It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, August 30, 2023
Global Fund secures deal to slash HIV treatment price
Geneva (AFP) – The Global Fund announced Wednesday a deal with generic pharmaceutical manufacturers to significantly slash the price of a cutting-edge HIV drug, in a move it said would save lives.
Issued on: 30/08/2023
The WHO has recommended TLD as the preferred first-line HIV treatment for adults and adolescents as it rapidly suppresses the virus that causes AIDS
The Global Fund, a partnership set up in 2002 to battle AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, said the agreement would make it possible to provide the advanced pill known as TLD for under $45 per person per year.
"This improved pricing -– a 25-percent reduction -– will allow governments in resource-limited settings to expand access to critical HIV services," it said in a statement.
The three-in-one pill bands together the drugs tenofovir disoproxil fumarate, lamivudine and dolutegravir.
The World Health Organization has recommended it as the preferred first-line HIV treatment for adults and adolescents, since it rapidly suppresses the virus that causes AIDS, has fewer side effects and is easy to take, the statement pointed out.
"The countries most affected by HIV face enormous fiscal constraints, and there are still millions of people who are HIV-positive who don't have access to quality treatment," Global Fund chief Peter Sands said in the statement.
"Reduced pricing for TLD means governments and other implementers of Global Fund grants can expand treatment programmes and invest more in prevention, saving more lives and reducing new infections."
Wednesday's announcement comes after the Global Fund, along with UNAIDS, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other partners in 2017 secured licensing agreements ensuring that TLD could be made available in low- and middle-income countries for up to $75 per person per year -- at the time an unprecedented pricing level.
Thanks to that deal, around 19 million more people living with HIV in resource-constrained settings are today receiving TLD, according to the Clinton Health Access Initiative.
Tunisia migrant crisis: 'Nowhere to live, nothing to eat'
Issued on: 30/08/2023 -
01:46
Nearly two months after mobs and authorities violently attacked black migrants in Tunisia, the country’s migration crisis continues, with new arrivals coming across overland borders including those fleeing conflict in Sudan. Many find themselves living in the streets often left to fend for themselves. France 24’s Lilia Blaise and Hamdi Tlili went to meet some of them in the southern Tunisian city of Zarzis.
Floods drown hope in Pakistan's impoverished Punjab villages
Okara (Pakistan) (AFP) – The coursing floods in eastern Pakistan first swallowed Nasreen Bibi's corn crop, then the cattle that fed on it, and finally her family home.
Issued on: 30/08/2023 -
A woman sits with her belongings floodwaters in a village in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province
They retreated to the roof to escape the rising water, before fleeing for their lives by boat.
"We didn't bring any of our belongings with us, everything we own is abandoned back there," said Bibi, who guesses her age in the 30s, from a relief camp inside a school in Mandi Ahmedabad, a village in eastern Punjab province.
"There is nothing left back home," she said, wiping away tears in a tent she shares with three young daughters.
"Fear plays on my children's minds."
Swaths of Pakistan's breadbasket were inundated this month, with at least 130,000 people evacuated, after the Sutlej river burst its banks and spilled over hundreds of villages and thousands of acres.
The head of Punjab's government, Mohsin Naqvi, said the flooding was caused by India releasing excess reservoir water into the Sutlej river, causing flooding downstream on the Pakistani side of the border.
With the water slowly receding, a ramshackle armada of 40 boats makes twice-daily food and aid deliveries to 80 water-bound villages where men perch on roofs guarding sodden possessions.
The floodwaters are still some eight feet (2.4 metres) deep, and the boats skim past the tops of waterlogged corn stalks blanched by the sun.
A family's financial security depends on agriculture in this largely impoverished corner of Pakistan.
Mud houses lie in ruins, with tumbled walls pooled in stagnant water, in Falak De Bheni, a village of 100 homes surrounded by drowned fields of sesame and rice.
"I don't want to plant a crop here next year, my heart can't bear it," Muhammad Tufail, 38, said as he stood at his ruined door surveying the damage.
"I don't even know how much money I spent, how many troubles I went through, to plant these crops. But the flood has left nothing in its wake."
More than 175 people were killed in Pakistan in rain-related incidents since the monsoon season began in late June, mainly due to electrocution and buildings collapsing, emergency services have reported.
- Flooding back -
Large tracts of rural Pakistan were ruined by record monsoon floods last summer that scientists linked to climate change and from which it is still recovering.
A village swamped by floodwaters in Pakistan's eastern Punjab province
A third of the country was submerged and 1,700 people were killed, while eight million were displaced.
