How a 15-year-old Ukrainian drone pilot helped destroy a Russian army column

Stewart Bell and Jeff Semple - 

KYIV, Ukraine — As the Russian army made its move on Kyiv in late February, the Ukrainian defences enlisted a drone pilot to pinpoint a column of military vehicles approaching the capital from the west.


© Stewart Bell/Global NewsAndrii Pokrasa with drone, June 2, 2022.

The civilian who took on the task sent his drone up in a field near his house and found the Russian convoy. Ukrainian artillery destroyed it and the drone operator was quietly saluted as a hero.

He's also 15.

Read more:

The first 100 days of war through the eyes of a Ukrainian village

In an interview with Global News, Andrii Pokrasa acknowledged he was the kid who helped stop the Russian invasion of Kyiv.

The incident was confirmed by his parents, the head of the Ukrainian drone owners federation and a commander in the armed forces unmanned reconnaissance section.

"He was the only one who was experienced with drones in that region," explained the commander, Yurii Kasjanov. "He's a real hero, a hero of Ukraine."

Pokrasa said the experience was “very, very scary” but he didn't want the Russian soldiers to overrun his town.

He said the civil defence forces turned to him because they needed the GPS coordinates of the Russian column so it could be targeted.

“They provided us information where approximately the Russian column could be. Our goal was to find the exact coordinates and provide the coordinates to the soldiers,” Pokrasa said.

“It was one of the biggest columns that was moving on the Zhytomyr road and we managed to find it because one of the trucks turned on its lights for a long time."

His father passed the details over to a territorial defence unit using a social media app and the Russian invasion force was stopped near Berezivka, about 40 kilometres west of Kyiv.

“I gave them the coordinates and photos, and after that they targeted the location," the teenager said. "And I needed to coordinate more specifically where they should shell with artillery.”

Global News is not publishing the name of Pokrasa's town for security reasons.

Consumer drones have become a crucial tool in the Ukraine war. Hundreds of civilian drone operators have been documenting everything from Russian troop movements to evidence of war crimes.

Their images are posted online or shared with Ukrainian authorities, leaving the Russian invasion force nowhere to hide, all because of commercial technology that even kids can operate.

“It’s a game-changer for the war,” said Taras Troiak, a former drone retailer who heads the Federation of Drone Owners of Ukraine.


Following the Feb. 24 invasion ordered by President Vladimir Putin, Troiak started a Facebook group to encourage civilian drone operators to locate Russian forces near Kyiv and inform the military.

About 1,000 civilian operators have since joined the effort, and drones have been arriving from supporters in Europe and North America, he said.

“If we didn’t have such operators and drones who can help the Ukrainian army, I think Kyiv already could be occupied by Russian forces,” said Troiak.

Youths were also involved, he added, recounting how Pokrasa detected a Russian column that had crossed the border from Belarus and was on the highway between Zhytomyr and Kyiv.

“This kid sent GPS coordinates and Russians, after this, became dead,” he said during an interview at his office in Kyiv.

Despite his role repelling the invasion, Pokrasa seemed like an otherwise typical teen. There was a skateboard and trampoline in his yard, and a bike on the front porch.

Afraid of heights, he saw a YouTube video of drone footage filmed over Kyiv and became hooked on looking at the world from above, he said.

Using money he and his father made buying and selling crypto-currency, he bought his first mini-drone last summer and began flying it every day, although once school began he wasn’t able to spend as much time with it.

When the Russians came, he initially stayed home with his family. But a few days into the war he was asked to help because he was the only person in the region with a working drone.

Read more:

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Wolverines’ of Ukraine step out of shadows

Because his neighbors frowned on his drone, fearing it would make them targets, he took it to a nearby field with his father after dark. He eventually spotted the moving headlights that gave away the Russian convoy.

“It was two kilometres from us,” he said.

He had mixed feelings about the Russian soldiers who were killed as a result.

“First of all I was so happy, but also it was people there. They were occupiers but anyway they were people,” he said.

Using a bigger drone with a longer range supplied by the Ukrainian forces, Pokrasa continued to help spot Russian military movements.

"I tried to protect them as much as possible," Kasjanov said of Pokrasa and his father. "I asked Andrii 'Are you not afraid?' And he replied 'Yes I am scared but I can't do it any other way.'"

The commander said many youths too young to join the armed forces had been contributing, not only with drones but also by relaying information collected by watching Russian troops from their homes and vehicles.

"They feel themselves free people in a free land so that's why they wanted to be part of it." he said.

Pokrasa's mother Iryna said she was worried when her husband began taking their son out at night to look for Russian soldiers “but they also didn’t tell me a lot of things.”

She eventually took him to Poland to finish the grade nine school year, although she said he wanted to stay in Ukraine and keep helping.

She said she was proud of her son, whom she felt was destined for a career as an entrepreneur but needed to spend more time on his studies.

Pokrasa said some of his friends were impressed and others weren’t when they heard about how he had taken on one of the world’s strongest armies with his drone.

“They’re not really the strongest army,” he said.

Stewart.Bell@globalnews.ca

USA
Can journalists and grieving communities coexist in tragedy?



NEW YORK (AP) — As a knot of journalists stood across from a mortuary witnessing a funeral for a child killed in the Uvalde school massacre, some people passing by didn't disguise their anger.


