U.S. officials describe what to do in case of a nuclear attack
So what should you do in a nuclear missile attack?
That key bit of advice was mostly missing from the mistaken alert sent out Saturday to mobile phones across Hawaii. All it said was, ‘‘BALLISTIC MISSILE THREAT INBOUND TO HAWAII. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.’’
A more detailed message scrolled across television screens in Hawaii, suggesting, ‘‘If you are indoors, stay indoors. If you are outdoors, seek immediate shelter in a building. Remain indoors well away from windows. If you are driving, pull safely to the side of the road and seek shelter in a building or lay on the floor.’’
The alerts were quickly withdrawn, but widespread curiosity about how to increase the odds of surviving a nuclear attack remains.
More...
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/us ... ailsignout
MAN-MADE DISASTERS
Why Hasn’t the World Been Destroyed in a Nuclear War Yet?
When opposing nations gained access to nuclear weapons, it fundamentally changed the logic of war. You might say that it made questions about war more cleanly logical—with nuclear-armed belligerents, there are fewer classic military analyses about morale, materiel, and maneuverings. Hundreds of small-scale tactical decisions dissolve into a few hugely important large-scale strategic ones, like, What happens if one side drops a nuclear bomb on its nuclear-armed opponent?
Using a dangerous weapon like a nuclear bomb can of course provoke dangerous responses. If one country crosses the nuclear line, what will its opponent do? What will its allies, or other nuclear-armed states do? The decision to use a nuclear weapon is practically nothing next to the chain reaction it begins. The act of one nation simply developing a nuclear weapon can provoke a “nuclear proliferation cascade,” as other nations, concerned about new nuclear-armed rivals, rush to follow suit. This is cited as one reason why it’s so important to prevent Iran from building its own nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, the important thinking about using nuclear weapons didn’t come from old military wisdom but from game theory, a new way to understand strategic decision-making. This analytical approach suggested that the standoff between the U.S. and USSR represented a Nash equilibrium: Neither superpower had reason to preemptively launch a nuclear attack, as it would surely provoke a devastating counterattack. At the same time, neither would disarm significantly enough to leave itself unable to retaliate to a preemptive strike. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction (or MAD, named somewhat facetiously by mathematician John von Neumann) seemed to keep the superpowers at a peaceful balance point. But it’s unsettling to live in a world whose existence is maintained only by the threatening logic of the Nash equilibrium.
http://nautil.us//blog/-why-hasnt-the-w ... 9-60760513
When opposing nations gained access to nuclear weapons, it fundamentally changed the logic of war. You might say that it made questions about war more cleanly logical—with nuclear-armed belligerents, there are fewer classic military analyses about morale, materiel, and maneuverings. Hundreds of small-scale tactical decisions dissolve into a few hugely important large-scale strategic ones, like, What happens if one side drops a nuclear bomb on its nuclear-armed opponent?
Using a dangerous weapon like a nuclear bomb can of course provoke dangerous responses. If one country crosses the nuclear line, what will its opponent do? What will its allies, or other nuclear-armed states do? The decision to use a nuclear weapon is practically nothing next to the chain reaction it begins. The act of one nation simply developing a nuclear weapon can provoke a “nuclear proliferation cascade,” as other nations, concerned about new nuclear-armed rivals, rush to follow suit. This is cited as one reason why it’s so important to prevent Iran from building its own nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, the important thinking about using nuclear weapons didn’t come from old military wisdom but from game theory, a new way to understand strategic decision-making. This analytical approach suggested that the standoff between the U.S. and USSR represented a Nash equilibrium: Neither superpower had reason to preemptively launch a nuclear attack, as it would surely provoke a devastating counterattack. At the same time, neither would disarm significantly enough to leave itself unable to retaliate to a preemptive strike. The doctrine of mutually assured destruction (or MAD, named somewhat facetiously by mathematician John von Neumann) seemed to keep the superpowers at a peaceful balance point. But it’s unsettling to live in a world whose existence is maintained only by the threatening logic of the Nash equilibrium.
http://nautil.us//blog/-why-hasnt-the-w ... 9-60760513
Will the U.S. Help the Saudis Get a Nuclear Weapon?
The last thing the Middle East needs is another country with the potential to build nuclear weapons. Yet that could happen if the United States mishandles Saudi Arabia’s plans to enter the nuclear power business and erect as many as 16 nuclear reactors for electricity generation over 25 years.
The Saudis aren’t saying they want to become the second country, after Israel, to have a nuclear arsenal in the increasingly unstable region. They insist the reactors would be used only to generate energy for domestic purposes, so they can rely on their huge reserves of oil to generate income from overseas.
Still, there are growing signs that the Saudis want the option of building nuclear weapons to hedge against their archrival, Iran, which had a robust nuclear program before accepting severe curbs under a 2015 deal with the United States and other major powers.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/opin ... 3053090226
The last thing the Middle East needs is another country with the potential to build nuclear weapons. Yet that could happen if the United States mishandles Saudi Arabia’s plans to enter the nuclear power business and erect as many as 16 nuclear reactors for electricity generation over 25 years.
The Saudis aren’t saying they want to become the second country, after Israel, to have a nuclear arsenal in the increasingly unstable region. They insist the reactors would be used only to generate energy for domestic purposes, so they can rely on their huge reserves of oil to generate income from overseas.
Still, there are growing signs that the Saudis want the option of building nuclear weapons to hedge against their archrival, Iran, which had a robust nuclear program before accepting severe curbs under a 2015 deal with the United States and other major powers.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/opin ... 3053090226
I Saw a Genocide in Slow Motion
Myanmar continues to kill its Rohingya, now by denying them health care and sometimes food instead of by wielding machetes and firing bullets.
RAKHINE STATE, Myanmar — Sono Wara spent the day crying. And even after her tear ducts emptied, her shirt was still wet from leaking milk.
Her newborn twins had died the previous day, and she squatted in her grass-roof hut, shattered by pain and grief. She is 18 and this was her first pregnancy, but as a member of the Rohingya ethnic minority she could not get a doctor’s help. So after a difficult delivery, her twins lie buried in the ground.
Sometimes Myanmar uses guns and machetes for ethnic cleansing, and that’s how Sono Wara earlier lost her mother and sister. But it also kills more subtly and secretly by regularly denying medical care and blocking humanitarian aid to Rohingya, and that’s why her twins are gone.
Myanmar and its Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, are trying to make the Rohingya’s lives unlivable, while keeping out witnesses. Some 700,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh in recent months, but the fate of those left behind has been less clear, for Myanmar mostly bans foreigners from Rohingya areas. The government fired a warning flare when it arrested two Reuters journalists for reporting on an army massacre of Rohingya; the reporters face up to 14 years in prison for committing superb journalism.
Entering Myanmar on a tourist visa, I was able to slip undetected into five Rohingya villages. What I found was a slow-motion genocide. The massacres and machete attacks of last August are over for now, but Rohingya remain confined to their villages — and to a huge concentration camp — and are systematically denied most education and medical care.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/opin ... dline&te=1
Myanmar continues to kill its Rohingya, now by denying them health care and sometimes food instead of by wielding machetes and firing bullets.
RAKHINE STATE, Myanmar — Sono Wara spent the day crying. And even after her tear ducts emptied, her shirt was still wet from leaking milk.
Her newborn twins had died the previous day, and she squatted in her grass-roof hut, shattered by pain and grief. She is 18 and this was her first pregnancy, but as a member of the Rohingya ethnic minority she could not get a doctor’s help. So after a difficult delivery, her twins lie buried in the ground.
Sometimes Myanmar uses guns and machetes for ethnic cleansing, and that’s how Sono Wara earlier lost her mother and sister. But it also kills more subtly and secretly by regularly denying medical care and blocking humanitarian aid to Rohingya, and that’s why her twins are gone.
Myanmar and its Nobel Peace Prize-winning leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, are trying to make the Rohingya’s lives unlivable, while keeping out witnesses. Some 700,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh in recent months, but the fate of those left behind has been less clear, for Myanmar mostly bans foreigners from Rohingya areas. The government fired a warning flare when it arrested two Reuters journalists for reporting on an army massacre of Rohingya; the reporters face up to 14 years in prison for committing superb journalism.
Entering Myanmar on a tourist visa, I was able to slip undetected into five Rohingya villages. What I found was a slow-motion genocide. The massacres and machete attacks of last August are over for now, but Rohingya remain confined to their villages — and to a huge concentration camp — and are systematically denied most education and medical care.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/opin ... dline&te=1
‘Never Again,’ Holocaust Museum Tells Burmese Leader
The decision by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to rescind its human-rights award to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is sad, and proper.
Few people in modern times had evoked as much admiration and support as the courageous daughter of Myanmar’s founding father when she defied the dictatorial junta in Myanmar through 15 years of house arrest. And few people have been as disappointing in their subsequent failure to act against, or even to acknowledge, the horrific persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority in her country.
“We had hoped that you — as someone we and many others have celebrated for your commitment to human dignity and universal human rights — would have done something to condemn and stop the military’s brutal campaign and to express solidarity with the targeted Rohingya population,” the Holocaust Museum wrote in an open letter explaining why it was taking back the Elie Wiesel Award it had presented five years earlier. Instead, the letter said, the ruling party Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi leads refused to cooperate with United Nations investigators, used “hateful rhetoric” against the Rohingya and cracked down on journalists trying to report on the vicious suppression of the group.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/11/opin ... dline&te=1
The decision by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to rescind its human-rights award to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is sad, and proper.
Few people in modern times had evoked as much admiration and support as the courageous daughter of Myanmar’s founding father when she defied the dictatorial junta in Myanmar through 15 years of house arrest. And few people have been as disappointing in their subsequent failure to act against, or even to acknowledge, the horrific persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority in her country.
“We had hoped that you — as someone we and many others have celebrated for your commitment to human dignity and universal human rights — would have done something to condemn and stop the military’s brutal campaign and to express solidarity with the targeted Rohingya population,” the Holocaust Museum wrote in an open letter explaining why it was taking back the Elie Wiesel Award it had presented five years earlier. Instead, the letter said, the ruling party Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi leads refused to cooperate with United Nations investigators, used “hateful rhetoric” against the Rohingya and cracked down on journalists trying to report on the vicious suppression of the group.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/11/opin ... dline&te=1
Weather and violence displace millions inside borders every year
Conflicts left nearly 12m people without a home in 2017
IN 2015 the refugee crisis in the eastern Mediterranean made headlines when a picture of a dead three-year-old Syrian boy, face down on a beach on the southern tip of Europe, brought home the tragic consequences of conflicts raging in Africa and the Middle East. Alan Kurdi’s desperate escape ended within five minutes of leaving Bodrum in Turkey, when the overloaded inflatable boat that carried him capsized. The journeys of those fleeing their homes to make new lives elsewhere capture headlines and animate politics. But millions more are forced out of their homes only to remain inside the borders of their countries. The number of such internally displaced people is shocking and has risen in recent years.
In 2017 over 30m people were displaced after natural disasters or outbreaks of violence, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and the Norwegian Refugee Council, an NGO. This is equivalent to 80,000 people each day abandoning their homes. As in previous years natural disasters were the biggest cause of upheaval. In the past decade a quarter of a billion people have been displaced, mostly because of storms, flooding or famine. By contrast 70m have been uprooted as a result of violent conflicts.
More...
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detai ... m=20180522
Conflicts left nearly 12m people without a home in 2017
IN 2015 the refugee crisis in the eastern Mediterranean made headlines when a picture of a dead three-year-old Syrian boy, face down on a beach on the southern tip of Europe, brought home the tragic consequences of conflicts raging in Africa and the Middle East. Alan Kurdi’s desperate escape ended within five minutes of leaving Bodrum in Turkey, when the overloaded inflatable boat that carried him capsized. The journeys of those fleeing their homes to make new lives elsewhere capture headlines and animate politics. But millions more are forced out of their homes only to remain inside the borders of their countries. The number of such internally displaced people is shocking and has risen in recent years.
In 2017 over 30m people were displaced after natural disasters or outbreaks of violence, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and the Norwegian Refugee Council, an NGO. This is equivalent to 80,000 people each day abandoning their homes. As in previous years natural disasters were the biggest cause of upheaval. In the past decade a quarter of a billion people have been displaced, mostly because of storms, flooding or famine. By contrast 70m have been uprooted as a result of violent conflicts.
More...
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detai ... m=20180522
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: The Carnage of the Cameroons
This is a story about an African nation’s fatal disregard of its minority population. It is also a story about the muddled sludge of colonial history.
Excerpt:
He is an Anglophone Cameroonian, and his home is in peril. News reports, sparse as they are, refer to what is going on in the western region of Cameroon as the “Anglophone crisis,” and it gives a somewhat benign linguistic tint to what is in fact a blistering devastation. Hundreds have died. Villages emptied, homes and shops reduced to blackened debris.
The carnage is not so much about language as it is about yet another African nation’s fatal disregard of its minority population. It is also about the muddled sludge of Europe’s colonial legacy.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/15/opin ... 3053090916
This is a story about an African nation’s fatal disregard of its minority population. It is also a story about the muddled sludge of colonial history.
Excerpt:
He is an Anglophone Cameroonian, and his home is in peril. News reports, sparse as they are, refer to what is going on in the western region of Cameroon as the “Anglophone crisis,” and it gives a somewhat benign linguistic tint to what is in fact a blistering devastation. Hundreds have died. Villages emptied, homes and shops reduced to blackened debris.
The carnage is not so much about language as it is about yet another African nation’s fatal disregard of its minority population. It is also about the muddled sludge of Europe’s colonial legacy.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/15/opin ... 3053090916
Your Tax Dollars Help Starve Children
ADEN, Yemen — He is an 8-year-old boy who is starving and has limbs like sticks, but Yaqoob Walid doesn’t cry or complain. He gazes stolidly ahead, tuning out everything, for in late stages of starvation the human body focuses every calorie simply on keeping the organs functioning.
Yaqoob arrived unconscious at Al Sadaqa Hospital here, weighing just over 30 pounds. He has suffered complications, and doctors say that it is unclear he will survive and that if he does he may suffer permanent brain damage.
