Tag Archives: World
Iran votes in presidential election
India hospitals running out of oxygen and beds
An alarming spike in COVID-19 cases has created a crisis across India, particularly in the capital, New Delhi, recording more than 25,000 cases — about one in three of those tested — in the past 24 hours, according to official data. The situation in New Delhi, which has a population of more than 20 million people, forced Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal to write to the federal government seeking more hospital beds. Several health care facilities have said they can no longer accommodate patients, leading to a rise in fatalities due to lack of space, oxygen cylinders and drugs. “The situation in Delhi is very grim,” Kejriwal wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He asked the PM to “earmark 7,000 beds out of 10,000 in the federal government-run hospitals in Delhi” for COVID-19 patients to “tide over the crisis.” “There is an acute dearth of oxygen in Delhi, and it should be supplied immediately,” Kejriwal added. On Sunday, India registered a record single-day rise of 261,500 coronavirus infections taking the nationwide case total to almost 1.48 million.
Covid variant spread rapidly in Britain even during lockdown
US Democracy under attack – Scenes from the U.S. Capitol siege
Armenians set fire to homes before handing villages over to Azerbaijan
Armenians resort to a scorched earth policy as the clock ticks down to a handover of territory to Azerbaijan under a Russia-brokered peace deal that followed six weeks of fighting between ethnic Armenian forces and Azeri troops over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas.
Thousands flee fighting in Ethiopia, cross border to Sudan
Hundreds, possibly thousands, have been killed in fighting that erupted on Nov. 4 between Ethiopian federal forces and Tigray’s regional army, sending about 40,000 refugees into neighboring Sudan. The Tigray conflict is an ongoing armed conflict that began in November 2020 in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia, between the Tigray Region special forces (led by Tigray People’s Liberation Front) and the Ethiopian National Defense Force, in alliance with the Amhara Region special forces. Rocket attacks have spilled over into the neighboring Amhara Region and the neighboring country of Eritrea.
Fearless and inquisitive, Robert Fisk
Robert Fisk (12 July 1946 – 30 October 2020) was a writer and journalist who held British and Irish nationality. He was an international correspondent, and covered the civil wars in Lebanon, Algeria and Syria, the Iran-Iraq conflict, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamic revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. Fluent in Arabic, he was among the few Western journalists to interview Osama bin Laden, which he did three times between 1993 and 1997. The journalist began his career at the Sunday Express. From there, he went to work for The Times as a correspondent in Northern Ireland, Portugal and the Middle East, in which he was based on Beirut intermittently since 1976. After 1989, he worked for The Independent. Fisk received many British and international journalism awards, including the Press Awards Foreign Reporter of the Year seven times. Fisk also wrote books, such as Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War and The Great War for Civilisation : The Conquest of the Middle East.
Early Life and Education
Fisk was an only child, born in Maidstone, Kent. His father William (‘Bill’) Fisk (1899–1992) was Borough Treasurer at Maidstone Corporation and had fought in the First World War. At the end of the war Bill Fisk was punished for disobeying an order to execute another soldier; his son said, “My father’s refusal to kill another man was the only thing he did in his life which I would also have done.” Though his father said little about his part in the war, it held a fascination for his son. After his father’s death, he discovered him to have been the scribe of his battalion’s war diaries from August 1918. Robert Fisk was educated at Yardley Court, a preparatory school, then at Sutton Valence School and Lancaster University, where he edited the student magazine Carolynne. He gained a PhD in Political Science, from Trinity College Dublin in 1983; the title of his doctoral thesis was “A condition of limited warfare: Éire’s neutrality and the relationship between Dublin, Belfast and London, 1939–1945”.
News Correspondent
Fisk worked on the Sunday Express diary column before a disagreement with the editor, John Junor, prompted a move to The Times. From 1972 to 1975, at the height of the Troubles, Fisk was The Times Belfast correspondent, before being posted to Portugal following the Carnation Revolution in 1974. He then was appointed Middle East correspondent (1976–1987). In addition to the Troubles and Portugal, he reported the Iranian revolution in 1979. When a story of his was spiked (Iran Air Flight 655) after Rupert Murdoch’s takeover, he moved to The Independent in 1989. The New York Times once described Robert Fisk as “probably the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain”.