© Provided by The Canadian PressCan journalists and grieving communities coexist in tragedy?

“Y'all are the scum of the Earth,” said one woman, surveying the cameras.

When tragedy comes to town in the 21st century, the media follows, focusing the world's eyes on a community during its most difficult hours. Columbine, Sandy Hook, now Uvalde, Texas — the list of places synonymous with horrible mass killings keeps growing.

Journalists are called upon to explain what happened, and sometimes to ask uncomfortable questions in places where many people want to be left alone to grieve. Is it possible to do it better, to co-exist within a moment no one wants to be part of?

Tempers have flared in Uvalde. One female journalist was told, “I hope your entire family dies in a massacre.” Some are threatened with arrest for trespassing while on public property. A group called “Guardians of the Children” blocked camera views, often with the encouragement of police.

Yet there are also people like Ben Gonzalez, who approached reporters near the mortuary after hearing the woman lash out to say that she doesn't speak for everyone. “Thank you for documenting this tragedy,” he said. “We'll look back at the photos you take and appreciate it.”

The shady courthouse square in Uvalde has been dotted by canopies erected by TV news crews. Journalists have been stationed at Robb Elementary School, where the shooting took place, near a makeshift memorial piled with flowers, stuffed animals and messages. At the local Starbucks, where many journalists go to work, tables are set aside for Uvalde residents.

These are the typical signs of the invasion of journalists that accompany such events.

“I respect the wishes of people if they want me to leave,” said Guillermo Contreras, a senior writer at the San Antonio Express-News. “By the second day (after the shooting), the people were overwhelmed. The town has been overrun by reporters. There was pretty much nowhere you could go without running into the media.”

Like most colleagues, Contreras tries to be sensitive to what Uvalde's people are enduring. He has a 10-year-old daughter at home.

“When you are at the epicenter of a situation like that, you really do need protection,” said Michele Gay, who lost her daughter Josephine in the Newtown school shooting a decade ago. “You are really not in a state of mind to be offering your feelings in front of the camera.”

Gay said she had no idea of the extent of attention given to the story until the state trooper assigned to protect her family drove them around town to see the memorials.

“At first, I was angry,” said Gay, co-founder and executive director of Safe and Sound Schools, an advocacy group. “It felt invasive. It felt hurtful ... At the same time, there were members of the media who were so thoughtful, caring and compassionate.”

The sensitivity that most journalists try to bring to such assignments can be undermined by those who stick cameras in the faces of people crying, or ask a grieving parent how it feels. One parent who lost a child in Newtown saw someone outside her home with a camera peering into a window, said Monsignor Robert Weiss of the town's St. Rose of Lima Parish.

In general, journalists do a poor job explaining what they do and a poor job putting themselves in the shoes of the people they are interviewing, many on the worst day of their lives, said Joy Mayer, a former journalism professor.


“It's really valid for people in that community to feel overwhelmed and resentful,” said Mayer, the director of Trusting News, which helps members of the media improve their relationship with the public.

Kelly McBride, an expert on journalism ethics at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, advises news organizations to better prepare when assigned to these stories. Most interviews on the street indicate this work hasn't been done; people in shock and trauma, she said, shouldn't have to make an on-the-spot decision about dealing with a reporter.

She praised CNN for sensitively handling the interview of a young survivor of the shooting who smeared herself in the blood of a dead classmate to appear dead. CNN reported on what the girl said, but didn't show her or play her voice.

Ana Rodriguez, who lost her daughter Maite in the shooting, sat at her dining room table to tell The Associated Press about how the girl aspired to become a marine biologist. She didn’t want her face to appear on camera to divert attention from her daughter.

Sometimes there's little time to prepare. Tony Dokoupil of CBS News was told to get on a plane to Texas. Fast. Dokoupil said he tried to get away from the pack and knock on doors; in one case, he came upon someone close to a child who died who helped arrange an interview with her parents.

He found residents polite and respectful even when they didn't want to talk. He was thanked by some people for being there and telling the stories.

Gay recommends journalists focus their attention on people who have lost their lives, not perpetrators. There has been a marked effort on the part of news organizations to minimize mentions of shooters, although Gay was concerned that she had seen more after Uvalde.

In Uvalde, questions raised about the police response to the shooting have lengthened the time the shooting has lingered in the news and increased hostility toward journalists. CNN used a tag team to stake out Pete Arredondo, the schools police chief who directed operations, and get an ambush interview.

“You have people who are supportive of law enforcement,” Contreras said. “It’s a small town; people know each other. All of a sudden people are pointing fingers at the officers you know, so there’s a division.”

For people in communities like Newtown and Uvalde in the immediate aftermath of these stories, the sheer repetitiveness is often wearing.

“If there’s been one interview out here there’s been 150,” said one downtown shopkeeper who, like many in Uvalde, didn’t want his name in a news story. “I mean, how many times can you interview people who don’t know nothing?”

There are some suggestions of what is known in the industry as a pool — where a handful of reporters ask questions of officials and report answers to a larger group. This is used most famously at the White House.

But McBride said this inevitably leads to less aggressive journalism. Most reporters are driven by the impulse to get things their competitors don't. It was tried in a few instances in Uvalde and proved unsatisfying, Contreras said.