Some 85,000 children may have already died here in Yemen, and 12 million more people may be on the brink of starvation, casualties in part of the three-year-old American-backed Saudi war in Yemen. United Nations officials and aid experts warn that this could become the worst famine the world has seen in a generation.
“The risk of a major catastrophe is very high,” Mark Lowcock, the United Nations humanitarian chief, told me. “In the worst case, what we have in Yemen now has the potential to be worse than anything any professional in this field has seen during their working lives.”
Both the Obama and Trump administrations have supported the Saudi war in Yemen with a military partnership, arms sales, intelligence sharing and until recently air-to-air refueling. The United States is thus complicit in what some human rights experts believe are war crimes.
The bottom line: Our tax dollars are going to starve children.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/opin ... 3053091209
ADEN, Yemen — He is an 8-year-old boy who is starving and has limbs like sticks, but Yaqoob Walid doesn’t cry or complain. He gazes stolidly ahead, tuning out everything, for in late stages of starvation the human body focuses every calorie simply on keeping the organs functioning.
Yaqoob arrived unconscious at Al Sadaqa Hospital here, weighing just over 30 pounds. He has suffered complications, and doctors say that it is unclear he will survive and that if he does he may suffer permanent brain damage.
Some 85,000 children may have already died here in Yemen, and 12 million more people may be on the brink of starvation, casualties in part of the three-year-old American-backed Saudi war in Yemen. United Nations officials and aid experts warn that this could become the worst famine the world has seen in a generation.
“The risk of a major catastrophe is very high,” Mark Lowcock, the United Nations humanitarian chief, told me. “In the worst case, what we have in Yemen now has the potential to be worse than anything any professional in this field has seen during their working lives.”
Both the Obama and Trump administrations have supported the Saudi war in Yemen with a military partnership, arms sales, intelligence sharing and until recently air-to-air refueling. The United States is thus complicit in what some human rights experts believe are war crimes.
The bottom line: Our tax dollars are going to starve children.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/07/opin ... 3053091209
The Oslo Forum Peacewriter Prize*
Monitoring ceasefires is getting harder: greater innovation is required
Aly Verjee
Senior Advisor, United States Institute of Peace
The article can be accessed at:
https://www.hdcentre.org/wp-content/upl ... e-2019.pdf
Monitoring ceasefires is getting harder: greater innovation is required
Aly Verjee
Senior Advisor, United States Institute of Peace
The article can be accessed at:
https://www.hdcentre.org/wp-content/upl ... e-2019.pdf
Jeeyo Aur Jeene Do - Kamal Haji | Raza Pirzada | Shama Judah | Rahila Babar | #LiveAndLetLive
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... e=emb_logo
Jeeyo Aur Jeene Do (Live and Let Live) is a tribute to the victims of the war, conflicts and persecutions around the world
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... e=emb_logo
Jeeyo Aur Jeene Do (Live and Let Live) is a tribute to the victims of the war, conflicts and persecutions around the world
Our Cruel Treatment of Animals Led to the Coronavirus
The conditions that lead to the emergence of new infectious diseases are the same ones that inflict horrific harms on animals.
There is the obvious and then there is what should be obvious. The obvious is that the coronavirus pandemic has brought much of the human world to a standstill. Many countries are in lockdown. So far, more than 1.7 million have been infected, more than 100,000 have died, and billions live in fear that the numbers of sick and dead will rise exponentially. Economies are in recession, with all the hardship that entails for human well-being.
What should be obvious, but may not be to many, is that none of this should come as a surprise. That there would be another pandemic was entirely predictable, even though the precise timing of its emergence and the shape of its trajectory were not. And there is an important sense in which the pandemic is of our own making as humans. A pandemic may seem like an entirely natural disaster, but it is often — perhaps even usually — not.
The coronavirus arose in animals and jumped the species barrier to humans and then spread with human-to-human transmission. This is a common phenomenon. Most — and some believe all — infectious diseases are of this type (zoonotic). That in itself does not put them within the realm of human responsibility. However, many zoonotic diseases arise because of the ways in which humans treat animals. The “wet” markets of China are a prime example. They are the likely source not only of Covid-19 but also of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and some outbreaks of avian influenza, for example. (Another possible source of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 may be one of the many mixed wildlife-livestock farms in China, but humans are responsible for those, too.)
The “wet” markets, which are found not only in China but also in some other East Asian countries, have a number of features that makes them especially conducive to spawning infectious zoonotic diseases. Live animals are housed in extremely cramped conditions until they are slaughtered in the market for those who have purchased them. In these conditions, infections are easily transmitted from one animal to another. Because new animals are regularly being brought to market, a disease can be spread through a chain of infection from one animal to others that arrive in the market much later. The proximity to humans, coupled with the flood of blood, excrement and other bodily fluids and parts, all facilitate the infection of humans. Once transmission from human to human occurs, an epidemic is the expected outcome, unless the problem is quickly contained. Global air travel can convert epidemic to pandemic within weeks or months — exactly as it did with the coronavirus.
It is these very conditions that facilitate the emergence of new infectious diseases and that also inflict horrific harms on animals — being kept in confined conditions and then butchered. Simply put, the coronavirus pandemic is a result of our gross maltreatment of animals.
Those who think that this is a Chinese problem rather than a human one should think again. There is no shortage of zoonoses that have emerged from human maltreatment of animals. The most likely origin of H.I.V. (human immunodeficiency virus), for example, is S.I.V. (simian immunodeficiency virus), and the most likely way in which it crossed the species barrier is through blood of a nonhuman primate butchered for human consumption. Similarly, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease probably had its origins in its bovine analogue — bovine spongiform encephalopathy (B.S.E.), or “mad cow disease.” The most probable mechanism of transmission is through human consumption of infected cattle.
In the future, we should fully expect our maltreatment of animals to wreak havoc on our own species. In addition to future pandemics, we face the very real risk of breeding antibiotic resistance. The major contributor to this is the use of antibiotics in the animal agriculture industry, as a growth promoter (to bring animals to slaughter weight as quickly as possible) and to curb the spread of infections among animals reared in cruel intensive “factory farmed” conditions.
It is entirely possible that the human future will involve a return to the pre-antibiotics era, in which people died in droves from infections that have been effectively treated since the discovery of penicillin and other early antibacterial agents. If so, it may turn out that the antibiotics era was a brief interlude between two much longer periods in human history in which we succumbed in large numbers to bacterial infections. That prospect, which is even more awful than the current crisis, is no less real for that. We, as a species, know about this problem, but we have not yet done what needs to be done to avert it (or at least minimize the chances of its happening).
What these and many other examples show is that harming animals can lead to considerable harm to humans. This provides a self-interested reason — in addition to the even stronger moral reasons — for humans to treat animals better. The problem is that even self-interest is an imperfect motivator. For all the puffery in calling ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise human,” we display remarkably little wisdom, even of a prudential kind.
This is not to deny the many intellectual achievements of humankind. However, they are combined with many cognitive and moral shortcomings, including undue confidence in our ability to solve problems. In general, humans respond to pandemics rather than act to prevent them — we attempt to prevent their spread after they emerge and to develop treatments for those infected. The current crisis demonstrates the folly of this approach. The closest we come to prevention is the effort to develop vaccines. But even this sort of prevention is a kind of reaction. Vaccines are developed in response to viruses that have already emerged. As the coronavirus experience shows, there can be a significant lag between that emergence and the development of a safe and effective vaccine, during which time great damage can be done both by the virus and by attempts to prevent its spread.
Real prevention requires taking steps to minimize the chances of the virus or other infectious agents emerging in the first place. One of a number of crucial measures would be a more intelligent — and more compassionate — appraisal of our treatment of nonhuman animals, and concomitant action.
Some might say that it is insensitive to highlight human responsibility for the current pandemic while we are in the midst of it. Isn’t it unseemly to rub our collective nose in this mess of our own making? Such concerns are misplaced. Earlier warnings of the dangers of our behavior, offered in less panicked times, went unheeded. Of course, it is entirely possible that even if we are now momentarily awakened, we will soon forget the lessons. There is plenty of precedent for that. However, given the importance of what lies in the balance, it is better to risk a little purported insensitivity than to pass up an opportunity to encourage some positive change. Millions of lives and the avoidance of much suffering are at stake.
David Benatar is a professor of philosophy and the director of the Bioethics Center at the University of Cape Town. His most recent book is “The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/opin ... 778d3e6de3
The conditions that lead to the emergence of new infectious diseases are the same ones that inflict horrific harms on animals.
There is the obvious and then there is what should be obvious. The obvious is that the coronavirus pandemic has brought much of the human world to a standstill. Many countries are in lockdown. So far, more than 1.7 million have been infected, more than 100,000 have died, and billions live in fear that the numbers of sick and dead will rise exponentially. Economies are in recession, with all the hardship that entails for human well-being.
What should be obvious, but may not be to many, is that none of this should come as a surprise. That there would be another pandemic was entirely predictable, even though the precise timing of its emergence and the shape of its trajectory were not. And there is an important sense in which the pandemic is of our own making as humans. A pandemic may seem like an entirely natural disaster, but it is often — perhaps even usually — not.
The coronavirus arose in animals and jumped the species barrier to humans and then spread with human-to-human transmission. This is a common phenomenon. Most — and some believe all — infectious diseases are of this type (zoonotic). That in itself does not put them within the realm of human responsibility. However, many zoonotic diseases arise because of the ways in which humans treat animals. The “wet” markets of China are a prime example. They are the likely source not only of Covid-19 but also of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and some outbreaks of avian influenza, for example. (Another possible source of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 may be one of the many mixed wildlife-livestock farms in China, but humans are responsible for those, too.)
The “wet” markets, which are found not only in China but also in some other East Asian countries, have a number of features that makes them especially conducive to spawning infectious zoonotic diseases. Live animals are housed in extremely cramped conditions until they are slaughtered in the market for those who have purchased them. In these conditions, infections are easily transmitted from one animal to another. Because new animals are regularly being brought to market, a disease can be spread through a chain of infection from one animal to others that arrive in the market much later. The proximity to humans, coupled with the flood of blood, excrement and other bodily fluids and parts, all facilitate the infection of humans. Once transmission from human to human occurs, an epidemic is the expected outcome, unless the problem is quickly contained. Global air travel can convert epidemic to pandemic within weeks or months — exactly as it did with the coronavirus.
It is these very conditions that facilitate the emergence of new infectious diseases and that also inflict horrific harms on animals — being kept in confined conditions and then butchered. Simply put, the coronavirus pandemic is a result of our gross maltreatment of animals.
Those who think that this is a Chinese problem rather than a human one should think again. There is no shortage of zoonoses that have emerged from human maltreatment of animals. The most likely origin of H.I.V. (human immunodeficiency virus), for example, is S.I.V. (simian immunodeficiency virus), and the most likely way in which it crossed the species barrier is through blood of a nonhuman primate butchered for human consumption. Similarly, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease probably had its origins in its bovine analogue — bovine spongiform encephalopathy (B.S.E.), or “mad cow disease.” The most probable mechanism of transmission is through human consumption of infected cattle.
In the future, we should fully expect our maltreatment of animals to wreak havoc on our own species. In addition to future pandemics, we face the very real risk of breeding antibiotic resistance. The major contributor to this is the use of antibiotics in the animal agriculture industry, as a growth promoter (to bring animals to slaughter weight as quickly as possible) and to curb the spread of infections among animals reared in cruel intensive “factory farmed” conditions.
It is entirely possible that the human future will involve a return to the pre-antibiotics era, in which people died in droves from infections that have been effectively treated since the discovery of penicillin and other early antibacterial agents. If so, it may turn out that the antibiotics era was a brief interlude between two much longer periods in human history in which we succumbed in large numbers to bacterial infections. That prospect, which is even more awful than the current crisis, is no less real for that. We, as a species, know about this problem, but we have not yet done what needs to be done to avert it (or at least minimize the chances of its happening).
What these and many other examples show is that harming animals can lead to considerable harm to humans. This provides a self-interested reason — in addition to the even stronger moral reasons — for humans to treat animals better. The problem is that even self-interest is an imperfect motivator. For all the puffery in calling ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise human,” we display remarkably little wisdom, even of a prudential kind.
This is not to deny the many intellectual achievements of humankind. However, they are combined with many cognitive and moral shortcomings, including undue confidence in our ability to solve problems. In general, humans respond to pandemics rather than act to prevent them — we attempt to prevent their spread after they emerge and to develop treatments for those infected. The current crisis demonstrates the folly of this approach. The closest we come to prevention is the effort to develop vaccines. But even this sort of prevention is a kind of reaction. Vaccines are developed in response to viruses that have already emerged. As the coronavirus experience shows, there can be a significant lag between that emergence and the development of a safe and effective vaccine, during which time great damage can be done both by the virus and by attempts to prevent its spread.
Real prevention requires taking steps to minimize the chances of the virus or other infectious agents emerging in the first place. One of a number of crucial measures would be a more intelligent — and more compassionate — appraisal of our treatment of nonhuman animals, and concomitant action.
Some might say that it is insensitive to highlight human responsibility for the current pandemic while we are in the midst of it. Isn’t it unseemly to rub our collective nose in this mess of our own making? Such concerns are misplaced. Earlier warnings of the dangers of our behavior, offered in less panicked times, went unheeded. Of course, it is entirely possible that even if we are now momentarily awakened, we will soon forget the lessons. There is plenty of precedent for that. However, given the importance of what lies in the balance, it is better to risk a little purported insensitivity than to pass up an opportunity to encourage some positive change. Millions of lives and the avoidance of much suffering are at stake.
David Benatar is a professor of philosophy and the director of the Bioethics Center at the University of Cape Town. His most recent book is “The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life’s Biggest Questions.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/opin ... 778d3e6de3
For Young Rohingya Brides, Marriage Means a Perilous, Deadly Crossing
Girls and young women from refugee camps in Bangladesh, promised to men they have never met, are undertaking the dangerous journey to Malaysia to join them.
BANGKOK — Haresa counted the days by the moon, waxing and waning over the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. Her days on the trawler, crammed into a space so tight that she could not even stretch her legs, bled into weeks, the weeks into months.
“People struggled like they were fish flopping around,” Ms. Haresa, 18, said of the other refugees on the boat. “Then they stopped moving.”