The villages along the Sutlej River were spared in that deluge but are now battling the highest water levels in 35 years, authorities have said.
The assistant commissioner of Dipalpur -- the hardest-hit area in this year's flood -- said 11 rescue centres and five relief camps had been set up, with 4,600 emergency boat trips made since the floods came in mid-August.
The flooded villages of Dipalpur remain without electricity two weeks after the floods started.
Most of the cattle have been evacuated but those left behind have nothing left to feed on.
"Fodder has washed away," said 50-year-old Taj Bibi, struggling to keep a buffalo, a cow and a calf alive on leaves chopped from trees.
"Our cattle are begging us for food but we have nothing to give them," she said. "We are dying of hunger and so are our animals."
At Bashir De Bheni, a small hamlet of 15 houses built on the submerged river bank, rescue workers dropped off antibiotics and rehydration medicine for a toddler suffering diarrhoea and high fever.
"Every problem imaginable has befallen us," said 60-year-old villager Muhammad Yasin.
Paris (AFP) – Oil companies are paying popular influencers to pump their gas on social media, sparking a backlash from some climate-conscious fans for promoting planet-warming fossil fuels among young people.
Young online celebrities best known for posting about video games, their dogs or their holidays to millions of followers are also dropping in unexpected plugs for gasoline stations, fuel rewards and club cards.
AFP found cases of such spots in India, Mexico, South Africa and the United States that promoted major oil firms such as BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies on platforms including Instagram, TikTok and Twitch.
"Come with me to get some snacks at my family Shell gas station," says one TikTok influencer, dubbed The Petrol Princess, who usually models wigs for her 2.7 million followers.
Her account is tagged as a "paid partnership" in line with the platform's rules.
In a separate investigation, DeSmog, a news site reporting on climate disinformation, said it found more than 100 influencers who had promoted oil and gas companies -- including a Filipina grandmother who usually posts about her family. Seeking 'social capital'
Analysts say companies are targeting young people on social media to shore up their oil and gas-based business even as countries seek cleaner alternatives to limit global warming, which is caused overwhelmingly by burning fossil fuels.
"Many young people are well aware of the urgency of the climate crisis and take a dim view of fossil fuel companies," which are now seeking to "build up social capital" with such audiences, said Melissa Aronczyk, a professor of communication and information at Rutgers University.
Some sponsored posts have received a mixed welcome.
One gamer, who has 178,000 followers for her @chica account on Instagram, drew sighs of dismay with a recent post showcasing a new Shell-sponsored feature in the video game Fortnite.
"I understand you have to make money but advertising a fossil fuel company in 2023 ain't the way," wrote one of her followers.
Some influencers advertised a Shell oil feature in video game Fortnite
AFP found videos promoting products for US oil giant ExxonMobil, including one by a pregnant mother at a gas station using the company's rewards programme, and one by a wedding-themed influencer.
"ExxonMobil, like many companies, works with influencers to educate consumers about the full benefits of our fuel rewards program," company media relations spokesperson Lauren Kight told AFP in an email.
A Shell spokesperson who asked not to be named told AFP it used advertising and social media to promote its low-carbon products, but declined to provide examples. They would not comment on the paid partnerships for petrol products.
In a search of Shell renewable fuel-related hashtags, AFP found just a handful of Instagram posts promoting its electric car-charging application.
BP, Chevron and TotalEnergies did not respond to requests to comment. 'Ethically suspect'
Duncan Meisel, executive director of Clean Creatives, a campaign to encourage PR and advertising professionals to abandon fossil-fuel clients, said an influencer ad for fossil fuels was "probably less questionable than one focused on greenwashing" -– where companies exaggerate their climate efforts.
But he judged it "more ethically suspect in other ways, because it's encouraging more use of a product that is actively harming people."
He said it was hard to gauge the scale of such advertising due to inconsistent labelling.
In one snapshot, analysis published in 2021 by the think tank InfluenceMap found that oil companies spent $10 million on Facebook ads in a year.
Instagram and TikTok demand users label branded content when they have been paid or received gifts from the company, along with restrictions on advertising dangerous products. They do not list fossil fuels among these.
Although endorsements by "third-party" personalities are a long-standing technique in advertising, Meisel and Aronczyk said fossil fuel firms' bid to court influencers could backfire.
"Growing up on your vids to watch you sell out to one of the most unethical and inhumane company (sic) in existence," wrote one of several dismayed followers to another gamer who plugged Shell fuel in an Instagram video.
"So devastating... There's no way you needed the money that bad."