Things grew quieter in Uvalde by this past weekend. Only a television satellite truck remained at the Robb school, and just a handful of journalists were at the courthouse square Saturday as a Hawaiian group presented a giant lei and sang songs.

There's no avoiding the shock an influx of journalists brings to a quiet community. Weiss recalls being swarmed by reporters after emerging from a meeting with parents. He didn't know what to say. But in general, the Catholic monsignor said he found the press respectful and has come to understand the importance of its role.

“We needed to get the story out there and we needed to keep this story out there,” Weiss said. “Because in 10 years, what has changed? If anything, it has gotten worse.”

___

Associated Press journalists Acacia Coronado, Jae C. Hong, Adriana Gomez Licon, Jay Reeves and Eliot Spagat in Uvalde, Texas, contributed to this report.

___

More on the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas: https://apnews.com/hub/uvalde-school-shooting

David Bauder, The Associated Press

Abortion rights advocates say they need more men's voices


NEW YORK (AP) — If Donovan Atterberry thought about abortion at all as a young man, it was perhaps with some vague discomfort, or a memory of the anti-abortion protesters outside the clinic that he would pass on his way to the park as a child.


© Provided by The Canadian PressAbortion rights advocates say they need more men's voices

It became real to him in 2013, when his girlfriend, now his wife, became pregnant with their first child together. She’d had a healthy pregnancy before, his stepdaughter, but this time genetic testing found a lethal chromosomal disorder in the developing fetus, one that would likely result in a stillbirth and also possibly put her life at risk during a delivery.

“As a man, I didn’t know how to console her, how to advise her,” Atterberry, now 32, recalls. “I said, ‘If I had to choose, I would choose you.’ ... It wasn’t a matter of do I believe in abortion or I don’t believe in abortion. At that point, I was thinking about her life.”

She chose to terminate the pregnancy and “it changed my whole perspective ... on bodily autonomy and things of that nature,” said Atterberry.

So much so, that he now works as a voting engagement organizer for New Voices for Reproductive Justice, which focuses on the health of Black women and girls, with abortion access being among the areas of concern.

“What I’m trying to convey is that it’s a human right for someone to have a choice,” he said.

That Atterberry is a man in support of abortion rights isn’t unusual; according to polls, a majority of American men say they support some level of access to abortion. And history is replete with men who have played active roles in supporting abortion, through organizations, as legislators and in the case of Dr. George Tiller, as an abortion provider. Tiller was assassinated in church by an anti-abortion extremist in Kansas in 2009.

Still, there is room for a lot more who are willing to speak out and be active in the political battles over abortion availability, Atterberry says.

Where men have always played an outsize role is in pushing for and enacting abortion restrictions — as advocates, state elected officials and most recently, as a U.S. Supreme Court justice. Justice Samuel Alito authored a draft of a high court ruling that would overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision establishing a nationwide right to abortion. The draft, which was leaked to a news outlet last month, appears to have the support of the majority of the six men sitting on the nine-justice court.

Women have always taken the lead in the fight to preserve abortion rights, for obvious reasons: They are the ones who give birth and who, in so many instances, are tasked with caring for children once they are brought into the world.

No one is calling for that leadership to change, said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University who specializes in law and gender.

“Men should not be out there trying to run the movement or take away leadership positions,” he said. “But being a part of it, supporting, listening and being active are all things that men can and should be doing.”

That’s what Oren Jacobson is trying to do at Men4Choice, the organization he co-founded in 2015, where the goal is to get men who say they support abortion rights to speak out and do more, such as protesting, making it a voting priority, and especially talking to other men.

“Everything we’re doing is focused on getting what are really millions of men — who in theory are pro-choice but are completely passive when it comes to their voice and their energy and their time in the fight for abortion rights and abortion access — to get off the sidelines and step in the fight as allies,” he said.

It hasn’t been the easiest of tasks.

Abortion “is almost never a conversation inside of male circles unless it’s introduced by somebody who is impacted by the issue in most cases,” he said. “Not only that, but ... you’re talking about a heavily stigmatized issue in society. You’re talking about sex and sexuality, you’re talking about anatomy, and none of those things are things that guys feel particularly comfortable talking about.”

But it is something that affects them and the culture they live in, notes Barbara Risman, sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“Sexuality has become so integrated into our lives, whether or not we’re partnered,” she said. “That is directly related to women’s control of fertility — and women do not control fertility in a world where abortion is not legal. ... Certainly, heterosexual sexual freedom is dependent on the ability to end an unwanted pregnancy.”

Also, a society in which the state has a say in reproductive decisions could lead to one in which the state has control over other decisions that could affect men more directly, Cohen said.

“Abortion law, abortion precedent is not just about abortion, it’s also about controlling intimate details to your life," he said. "So whether it’s your sex life, your family life, other parts of your private life, medical care, decision-making, all of those are wrapped up into abortion law and abortion jurisprudence and abortion policy,” he said.

Since the Supreme Court draft was leaked, Jacobson said he's seen more men speak out about abortion access and show more interest in his group's work than he has in the past several years.

What remains to be seen, he said, “is whether or not it’s going to catalyze the type of allyship that’s needed now and frankly has been needed for a long time."