Dozens of bodies were thrown overboard, some beaten and some starved, survivors said. Ms. Haresa’s aunt died, then her brother.
Six full moons after she boarded the fishing boat in Bangladesh with hopes that human traffickers would ferry her to Malaysia for an arranged marriage, Ms. Haresa, who goes by one name, and almost 300 other Rohingya refugees found sanctuary in Indonesia last month. Her sister, 21, died two days after the boat landed.
Banished from their homes in Myanmar and crammed into refugee settlements in neighboring Bangladesh, thousands of Rohingya have taken the perilous boat crossing to Malaysia, where many from the persecuted minority group toil as undocumented workers. Hundreds have died along the way.
Most of those now undertaking the trip, like Ms. Haresa, are girls and young women from refugee camps in Bangladesh whose parents have promised them in marriage to Rohingya men in Malaysia. Two-thirds of those who landed in Indonesia last month with Ms. Haresa were female.
Amira Bibi and her family escaped their native Rakhine State, in Myanmar’s far west, as the military torched hundreds of Rohingya villages three years ago. The fourth of nine siblings, she said she knew her place in life.
“My parents are getting old and my brothers are with their own families,” she said. “How long are my parents going to bear the burden of me?”
Through the matchmaking of a cousin in Malaysia who works as a grass-cutter, Ms. Bibi’s parents found a fiancé for her. She asked for details about the man but none were provided, apart from his name, she said.
After surviving more than six months at sea in a failed attempt to reach him, Ms. Bibi spoke from Indonesia with her fiancé a country away. The phone call lasted two minutes. “He sounded young,” she said. That is the extent of what she knows about him.
Ms. Bibi initially told staff from the United Nations refugee agency that she was 15 years old, but later amended her age to 18. Child marriage is common among the Rohingya, especially in rural populations.
Mostly stateless, the Muslim minority has been subjected to an apartheidlike existence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. Over the past few years, waves of pogroms have pushed the Rohingya across the border to Bangladesh, where human traffickers prey on the young and desperate in the refugee camps, along with their families.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Girls and young women from refugee camps in Bangladesh, promised to men they have never met, are undertaking the dangerous journey to Malaysia to join them.
BANGKOK — Haresa counted the days by the moon, waxing and waning over the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. Her days on the trawler, crammed into a space so tight that she could not even stretch her legs, bled into weeks, the weeks into months.
“People struggled like they were fish flopping around,” Ms. Haresa, 18, said of the other refugees on the boat. “Then they stopped moving.”
Dozens of bodies were thrown overboard, some beaten and some starved, survivors said. Ms. Haresa’s aunt died, then her brother.
Six full moons after she boarded the fishing boat in Bangladesh with hopes that human traffickers would ferry her to Malaysia for an arranged marriage, Ms. Haresa, who goes by one name, and almost 300 other Rohingya refugees found sanctuary in Indonesia last month. Her sister, 21, died two days after the boat landed.
Banished from their homes in Myanmar and crammed into refugee settlements in neighboring Bangladesh, thousands of Rohingya have taken the perilous boat crossing to Malaysia, where many from the persecuted minority group toil as undocumented workers. Hundreds have died along the way.
Most of those now undertaking the trip, like Ms. Haresa, are girls and young women from refugee camps in Bangladesh whose parents have promised them in marriage to Rohingya men in Malaysia. Two-thirds of those who landed in Indonesia last month with Ms. Haresa were female.
Amira Bibi and her family escaped their native Rakhine State, in Myanmar’s far west, as the military torched hundreds of Rohingya villages three years ago. The fourth of nine siblings, she said she knew her place in life.
“My parents are getting old and my brothers are with their own families,” she said. “How long are my parents going to bear the burden of me?”
Through the matchmaking of a cousin in Malaysia who works as a grass-cutter, Ms. Bibi’s parents found a fiancé for her. She asked for details about the man but none were provided, apart from his name, she said.
After surviving more than six months at sea in a failed attempt to reach him, Ms. Bibi spoke from Indonesia with her fiancé a country away. The phone call lasted two minutes. “He sounded young,” she said. That is the extent of what she knows about him.
Ms. Bibi initially told staff from the United Nations refugee agency that she was 15 years old, but later amended her age to 18. Child marriage is common among the Rohingya, especially in rural populations.
Mostly stateless, the Muslim minority has been subjected to an apartheidlike existence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. Over the past few years, waves of pogroms have pushed the Rohingya across the border to Bangladesh, where human traffickers prey on the young and desperate in the refugee camps, along with their families.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Safety Message by President Al-Karim Alidina Nov 2, 2020 (Previously Recorded)
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjZg0FBR8pY
A message from the National Council on Staying Safe by President Al-Karim Alidina - Nov 2, 2020
Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjZg0FBR8pY
A message from the National Council on Staying Safe by President Al-Karim Alidina - Nov 2, 2020
The Most Dangerous Roads From Around The World That Are More Terrifying Than Any Roller Coaster
Are you up for taking the ultimate road trip? For plenty of years, roads have provided people an efficient way to travel. However, that’s not always the case since some roads are heavily traveled and worn down dramatically.
Others are remote, winding, or extremely narrow that make them almost impossible to drive down. Whatever the case may be, however, you will be thankful that walking from work to home isn’t so bad.
Slide show at:
https://www.postfun.com/surprising/dangerous-roads/
Are you up for taking the ultimate road trip? For plenty of years, roads have provided people an efficient way to travel. However, that’s not always the case since some roads are heavily traveled and worn down dramatically.
Others are remote, winding, or extremely narrow that make them almost impossible to drive down. Whatever the case may be, however, you will be thankful that walking from work to home isn’t so bad.
Slide show at:
https://www.postfun.com/surprising/dangerous-roads/
Stampede at Israel Religious Celebration Kills at Least 45
An estimated 100,000 people had gathered on Mount Meron to celebrate a religious holiday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terrible disaster.”
JERUSALEM — A stampede early Friday at a mountainside religious celebration in Israel that drew tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews left at least 45 people dead and scores more injured.
By some estimates, about 100,000 people were crammed together late Thursday to celebrate a holiday on Mount Meron in northern Israel, despite warnings from the authorities about the risk of Covid-19 transmission.
The deadly crush began around 1 a.m. on Friday, as celebrants began to pour out of a section of a compound where festivities were being held. The death toll of 45, released later by the Health Ministry, made it one of the worst civilian disasters in Israeli history.
Magen David Adom, the national ambulance service, said early Friday that it had treated 150 injured people. It posted a video on Twitter that showed a fleet of ambulances, red sirens flashing, waiting to evacuate the wounded.
“A terrible disaster,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, and Emanuele Giaufret, the European Union’s ambassador, offered condolences on Twitter to families of the victims.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews traditionally gather at Mount Meron for the holiday, Lag b’Omer, to dance and make bonfires around the tomb of a prominent rabbi from antiquity. Critics have warned for years that the site’s patchy infrastructure cannot safely handle large crowds.
A video said to have been taken right before the stampede on Friday showed a mass of people in ecstatic celebration, moving in unison to the music.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3
An estimated 100,000 people had gathered on Mount Meron to celebrate a religious holiday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terrible disaster.”
JERUSALEM — A stampede early Friday at a mountainside religious celebration in Israel that drew tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews left at least 45 people dead and scores more injured.
By some estimates, about 100,000 people were crammed together late Thursday to celebrate a holiday on Mount Meron in northern Israel, despite warnings from the authorities about the risk of Covid-19 transmission.
The deadly crush began around 1 a.m. on Friday, as celebrants began to pour out of a section of a compound where festivities were being held. The death toll of 45, released later by the Health Ministry, made it one of the worst civilian disasters in Israeli history.
Magen David Adom, the national ambulance service, said early Friday that it had treated 150 injured people. It posted a video on Twitter that showed a fleet of ambulances, red sirens flashing, waiting to evacuate the wounded.
“A terrible disaster,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, and Emanuele Giaufret, the European Union’s ambassador, offered condolences on Twitter to families of the victims.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews traditionally gather at Mount Meron for the holiday, Lag b’Omer, to dance and make bonfires around the tomb of a prominent rabbi from antiquity. Critics have warned for years that the site’s patchy infrastructure cannot safely handle large crowds.
A video said to have been taken right before the stampede on Friday showed a mass of people in ecstatic celebration, moving in unison to the music.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The ‘vaccine hesitant’ are a threat to society. But we must show them compassion
When we think of vaccines, most of us focus on how they will protect our families and ourselves. But the overarching role of vaccination is to protect the population at large, especially the most vulnerable among us, through herd immunity. If we think of viruses as raindrops, then vaccines work like raincoats for each person who gets one, while herd immunity acts like an umbrella for the whole community. In rough terms, 70 per cent of a population needs to be immune to an infectious threat – through vaccination or previous exposure – before herd immunity can be achieved. And since no vaccine is 100 per cent effective, we need to immunize even more than 70 per cent of the population to make the umbrella in our analogy waterproof.
Today’s vaccines have been shown to be among the safest medications on the planet. Still, there are people who reject these miracles of modern science. They are well-meaning, educated and often pillars of their community. And yet the vaccine hesitant represent one of the greatest threats to society.
Why are their beliefs so toxic? Because not only do they risk the welfare of themselves and their loved ones, but they threaten the health of the rest of us, too. In the midst of the COVID pandemic, it is more vital than ever to try to persuade the vaccine hesitant to do what most of us view as our societal obligation.
I meet them daily in my work in the ER. Parents who refuse tetanus boosters for their children. People with chronic respiratory conditions who wind up on ventilators after balking at their annual flu shots or pneumonia vaccine. And now, alarmingly, patients – and, even more disturbingly, fellow health care workers – who swear off the COVID vaccine. Often, there is a personal basis for their views. Many of them associate their own medical conditions and tragedies, or those of their loved ones, back to a vaccination event, even after such links have been scientifically debunked.
But one of the biggest drivers behind the fear of vaccination is the idea that mainstream medicine doesn’t take their concerns seriously. That sense of being unheard drives the vaccine-hesitant right into the arms of those who push anti-vax beliefs, who make them feel counted.
Like most physicians, I view vaccination to be among the greatest achievements of modern medicine. But it does no good to demonize the vaccine hesitant. I have found lecturing and disparaging them accomplishes nothing except to entrench their views and further the divide. I believe showing compassion and trying to understand the basis of their beliefs can accomplish as much to heal the rift as providing actual proof of vaccine safety. At the very least, the sense that they are being listened to is the first crucial step to winning them over to the side of science and reason.
The ER can be a hectic workplace, but to me vaccine hesitancy represents its own form of emergency. And when I encounter such people, I take the time to approach the subject from their perspective – to try to understand what drives their fear of vaccines and to acknowledge their concerns. Then I cite some of the miraculous advances made through vaccination, such as eradicating smallpox and banishing polio to the remote corners of the planet. I describe how the trusted scientific literature uniformly supports vaccination, and I explain the importance of herd immunity. I also tell them how committed I am to fully vaccinating my own family. If they have further questions, I refer them to trusted resources such as the CDC, the WHO or Health Canada websites. But I must admit, sometimes, when most exasperated, I have to fight the urge to ask if they would turn down a rabies vaccine after being bitten by a rabid bat.
I once saw a young mother in the ER who was so concerned about her toddler’s fever and rash that she broke into tears of relief when I told her the child did not have measles. She then sheepishly confessed that she had avoided getting the child vaccinated because her husband’s family was adamantly opposed to it. After a long discussion, she promised to reconsider. Coincidentally, I saw her six months later for an unrelated complaint, and I was so gratified to hear that not only had her child been vaccinated but she had also persuaded her husband’s sister to immunize her children, too.
I suspect that this anecdote is the exception and far more often my arguments fall on deaf ears. It is impossible to overlook the irony that we live in the greatest age of information accessibility and, paradoxically, during a time with such ready acceptance of misinformation. These beliefs are contradicted by any objective scientific standard. So instead, they rely on anecdotal stories – association with diseases rather than causation – and an echo chamber of their own belief system that rises to the level of religion. I see their approach as an offshoot of the tribalism that has caused conspiracy theories to fester across the planet.
In fairness, vaccine hesitancy is a broad term that encompasses a spectrum of heterogenous beliefs, from people who will accept many but not all vaccines to those who vehemently oppose any form of immunization. But the fiercest have their own equivalent of the “Big Lie” – the conspiracy theory that drove the insurrection on Capitol Hill in Washington. It boils down to one shameful study from the 1990s that falsely equated the measles vaccine with a higher risk of developing autism. The so-called findings of this fraudulent, academic tsunami have been disproven by multiple legitimate studies. Yet their Big Lie has persisted for decades, undeterred by facts.
I do not judge the sincerity or morality of the vaccine hesitant, but I am terrified of the damage they might inflict, particularly during this pandemic. And while I do not expect to change their minds or hearts in a single encounter, I believe we all owe it to society to at least try to sway them from their ironically infectious and unfounded beliefs. But to do so with kindness and respect.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
When we think of vaccines, most of us focus on how they will protect our families and ourselves. But the overarching role of vaccination is to protect the population at large, especially the most vulnerable among us, through herd immunity. If we think of viruses as raindrops, then vaccines work like raincoats for each person who gets one, while herd immunity acts like an umbrella for the whole community. In rough terms, 70 per cent of a population needs to be immune to an infectious threat – through vaccination or previous exposure – before herd immunity can be achieved. And since no vaccine is 100 per cent effective, we need to immunize even more than 70 per cent of the population to make the umbrella in our analogy waterproof.
Today’s vaccines have been shown to be among the safest medications on the planet. Still, there are people who reject these miracles of modern science. They are well-meaning, educated and often pillars of their community. And yet the vaccine hesitant represent one of the greatest threats to society.
Why are their beliefs so toxic? Because not only do they risk the welfare of themselves and their loved ones, but they threaten the health of the rest of us, too. In the midst of the COVID pandemic, it is more vital than ever to try to persuade the vaccine hesitant to do what most of us view as our societal obligation.
I meet them daily in my work in the ER. Parents who refuse tetanus boosters for their children. People with chronic respiratory conditions who wind up on ventilators after balking at their annual flu shots or pneumonia vaccine. And now, alarmingly, patients – and, even more disturbingly, fellow health care workers – who swear off the COVID vaccine. Often, there is a personal basis for their views. Many of them associate their own medical conditions and tragedies, or those of their loved ones, back to a vaccination event, even after such links have been scientifically debunked.