War Reporting
Fisk lived in Beirut from 1976, remaining throughout the Lebanese Civil War. He was one of the first journalists to visit the scene of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, as well as the Syrian Hama Massacre. His book on the Lebanese conflict, Pity the Nation, was first published in 1990. Fisk also reported on the Soviet–Afghan War, the Iran–Iraq War, the Arab–Israeli conflict, the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the Algerian Civil War, the Bosnian War, the 2001 international intervention in Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Arab Spring in 2011 and the ongoing Syrian Civil War. During the Iran–Iraq War, he suffered partial but permanent hearing loss as a result of being close to Iraqi heavy artillery in the Shatt-al-Arab when covering the early stages of the conflict.
After the United States and allies launched their intervention in Afghanistan, Fisk was for a time transferred to Pakistan to provide coverage of the conflict. While reporting from there, he was attacked and beaten by a group of Afghan refugees fleeing heavy bombing by the United States Air Force. He was ultimately rescued from this attack by another Afghan refugee. In his graphic account of his own beating, Fisk absolved the attackers of responsibility and pointed out that their “brutality was entirely the product of others, of us—of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the ‘War for Civilisation’ just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them ‘collateral damage.'”
During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Fisk was based in Baghdad and filed many eyewitness reports. He has criticised other journalists based in Iraq for what he calls their “hotel journalism”, reporting from one’s hotel room without interviews or first hand experience of events. His opposition to the war brought criticism from both Irish Sunday Independent columnist and senator, Eoghan Harris, and The Guardian columnist, Simon Hoggart. Fisk has criticised the Coalition’s handling of the sectarian violence in post-invasion Iraq, and argued that the official narrative of sectarian conflict is not possible: “The real question I ask myself is: who are these people who are trying to provoke the civil war? Now the Americans will say it’s Al Qaeda, it’s the Sunni insurgents. It is the death squads. Many of the death squads work for the Ministry of Interior. Who runs the Ministry of Interior in Baghdad? Who pays the Ministry of the Interior? Who pays the militia men who make up the death squads? We do, the occupation authorities. (…) We need to look at this story in a different light.”
Courtesy : Wikipedia
Nagorno-Karabakh : Armenian, Azerbaijan engage in fierce clashes
The Tragedy of the West Coast Wildfires
For more than a century, the Mount Wilson Observatory has looked down on Los Angeles from a peak five thousand seven hundred and fifteen feet above sea level, a height that once lifted it above the city’s smog. The clear air allowed Edwin Hubble, in 1924, to discover that what was then called the Andromeda nebula was not a smudge of stars in the Milky Way but a galaxy of its own, and, later, to find proof that the universe was expanding, leading to the formulation of the Hubble constant, which describes its rate of motion. The observatory is a cherished monument and a site of ongoing research and discovery. Last week, though, the sky above it was a sickly orange, as firefighters fought to save it, along with an array of television and communications towers that also sit on Mount Wilson, from the Bobcat Fire. On Friday, they were struggling to hold the flames back with only a few hundred feet to spare.
The Bobcat Fire has raked across more than sixty thousand acres in the San Gabriel Mountains and triggered evacuation warnings for residents of the foothill communities. But it is only one of forty-one major fire complexes causing havoc in California, Oregon, and Washington. More than five million acres have burned. Some thirty people have died, and dozens are missing. Breathing the air of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle has been not only unhealthy but, on some days, hazardous. The threat to Mount Wilson is a single scene in that larger disaster, but it encapsulates a moment in which both science and the everyday rhythms of American life seem to be under assault.