Deepti Hajela, The Associated Press

Transgender, nonbinary teens at higher risk of suicide compared with peers: study



MONTREAL — Transgender and nonbinary teens are at much greater risk than their cisgender peers of having suicidal thoughts or attempting suicide, warns a new study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.


© Provided by The Canadian PressTransgender, nonbinary teens at higher risk of suicide compared with peers: study

The study, led by researchers from the University of Ottawa and published on Monday, indicates more than half of transgender teens said they had seriously considered suicide in the 12 months preceding the survey.

In total, 14 per cent of adolescents reported having suicidal thoughts over the previous year, while 6.8 per cent said they'd attempted to take their own lives. Transgender youth were five times more likely to have thought about suicide and 7.6 times more likely to have attempted suicide compared with youth who are cisgender — people whose gender identity corresponds with their sex at birth.

"This is very concerning," said Dr. Ian Colman, the study's author, based at the school of epidemiology and public health at the University of Ottawa's faculty of medicine. "Even though the stigma is going down, even though we see social progress in this area, it seems that our teenagers continue to experience difficulties.”

The data studied by Colman and his colleagues came from the Canadian Survey of Child and Youth Health published by Statistics Canada in 2019. Their sample consisted of 6,800 adolescents aged 15 to 17, the vast majority of whom (99.4 per cent) identified as cisgender and 0.6 per cent as transgender.

The majority (78.6 per cent) of survey participants identified as heterosexual, 14.7 per cent said they were attracted to more than one gender, and 4.3 per cent were unsure of their attraction. The survey indicated 1.6 per cent of respondents were young women who said they were attracted to the same sex, while 0.8 per cent of respondents were boys who said they were attracted to boys.

"One in five teenagers is a sexual or gender minority," Colman said, adding that the survey results indicated that mental health concerns are not a small problem.

"When you think that more than half of young transgender people have recently considered ending their lives, it means that even if we are aware of the problem and even if we try to help them, it is not enough, and we need to do more to try to provide safe spaces for these youth, as they are going through what is a difficult time for everybody,” he said.

Adolescence can be a turbulent time, especially for young transgender people, and even those who can count on the support of people around them will not be entirely immune to the turmoil, Colman said. It is even more difficult, he said, for young people who do not have such support and must weather the storm alone.

Researchers say the association between contemplating suicide or attempting suicide and belonging to a sexual or gender minority is in part explained by the bullying or cyberbullying to which these young people are subjected.

The findings of the Ontario study are consistent with those of a Quebec survey, the results of which were released earlier this year and found young people who reported having an "other gender identity" were up to three times more likely than their peers to show worrying signs of mental health problems.

These young people, for example, were much more likely than others to perceive their mental health as “fair” or “poor”; to experience moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety or depression; or to have recently considered that it would be better for their life to end.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death in Canada among adolescents and young adults aged 15 to 24.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 6, 2022.

Jean-Benoit Legault, The Canadian Press

KLEIN DEREGULATION DOOMS US

Alberta needs a greener grid but access fees could swamp us if we don't fix the system

Kristen van de Biezenbos - 


There's no escaping it. Calgary's commitment to net zero is going to require more electrical infrastructure — more high-voltage transmission lines and better connections throughout neighbourhoods.

So if you think the add-on fees on your utility are high now, just wait.

Access fees for the provincial grid and local power lines doubled in the past 10 years and now make up, on average, half of a residential bill.

Those costs will keep growing, in part, because of the need to decarbonize. But also because here, in Alberta, the electricity market system is vulnerable to overcharging by utilities. Those inflated costs are passed on to ratepayers.

And if that's not dealt with now, the cost of achieving net zero could be much more painful.

But first, let's look at how we got here.

Alberta's power market is unique in Canada but is similar to "unbundled" competitive markets in other parts of the world, including the U.S. and Europe.

Starting in the 1990s, Alberta unbundled or split the former electricity monopolies into the component parts of the power system — electricity generation, or power plants; transmission, or high-voltage power lines; distribution lines and poles in the cities connecting power to homes and businesses; and retail, or billing services.

The intention behind this was to create competitive markets for generation and retail services and to use regulation to keep transmission and distribution rates fair for both utilities and customers. But the pressure to expand and overbuild is baked right into the system.


© David Bajer/CBCAn aerial view of power lines in Edmonton in April 2022.


Transmission and distribution are still owned by companies with monopolies in different areas of the province, and so, to prevent them from engaging in monopoly behaviour, their rates are reviewed and approved by the Alberta Utilities Commission.

The commission is supposed to allow companies to charge back only the capital projects and other assets the system really needs.

But companies face pressure from their shareholders to get higher rates, and the simplest way for a company to push rates up is to add more infrastructure because the value of a monopoly's assets is the backbone of its rate — it earns a profit based on what it owns.

Relying on a whistleblower

Plus, as the recent overcharging scandal involving an ATCO transmission line to Jasper shows, transmission companies can deliberately inflate costs. In the ATCO case, it granted a single-source contract to a subcontractor, knowing the company was overcharging by 30 per cent, because this contract was part of a promise to secure lucrative work for one of ATCO's affiliates.

That 30 per cent overcharge would have been passed on to ratepayers had a whistleblower inside ATCO's own accounting department not alerted the commission before the costs could be added.