But one of the biggest drivers behind the fear of vaccination is the idea that mainstream medicine doesn’t take their concerns seriously. That sense of being unheard drives the vaccine-hesitant right into the arms of those who push anti-vax beliefs, who make them feel counted.
Like most physicians, I view vaccination to be among the greatest achievements of modern medicine. But it does no good to demonize the vaccine hesitant. I have found lecturing and disparaging them accomplishes nothing except to entrench their views and further the divide. I believe showing compassion and trying to understand the basis of their beliefs can accomplish as much to heal the rift as providing actual proof of vaccine safety. At the very least, the sense that they are being listened to is the first crucial step to winning them over to the side of science and reason.
The ER can be a hectic workplace, but to me vaccine hesitancy represents its own form of emergency. And when I encounter such people, I take the time to approach the subject from their perspective – to try to understand what drives their fear of vaccines and to acknowledge their concerns. Then I cite some of the miraculous advances made through vaccination, such as eradicating smallpox and banishing polio to the remote corners of the planet. I describe how the trusted scientific literature uniformly supports vaccination, and I explain the importance of herd immunity. I also tell them how committed I am to fully vaccinating my own family. If they have further questions, I refer them to trusted resources such as the CDC, the WHO or Health Canada websites. But I must admit, sometimes, when most exasperated, I have to fight the urge to ask if they would turn down a rabies vaccine after being bitten by a rabid bat.
I once saw a young mother in the ER who was so concerned about her toddler’s fever and rash that she broke into tears of relief when I told her the child did not have measles. She then sheepishly confessed that she had avoided getting the child vaccinated because her husband’s family was adamantly opposed to it. After a long discussion, she promised to reconsider. Coincidentally, I saw her six months later for an unrelated complaint, and I was so gratified to hear that not only had her child been vaccinated but she had also persuaded her husband’s sister to immunize her children, too.
I suspect that this anecdote is the exception and far more often my arguments fall on deaf ears. It is impossible to overlook the irony that we live in the greatest age of information accessibility and, paradoxically, during a time with such ready acceptance of misinformation. These beliefs are contradicted by any objective scientific standard. So instead, they rely on anecdotal stories – association with diseases rather than causation – and an echo chamber of their own belief system that rises to the level of religion. I see their approach as an offshoot of the tribalism that has caused conspiracy theories to fester across the planet.
In fairness, vaccine hesitancy is a broad term that encompasses a spectrum of heterogenous beliefs, from people who will accept many but not all vaccines to those who vehemently oppose any form of immunization. But the fiercest have their own equivalent of the “Big Lie” – the conspiracy theory that drove the insurrection on Capitol Hill in Washington. It boils down to one shameful study from the 1990s that falsely equated the measles vaccine with a higher risk of developing autism. The so-called findings of this fraudulent, academic tsunami have been disproven by multiple legitimate studies. Yet their Big Lie has persisted for decades, undeterred by facts.
I do not judge the sincerity or morality of the vaccine hesitant, but I am terrified of the damage they might inflict, particularly during this pandemic. And while I do not expect to change their minds or hearts in a single encounter, I believe we all owe it to society to at least try to sway them from their ironically infectious and unfounded beliefs. But to do so with kindness and respect.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion ... VgMaFxFnIY
After Kumbh, Uttarakhand Sees 1800% Jump in COVID-19 Cases
Uttarakhand recorded an 1800% increase in COVID-19 cases between 31 March to 24 April, when the Haridwar Mahakumbh was held.
The massive congregation likely turned into a super spreader event in the state as Uttarakhand recorded 1.3 lakh COVID-19 cases in over a month , which is over half of the state’s case tally till date.
Over 35 lakh people had gathered at Haridwar on 12 April and 13.51 lakh on 14 April.
What’s more, the state recorded 1,713 COVID-19 deaths during this time, which is half of the state’s total COVID-19 fatalities since the time the pandemic began in 2020.
Uttarakhand with a 24% positivity rate recorded 151 deaths on Thursday and 137 deaths on Friday .
Also Read: Kumbh Mela Now ‘Symbolic’, Yet Crowds Gather for Last ‘Shahi Snan’
The total number of active cases in state stood at 1,863 as on 31 March before the festival began and shot up to 33,330 by 24 April.
Garima Dasauni, spokesperson of the state Congress blamed the government for risking people’s lives, “The two biggest reasons for the surge in cases and deaths is the untimely Khumbh and the very untimely change of guard which shouldn’t have happened when the CM was holding the post of health minister as well. The new CM hasn’t held any administrative posts before this and his mishandling of the COVID situation started on the day he took over when he announced a grand Khumbh with no restrictions on devotees.”
The last Shahi Snan of Kumbh is scheduled for Tuesday and the authorities have clarified that it would be symbolic.
In lieu of the massive surge in coronavirus cases in the state, Uttarakhand Cabinet Minister Subodh Uniyal said, “COVID-19 infection has reached villages of Uttarakhand. The level of transmission despite corona Curfew is a matter of concern. To contain the spread, the government will take a major decision by 10 May.”
Also Read: Tests? Quarantine? Here Are States’ Rules for Kumbh Returnees
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/kumbh-uttarak ... 40227.html
Uttarakhand recorded an 1800% increase in COVID-19 cases between 31 March to 24 April, when the Haridwar Mahakumbh was held.
The massive congregation likely turned into a super spreader event in the state as Uttarakhand recorded 1.3 lakh COVID-19 cases in over a month , which is over half of the state’s case tally till date.
Over 35 lakh people had gathered at Haridwar on 12 April and 13.51 lakh on 14 April.
What’s more, the state recorded 1,713 COVID-19 deaths during this time, which is half of the state’s total COVID-19 fatalities since the time the pandemic began in 2020.
Uttarakhand with a 24% positivity rate recorded 151 deaths on Thursday and 137 deaths on Friday .
Also Read: Kumbh Mela Now ‘Symbolic’, Yet Crowds Gather for Last ‘Shahi Snan’
The total number of active cases in state stood at 1,863 as on 31 March before the festival began and shot up to 33,330 by 24 April.
Garima Dasauni, spokesperson of the state Congress blamed the government for risking people’s lives, “The two biggest reasons for the surge in cases and deaths is the untimely Khumbh and the very untimely change of guard which shouldn’t have happened when the CM was holding the post of health minister as well. The new CM hasn’t held any administrative posts before this and his mishandling of the COVID situation started on the day he took over when he announced a grand Khumbh with no restrictions on devotees.”
The last Shahi Snan of Kumbh is scheduled for Tuesday and the authorities have clarified that it would be symbolic.
In lieu of the massive surge in coronavirus cases in the state, Uttarakhand Cabinet Minister Subodh Uniyal said, “COVID-19 infection has reached villages of Uttarakhand. The level of transmission despite corona Curfew is a matter of concern. To contain the spread, the government will take a major decision by 10 May.”
Also Read: Tests? Quarantine? Here Are States’ Rules for Kumbh Returnees
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/kumbh-uttarak ... 40227.html
Scores of dead bodies found floating in India's Ganges River
Associated Press Tue, May 11, 2021, 9:12 AM
This frame grab from video provided by KK Productions shows police officials stand guard at the banks of the river where several bodies were found lying in Ghazipur district in Uttar Pradesh state India, Tuesday, May 11, 2021. Scores of dead bodies have been found floating down the Ganges River in eastern India amid a ferocious surge in coronavirus infections in the country, but authorities said Tuesday they haven't been able to determine the cause of death. Health officials working through the night Monday retrieved 71 bodies, officials in Bihar state said. (KK PRODUCTIONS via AP)
This frame grab from video provided by KK Productions shows bodies lying along the river in Ghazipur district in Uttar Pradesh state India, Tuesday, May 11, 2021. Scores of dead bodies have been found floating down the Ganges River in eastern India amid a ferocious surge in coronavirus infections in the country, but authorities said Tuesday they haven't been able to determine the cause of death. Health officials working through the night Monday retrieved 71 bodies, officials in Bihar state said. (KK PRODUCTIONS via AP)
NEW DELHI (AP) — Scores of dead bodies have been found floating down the Ganges River in eastern India as the country battles a ferocious surge in coronavirus infections. Authorities said Tuesday they haven't yet determined the cause of death.
Health officials working through the night Monday retrieved 71 bodies, officials in Bihar state said.
Images on social media of the bodies floating in the river prompted outrage and speculation that they died from COVID-19. Authorities performed post mortems on Tuesday but said they could not confirm the cause of death due to the decomposition of the bodies.
More corpses were found floating in the river on Tuesday, washing up in Ghazipur district in neighboring Uttar Pradesh state. Police and villagers were at the site, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Monday’s incident.
“We are trying to find out where did these dead bodies come from? How did they get here?” said Mangla Prasad Singh, a local official.
Surinder, a resident of Ghazipur who uses one name, said villagers didn't have enough wood to cremate their dead on land.
“Due to the shortage of wood, the dead are being buried in the water,” he said. “Bodies from around 12-13 villages have been buried in the water.”
Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are experiencing rising COVID-19 cases as infections in India grow faster than anywhere else in the world.
On Tuesday, the country confirmed nearly 390,000 new cases, including 3,876 more deaths. Overall, India has had the second highest number of confirmed cases after the U.S. with nearly 23 million and over 240,000 deaths. All of the figures are almost certainly a vast undercount, experts say.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sc ... 47995.html
Associated Press Tue, May 11, 2021, 9:12 AM
This frame grab from video provided by KK Productions shows police officials stand guard at the banks of the river where several bodies were found lying in Ghazipur district in Uttar Pradesh state India, Tuesday, May 11, 2021. Scores of dead bodies have been found floating down the Ganges River in eastern India amid a ferocious surge in coronavirus infections in the country, but authorities said Tuesday they haven't been able to determine the cause of death. Health officials working through the night Monday retrieved 71 bodies, officials in Bihar state said. (KK PRODUCTIONS via AP)
This frame grab from video provided by KK Productions shows bodies lying along the river in Ghazipur district in Uttar Pradesh state India, Tuesday, May 11, 2021. Scores of dead bodies have been found floating down the Ganges River in eastern India amid a ferocious surge in coronavirus infections in the country, but authorities said Tuesday they haven't been able to determine the cause of death. Health officials working through the night Monday retrieved 71 bodies, officials in Bihar state said. (KK PRODUCTIONS via AP)
NEW DELHI (AP) — Scores of dead bodies have been found floating down the Ganges River in eastern India as the country battles a ferocious surge in coronavirus infections. Authorities said Tuesday they haven't yet determined the cause of death.
Health officials working through the night Monday retrieved 71 bodies, officials in Bihar state said.
Images on social media of the bodies floating in the river prompted outrage and speculation that they died from COVID-19. Authorities performed post mortems on Tuesday but said they could not confirm the cause of death due to the decomposition of the bodies.
More corpses were found floating in the river on Tuesday, washing up in Ghazipur district in neighboring Uttar Pradesh state. Police and villagers were at the site, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from Monday’s incident.
“We are trying to find out where did these dead bodies come from? How did they get here?” said Mangla Prasad Singh, a local official.
Surinder, a resident of Ghazipur who uses one name, said villagers didn't have enough wood to cremate their dead on land.
“Due to the shortage of wood, the dead are being buried in the water,” he said. “Bodies from around 12-13 villages have been buried in the water.”
Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are experiencing rising COVID-19 cases as infections in India grow faster than anywhere else in the world.
On Tuesday, the country confirmed nearly 390,000 new cases, including 3,876 more deaths. Overall, India has had the second highest number of confirmed cases after the U.S. with nearly 23 million and over 240,000 deaths. All of the figures are almost certainly a vast undercount, experts say.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/sc ... 47995.html
Hundreds of bodies found buried along Indian riverbanks
RAJESH KUMAR SINGH and BISWAJEET BANERJEE
Associated Press Sun, May 16, 2021, 12:09 AM
PRAYAGRAJ, India (AP) — Police are reaching out to villagers in northern India to investigate the recovery of bodies buried in shallow sand graves or washed up on the Ganges River banks, prompting speculation on social media that they're the remains of COVID-19 victims.
In jeeps and boats, police used portable loudspeakers with microphones asking people not to dispose of bodies in rivers. "We are here to help you perform the last rites,” police said.
On Friday, rains exposed the cloth coverings of bodies buried in shallow sand graves on a wide, flat riverbank in Prayagraj, a city in Uttar Pradesh state. While officials say the riverside burials have taken place for decades, the sheer numbers in the shadow of the pandemic are focusing more attention on the practice.
Navneet Sehgal, a state government spokesman, on Sunday denied local media reports that more than 1,000 corpses of COVID-19 victims had been recovered from rivers in the past two weeks. “I bet these bodies have nothing to do with COVID-19,” he said.
He said some villagers did not cremate their dead as is customary, due to a Hindu tradition during some periods of religious significance, and instead disposed of them in rivers or by digging graves on riverbanks.
Ramesh Kumar Singh, a member of Bondhu Mahal Samiti, a philanthropic organization that helps cremate bodies, said the number of deaths is very high in rural areas, and poor people have been disposing of bodies in the river because of the exorbitant cost of performing the last rites and a shortage of wood. The cost of cremation has tripled up to 15,000 rupees ($210).
On Saturday, an Associated Press photojournalist estimated there were at least 300 shallow riverside graves on a sand bar near near Prayagraj. Each grave was covered by an orange, yellow or reddish cloth and appeared laid out in the same direction. Several policemen were at the scene, but allowed a family who arrived in a small truck to bury a 75-year-old woman at the site.
K.P. Singh, a senior police officer, said authorities had earmarked a cremation ground on the Prayagraj riverbank for those who died of COVID-19, and police were no longer allowing any burials on the riverfront. Authorities in Sehgal state have found “a small number” of bodies on the riverbanks, he said, but didn’t give a figure.
However, on Sunday, a 30-year-old Buddhist came to the same riverbank in Prayagraj with other family members and buried his mother, who he said had died of a heart attack.
“She was not infected with COVID-19,” Vijay Kumar told the AP, adding that his religion allows both cremation and burial, “but I chose burial.”