None of the influencers mentioned in this story responded to requests to comment.
"Influencers that work with fossil fuel companies should expect their reputation to take a hit," said Meisel.
"Fossil fuel companies are the world's biggest polluters, deeply disliked by young people -- and for anyone who sees these videos, the unfollow button is never far away."
Australia to hold Indigenous rights referendum on Oct 14
Sydney (AFP) – Australia will hold a historic Indigenous rights referendum on October 14, the prime minister said Wednesday, setting up a defining moment for the nation's relationship with Aboriginal minorities.
Issued on: 30/08/2023
Supporters of the YES campaign set up a barbecue in the centre of the Northern Territory city of Darwin on August 30, 2023.
"On that day, every Australian will have a once-in-a-generation chance to bring our country together," Anthony Albanese said as he announced the date for the compulsory and binding vote.
"October 14 is our time. It's our chance. It's a moment calling out to the best of our Australian character."
If passed, Indigenous Australians -- whose ancestors have lived on the continent for at least 60,000 years -- would be recognised in the constitution for the first time.
They would also gain a constitutionally enshrined right to be consulted on laws that impact their communities, the so-called "Voice to Parliament".
"It permits our people to have a seat at the table," said Indigenous academic and constitutional lawyer Megan Davis.
The "yes" campaign is currently trailing in the polls, sparking fears a failed referendum could tarnish Australia's global reputation and squander a rare chance to reduce pervasive inequality.
"Voting no closes the door on this opportunity to move forward," Albanese said from South Australia, a crucial swing state.
"Don't close the door on the next generation of Indigenous Australians."
Aboriginal Australians carry the flame for some of the world's oldest continuous cultures.
If the referendum is passed, Indigenous Australians will be recognised in the constitution for the first time
But more than two centuries after the first British settlers dropped anchor in Sydney Harbour, they are still far more likely to die young, live in poverty, and wind up in prison.
The leader of Australia's conservative opposition party Peter Dutton has spearheaded the "no" campaign, has argued it is not "in our country's best interests" and claimed it would create red tape.
Indigenous activist Georgia Corrie, 30, has been drumming up support in the Northern Territory, which has the highest proportional Aboriginal population in the country.
"The feeling on the ground is great, there is a lot of support for the upcoming referendum," she told AFP.
"Australians have recognised it's time to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people." Divisive proposal
Albanese points to polls which showed about 80 percent of Indigenous Australians support the Voice. But it is by no means universally popular.
Some fear it would taint the constitution or strain race relations, while some Indigenous Australians believe it does not go far enough.
Conservative Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, an Indigenous Australian who opposes the Voice, said it would sow division and discontent.
"We will not allow the prime minister and this referendum to divide our country along the lines of race within our constitution," she said following Albanese's announcement.
Indigenous Australians have lived on the continent for at least 60,000 years
Initial surveys hinted at broad support for the proposal, but approval has "been on a downward arc" in recent months, pollster William Bowe told AFP.
Bowe said the "no" campaign's adept use of Indigenous spokespeople had "persuaded a lot of Australians that it's not racist for them to do what they are naturally inclined to do in referendums, which is to cautiously favour the status quo."
Since Australia became a federation in 1901, 44 constitutional referendums have been held. Only eight have passed, most recently 1977 votes setting retirement ages for judges, allowing electors in territories to vote and setting a process for filling vacant Senate seats.
For this referendum to pass it needs to win a majority of votes in a majority of Australia's eight states and territories.
One poll on the eve of Albanese's announcement found slim support in the key state of South Australia, while a different survey in Tasmania had respondents leaning towards no.
Former conservative foreign minister Julie Bishop warned this week that a no vote would send a "very negative message" to the world about Australia's respect for racial equality.
Strike-hit German stunt performers train kids during filming freeze
Babelsberg (Germany) (AFP) – Ten-year-old Nathaniel squeezes his eyes shut, straightens his back and sucks in his breath as he plunges backward from the reinforced steel roof of a stunt car.
Issued on: 30/08/2023
Seventy-five children between the ages of six and 16 are allowed to take part in each workshop
The stacked blue mats that catch his fall release a loud hiss as two burly men give the blond primary school pupil high-fives for his successful first attempt at being an action hero.
While the actors' and writers' strikes in Hollywood freeze up film production around the world, stunt performers in Germany are biding their time putting on "adrenaline-packed" workshops for kids.
Nathaniel, who dreams of working on a James Bond movie one day, signed up for the class with his six-year-old sister Amelia at the Filmpark in Babelsberg outside Berlin, a mecca of the film industry for over a century.