How many other deals or examples of fudging of numbers slip through because no one risks their career standing up to say stop?

The incentives to overbuild and overcharge are a problem that needs to be addressed now, because more lines will almost certainly have to be built over the next decade. Both wind and solar require considerable space, so new farms tend to be built in rural areas where transmission infrastructure is absent. New lines will be needed to connect the facilities.

Estimates vary, but transmission lines can cost up to $3 million per kilometre. That adds up, and you will see the cost on your bill in the fees.

A deeper need for change

Alberta will require significant distribution upgrades within cities, too, to handle more rooftop solar and other demand-side generation, to accommodate increased power draws from electric heating systems, major appliances, heating and cooling (especially with extreme weather on the rise) and electric vehicles without causing rolling blackouts and brownouts.

The province needs more wind and solar power and a better, smarter transmission and distribution system. But these things will likely involve high upfront costs, and too many Albertans are already buckling under the weight of existing bills, especially when it comes on top of inflation. We see that in the number of families seeking emergency help or having their power limited.

We need a plan for how to manage those costs, and we need it soon. This could mean revisiting the rate formulas for transmission/distribution and scaling back retail fees, or it could mean asking for federal funding and help from the Canada Infrastructure Bank to finance future upgrades.

Whatever the solution, Calgary's commitment to net zero means waiting to act will only let the bills continue to climb while ratepayers' pain deepens.

Outrage over police response as First Nations marchers hit by truck

Adrian Humphreys

NATIONAL POST

JUNE 6,2022


Witnesses were expressing outrage Sunday over police response to an incident the day before in Mission, B.C., when the driver of a pickup truck drove into a group marching to raise awareness of the treatment of First Nations at residential schools, injuring five.


© Provided by National PostMission RCMP says it's fortunate that no one was

While the RCMP said there was no indication it was a targeted attack, rather than characterizing the incident as a dangerous hit-and-run, officers declared it “an impatient driver (who) tried to get around a group of people marching on the highway,” in a media release .

“The RCMP are totally downplaying what actually happened,” said Garett Dan, of Abbotsford, B.C., who was participating in the march at the site of the St. Mary’s Residential School, where both of his parents attended.

“They shouldn’t be sugar coating anything like that. It was a hit and run. He fled the scene.”

The pickup driver steered onto the shoulder of the road in an apparent attempt to bypass traffic, he said. One of the march organizers stopped him.

“He didn’t like it and then all of a sudden he decided to hit him with his truck,” Dan said. “He drove into him. I was looking into my rear-view mirror to keep an eye on what was going on and you could clear-as-day see he went driving towards him.

“It doesn’t matter who you are, just because you’re in a hurry doesn’t mean you get to ride the shoulder and try to drive through a crowd of people.”

The driver allegedly hit more marchers further along the road.

Chris Robertson helped run the event, the March for Recognition for Residential Schools, which was organized by the B.C. chapter of the Crazy Indians Brotherhood, a drug and alcohol support group.

He said there were children and elders participating but none was hit.

Robertson heard that a truck had hit one of the traffic control flagmen at the back of the march and then saw the truck coming up the shoulder towards him.

Several organizers called for him to stop.

“I turned and looked back at him and at that point he stepped on the throttle and started towards us,” Robertson said.

One of his friends went under the truck and rolled out, while another went over the hood, he said. The truck’s bumper hit Robertson’s knee as it passed. The driver briefly stopped. Some water bottles were thrown at his truck, and he drove off, he said.

“Had it been any one of us (driving), we’d be in jail already. We would be charged with attempted murder, assault with a dangerous weapon … the book would have been thrown at us already,” Robertson said.

“If that man’s skin tone was another colour he’d be in jail. This is what our people talk about when we say white privilege. I hate going the racial route, because in order to get past things you need to rise up, but when stuff like this happens, this is what we’re talking about.”

Police were called about 12:30 p.m., said RCMP Const. Harrison Mohr, a media relations officer with the Mission detachment.

“It sounds like this driver became upset that his trip was going to be delayed by a few minutes and drove into oncoming traffic to try to get around the group,” Mohr said.

“When faced with oncoming traffic, he drove his vehicle into the midst of the group until the cars went by, then pulled out and passed again. In doing so, he struck several members of the March. Fortunately, none were seriously injured, and the March was able continue as planned.

“There is no indication that this incident was targeted, or that the driver’s actions had anything specifically to do with the people marching or their cause,” the RCMP said.

No one has been arrested and it remains under investigation. Mohr called on the public to provide dashcam or cellphone video.

The first word in the headline of the RCMP’s public statement on the incident is “minor.”

The last line of the RCMP statement says: “Trying to save a few minutes of time by endangering the lives of others is simply unacceptable.”

In answer to questions from National Post, Mohr said on Sunday that while witnesses helped to identify the licence plate of the truck, officers are “still working to confirm the identity of the driver.”

He said several witnesses were “not immediately available to meet with us,” on Saturday and officers wish to speak to more witnesses and gather evidence to support a charge recommendation.

“Our understanding is that only two of the four people who were hit actually went to hospital, and the two that did arranged for their own transportation and did not require an ambulance,” Mohr said.