Health authorities last week retrieved 71 bodies that washed up on a Ganges River bank in neighboring Bihar state.
Authorities performed post mortems but said they could not confirm the cause of death due to decomposition.
A dozen corpses were also found last week buried in sand at two locations on the riverbank in Unnao district, 40 kilometers (25 miles) southwest of Lucknow, the Uttar Pradesh state capital. District Magistrate Ravindra Kumar said an investigation is underway to identify the cause of death.
India’s two big states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, with nearly 358 million people in total, are among the worst hit in the virus surge sweeping through the country with devastating death tolls. Hapless villagers have been rushing the sick to nearby towns and cities for treatment, many of them dying on the way, victims of India's crumbling health care.
After hitting record highs for weeks, the number of new cases was stabilizing, said Dr. V.K. Paul, a government health expert.
The Health Ministry on Sunday reported 311,170 confirmed cases in the past 24 hours, down from 326,098 on Saturday.
It also reported 4,077 additional deaths, taking the total fatalities to 270,284. Both figures are almost certainly a vast undercount, experts say.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/in ... 14298.html
RAJESH KUMAR SINGH and BISWAJEET BANERJEE
Associated Press Sun, May 16, 2021, 12:09 AM
PRAYAGRAJ, India (AP) — Police are reaching out to villagers in northern India to investigate the recovery of bodies buried in shallow sand graves or washed up on the Ganges River banks, prompting speculation on social media that they're the remains of COVID-19 victims.
In jeeps and boats, police used portable loudspeakers with microphones asking people not to dispose of bodies in rivers. "We are here to help you perform the last rites,” police said.
On Friday, rains exposed the cloth coverings of bodies buried in shallow sand graves on a wide, flat riverbank in Prayagraj, a city in Uttar Pradesh state. While officials say the riverside burials have taken place for decades, the sheer numbers in the shadow of the pandemic are focusing more attention on the practice.
Navneet Sehgal, a state government spokesman, on Sunday denied local media reports that more than 1,000 corpses of COVID-19 victims had been recovered from rivers in the past two weeks. “I bet these bodies have nothing to do with COVID-19,” he said.
He said some villagers did not cremate their dead as is customary, due to a Hindu tradition during some periods of religious significance, and instead disposed of them in rivers or by digging graves on riverbanks.
Ramesh Kumar Singh, a member of Bondhu Mahal Samiti, a philanthropic organization that helps cremate bodies, said the number of deaths is very high in rural areas, and poor people have been disposing of bodies in the river because of the exorbitant cost of performing the last rites and a shortage of wood. The cost of cremation has tripled up to 15,000 rupees ($210).
On Saturday, an Associated Press photojournalist estimated there were at least 300 shallow riverside graves on a sand bar near near Prayagraj. Each grave was covered by an orange, yellow or reddish cloth and appeared laid out in the same direction. Several policemen were at the scene, but allowed a family who arrived in a small truck to bury a 75-year-old woman at the site.
K.P. Singh, a senior police officer, said authorities had earmarked a cremation ground on the Prayagraj riverbank for those who died of COVID-19, and police were no longer allowing any burials on the riverfront. Authorities in Sehgal state have found “a small number” of bodies on the riverbanks, he said, but didn’t give a figure.
However, on Sunday, a 30-year-old Buddhist came to the same riverbank in Prayagraj with other family members and buried his mother, who he said had died of a heart attack.
“She was not infected with COVID-19,” Vijay Kumar told the AP, adding that his religion allows both cremation and burial, “but I chose burial.”
Health authorities last week retrieved 71 bodies that washed up on a Ganges River bank in neighboring Bihar state.
Authorities performed post mortems but said they could not confirm the cause of death due to decomposition.
A dozen corpses were also found last week buried in sand at two locations on the riverbank in Unnao district, 40 kilometers (25 miles) southwest of Lucknow, the Uttar Pradesh state capital. District Magistrate Ravindra Kumar said an investigation is underway to identify the cause of death.
India’s two big states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, with nearly 358 million people in total, are among the worst hit in the virus surge sweeping through the country with devastating death tolls. Hapless villagers have been rushing the sick to nearby towns and cities for treatment, many of them dying on the way, victims of India's crumbling health care.
After hitting record highs for weeks, the number of new cases was stabilizing, said Dr. V.K. Paul, a government health expert.
The Health Ministry on Sunday reported 311,170 confirmed cases in the past 24 hours, down from 326,098 on Saturday.
It also reported 4,077 additional deaths, taking the total fatalities to 270,284. Both figures are almost certainly a vast undercount, experts say.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/in ... 14298.html
Ambulances line up outside India crematorium
Reuters Videos Mon, May 10, 2021, 10:05 AM
Crematorium workers and relatives wearing protective suits made rows of fires to burn the dead bodies in the Indian tech hub.
Indian coronavirus infections and deaths held close to record daily highs on Monday, increasing calls for the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to lock down the world's second-most populous country.
Our goal is to create a safe and engaging place for users to connect over interests and passions. In order to improve our community experience, we are temporarily suspending article commenting.
World
The bloated, decaying bodies of COVID victims are washing up on the banks of India's Ganges River
Cheryl Teh
INSIDER Mon, May 10, 2021, 11:30 PM
ganges funeral pyres
A man walks past burning pyres with people who died from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), on the banks of the river Ganges at Garhmukteshwar in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, May 6, 2021. Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
More
Dozens of decaying corpses are washing up on the banks of India's Ganges River.
The local authorities believe these are the corpses of COVID dead from Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India.
The corpses may have been immersed in the river, as India faces a shortage of wood for cremations.
Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
The decaying bodies of COVID dead have been washing up on the banks of India's Ganges River, say reports from local media in India.
On Monday, the BBC wrote that dozens of bodies were surfacing on the riverbanks, on a stretch of water bordering the northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
According to Al Jazeera News, residents they spoke to speculated that families were immersing the bodies into the river because they can neither find open plots in cemeteries or a crematorium to burn the corpses, nor afford to buy wood to make funeral pyres.
The Ganges is seen as a viable alternative for Indian funeral rites as the river's waters, known as "Gangaa Jal," are believed to have purifying powers.
"Private hospitals are looting people. Common people are not left with money to pay a priest and spend more on cremation at the river bank. They are asking 2,000 rupees (around $27) just to get the corpse out of the ambulance. The river has become their last recourse, so people are immersing corpses in the river," a local named Chandra Mohan told the BBC.
The number of bodies pulled from the river is unconfirmed, as the local authorities have not made a tally public. But according to Indian news channel Times Now News, residents in the area said some 150 dead bodies were recovered and were likely COVID victims dumped on the riverbanks and washed downstream by the current.
The BBC confirmed that at least 40 bodies were found - with the condition of the corpses indicating that they might have been floating in the waters of the Ganges for a few days.
Indian news outlet NDTV reported that the bloated and partially-burnt bodies were found drifting in the waters near Bihar's Buxar district, a state which neighbors Uttar Pradesh.
Uttar Pradesh is the most highly-populated state in India and home to some 200 million people. It also continues to grapple with the deadly second wave of the COVID virus that has ravaged the nation's healthcare system - as it reported 21,331 new COVID cases on Monday.
Ashok Kumar, a local official, told the BBC the remains removed from the river would either be buried or cremated.
India has recorded over 22.7 million COVID cases and 246,000 deaths. The country is struggling to keep a massive surge in COVID infections under control as it tangles with deadly, more transmissible COVID variants - but the daily death toll has continued to rise far beyond what the country's crematoriums can handle.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/am ... 51432.html
Reuters Videos Mon, May 10, 2021, 10:05 AM
Crematorium workers and relatives wearing protective suits made rows of fires to burn the dead bodies in the Indian tech hub.
Indian coronavirus infections and deaths held close to record daily highs on Monday, increasing calls for the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to lock down the world's second-most populous country.
Our goal is to create a safe and engaging place for users to connect over interests and passions. In order to improve our community experience, we are temporarily suspending article commenting.
World
The bloated, decaying bodies of COVID victims are washing up on the banks of India's Ganges River
Cheryl Teh
INSIDER Mon, May 10, 2021, 11:30 PM
ganges funeral pyres
A man walks past burning pyres with people who died from the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), on the banks of the river Ganges at Garhmukteshwar in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India, May 6, 2021. Danish Siddiqui/Reuters
More
Dozens of decaying corpses are washing up on the banks of India's Ganges River.
The local authorities believe these are the corpses of COVID dead from Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India.
The corpses may have been immersed in the river, as India faces a shortage of wood for cremations.
Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
The decaying bodies of COVID dead have been washing up on the banks of India's Ganges River, say reports from local media in India.
On Monday, the BBC wrote that dozens of bodies were surfacing on the riverbanks, on a stretch of water bordering the northern Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.
According to Al Jazeera News, residents they spoke to speculated that families were immersing the bodies into the river because they can neither find open plots in cemeteries or a crematorium to burn the corpses, nor afford to buy wood to make funeral pyres.
The Ganges is seen as a viable alternative for Indian funeral rites as the river's waters, known as "Gangaa Jal," are believed to have purifying powers.
"Private hospitals are looting people. Common people are not left with money to pay a priest and spend more on cremation at the river bank. They are asking 2,000 rupees (around $27) just to get the corpse out of the ambulance. The river has become their last recourse, so people are immersing corpses in the river," a local named Chandra Mohan told the BBC.
The number of bodies pulled from the river is unconfirmed, as the local authorities have not made a tally public. But according to Indian news channel Times Now News, residents in the area said some 150 dead bodies were recovered and were likely COVID victims dumped on the riverbanks and washed downstream by the current.
The BBC confirmed that at least 40 bodies were found - with the condition of the corpses indicating that they might have been floating in the waters of the Ganges for a few days.
Indian news outlet NDTV reported that the bloated and partially-burnt bodies were found drifting in the waters near Bihar's Buxar district, a state which neighbors Uttar Pradesh.
Uttar Pradesh is the most highly-populated state in India and home to some 200 million people. It also continues to grapple with the deadly second wave of the COVID virus that has ravaged the nation's healthcare system - as it reported 21,331 new COVID cases on Monday.
Ashok Kumar, a local official, told the BBC the remains removed from the river would either be buried or cremated.
India has recorded over 22.7 million COVID cases and 246,000 deaths. The country is struggling to keep a massive surge in COVID infections under control as it tangles with deadly, more transmissible COVID variants - but the daily death toll has continued to rise far beyond what the country's crematoriums can handle.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/am ... 51432.html
‘No Way Out’: A Sudden Life-and-Death Struggle at a Houston Concert
Eight people died at Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival, and hundreds more were injured as investigators sought to determine why and how a surging crowd turned deadly.
Watch video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000 ... 778d3e6de3
An ambulance in the crowd during the Astroworld music festival in Houston. Eight people died during a crush of fans at a performance.Credit...Twitter @Onacasella, via Reuters
HOUSTON — Panic and then desperation spread through the crowd of 50,000 mostly young people just as the popular hometown rapper they had come to see, Travis Scott, took the stage Friday night. It came like a wave, an unstoppable movement of bodies that could not be held back.
Some collapsed. Others fought for air. Concertgoers lifted up the unconscious bodies of friends and strangers and surfed them over the top of the crowd, hoping to send them to safety. Others shouted out for help with CPR and pleaded for the concert to stop.
It kept going.
In the end, eight people died, ranging in age from 14 to 27, according to city officials. Hundreds more were treated for injuries at a field hospital at the concert venue, the NRG Park in Houston, or at local hospitals. Among those treated at a hospital was a 10-year-old child.
By Saturday, officials in Houston were at a loss to explain how the concert, part of the two-day Astroworld music festival organized by Live Nation and Mr. Scott, had transformed in an instant from a celebration to a struggle for life. So too were those who had been at the outdoor concert, who described a thrust of the crowd that would not let up as Mr. Scott took the stage around 9 p.m.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/us/t ... 778d3e6de3
Eight people died at Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival, and hundreds more were injured as investigators sought to determine why and how a surging crowd turned deadly.
Watch video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000 ... 778d3e6de3
An ambulance in the crowd during the Astroworld music festival in Houston. Eight people died during a crush of fans at a performance.Credit...Twitter @Onacasella, via Reuters
HOUSTON — Panic and then desperation spread through the crowd of 50,000 mostly young people just as the popular hometown rapper they had come to see, Travis Scott, took the stage Friday night. It came like a wave, an unstoppable movement of bodies that could not be held back.
Some collapsed. Others fought for air. Concertgoers lifted up the unconscious bodies of friends and strangers and surfed them over the top of the crowd, hoping to send them to safety. Others shouted out for help with CPR and pleaded for the concert to stop.
It kept going.
In the end, eight people died, ranging in age from 14 to 27, according to city officials. Hundreds more were treated for injuries at a field hospital at the concert venue, the NRG Park in Houston, or at local hospitals. Among those treated at a hospital was a 10-year-old child.
By Saturday, officials in Houston were at a loss to explain how the concert, part of the two-day Astroworld music festival organized by Live Nation and Mr. Scott, had transformed in an instant from a celebration to a struggle for life. So too were those who had been at the outdoor concert, who described a thrust of the crowd that would not let up as Mr. Scott took the stage around 9 p.m.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/06/us/t ... 778d3e6de3
Astroworld Disaster Rekindles Fears About Music Festival Safety
The concert industry notes that serious problems are still rare, but over the years a number of deadly stampedes have shown the inherent dangers of big, excited crowds.
On Dec. 3, 1979, a crowd amassed outside Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati for a concert by the Who. The show was booked without seat reservations, giving early-bird fans the chance to rush toward the stage. In the confusion outside the venue, 11 people were crushed to death.
In response, Cincinnati banned that kind of general-admission model, sometimes called festival seating, and the incident served as a reminder of the inherent danger when pop music is mixed with big crowds.
Cincinnati’s ban was lifted in 2004, just as a new, lucrative era of music festivals was taking off, led by events like Coachella, that were modeled after European festivals where fans roamed free and took in attractions on multiple stages.
But through the years a series of disasters at concerts, clubs and festivals have served as reminders of the dangers of crowds, like the death of nine people at a Danish festival in 2000, or a stampede at a nightclub in Chicago in 2003 that left 21 dead.