"When you fall you need to tuck your chin into your chest, make your back stiff like a board, tense everything up, cross your arms over your chest and then just let go," Nathaniel said, summarising what he learned in the lesson.
Seventy-five children between the ages of six and 16 are allowed to take part in each workshop, which are held in the crater of a mock-up volcano.
Stuntcrew Babelsberg managing director Martin Lederer said the sessions have fortunately been booked out this summer as the industry grapples with the impact of the strikes.
Boom to 'pause button'
The Writers Guild of America (WGA) walked off the job in May and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) followed suit in July in a conflict over wages and other conditions.
Countless film productions have ground to a halt and the Berlin region, one of Hollywood's choice destinations in Europe, has felt the body blow from the industry's worst labour dispute in more than 60 years.
Lederer's team, who have worked on blockbusters including the Matrix, John Wick and Hunger Games franchises, can use the work generated by stunt shows and tutorials.
Martin Lederer's team have worked on blockbusters including the Matrix, John Wick and Hunger Games franchises
"It's a lot quieter right now -- after the pandemic people were making up for lost time and we were seeing a boom but now it's like someone hit the pause button," Lederer, 40, told AFP.
"The two sides seem really dug in so the strike could go on for quite a while."
On the grounds of the amusement park near the legendary Studio Babelsberg, kids queue up to learn the basics of theatrical fist-fighting and body rolls. The workshops are included in the children's admission price.
Katja Pickbrenner, 44, a stunt woman for nearly two decades, said the work with youngsters during the summer holiday marked a nice change from the usual derring-do of her job.
"I watch to see that everyone's taking part, having a good time, isn't too scared to join in," she said as her pupils levelled fake blows at each other, winced in mock pain and practised their battle cries.
While she kept busy with stunt shows and workshops, Pickbrenner said many of her colleagues who worked mainly on movies and series were in dire straits due to the strikes.
"It's really sink or swim," she said.
Building courage
Stuntcrew Babelsberg works for many German and international production companies as well as Studio Babelsberg, which calls itself the world's oldest major film studio, founded in 1912.
After boasting big-budget productions by the likes of Steven Spielberg and Quentin Tarantino in recent years, Studio Babelsberg has fallen on hard times that have been exacerbated by the Hollywood strikes.
Business shortfalls led the studio to announce subsidised part-time work schemes known as "Kurzarbeit" from September 1 to avert mass layoffs. Forty percent of the workforce is affected, according to its works council.
Despite boasting big-budget productions, Studio Babelsberg has fallen on hard times exacerbated by Hollywood strikes
"We are optimistic that the Kurzarbeit can be shortened as soon as production is resumed," co-CEO Andy Weltman told AFP.
Back at the Filmpark, mother of four Kathleen Richter said the workshop helped keep her children from climbing the walls at home during the long school break.
"My kids are pretty sporty and were really looking forward to it," Richter, 41, said. "It's great for them to learn how to fight and fall down without getting hurt or hurting each other."
Vivian, 10, looking exhilarated after her third go at tumbling from the car roof, said she'd love to be an actor when she grows up and that playing the daredevil was a good start to building courage.
"I can jump off the three-metre (10-foot) diving board at the pool backwards but this was still a bit of a shock," she said.
"As soon as you see that a lot of kids ahead of you have done it though, and some of them smaller than you are, you can calm down and enjoy it."
India deploys 'monkey-men' to scare away primates from G20 summit
New Delhi (AFP) – Indian officials preparing for the G20 summit next week have hired teams of "monkey-men" and erected primate cutouts to deter marauding monkeys from munching on the floral displays laid out for global leaders.
Issued on: 30/08/2023
Indian authorities are trying to scare away macaque monkeys from the G20 summit venues in New Delhi
New Delhi's city council has hired more than 30 "monkey wallahs", or "monkey-men", who mimic the hoots and screams of the aggressive langur monkey -- the natural enemy of the smaller rhesus macaque primates who wreak havoc in the capital's leafy government areas.
"We can't remove the monkeys from their natural habitat, so we have deployed a team of 30-40 men who are trained to scare away monkeys," Satish Upadhyay, the vice-chairman of the New Delhi Municipal Council, told AFP on Wednesday.
"We will deploy one man each at the hotels where the delegates would be staying, as well as in places where monkey sightings have been reported."
Though revered in the majority Hindu nation, monkeys are a major menace, often trashing gardens, office and residential rooftops and even viciously attacking people for food.
