during this campaign includes plans to regulate total emissions cuts in the oil and gas sector for the first time, with a view to getting to net zero by 2050.

"That is what we are committed to, that is what we are going to do, full stop," said Trudeau on Tuesday. "Just so people are clear -- major oil industry companies have also all committed to getting to net zero by 2050. This is an inevitable part of that."

The Liberals' climate change pledges also include setting new regulations that will require half of all cars sold in Canada to be zero-emission by 2030, and 100 per cent by 2035. Trudeau also said that if his party is elected it would help workers in the energy and construction industries pivot to new fields.

Singh said, however, that Trudeau had run on a green platform when he was first elected into government in 2015 but that the Liberal party had come up short on its climate-change promises since then.

"(Trudeau) sets targets and misses them. He says he's going to end fossil-fuel subsidies, and instead of ending them he increases them," said Singh.

The Conservatives' climate plans, meanwhile, include a promise to return Canada to a goal of slashing greenhouse gas emissions to 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030, rather than adopt a target recently increased by the Liberals of between 40 and 45 per cent.

The Tories are also pitching a "personal low-carbon savings account," in which consumers would see what they pay on fuel stored into an account that can be used for green purchases later, and vowing to revive the cancelled Northern Gateway pipeline project.

NDP candidate Norm di Pasquale, who is running in the Spadina-Fort York riding, said that climate change poses a real threat in downtown Toronto.

"We've had flooding of Lake Ontario, I worry about the Toronto Islands in particular," said Di Pasquale, referring to the small cluster of homes in the city's harbour. "They've had to sandbag their homes and some were actually forced to leave their homes.

"The effect on Lake Ontario is one of the more pronounced here."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 7, 2021.