Those fears were rekindled again with Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston last Friday, where nine people died and more than 300 were injured, at a packed event that drew 50,000 people to NRG Park.
For now, more questions than answers surround Astroworld, including how well the festival’s security plan was followed and why it took nearly 40 minutes to shut the show down after Houston officials declared a “mass casualty event.” The Houston police are conducting a criminal investigation, and dozens of civil lawsuits have been filed against Mr. Scott and Live Nation, the festival’s promoter, among other defendants.
The event, and the finger-pointing in response, seemed all too familiar to Paul Wertheimer, a concert security expert and longtime critic of the industry. He began his career investigating the Who disaster and has since documented thousands of safety incidents at festivals and concerts; his research has included hours studying the dynamics of mosh pits.
“I’ve been living this recurring nightmare, what happened in Houston, for 40 years,” he said in an interview. “I’ve seen it over and over again.”
The Astroworld disaster has already ignited debate about the safety of festivals, just as the industry has finally seen the return of large-scale touring after more than a year of dormancy during the pandemic.
To critics like Mr. Wertheimer, Astroworld is yet another sign that concert promoters prioritize profits over safety. The concert industry sees it differently, arguing that the rarity of serious problems given the many thousands of events that go on without major incident each year proves that most shows are perfectly safe, and that expertise has been developed to protect the public.
Live Nation, the world’s largest concert company, put on some 40,000 shows of various sizes in 2019, the most recent year that it had a full slate of events. Deaths and major injuries are rare, and when they do occur they often involve factors like drug overdoses.
Still, the impact of the deaths in Houston are already being felt in the industry, as executives calculate the increased costs and heightened security measures they expect will be required in the future to avoid becoming the next Astroworld.
Randy Phillips, the former chief executive of AEG Live, a concert giant that counts Coachella among its portfolio of festivals, said that for shows he is planning on his own as a promoter, “we are oversecuring and overinsuring all participants in a way we probably wouldn’t have pre-Astroworld.”
Until the criminal investigation is completed, and courts sort out liability in the civil suits, it may be unclear just what steps festivals promoters and concert venues should take to prevent a recurrence. But few doubt there will be repercussions that will affect insurance, security, government regulations and contractual agreements among promoters, performers, venues and various third parties like security firms.
In a statement, Live Nation said, “We continue to support and assist local authorities in their ongoing investigation so that both the fans who attended and their families can get the answers they want and deserve.” The company declined to comment further.
For Live Nation and other promoters, festivals have become an important moneymaker. The day before the Astroworld disaster, in a conference call with analysts to announce Live Nation’s third-quarter financial results, Michael Rapino, its chief executive, said that when the company controls all revenue streams for a festival, “it’s our highest-margin business.”
Crowd-control plans are an essential part of those events, and have evolved over the last two decades or so as festivals have become a key part of the touring industry.
To manage general-admission events, long barriers known as crowd breaks are usually deployed to divide large spaces into smaller zones that contain as few as 5,000 patrons, reducing the risk of overcrowding, Mr. Phillips said. Other practices have emerged, like the use of counterprogramming on multiple stages, with overlapping set times, to prevent the full force of a festival audience from piling into one place at the same time.
It is unclear how well those lessons were implemented at Astroworld.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/arts ... 778d3e6de3
The concert industry notes that serious problems are still rare, but over the years a number of deadly stampedes have shown the inherent dangers of big, excited crowds.
On Dec. 3, 1979, a crowd amassed outside Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati for a concert by the Who. The show was booked without seat reservations, giving early-bird fans the chance to rush toward the stage. In the confusion outside the venue, 11 people were crushed to death.
In response, Cincinnati banned that kind of general-admission model, sometimes called festival seating, and the incident served as a reminder of the inherent danger when pop music is mixed with big crowds.
Cincinnati’s ban was lifted in 2004, just as a new, lucrative era of music festivals was taking off, led by events like Coachella, that were modeled after European festivals where fans roamed free and took in attractions on multiple stages.
But through the years a series of disasters at concerts, clubs and festivals have served as reminders of the dangers of crowds, like the death of nine people at a Danish festival in 2000, or a stampede at a nightclub in Chicago in 2003 that left 21 dead.
Those fears were rekindled again with Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston last Friday, where nine people died and more than 300 were injured, at a packed event that drew 50,000 people to NRG Park.
For now, more questions than answers surround Astroworld, including how well the festival’s security plan was followed and why it took nearly 40 minutes to shut the show down after Houston officials declared a “mass casualty event.” The Houston police are conducting a criminal investigation, and dozens of civil lawsuits have been filed against Mr. Scott and Live Nation, the festival’s promoter, among other defendants.
The event, and the finger-pointing in response, seemed all too familiar to Paul Wertheimer, a concert security expert and longtime critic of the industry. He began his career investigating the Who disaster and has since documented thousands of safety incidents at festivals and concerts; his research has included hours studying the dynamics of mosh pits.
“I’ve been living this recurring nightmare, what happened in Houston, for 40 years,” he said in an interview. “I’ve seen it over and over again.”
The Astroworld disaster has already ignited debate about the safety of festivals, just as the industry has finally seen the return of large-scale touring after more than a year of dormancy during the pandemic.
To critics like Mr. Wertheimer, Astroworld is yet another sign that concert promoters prioritize profits over safety. The concert industry sees it differently, arguing that the rarity of serious problems given the many thousands of events that go on without major incident each year proves that most shows are perfectly safe, and that expertise has been developed to protect the public.
Live Nation, the world’s largest concert company, put on some 40,000 shows of various sizes in 2019, the most recent year that it had a full slate of events. Deaths and major injuries are rare, and when they do occur they often involve factors like drug overdoses.
Still, the impact of the deaths in Houston are already being felt in the industry, as executives calculate the increased costs and heightened security measures they expect will be required in the future to avoid becoming the next Astroworld.
Randy Phillips, the former chief executive of AEG Live, a concert giant that counts Coachella among its portfolio of festivals, said that for shows he is planning on his own as a promoter, “we are oversecuring and overinsuring all participants in a way we probably wouldn’t have pre-Astroworld.”
Until the criminal investigation is completed, and courts sort out liability in the civil suits, it may be unclear just what steps festivals promoters and concert venues should take to prevent a recurrence. But few doubt there will be repercussions that will affect insurance, security, government regulations and contractual agreements among promoters, performers, venues and various third parties like security firms.
In a statement, Live Nation said, “We continue to support and assist local authorities in their ongoing investigation so that both the fans who attended and their families can get the answers they want and deserve.” The company declined to comment further.
For Live Nation and other promoters, festivals have become an important moneymaker. The day before the Astroworld disaster, in a conference call with analysts to announce Live Nation’s third-quarter financial results, Michael Rapino, its chief executive, said that when the company controls all revenue streams for a festival, “it’s our highest-margin business.”
Crowd-control plans are an essential part of those events, and have evolved over the last two decades or so as festivals have become a key part of the touring industry.
To manage general-admission events, long barriers known as crowd breaks are usually deployed to divide large spaces into smaller zones that contain as few as 5,000 patrons, reducing the risk of overcrowding, Mr. Phillips said. Other practices have emerged, like the use of counterprogramming on multiple stages, with overlapping set times, to prevent the full force of a festival audience from piling into one place at the same time.
It is unclear how well those lessons were implemented at Astroworld.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/arts ... 778d3e6de3
Pakistan hosts OIC's Council of Foreign Ministers meeting today
- OIC meeting seeks answers to Afghanistan's looming humanitarian, economic crises.
- PM Imran Khan to deliver keynote address at OIC meeting.
- Afghan delegation attending the moot is being led by Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi.
At the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's insistence, Pakistan will host the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation's (OIC) Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in Islamabad today (Saturday).
The purpose of the OIC meeting is to address the looming humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and turn the world's attention to the people of the war-ravaged country, who are at severe risk of starvation and disease.
Prime Minister Imran Khan will deliver the keynote address at the event. Islamabad is playing an instrumental role in gathering the world and the Taliban on the same platform in hopes to find a lasting solution to the crises faced by Afghanistan.
The Afghan delegation attending the moot is being led by Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi.
Pakistan has time and again emphasised that the lack of prompt response would lead to food shortages for some 22.8mn people and affect about 3.2mn children with malnutrition.
"The OIC Extraordinary session in Islamabad would prove to be a stepping stone in finding solutions to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and this was also an opportunity for world capitals to know about ground realities from Taliban representatives," said Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi earlier.
"In case of such a crisis, the country's neighbours, including Pakistan, and European Union states, would have to prepare for another influx of refugees. We are expecting some financial support from the OIC member states."
Special representatives on Afghanistan from the United States, Russia, China and European Union would also attend the event, the Pakistani foreign minister had said.
Besides the foreign ministers from the OIC member states and observers, participants would also include special invitees from the United Nations system, international financial institutions and some non-member states including the US, UK, France, China, Russia, Germany, Italy and Japan.
"Besides expressing solidarity with the Afghan people, the CFM is expected to explore avenues for containing and reversing the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Afghanistan, especially in terms of food shortages, displacement of people and a potential economic collapse," said the Foreign Office.
Later a meeting of the Troika Plus – comprising Pakistan, China, Russia and the United States — P5 countries and Germany, Japan, Italy and Australia would also be held in Islamabad to discuss the Afghan situation.
A delegation from Saudi Arabia including Afghan affairs department head Prince Abdullah bin Khalid bin Saud al-Kabir and Prince Jiluwi bin Turki have arrived. Official sources say that Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan will also attend the conference.
According to the tentative programme for Saturday, the conference will include statements from Foreign Minister Qureshi, Saudi Foreign Minister Farhan Al-Saud, who is also the OIC Summit Chair, Hissein Brahim Taha, Secretary-General of the OIC, statements on behalf of OIC Regional Groups (Asia, Africa, Arab) and a final statement by President Islamic Development Bank, Dr Muhammad Al-Jasser.
https://www.geo.tv/latest/388360-pakist ... ting-today
- OIC meeting seeks answers to Afghanistan's looming humanitarian, economic crises.
- PM Imran Khan to deliver keynote address at OIC meeting.
- Afghan delegation attending the moot is being led by Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi.
At the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia's insistence, Pakistan will host the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation's (OIC) Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in Islamabad today (Saturday).
The purpose of the OIC meeting is to address the looming humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and turn the world's attention to the people of the war-ravaged country, who are at severe risk of starvation and disease.
Prime Minister Imran Khan will deliver the keynote address at the event. Islamabad is playing an instrumental role in gathering the world and the Taliban on the same platform in hopes to find a lasting solution to the crises faced by Afghanistan.
The Afghan delegation attending the moot is being led by Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi.
Pakistan has time and again emphasised that the lack of prompt response would lead to food shortages for some 22.8mn people and affect about 3.2mn children with malnutrition.
"The OIC Extraordinary session in Islamabad would prove to be a stepping stone in finding solutions to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan and this was also an opportunity for world capitals to know about ground realities from Taliban representatives," said Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi earlier.
"In case of such a crisis, the country's neighbours, including Pakistan, and European Union states, would have to prepare for another influx of refugees. We are expecting some financial support from the OIC member states."
Special representatives on Afghanistan from the United States, Russia, China and European Union would also attend the event, the Pakistani foreign minister had said.
Besides the foreign ministers from the OIC member states and observers, participants would also include special invitees from the United Nations system, international financial institutions and some non-member states including the US, UK, France, China, Russia, Germany, Italy and Japan.
"Besides expressing solidarity with the Afghan people, the CFM is expected to explore avenues for containing and reversing the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Afghanistan, especially in terms of food shortages, displacement of people and a potential economic collapse," said the Foreign Office.
Later a meeting of the Troika Plus – comprising Pakistan, China, Russia and the United States — P5 countries and Germany, Japan, Italy and Australia would also be held in Islamabad to discuss the Afghan situation.
A delegation from Saudi Arabia including Afghan affairs department head Prince Abdullah bin Khalid bin Saud al-Kabir and Prince Jiluwi bin Turki have arrived. Official sources say that Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan will also attend the conference.
According to the tentative programme for Saturday, the conference will include statements from Foreign Minister Qureshi, Saudi Foreign Minister Farhan Al-Saud, who is also the OIC Summit Chair, Hissein Brahim Taha, Secretary-General of the OIC, statements on behalf of OIC Regional Groups (Asia, Africa, Arab) and a final statement by President Islamic Development Bank, Dr Muhammad Al-Jasser.
https://www.geo.tv/latest/388360-pakist ... ting-today
At Least 12 Die in Stampede at a Hindu Shrine in Kashmir
Thousands of devotees were visiting the Mata Vaishno Devi shrine to mark the beginning of the year.
SRINAGAR, Kashmir — At least 12 people were killed and more than a dozen were injured in a stampede early Saturday near the city of Jammu in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, as thousands of devotees were paying obeisance at a famous Hindu shrine to mark the beginning of the new year.
Hundreds of people were packed inside a corridor of the shrine, Mata Vaishno Devi, in the hilly town of Katra, when at about 2:30 a.m. a clash broke out outside, leading to the stampede, police officials said.
Dilbag Singh, the top police officer of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, which contains Katra, said that officers had been quick to respond to emergency calls but that the “damage was already done.”
One of the devotees at the shrine, Bunty Singh, said he, like thousands of others, had arrived to offer prayers just after midnight, an auspicious time for many Hindus to start the first day of a year. But Mr. Singh, 45, a businessman from neighboring Punjab State, said that the roads leading to the shrine were packed and that there was hardly any space to walk.
“A sudden commotion broke out,” he said. “Before the stampede, there was a noise for some time, as if people were fighting with each other.”
Deadly stampedes during religious pilgrimages and festivals are common in India, where public safety measures are often flouted by temple authorities. The stampedes are often brought on by overcrowding in small areas with few exit-control measures in place. In recent years, officials across the country have been trying to improve public safety at temples and shrines, which are visited by hundreds of thousands of people each day. According to local officials, the temple authorities in Katra said they had taken the required safety measures.
In October 2013, at least 115 people died when thousands of religious pilgrims panicked that a narrow bridge they were crossing might be collapsing. About half a million worshipers had flocked that month to a temple in the northern Madhya Pradesh State for a festival. In April 2016, a series of explosions caused by a fireworks display during a religious festival at a temple in the southern Kerala State left 106 dead and hundreds injured.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Thousands of devotees were visiting the Mata Vaishno Devi shrine to mark the beginning of the year.