The Delhi metropolitan area, home to around 30 million people, has been on an intense beautification drive since India assumed the G20 presidency last year.
Police have readied a near-shutdown of the centre of the capital for the September 9-10 summit, with roads blocked and a holiday declared with businesses shut. 'Change a monkey's mind?'
But worries that troops of monkeys may charge in front of the conveys of cars ferrying presidents and prime ministers from the Group of 20 nations meant the council turned to the forest department for a plan.
Life-size cutouts of the langur have also been set up in a bid to scare away the monkeys, and the city will also move them around to convince the macaques that they are real.
For decades, Delhi's streets were patrolled by men with trained langurs, but that practice ended when a court ruled that keeping them in captivity was cruel.
In other parts of the city, watchmen use slingshots and sticks to ward off the animals.
The monkeys also become wise quickly -- when a plastic langur was set up, playing recorded sounds of the animals, it lasted only three days before monkeys tore it to pieces.
Some have questioned how effective the monkey policy will be.
The Times of India asked Wednesday: "How many langur cutouts does it take to change a monkey's mind?"
Syria protests spurred by economic misery stir memories of the 2011 anti-government uprising
BEIRUT (AP) — Anti-government protests in southern Syria have stretched into a second week, with demonstrators waving the colorful flag of the minority Druze community, burning banners of President Bashar Assad's government and at one point raiding several offices of his ruling party.
The protests were initially driven by surging inflation and the war-torn country's spiraling economy but quickly shifted focus, with marchers calling for the fall of the Assad government.
The demonstrations have been centered in the government-controlled province of Sweida, the heartland of Syria’s Druze, who had largely stayed on the sidelines during the long-running conflict between Assad and those trying to topple him.
In a scene that once would have been unthinkable in the Druze stronghold, protesters kicked members of Assad’s Baath party out of some of their offices, welded the doors shut and spray-painted anti-government slogans on the walls.
The protests have rattled the Assad government, but don't seem to pose an existential threat. They come at a time when government forces have consolidated control over most of the country. Meanwhile, Damascus has returned to the Arab fold and restored ties with most governments in the region.
Still, anger is building, even among Syrians who did not join the initial anti-Assad protests in 2011. Those demonstrations were met with a harsh crackdown and plunged the country into years of civil war.
For some, the final straw came two weeks ago when the Syrian president further scaled back the country’s expensive fuel and gasoline subsidy program. Assad also doubled meager public sector wages and pensions, but those actions did little to cushion the blow, instead accelerating inflation and further weakening the already sinking Syrian pound. The results further piled on the economic pressure on millions living in poverty.
Soon after, protests kicked off in Sweida and the neighboring province of Daraa.
Over the past decade, Sweida had largely isolated itself from Syria’s uprising-turned-conflict. The province witnessed sporadic protests decrying corruption and the country’s economic backslide. This time, crowds quickly swelled into the hundreds, calling out political repression by Assad's government and stirring echoes of the protests that rocked the country in 2011.
“People have reached a point where they can no longer withstand the situation," Rayan Maarouf, editor-in-chief of the local activist media collective Suwayda24, told The Associated Press. “Everything is crumbling.”
While Assad’s political fortunes have been on the rise in recent months, life for much of the country’s population has become increasingly miserable. At least 300,000 civilians have been killed in the conflict, half of Syria’s prewar population of 23 million has been displaced and large parts of the infrastructure have been crippled. Ninety percent of Syrians live in poverty. Rampant corruption and Western-led sanctions have also worsened poverty and inflation.
In Daraa — often referred to as the birthplace of the 2011 uprising but now under government control — at least 57 people were arrested in the current protests, according to the Britain-based Syrian Network for Human Rights. Unlike in 2011, government forces did not use lethal force.
In Sweida, the response has been more restrained, with Assad apparently wary of exerting too much force against the Druze. During the years of civil war, his government presented itself as a defender of religious minorities against Islamist extremism.
Over the years, the province's young men also have armed themselves to defend their villages from Islamic State militants and Damascus-associated militias that produce and trade in illegal amphetamine pills, known as Captagon.
Joseph Daher, a Swiss-Syrian researcher and professor at the European University Institute in Florence, believes that this provides a layer of protection for protesters.
“Unlike other government-held areas, Sweida has some form of limited autonomy,” Daher said.
Meanwhile, in Damascus, Lattakia, Tartous and other urban government strongholds, some are voicing their discontent more quietly. They write messages of support for the protests on paper, take pictures of those notes on the streets of their towns, and share them on social media.