Part of the attack is being led by Donald J. Trump. The wildfire crisis is an aspect of the climate crisis: hotter temperatures and changing rainfall patterns have turned swaths of the West into a tinderbox. But last Monday, in California, Trump told people to trust him that it will “start getting cooler,” and added, “I don’t think science knows, actually.” He used the trip to bestow the Distinguished Flying Cross on two military-helicopter crews that had been deployed to fight the Creek Fire, which had scorched a quarter of a million acres in Fresno, Madera, and Mariposa Counties and, at the end of last week, was still mostly uncontained. The crew members deserve the honor—they risked their lives to save more than two hundred people trapped by the fire—but the event was also a reminder of how, for Trump, pomp serves as a substitute for policy. Of course, the policies he does pursue, such as renouncing the Paris climate accord, do real harm. (The contrast between Trump and Joe Biden, who spoke about the California fires on the same day, but with reason and urgency, was stark.) The question is whether, in November, Trump and the Republican Party, which has long blocked action on the climate, will be held to account.
The signals are mixed. Polls show that addressing the climate crisis remains a partisan issue. That is a tragedy, particularly since Americans no longer have to guess whether climate change will affect them: they can see it in the tracts of burnt-out homes and in the smoke rising in the West, which, last week, drifted far enough to turn skies in New England hazy. They can register it in the length of time that Hurricane Sally lolled in the Gulf of Mexico before inundating Pensacola and other communities, while, at one point, four other named storms spun alongside it. Last Friday, with more than two months to go in the storm season, the National Hurricane Center used up the last name (Wilfred) on its alphabetized list. Greek letters come next, and Subtropical Storm Alpha was identified by early afternoon; Beta followed within hours. Now every year may be another 2020, in terms of a pileup of calamities.
The Economist, in a survey of the climate factors contributing to the wildfires, concluded that “people on America’s west coast will have to learn to coëxist with more, and more frequent, fires.” Or they can move, and, indeed, many may be forced to do so. According to a joint project by ProPublica and the Times, if emissions are not cut drastically by mid-century—and, to an extent, even if they are—for an increasing number of days each year, some heavily populated areas of the country will be too hot or too humid, or both, for residents to venture safely outdoors. These include parts of Texas and Arizona, but also of North Carolina, Missouri, and Illinois.
Meanwhile, cities and towns on the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf Coast will confront rising sea levels that may make living in all but the wealthiest places miserable or unsustainable. Eventually, not even government-backed flood-insurance programs will be enough to keep people on land that is being lost to the sea. Farm communities will face a reckoning as well, with many crop yields projected to fall. As for the wildfires, models show them consuming ground not only in the West but in such disparate states as Florida and Minnesota. Climate migrants will not only be leaving homes in the Global South; they will include Americans crisscrossing the country.
In short, the climate crisis is, at last, poised to change the map of American politics, because it will change the map of America. Comparisons have been drawn to the Great Migration, when, from the nineteen-twenties to the nineteen-sixties, more than six million Black Americans settled in Northern states, a shift that reshaped urban politics and culture and gave support to the civil-rights movement. But that analogy is inadequate. Projections about the demographics of various states may be upended in ways that are impossible to predict. People forced out of their homes in a red state, or a blue one, will not necessarily become green voters. Mass dislocation might lead to an environmentalist awakening, or even mobilize Americans to confront issues of inequality, but it could also contribute to a politics of resentment. One can too easily imagine a future demagogue—Trump may not be the last—exploiting domestic climate migrants’ sense of betrayal and fear.
Yet the polls show, too, that voters who do care about the climate, including a majority of younger people, tend to be passionate about the issue. They have the potential to be an ever more powerful electoral force. As with the battle to save the Mount Wilson Observatory, the climate crisis involves choices about what we value. Politics and leadership, not to mention science, will matter, perhaps as never before, because of how very wrong things could go in the next decades, and how much upheaval there is likely to be. As Edwin Hubble might have observed, everything is in motion. There are few constants left. ♦
Published in the print edition of the September 28, 2020, issue, with the headline “In Flames.”
By Amy Davidson Sorkin
Courtesy : The NewYorker