Witnesses told the Post five people were injured.

By Sunday, Mohr was characterizing the motorist as a “dangerous driver” rather than an “impatient” one. He confirmed witnesses said he was “swerving into the group whenever he needed to avoid oncoming traffic.

“When our officers interview the suspect, they will certainly be interested in hearing directly from him about what his intentions were that day.”

Parts of the incident were caught on cameras at the march. Images show a blue Chevrolet pickup. An engine can be heard revving along with shouts from the crowd.

A white man with glasses and a baseball cap can be seen sticking his out of the window and turning back before driving off.

Iraq's Kurdistan judicial council defies supreme court over oil law

Sat, June 4, 2022

(Reuters) -The judicial council of Iraq's Kurdistan said the region's oil law remained in force, rejected a ruling from the federal supreme court that Kurdish authorities should hand over their crude supplies.

Iraq's federal supreme court ruled in February that Kurdistan's law regulating its oil and gas industry was unconstitutional.

"The actions of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in relation to oil and gas operations are in accordance with the Iraqi constitution of 2005. The provisions of the oil and gas law issued by the parliament of the Kurdistan region in 2007 do not violate those of the Iraqi Constitution," Kurdistan's judicial council said in a statement released on Saturday.

The statement said Article 112 of the Iraqi constitution, announced in August 2005, granted the federal government supervision over Kurdistan's oil and gas fields operating at that time, but that fields that started commercial production after that date did not apply to this article.

It also indicated that all oil and gas fields currently operating in the region started commercial production after August 2005.

The KRG has been developing oil and gas resources independently of the federal government, and in 2007 enacted its own law that established the directives by which the region would administer these resources.

(Reporting by Ali Sultan, Moaz Abd-Alaziz and Enas AlashrayWriting by Moaz Abd-AlazizEditing by Mark Potter)

Afghan musicians in Peshawar: between a rock and a hard place

Manzoor Ali Published June 6, 2022 - 

PESHAWAR: The four Afghan musicians were relaxing in their office in Tehkal area of Peshawar after a performance at an event when police came after them during the early hours of May 28.

Among the four was Javed Khan, (not his real name), who had arrived in Peshawar a few weeks back after a circuitous journey that brought him to Chaman. He was picked up by police that day.

“I have a large household, including an ailing father, to take care of; therefore, I came to Pakistan,” he said. Mr Khan said police checked their documents and took them into custody for illegal stay in Pakistan under Section 14 of the Foreigners Act 1946.

The musicians spent a week behind bars and their arrests created social media uproar. Civil society organisations arranged two protests against their detention until a local court granted them bail on Friday (June 3).

Mr Khan said the dire economic plight of Afghanistan had pushed him into exile. “I had no source of income; therefore, I came to Peshawar.”

The detained musicians are among thousands of Afghans who escaped to Pakistan after the fall of Kabul to Taliban in August last year and are living in constant fear of arrests and deportation.

However, the musicians’ detention has highlighted the hard choices Afghans fleeing their country have to make and the inconveniences they have to put up with.

A tale of two exiles

Hayat Khan, 53, (real name withheld on request), faced displacement from Afghanistan twice during the course of conflict in his country. He first fled to Pakistan in his childhood after the Soviet invasion of his country in 1979 and stayed here for 25 years.

Mr Khan’s musical journey started at the same time and he took inspiration from one of his relatives, a rubab player. He became a pupil of Misal Khan Ustad to learn the rubab. Later he went to work alongside Ahmed Gul Ustad, Nazeer Gul and Gulzar Alam.

“I learnt real music from Gulzar Alam and he is my Ustad (teacher),” Mr Khan said.

The US invasion of Afghanistan opened the second chapter in Mr Khan’s life. He had returned to Afghanistan after Hamid Karzai took over as president in 2001.

The US invasion gave birth to a bourgeoning media scene and culture industry. It was during this time Mr Khan went to work with several Afghan television channels like Shamshad, Khursheed, Lamar and Zhuwandun.

The reversal of fortunes for Mr Khan came when the Taliban rolled into Kabul last year. That fateful day he locked his office in Jade-i-Maiwand area of Kabul and went into hiding.

After a hide and seek lasting two months, he decided to move to Pakistan and came to Kandahar. Then he crossed the Pak-Afghan border via Chaman, reaching Quetta. From there he came to Peshawar, where he is currently staying with his family.

While in Kandahar, his teenage son went missing, but the boy contacted the family after several months, telling them that he had managed to sneak into Turkey via Iran.

Looking at his son’s jubilant face in the picture and pondering over his uncertain fate as a refugee, Hayat Khan’s eye welled up. “If Turks get hold of him, he will be deported to Kabul on the next flight,” he feared.

About their stay in Peshawar, Hayat Khan said “we cannot even think of venturing out” to Qissa Khawni Bazaar since “we have no visas” and could be deported to Afghanistan if police arrested them.

In case of deportation, he said, “we face threat to our lives at the hands of Taliban”.

According to Hayat Khan, he and many other people lost their livelihood after the fall of Kabul and were now living in penury under constant threat of arrest and deportation.

Public support for musicians

According to Rashid Ahmed Khan, president of Hunari Tolana, about 150 Afghan artists had made Peshawar their home since August last year.