Others suffer in silence and focus on daily survival. In Damascus, some have taken to carrying backpacks instead of wallets to carry the wads of cash they need to make everyday purchases amid the rampant inflation, while families struggle to buy basic necessities.
“If I buy (my son) two containers of milk, I’d have spent my entire month’s salary,” Damascus resident Ghaswan al-Wadi told the AP while preparing her family dinner at home after a long day at work.
The ongoing protests highlight Assad's vulnerability as a result of the failing economy, even in areas that tried to withstand the situation and not hold large-scale protests against his rule.
Could the protests eventually threaten his rule?
Daher said this could only happen if the protesters banded together.
“You have forms of solidarity from other cities (with Sweida)," Daher said. “But you can’t say it would have a real effect on the regime, unless there would be collaboration between (protesters in) different cities.”
Anti-government protests in southern Syria have stretched into a second week, with demonstrators waving the colorful flag of the minority Druze community, burning banners of President Bashar Assad's government and at one point raiding several offices of his ruling party. The protests were initially driven by surging inflation and the war-torn country's spiraling economy but quickly shifted focus, with marchers calling for the fall of the Assad government. For in--depth analysis and a deeper perspective on the demonstrators' rage and demand for change, FRANCE 24's Mark Owen is joined by Celine Kassem, Human rights activist and Media Executive for the Syrian Emergency Task Force.
Protests against Assad, economic crisis hit Druze city in Syria • FRANCE 24
English Aug 25, 2023
Hundreds of Syrians in the mainly Druze city of As-Suwayda took to the streets for a fifth consecutive day on Thursday, protesting at worsening economic conditions and demanding the departure of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. Mahmoud Naffakh, of France 24's Observers team, takes a closer look at the causes and consequences of these rare demonstrations against the Syrian authorities.
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Indian teen chess wizard Pragg given hero's welcome
Chennai (India) (AFP) – India's teen chess prodigy Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa arrived home to celebration Wednesday, with media jostling to catch a glimpse of the newly minted star who faced international No.1 Magnus Carlsen in the World Cup final.
India's chess grandmaster and silver medallist Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa is welcomed upon his return from the FIDE Chess World Cup
AFP
Popularly known as "Pragg", the 18-year-old is the youngest player to reach a chess World Cup final, held last week in the Azerbaijani capital Baku.
Pragg finished with the silver after losing to Carlsen in a nail-biting tiebreak at the International Chess Federation (FIDE) final.
He earned praise from chess legend Garry Kasparov who said Pragg was "very tenacious in difficult positions".
On Wednesday, Pragg was greeted by hordes of supporters who handed him bouquets of flowers and sweets as he emerged from the airport in his home city of Chennai in southern India.
"I am very happy to see so many people have come to receive me... it feels really great," he said, as he stood shyly waving from the sunroof of a car, with a purple and gold scarf draped around his neck.
Such adulation is usually reserved in India for cricket stars, who enjoy celebrity status.
The son of a bank employee and a housewife, the grandmaster has been playing the sport since he was four.
Mother's cooking
Pragg's success has been fuelled by the cooking of his mother Nagalakshmi, who accompanies him on chess tournaments with pots and southern Indian seasonings to make his favourite meal of rice and spicy rasam or sambhar soup.
Nagalakshmi told the ChessBase India news site on Tuesday that she had made rice and sambhar for Pragg at the FIDE World Rapid Team Championship in Dusseldorf, Germany, that followed the Baku event.
Pragg's first coach S. Thiagarajan, who began teaching him at age four, said his student was always dedicated.
"He was always a bright student and a jovial child," Thiagarajan, who coached him at his academy until he was 10, told AFP.
"He used to be in the academy every day from 10:00 am to 7:00 pm, at times staying longer -- and I would give him homework which would take at least three hours to finish," he said.
In 2018 -- aged just 12 years, 10 months and 13 days -- Pragg became the world's then second-youngest chess grandmaster.
Chess has gained in popularity in India in the past two decades after Vishwanathan Anand became the country's first grandmaster aged 18 in 1988 and dominated the game in the 2000s.
A predecessor to chess is thought by some to have originated in India in the sixth century AD, from where it spread to Persia and developed into the "Game of Kings" it is today.
The Pinwheel Galaxy, or Messier 101, on May 21, 2023, four days after the light from the supernova 2023ixf reached Earth. Credit: Steven Bellavia
Alex Filippenko is the kind of guy who brings a telescope to a party. True to form, at a soiree on May 18 this year, he wowed his hosts with images of star clusters and colorful galaxies—including the dramatic spiral Pinwheel Galaxy—and snapped telescopic photos of each.