SRINAGAR, Kashmir — At least 12 people were killed and more than a dozen were injured in a stampede early Saturday near the city of Jammu in the Indian-controlled portion of Kashmir, as thousands of devotees were paying obeisance at a famous Hindu shrine to mark the beginning of the new year.
Hundreds of people were packed inside a corridor of the shrine, Mata Vaishno Devi, in the hilly town of Katra, when at about 2:30 a.m. a clash broke out outside, leading to the stampede, police officials said.
Dilbag Singh, the top police officer of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, which contains Katra, said that officers had been quick to respond to emergency calls but that the “damage was already done.”
One of the devotees at the shrine, Bunty Singh, said he, like thousands of others, had arrived to offer prayers just after midnight, an auspicious time for many Hindus to start the first day of a year. But Mr. Singh, 45, a businessman from neighboring Punjab State, said that the roads leading to the shrine were packed and that there was hardly any space to walk.
“A sudden commotion broke out,” he said. “Before the stampede, there was a noise for some time, as if people were fighting with each other.”
Deadly stampedes during religious pilgrimages and festivals are common in India, where public safety measures are often flouted by temple authorities. The stampedes are often brought on by overcrowding in small areas with few exit-control measures in place. In recent years, officials across the country have been trying to improve public safety at temples and shrines, which are visited by hundreds of thousands of people each day. According to local officials, the temple authorities in Katra said they had taken the required safety measures.
In October 2013, at least 115 people died when thousands of religious pilgrims panicked that a narrow bridge they were crossing might be collapsing. About half a million worshipers had flocked that month to a temple in the northern Madhya Pradesh State for a festival. In April 2016, a series of explosions caused by a fireworks display during a religious festival at a temple in the southern Kerala State left 106 dead and hundreds injured.
More....
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
Putin Is Brandishing the Nuclear Option. How Serious Is the Threat?
Over the weekend, as his military laid siege to Ukraine for the fourth day, President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s nuclear forces into a higher state of alert, the first time the Kremlin has done so since the Russian Federation was established in 1991.
“This is unprecedented in the post-Cold War era,” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington nonprofit, told NBC. “There has been no instance in which a U.S. or a Russian leader has raised the alert level of their nuclear forces in a middle of a crisis in order to try to coerce the other side’s behavior.”
Since the end of the Cold War, it has been easy enough for most people to disregard the possibility of a nuclear attack; the conflict in Ukraine has thrust it back into view. How troubling is Putin’s escalation, and in what ways might the prospect of a nuclear exchange shape the outcome of this conflict? Here’s what people are saying.
What does Putin’s order mean?
Russia and the United States control 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. Those weapons can be delivered by aircraft — as were the two atomic bombs that the United States used against Japan in World War II — or via submarine- or land-based missiles.
During the Cold War, as Robert Burns of The Associated Press explains, the United States and Russia maintained several times their current number of nuclear weapons, and kept them more closely at the ready. Shortly before the Soviet Union’s collapse, President George H.W. Bush took U.S. nuclear-armed bombers off alert in an effort to slow the nuclear arms race.
But both nations have kept their land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles at a constant state of readiness. Capable of being launched within minutes, these missiles provided the bedrock of the “mutually assured destruction” strategy that U.S. nuclear doctrine credits with avoiding nuclear exchanges throughout the Cold War.
How Putin’s order will change the status quo isn’t yet clear: In his televised announcement he issued only a vague command to his generals for “special combat readiness.”
“If Russia’s alerts look anything like ours, this means that the crews and institutions that control strategic missiles, submarines and bombers will be told to make preparedness a higher priority,” Tom Nichols writes for The Atlantic. “They will cancel leaves, conduct inspections, check their communications and so on, and their intelligence organizations will devote more time and attention than usual to monitoring for indications of possible launches against Russia.”
On Tuesday, the Russian military announced it had conducted drills involving nuclear submarines and mobile land-based missile launchers. But it’s not yet known — at least among the public — whether the exercises were directly related to Putin’s order or if they marked a change in the country’s standard nuclear operations.
“Both Russia and the United States conduct drills that replicate various levels of nuclear alert status, so the choreography of such moves is well understood by both sides,” David E. Sanger and William J. Broad report for The Times. The United States and its allies monitor Russia’s nuclear forces around the clock, so “a deviation from usual practice would almost certainly be noticeable.”
How worrying is Putin’s escalation?
History is full of instances in which nuclear powers publicly threatened to use their arsenals. Matthew Kroenig, a professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown, pointed to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the 1969 border war between the Soviet Union and China, and the 1999 war between India and Pakistan, among other examples. (More recently, President Donald Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” after it conducted long-range missile tests.)
Perhaps one of the closest precedents to the current moment occurred during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Arab states, then allied with the Soviet Union, launched attacks on Israel. As Nichols recounts, the Nixon administration responded by raising the United States’ nuclear alert level, albeit with no formal announcement.
From a strategic standpoint, many experts say that there is no reason for Putin to use nuclear weapons: His goal, according to Paul Hare, a senior lecturer in global studies at Boston University, is to “swallow Ukraine” and restore the historical power of imperial Russia — not to instigate a nuclear exchange, which, if it did not bring about civilization’s end, would make him a pariah not just to the world’s democracies but also to China.
Among those who see Putin’s order as incongruous with that goal, the move has raised questions about his state of mind. “It makes no sense,” said Graham Allison, a Harvard political scientist who worked on the project to decommission thousands of nuclear weapons that once belonged to the Soviet Union. He noted that the incident is “adding to the worry that Putin’s grasp on reality may be loosening.”
Other experts, though, are skeptical of such conjecture. “I don’t fully subscribe to this view that Putin’s lost it completely,” Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard, told Yahoo News. “I always like to remind people, and occasionally remind my students, that plenty of leaders that we regarded as fairly smart and fairly sensible did dumb things in the past.”
It’s also possible to see the alert as an attempt by Putin to guard against the threat of overthrow that he may see as the ultimate goal of the countries issuing sanctions. In the view of Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russia’s nuclear forces at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, Putin’s announcement could make his government less vulnerable to decapitation.
Still, some experts and military officials warn that the risk for mistakes in a heightened state of alert is worrisome. “What would happen if the Russian warning system had a false alarm in the middle of a crisis like this?” Jeffrey Lewis, a senior scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said on NPR. “Would Putin know it was a false alarm? Or would he jump to the wrong conclusion?”
“I don’t think we should look at this as a threat by Putin to use nuclear weapons against the United States, against Europe, against NATO,” said Kimball. But, he added, “it’s a point in which both sides needs to back down and move the word ‘nuclear’ from this equation.”
The United States seems to be doing just that. The Biden administration could have countered Putin’s order by putting its bombers, nuclear silos and submarines on a higher alert level. Instead, the White House made clear that it had not changed. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations also told the Security Council on Sunday that Russia was “under no threat” and chided Putin for “another escalatory and unnecessary step that threatens us all.”
How nuclear weapons are shaping the terms of the Ukraine conflict and beyond
Since the dawn of the Cold War, the logic of mutually assured destruction held that nuclear weapons would act as deterrents to full-scale nuclear conflict. One school of thought known as “nuclear revolution theory” posits that the proliferation of nuclear weapons has made the world safer by increasing the risk of aggression. The advent of nuclear weapons did coincide with a decades-long decline in war-related deaths among nuclear-armed states.
But another theory holds that nuclear weapons can make conventional warfare more likely rather than less. It’s known in academic circles as the “stability-instability paradox”: Because nuclear-armed states feel secure in the knowledge that neither side will chance annihilation, they develop a larger risk appetite for crisis, escalation and violence at a smaller scale than full-blown war.
Viewed through the lens of the stability-instability paradox, nuclear weapons may have actually laid the groundwork for the current conflict. “Russia can be relatively confident that the United States and its allies won’t come to Ukraine’s defense directly, because such a clash carries the threat of nuclear war,” Zack Beauchamp writes for Vox. “This could make Putin more confident that his invasion could succeed.”
Perhaps the most destabilizing effect of Russia’s invasion, then, could be a renewed global thirst for nuclear weapons as a means of protecting national sovereignty, Ivan Krastev writes in The Times. He notes that at the Munich Security Forum this month, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine stated that his country had made a mistake in abandoning the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. In the face of a nuclear-armed China and North Korea, a large majority of South Koreans have also come to favor the development of a domestic nuclear weapons program. (The current prime minister of Japan, it should be said, has remained resolute in his country’s commitment to nonproliferation, calling the idea of hosting U.S. nuclear weapons “unacceptable.”)
“I sense a period ending,” writes Mary Elise Sarotte, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, in The Times. “I am now deeply afraid that Mr. Putin’s recklessness may cause the years between the Cold War and the Covid-19 pandemic to seem a halcyon period to future historians, compared with what came after. I fear we may find ourselves missing the old Cold War.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Over the weekend, as his military laid siege to Ukraine for the fourth day, President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia’s nuclear forces into a higher state of alert, the first time the Kremlin has done so since the Russian Federation was established in 1991.
“This is unprecedented in the post-Cold War era,” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington nonprofit, told NBC. “There has been no instance in which a U.S. or a Russian leader has raised the alert level of their nuclear forces in a middle of a crisis in order to try to coerce the other side’s behavior.”
Since the end of the Cold War, it has been easy enough for most people to disregard the possibility of a nuclear attack; the conflict in Ukraine has thrust it back into view. How troubling is Putin’s escalation, and in what ways might the prospect of a nuclear exchange shape the outcome of this conflict? Here’s what people are saying.
What does Putin’s order mean?
Russia and the United States control 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. Those weapons can be delivered by aircraft — as were the two atomic bombs that the United States used against Japan in World War II — or via submarine- or land-based missiles.
During the Cold War, as Robert Burns of The Associated Press explains, the United States and Russia maintained several times their current number of nuclear weapons, and kept them more closely at the ready. Shortly before the Soviet Union’s collapse, President George H.W. Bush took U.S. nuclear-armed bombers off alert in an effort to slow the nuclear arms race.
But both nations have kept their land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles at a constant state of readiness. Capable of being launched within minutes, these missiles provided the bedrock of the “mutually assured destruction” strategy that U.S. nuclear doctrine credits with avoiding nuclear exchanges throughout the Cold War.
How Putin’s order will change the status quo isn’t yet clear: In his televised announcement he issued only a vague command to his generals for “special combat readiness.”
“If Russia’s alerts look anything like ours, this means that the crews and institutions that control strategic missiles, submarines and bombers will be told to make preparedness a higher priority,” Tom Nichols writes for The Atlantic. “They will cancel leaves, conduct inspections, check their communications and so on, and their intelligence organizations will devote more time and attention than usual to monitoring for indications of possible launches against Russia.”
On Tuesday, the Russian military announced it had conducted drills involving nuclear submarines and mobile land-based missile launchers. But it’s not yet known — at least among the public — whether the exercises were directly related to Putin’s order or if they marked a change in the country’s standard nuclear operations.
“Both Russia and the United States conduct drills that replicate various levels of nuclear alert status, so the choreography of such moves is well understood by both sides,” David E. Sanger and William J. Broad report for The Times. The United States and its allies monitor Russia’s nuclear forces around the clock, so “a deviation from usual practice would almost certainly be noticeable.”
How worrying is Putin’s escalation?
History is full of instances in which nuclear powers publicly threatened to use their arsenals. Matthew Kroenig, a professor of government and foreign service at Georgetown, pointed to the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the 1969 border war between the Soviet Union and China, and the 1999 war between India and Pakistan, among other examples. (More recently, President Donald Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen” after it conducted long-range missile tests.)
Perhaps one of the closest precedents to the current moment occurred during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Arab states, then allied with the Soviet Union, launched attacks on Israel. As Nichols recounts, the Nixon administration responded by raising the United States’ nuclear alert level, albeit with no formal announcement.
From a strategic standpoint, many experts say that there is no reason for Putin to use nuclear weapons: His goal, according to Paul Hare, a senior lecturer in global studies at Boston University, is to “swallow Ukraine” and restore the historical power of imperial Russia — not to instigate a nuclear exchange, which, if it did not bring about civilization’s end, would make him a pariah not just to the world’s democracies but also to China.
Among those who see Putin’s order as incongruous with that goal, the move has raised questions about his state of mind. “It makes no sense,” said Graham Allison, a Harvard political scientist who worked on the project to decommission thousands of nuclear weapons that once belonged to the Soviet Union. He noted that the incident is “adding to the worry that Putin’s grasp on reality may be loosening.”
Other experts, though, are skeptical of such conjecture. “I don’t fully subscribe to this view that Putin’s lost it completely,” Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard, told Yahoo News. “I always like to remind people, and occasionally remind my students, that plenty of leaders that we regarded as fairly smart and fairly sensible did dumb things in the past.”
It’s also possible to see the alert as an attempt by Putin to guard against the threat of overthrow that he may see as the ultimate goal of the countries issuing sanctions. In the view of Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russia’s nuclear forces at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, Putin’s announcement could make his government less vulnerable to decapitation.
Still, some experts and military officials warn that the risk for mistakes in a heightened state of alert is worrisome. “What would happen if the Russian warning system had a false alarm in the middle of a crisis like this?” Jeffrey Lewis, a senior scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said on NPR. “Would Putin know it was a false alarm? Or would he jump to the wrong conclusion?”
“I don’t think we should look at this as a threat by Putin to use nuclear weapons against the United States, against Europe, against NATO,” said Kimball. But, he added, “it’s a point in which both sides needs to back down and move the word ‘nuclear’ from this equation.”
The United States seems to be doing just that. The Biden administration could have countered Putin’s order by putting its bombers, nuclear silos and submarines on a higher alert level. Instead, the White House made clear that it had not changed. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations also told the Security Council on Sunday that Russia was “under no threat” and chided Putin for “another escalatory and unnecessary step that threatens us all.”
How nuclear weapons are shaping the terms of the Ukraine conflict and beyond
Since the dawn of the Cold War, the logic of mutually assured destruction held that nuclear weapons would act as deterrents to full-scale nuclear conflict. One school of thought known as “nuclear revolution theory” posits that the proliferation of nuclear weapons has made the world safer by increasing the risk of aggression. The advent of nuclear weapons did coincide with a decades-long decline in war-related deaths among nuclear-armed states.