His organisation took up their case with the KP culture department. “We have shared their names with the culture department. The department will now share them with police,” he said.

He said since Pakistan was not issuing visas for Afghans, most of them were coming via Chaman.

Hunari Tolana, Mafkoora Research Centre and other organisations staged a protest against the musicians’ detention last week.

The Human Rights Commi­ssion of Pakistan (HRCP) also expressed concern over the detention.

Following the protests, the authorities decided the culture department would issue cards to the musicians after registration in order to avoid a repeat of the May 28 incident.

The sword of deportation

The musicians’ fate still hangs in the balance despite an outpouring of support and their release on bail.

Tariq Afghan, a Peshawar High Court lawyer who is representing the detained musicians, said Islamabad should accommodate them on humanitarian grounds.

On the other hand, police sources told Dawn they had registered over 1,700 cases against Afghan nationals and arrested over 1,900 of them.

It was not clear how many of them were deported.

According to Capital City Police Officer Muhammad Ijaz Khan, the Afghans were being arrested for having no valid documents for their stay in Pakistan.

Barrister Muhammad Ali Saif, the KP government’s spokesperson, said police had recently taken action against those illegally staying in the country.

He added that the KP government would chalk out a mechanism to avoid a similar situation in future.

Published in Dawn, June 6th, 2022

Faults of theory
Abrahim Shah Published June 6, 2022 

THE recent surge in petrol prices necessitates that we question the conversation on inflation and economic policy. While supply-side shocks such as Covid-19 and the Ukraine-Russia war carry responsibility for this inflation, it is important to realise how modern economic theory omits mention of elite capture and circumscribes the discourse on inflation and economic well-being.

Ever since the rise of Milton Friedman’s monetarist school of thought following the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, inflation has been attributed to disturbances in the money supply — ‘too much money chasing too few goods’. This narrative, now the dominant paradigm in leading economics schools, envisions controlled government spending and interest rates that prevent the money supply or aggregate demand from rising rapidly.

This emphasis on money supply posits inflation as a ‘technical aberration’ — an outcome of faulty economic policies that result in the excessive circulation of money. It thus conveniently ignores how rising costs of living are products of political decisions and elite capture.

Pakistan’s economy perfectly captures this contradiction. As most Pakistanis reel from the unprecedented rise in petrol prices and the concomitant spike in the cost of living, many individuals have seen their wealth increase substantially through inflated asset prices and speculation in real estate. This speculation, coupled with the mushrooming of private housing societies, has resulted in land prices soaring beyond the financial capacity of most Pakistanis.

Economic policymaking must be questioned.

While many have made windfall gains from the real estate bubble, this sector has continued to evade even minimal levels of taxation. This poses two fundamental challenges and adds major caveats to the discourse on inflation. First, as land prices rise, individuals are forced to move to city outskirts and to live on high rents. This eats into their savings and incomes which are already facing the brunt of stagnant wages.

Second, the missed revenue stemming from the state’s inability to tax this influential sector significantly stymies the government’s ability to fund social welfare programmes such as affordable housing. The state’s failure to provide subsidised services such as housing and public transport thus only further exacerbates the cost of living as individuals are forced to increasingly rely on the profit-oriented private sector for these essential services.

This shift of revenue from the government to private coffers is a hallmark of the neoliberal paradigm and is something that needs to be critically analysed in conversations on inflation and economic policy. For as governments are forced into austerity on account of rising debt levels, they are unable to provide essential subsidies that only further aggravate the plight of the poor. With receding social welfare programmes and the government being unable to fund projects such as developing alternative sources of energy, the cost of living rises significantly. The recent decision of the government to hike price of cooking oil by almost Rs200 in Pakistan, the salvo against the NHS in the UK and burgeoning student debt in the US are all products of this paradigm.

The example of US student debt further convolutes the simplistic take of mainstream economic theory on inflation and economic growth. As Michael Hudson argues in Killing the Host, the direction the finance industry took in the 1980s resulted in industries shifting from ‘equity to debt’, while trade liberalisation policies led to the unfettered flow of hot capital, pushing governments into increasing levels of debt. As debt surged, countries were for­ced to adopt inc­reasing levels of austerity, further disadvan-t­­­a­­ging the least-privileged.

It thus becomes absolutely essent­ial that we quest­ion the turn economic policy­making takes in the wake of global inflationary crises. Emphasis on austerity measures or curbing money supply will stand redundant unless Pakistan embraces major reforms that make the economy more equitable and allow for a social safety cushion for the majority.

As history shows, however, responses to major economic crises have often been skewed to support the privileged over the many. This is evidenced both by the ‘Volcker Shock’ of the 1980s in the wake of the preceding stagflation and the bank bailouts after the 2008 global recession. Both of these interventions resulted in significant increases in inequality and wealth shifting from the bottom to the top of the income pyramid.

Policies that rely on trite and questionable economic fundamentals and which fail to account for political realities such as elite capture are thus no longer adequate to solve the economic conundrum Pakistan faces. What is instead necessary is to strongly question economic principles and the willingness to embrace alternative visions for a progressive society.

The writer is a civil servant and studied at Cornell University and at the University of Oxford.