Only late the next afternoon did he learn that a bright supernova had just been discovered in the Pinwheel Galaxy. Lo and behold, he'd also captured it, at 11 p.m. the night before—eleven and a half hours before the explosion's discovery on May 19 by amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki in Japan.
Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley, graduate student Sergiy Vasylyev and postdoctoral fellow Yi Yang threw out their planned observations at the UC's Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton a few hours later to focus on the exploding star, which had been dubbed SN 2023ixf. They and hundreds of other astronomers were eager to observe the nearest supernova since 2014, a mere 21 million light years from Earth.
These observations were the earliest-ever measurements of polarized light from a supernova, showing more clearly the evolving shape of a stellar explosion. The polarization of light from distant sources like supernovae provides the best information on the geometry of the object emitting the light, even for events that cannot be spatially resolved.
"Some stars prior to exploding go through undulations—fitful behavior that gently ejects some of the material—so that when the supernova explodes, either the shock wave or the ultraviolet radiation causes the stuff to glow," Filippenko said. "The cool thing about the spectropolarimetry is that we get some indication of the shape and extent of the circumstellar material."
The spectropolarimetry data told a story in line with current scenarios for the final years of a red supergiant star about 10 to 20 times more massive than our sun: Energy from the explosion lit up clouds of gas that the star shed over the previous few years; the ejecta then punched through this gas, initially perpendicular to the bulk of the circumstellar material; and finally, the ejecta engulfed the surrounding gas and evolved into a rapidly expanding but symmetric cloud of debris.
The explosion, a Type II supernova resulting from the collapse of the iron core of a massive star, presumably left behind a dense neutron star or a black hole. Such supernovae are used as calibratable candles to measure the distances to distant galaxies and map the cosmos.
Another group of astronomers led by Ryan Chornock, a UC Berkeley adjunct associate professor of astronomy, gathered spectroscopic data using the same telescope at Lick Observatory. Graduate student Wynn Jacobson-Galán and professor Raffaella Margutti analyzed the data to reconstruct the pre- and post-explosion history of the star, and found evidence that it had shed gas for the previous three to six years before collapsing and exploding. The amount of gas shed or ejected before the explosion could have been 5% of its total mass—enough to create a dense cloud of material through which the supernova ejecta had to plow.
"I think this supernova is going to make a lot of us think in much more detail about the subtleties of the whole population of red supergiants that lose a lot of material before explosion and challenge our assumptions about mass loss," Jacobson-Galán said. "This was a perfect laboratory to understand in more detail the geometry of these explosions and the geometry of mass loss, something we already felt ignorant about."
The improved understanding of how Type II supernovae evolve could help refine their use as distance measures in the expanding universe, Vasylyev said.
The two papers describing these observations have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Margutti and Chornock are co-authors of both papers, which are currently available on the arXiv preprint server.
One of the most studied supernovae to date
In the more than three months since the supernova's light reached Earth, perhaps three dozen papers have been submitted or published about it, with more to come as the light from the explosion continues to arrive and the observations of a variety of telescopes are analyzed.
"In the world of Type II supernovae, it's very rare to have basically every wavelength detected, from hard X-rays to soft X-rays to ultraviolet. to optical, near-infrared, radio, millimeter. So it's really a rare and unique opportunity," said Margutti, a Berkeley professor of physics and of astronomy. "These papers are the beginning of a story, the first chapter. Now we are writing the other chapters of the story of that star."
"The big-picture question here is we want to connect how a star lives with how a star dies," Chornock said. "Given the proximity of this event, it will allow us to challenge the simplifying assumptions that we have to make in most of the other supernovae we study. We have such a wealth of detail that we're going to have to figure out how to fit it all together to understand this particular object, and then that will inform our understanding of the broader universe."
Lick Observatory's telescopes on top of Mount Hamilton near San Jose were critical to the astronomers' efforts to assemble a complete picture of the supernova. The Kast spectrograph on the Shane 120-inch telescope is able to switch quickly from a normal spectrometer to a spectropolarimeter, which allowed Vasylyev and Filippenko to obtain measurements of both the spectrum and its polarization. The group led by Jacobson-Galán, Chornock and Margutti employed both the Kast spectrograph and the photometer on the Nickel 40-inch telescope, with photometry (brightness measurements) also from the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii through the Young Supernova Experiment collaboration.
The polarization of light emitted by an object—that is, the orientation of the electric field of the electromagnetic wave—carries information about the shape of the object. Light from a spherically symmetric cloud, for example, would be unpolarized because the electric fields symmetrically cancel. Light from an elongated object, however, would produce a nonzero polarization.
While polarimetry measurements of supernovae have been going on for more than three decades, few are close enough—and thus bright enough—for such measurements. And no other supernova has been observed as early as 1.4 days after the explosion, as with SN 2023ixf.
The observations yielded some surprises.
"The most exciting thing is that this supernova shows a very high continuum polarization, nearly 1%, at early times," Vasylyev said. "That sounds like a small number, but it's actually a huge deviation from spherical symmetry."
Based on the changing intensity and direction of polarization, the researchers were able to identify three distinct phases in the evolution of the exploding star. Between one and three days after the explosion, the light was dominated by emission from the circumstellar medium, perhaps a disk of material or lopsided blob of gas shed earlier by the star. This was due to ionization of the surrounding gas by ultraviolet and X-ray light from the explosion and by stellar material plowing through the gas, so-called shock ionization.
"Early on, we're saying that most of the light that we're seeing is from some kind of non-spherical circumstellar medium that is confined to somewhere around 30 A.U.," Yang said. An astronomical unit (AU), the average distance between Earth and our sun, is 93 million miles.
At 3.5 days, the polarization quickly dropped by half, and then a day later shifted by nearly 70 degrees, implying an abrupt change in the geometry of the explosion. They interpret this moment, 4.6 days after explosion, as the time when the ejecta from the exploding star broke out from the dense circumstellar material.
"Essentially, it engulfs the circumstellar material, and you get this peanut-shaped geometry," Vasylyev said. "The intuition there is that the material in the equatorial plane is denser, and the ejecta get slowed down, and the path of least resistance will be toward the axis where there's less circumstellar material. That's why you get this peanut shape aligned with the preferential axis through which it explodes."
The polarization remained unchanged between days 5 and 14 after the explosion, implying that the expanding ejecta had overwhelmed the densest region of surrounding gas, allowing emission from the ejecta to dominate over light from shock ionization.
Shock ionization
The spectroscopic evolution roughly agreed with this scenario, Jacobson-Galán said. He and his team saw emissions from the gas surrounding the star about a day after the explosion, likely produced as the ejecta slammed into the circumstellar medium and produced ionizing radiation that caused the surrounding gas to emit light. Spectroscopic measurements of the light from this shock ionization showed emission lines from hydrogen, helium, carbon and nitrogen, which is typical of core-collapse supernovae.
The emissions produced by shock ionization continued for about eight days, after which it decreased, indicating that the shock wave had moved into a less dense area of space with little gas to ionize and reemit, similar to what Vasylyev and Filippenko observed.
Margutti noted that other astronomers have looked at archival images of the Pinwheel Galaxy and found several occasions when the progenitor star brightened in the years before the explosion, suggesting that the red supergiant repeatedly sloughed off gas. This is consistent with her group's observations of ejecta from the explosion plowing through this gas, though they estimate a density about 1,000 times less than implied by the pre-explosion undulations.
Analysis of other observations, including X-ray measurements, could resolve this issue.
"This is a very special situation where we know what the progenitor was doing before because we saw it slowly oscillating, and we have all the probes in place to try to reconstruct the geometry of the circumstellar medium," she said. "And we know for a fact that it cannot be spherical. By putting together the radiant X-rays with what Wynn found and what Sergiy and Alex are finding, then we will be able to have a complete picture of the explosion."
The astronomers acknowledged the help of numerous researchers and students who gave up their observing time at Lick to allow the teams to focus on SN 2023ixf, and the observational assistance of Thomas Brink, an associate specialist in astronomy at UC Berkeley.
Filippenko captured his early photo of SN 2023ixf with a Unistellar eVscope, which has become popular among amateurs because the telescope subtracts background light and thus allows nighttime viewing in areas like cities, with lots of light pollution. He and 123 other astronomers—mostly amateurs—using Unistellar telescopes recently published their early observations of the supernova.
"This fortuitous observation, obtained while conducting public outreach in astronomy, shows that the star exploded considerably earlier than when Itagaki discovered it," he said, jokingly adding, "I should have immediately examined my data."
More information: Sergiy S. Vasylyev et al, Early-time Spectropolarimetry of the Asymmetric Type II Supernova SN 2023ixf, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2307.01268
W. V. Jacobson-Galan et al, SN 2023ixf in Messier 101: Photo-ionization of Dense, Close-in Circumstellar Material in a Nearby Type II Supernova, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2306.04721