Published in Dawn, June 6th, 2022

Web of resilience

Ali Tauqeer Sheikh Published June 5, 2022 -

PAKISTAN’S development model has still not recognised the limits of the natural environment and the damage it would cause, if violated, to the sustainability of development and to the health and well-being of its population. Pakistan’s environment journey began with Stockholm Declaration in 1972. A delegation led by Nusrat Bhutto represented the country at the Stockholm meeting, resulting in the establishment of the Urban Affairs Division (UAD), the precursor of today’s Ministry of Climate Change. In setting the country’s environmental agenda, we were inspired by the Stockholm Principles, but in reality, we have mostly ignored them for the last five decades. We’ve paid lip service to environmental sustainability without really thinking how this could make our economic growth robust.

On this World Environment Day, the world is celebrating Stockholm+50 to once again draw attention to the centrality of environment-development linkages under the rubric of ‘Only One Earth’. The 26 principles enunciated in the Stockholm Declaration have catalysed a new era of multilateral environmentalism. The world has in the last 50 years steadily built a complex web of linkages between the environment and development. The genesis of at least four principles of primary importance to Pakistan can be traced to the Stockholm Declaration: i) environmental problems are global, not just local, ii) the principle of precaution, requiring immediate action rather than waiting for conclusive scientific evide­n­­ce, iii) the principle of additionality, further expounded as the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” and iv) the ‘polluter pays’ principle, requiring emitters to bear the cost of damage to society and the environment. These principles were adopted and further refined at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 20 years later, in June 1992.

These four principles are now embedded in the Earth Charter as well as in numerous international agreements that form the backbone of the international environmental order, including around 18 multilateral environment agreements (MEA) that Pakistan has signed since. Almost all these agreements are inspired by the principles of Stockholm. Pakistan has also ratified all three Rio conventions — climate change, biodiversity and desertification. These conventions are intrinsically linked and represent a way of contributing to the sustainable development goals of Agenda-21, known as the SDGs.

In the last 50 years, the world has built a web of linkages between environment and development.

Forty years after Stockholm, and 20 years after the Earth Summit, in June 2012, world leaders initiated a process in Rio de Janeiro (Rio+20) for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development to negotiate the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 SDGs. Finally adopted in 2015, Pakistan affirmed and adopted Agenda-21 with characteristic enthusiasm. It is sometimes argued that the SDGs have taken the concept of sustainable development that had initially emerged from Stockholm and was subsequently defined by the Brundtland Commission in 1988 as development that “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.

It is, however not just principles, MEAs, or conventions that were triggered by the Stockholm Confe­rence. A recently released series of studies by the International Institute of Sustainable Development has argued that no less significant has been its contribution to the democratisation of environmental governance. Starting with the conference, global environmental negotiations have unlocked the doors to broader participation of diverse stakeholders in international environmental negotiations. This originates from the belief that governments cannot solve environmental problems alone. The Earth Summit recognised nine major groups as card-carrying delegates — women, children and youth, indigenous peoples, NGOs, local authorities, workers and trade unions, business and industry, the scientific and technological community, and farmers. It is now recognised that bringing in industry and the private sector is essential to both responding to environmental challenges and scaling up the implementation of MEAs and the SDGs. It is against this backdrop that the annual climate summits have become the largest congregations of environment interest groups.

While this accountability and inclusion has taken root globally, in Pakistan the soil has been less than fertile. From its establishment in 1973 to the end of the Cold War in 1991, the UAD stayed mostly dormant. The Environment Ordinance in 1983 and the Environment Act in 1997 remained top-down and resulted in two rigid dichotomies. Most importantly, contrary to emergent global trends, Pakistan’s environmental policies glossed over the Stockholm Principles and ignored the intrinsic environment-development link. Secondly, it focused on brown environment (urban) issues without having the necessary regulatory competencies or a culture of compliance. In this way, it laid the foundation for an adversarial relationship between the UAD and environmental stakeholders.

This approach has remained dominant for the last 50 years in Pakistan’s environmental decision-making. There are a few refreshing exceptions like the development of the National Conservation Strategy. Prepared over three years, and under the supervision of the deputy chairman, Planning Commission, it benefited from consultations with more than 3,000 sectoral experts and stakeholders. Its development was based on three operating principles: i) achieving greater public partnership in development and management, ii) merging environment and economics in decision-making, and iii) focusing on sustainable improvements in the quality of life. It was committed to increasing government spending on natural resource management and efficiency of resource use from four per cent of national investment to 8pc by 2000. Authored under the insightful leadership of Syed Ayub Qutub, the NCS recommended 14 areas for action — each area fully immersed in the Stockholm Principles. Presented at the Earth Summit in June 1992, for a moment, Pakistan seemed like a global environment leader.

Fifty years after Stockholm, we face a planetary crisis of climate change, propelled by unabated emissions and biodiversity loss made worse by persistent poverty and growing inequalities. This could not have been imagined in 1973 when the UAD was first set up. Now sustainable development has emerged as a cornerstone of the international development discourse. The collective search for solutions to reconcile economic development and environmental management resulted in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 SDGs in 2015, the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2016, and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction in 2018. They all have 2030 as the culmination year, just to remind policymakers before budgetary proposals are finalised.

The writer is an expert on climate change and development.

Published in Dawn, June 5th, 2022