But another theory holds that nuclear weapons can make conventional warfare more likely rather than less. It’s known in academic circles as the “stability-instability paradox”: Because nuclear-armed states feel secure in the knowledge that neither side will chance annihilation, they develop a larger risk appetite for crisis, escalation and violence at a smaller scale than full-blown war.
Viewed through the lens of the stability-instability paradox, nuclear weapons may have actually laid the groundwork for the current conflict. “Russia can be relatively confident that the United States and its allies won’t come to Ukraine’s defense directly, because such a clash carries the threat of nuclear war,” Zack Beauchamp writes for Vox. “This could make Putin more confident that his invasion could succeed.”
Perhaps the most destabilizing effect of Russia’s invasion, then, could be a renewed global thirst for nuclear weapons as a means of protecting national sovereignty, Ivan Krastev writes in The Times. He notes that at the Munich Security Forum this month, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine stated that his country had made a mistake in abandoning the nuclear weapons it inherited from the Soviet Union. In the face of a nuclear-armed China and North Korea, a large majority of South Koreans have also come to favor the development of a domestic nuclear weapons program. (The current prime minister of Japan, it should be said, has remained resolute in his country’s commitment to nonproliferation, calling the idea of hosting U.S. nuclear weapons “unacceptable.”)
“I sense a period ending,” writes Mary Elise Sarotte, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, in The Times. “I am now deeply afraid that Mr. Putin’s recklessness may cause the years between the Cold War and the Covid-19 pandemic to seem a halcyon period to future historians, compared with what came after. I fear we may find ourselves missing the old Cold War.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
This Is What It’s Like to Witness a Nuclear Explosion
By Rod Buntzen
Mr. Buntzen is the author of “The Armageddon Experience: A Nuclear Weapons Test Memoir.”
In the early days of his war against Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin told the world that he had ordered his nation’s nuclear forces to a higher state of readiness. Ever since, pundits, generals and politicians have speculated about what would happen if the Russian military used a nuclear weapon.
What would NATO do? Should the United States respond with its own nuclear weapons?
These speculations all sound hollow to me. Unconvincing words without feeling.
In 1958, as a young scientist for the U.S. Navy, I witnessed the detonation of an 8.9-megaton thermonuclear weapon as it sat on a barge in Eniwetok Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. I watched from across the lagoon at the beach on Parry Island, where my group prepared instrumentation to measure the atmospheric radiation. Sixty-three years later, what I saw remains etched in my mind, which is why I’m so alarmed that the use of nuclear weapons can be discussed so cavalierly in 2022.
Although the potential horror of nuclear weapons remains frozen in films from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the public today has little understanding of the stakes of the Cold War and what might be expected now if the war in Ukraine intentionally or accidentally spins out of control.
The test I witnessed, code-named Oak, was part of a larger series called Hardtack I, which included 35 nuclear detonations over several months in 1958. With world concern about atmospheric testing mounting, the military was eager to test as many different types of weapons as it could before any atmospheric moratorium was announced. The hydrogen bomb used in the Oak test was detonated at 7:30 a.m. A second bomb was set off at noon on nearby Bikini Atoll.
Operation Hardtack Oak, June 1958.Credit...Photograph via Wikimedia Commons
In a nuclear detonation, the thermal and shock effects are the most immediate and are unimaginable. The fission-fusion process that occurs in a thermonuclear explosion happens in a millionth of a second.
As I watched from 20 miles away, all the materials in the bomb, barge and surrounding lagoon water and air had been vaporized and raised to a temperature of tens of millions of degrees.
As the X-rays and neutrons from the bomb raced outward, they left the heavier material particles behind, creating a radiation front that was absorbed by the surrounding air. The radiation, absorption, reradiation and expansion processes continued, cooling the bomb mass within milliseconds.
The outer high-pressure shock region cooled and lost its opacity as it raced toward me, and a hotter inner fireball again appeared.
This point in the process is called breakaway, occurring about three seconds after detonation, when the fireball radius was already nearly 5,500 feet.
Operation Hardtack Oak, June 1958.Credit...Los Alamos National Labs
By now, the fireball had begun to rise, engulfing more and more atmosphere and sweeping up coral and more lagoon water into an enormous column. The ball of fire eventually reached a radius of 1.65 miles.
Time seemed to have stopped. I had lost my count of the seconds.
The heat was becoming unbearable. Bare spots at my ankles were starting to hurt. The aluminum foil hood I had fashioned for protection was beginning to fail.
I thought that the hair on the back of my head might catch on fire.
The brightness the detonation created defies description. I worried that my high-density goggles would fail.
Keeping my eyes closed, I turned until I could see the edge of the fireball.
As I again turned away from the fireball, I opened my eyes inside the goggles and saw outlines of the trees and objects nearby.
The visible light penetrating my goggles increased, and the heat on my back grew more intense. I squirmed to distribute the heat from my side to my back.
About 30 or 40 seconds after detonation, I took off the goggles and watched the angry violet-red and brown cloud from the fireball.
As the rising cloud started to form a mushroom cap, I waited for the shock wave to arrive. In the distance, I could see a long vertical shadow approaching. I instinctively opened my mouth and moved my jaw side to side to equalize pressure difference across my eardrums, closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears.
Pow!
Operation Hardtack Oak, June 1958.Credit...Los Alamos National Labs
It hit me like a full body slap, knocking me back. I opened my eyes to see another shadow approaching from a slightly different direction. Over the next few seconds, I felt several smaller blows created by reflections of the pressure wave off distant islands.
The fireball kept expanding and climbing at over 200 miles per hour, reaching an altitude of about 2 miles. The boiling mass 20 miles away turned into a mixture of white and gray vapor and continued its climb until it reached somewhere about 100,000 feet.
Meanwhile, the lagoon water had receded like a curtain being pulled back, and the sea bottom slowly appeared. Shark netting that usually protected swimmers lay on the bottom.
Finally, the water stopped receding and appeared to form a wall, like pictures of Moses parting the sea. The wall seemed to remain motionless before finally roaring back.
The water receded for a second time, then repeatedly in smaller and smaller waves and finally as minuscule oscillations across the lagoon surface that lasted all day.
Operation Hardtack Umbrella, June 1958.Credit...Photograph via Wikimedia Commons
Mankind conducted more than 500 nuclear tests in the atmosphere before moving operations underground, where we tested 1,500 more. Tests to verify the design of weapons. Tests to measure the impact of radiation on people. Tests to make political statements.
During my early Navy career, I focused on scenarios involving nuclear exchanges that could have killed tens of millions of people — what was known during the Cold War as mutually assured destruction.
But the end of the Cold War didn’t bring an end to these fearsome weapons.
Just a few months ago, in January, Russia, China, France, Britain and the United States issued a joint statement affirming that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
“We underline our desire to work with all states to create a security environment more conducive to progress on disarmament with the ultimate goal of a world without nuclear weapons with undiminished security for all,” the statement read.
If nuclear weapons are used in Ukraine, the biggest worry is that the conflict could spin quickly out of control. In a strategic war with Russia, hundreds of detonations like the one I witnessed could blanket our countries.
Having witnessed one thermonuclear explosion, I hope that no humans ever have to witness another.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
By Rod Buntzen
Mr. Buntzen is the author of “The Armageddon Experience: A Nuclear Weapons Test Memoir.”
In the early days of his war against Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin told the world that he had ordered his nation’s nuclear forces to a higher state of readiness. Ever since, pundits, generals and politicians have speculated about what would happen if the Russian military used a nuclear weapon.
What would NATO do? Should the United States respond with its own nuclear weapons?
These speculations all sound hollow to me. Unconvincing words without feeling.
In 1958, as a young scientist for the U.S. Navy, I witnessed the detonation of an 8.9-megaton thermonuclear weapon as it sat on a barge in Eniwetok Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. I watched from across the lagoon at the beach on Parry Island, where my group prepared instrumentation to measure the atmospheric radiation. Sixty-three years later, what I saw remains etched in my mind, which is why I’m so alarmed that the use of nuclear weapons can be discussed so cavalierly in 2022.
Although the potential horror of nuclear weapons remains frozen in films from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the public today has little understanding of the stakes of the Cold War and what might be expected now if the war in Ukraine intentionally or accidentally spins out of control.
The test I witnessed, code-named Oak, was part of a larger series called Hardtack I, which included 35 nuclear detonations over several months in 1958. With world concern about atmospheric testing mounting, the military was eager to test as many different types of weapons as it could before any atmospheric moratorium was announced. The hydrogen bomb used in the Oak test was detonated at 7:30 a.m. A second bomb was set off at noon on nearby Bikini Atoll.
Operation Hardtack Oak, June 1958.Credit...Photograph via Wikimedia Commons
In a nuclear detonation, the thermal and shock effects are the most immediate and are unimaginable. The fission-fusion process that occurs in a thermonuclear explosion happens in a millionth of a second.
As I watched from 20 miles away, all the materials in the bomb, barge and surrounding lagoon water and air had been vaporized and raised to a temperature of tens of millions of degrees.
As the X-rays and neutrons from the bomb raced outward, they left the heavier material particles behind, creating a radiation front that was absorbed by the surrounding air. The radiation, absorption, reradiation and expansion processes continued, cooling the bomb mass within milliseconds.
The outer high-pressure shock region cooled and lost its opacity as it raced toward me, and a hotter inner fireball again appeared.
This point in the process is called breakaway, occurring about three seconds after detonation, when the fireball radius was already nearly 5,500 feet.
Operation Hardtack Oak, June 1958.Credit...Los Alamos National Labs
By now, the fireball had begun to rise, engulfing more and more atmosphere and sweeping up coral and more lagoon water into an enormous column. The ball of fire eventually reached a radius of 1.65 miles.
Time seemed to have stopped. I had lost my count of the seconds.
The heat was becoming unbearable. Bare spots at my ankles were starting to hurt. The aluminum foil hood I had fashioned for protection was beginning to fail.
I thought that the hair on the back of my head might catch on fire.
The brightness the detonation created defies description. I worried that my high-density goggles would fail.
Keeping my eyes closed, I turned until I could see the edge of the fireball.
As I again turned away from the fireball, I opened my eyes inside the goggles and saw outlines of the trees and objects nearby.
The visible light penetrating my goggles increased, and the heat on my back grew more intense. I squirmed to distribute the heat from my side to my back.
About 30 or 40 seconds after detonation, I took off the goggles and watched the angry violet-red and brown cloud from the fireball.
As the rising cloud started to form a mushroom cap, I waited for the shock wave to arrive. In the distance, I could see a long vertical shadow approaching. I instinctively opened my mouth and moved my jaw side to side to equalize pressure difference across my eardrums, closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears.
Pow!
Operation Hardtack Oak, June 1958.Credit...Los Alamos National Labs
It hit me like a full body slap, knocking me back. I opened my eyes to see another shadow approaching from a slightly different direction. Over the next few seconds, I felt several smaller blows created by reflections of the pressure wave off distant islands.
The fireball kept expanding and climbing at over 200 miles per hour, reaching an altitude of about 2 miles. The boiling mass 20 miles away turned into a mixture of white and gray vapor and continued its climb until it reached somewhere about 100,000 feet.
Meanwhile, the lagoon water had receded like a curtain being pulled back, and the sea bottom slowly appeared. Shark netting that usually protected swimmers lay on the bottom.
Finally, the water stopped receding and appeared to form a wall, like pictures of Moses parting the sea. The wall seemed to remain motionless before finally roaring back.
The water receded for a second time, then repeatedly in smaller and smaller waves and finally as minuscule oscillations across the lagoon surface that lasted all day.
Operation Hardtack Umbrella, June 1958.Credit...Photograph via Wikimedia Commons
Mankind conducted more than 500 nuclear tests in the atmosphere before moving operations underground, where we tested 1,500 more. Tests to verify the design of weapons. Tests to measure the impact of radiation on people. Tests to make political statements.
During my early Navy career, I focused on scenarios involving nuclear exchanges that could have killed tens of millions of people — what was known during the Cold War as mutually assured destruction.
But the end of the Cold War didn’t bring an end to these fearsome weapons.
Just a few months ago, in January, Russia, China, France, Britain and the United States issued a joint statement affirming that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
“We underline our desire to work with all states to create a security environment more conducive to progress on disarmament with the ultimate goal of a world without nuclear weapons with undiminished security for all,” the statement read.
If nuclear weapons are used in Ukraine, the biggest worry is that the conflict could spin quickly out of control. In a strategic war with Russia, hundreds of detonations like the one I witnessed could blanket our countries.
Having witnessed one thermonuclear explosion, I hope that no humans ever have to witness another.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Re: MAN-MADE DISASTERS
An Age of Existential Uncertainty
I grew up during the Cold War, when, in elementary school, we still participated in bomb drills. A bell would ring or horn would blow and we would duck and cover, or in some teachers’ classrooms, just put our heads down on our desks.
From the videos of utter destruction caused by nuclear weapons, I couldn’t see how any of these drills would be helpful (apparently duck and cover did offer some protection). I simply assumed it would be better to be resting when I died than not.
Although we lived in a small Louisiana town, in the middle of nowhere really, we were about 30 minutes away from Barksdale Air Force Base, where President George W. Bush would, years later, take refuge after the attacks on 9/11. As children, it felt like we were in the military arena, particularly every time the jets overhead latticed the skies with contrails or produced a sonic boom.
Even people of modest means in the area built bomb shelters. Armageddon was in the air.
America and the Soviet Union were locked in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction: There were so many nuclear weapons that if one side used them to launch an attack, we were told the other would immediately respond, prompting the annihilation of both countries and possibly the world.
This idea offered some assurance, but not enough. The idea that a mistake could be made lingered like a combustible fume. It haunted. In the popular 1983 film “WarGames,” a high school hacker accidentally connects with NORAD computers, and, thinking he’s simply playing a game, almost instigates a nuclear war.
I find it hard to explain to younger people what it felt like to live all my formative years with such uncertainty, with the belief that the world might end at any moment. I don’t know how to explain what it felt like to fill a time capsule in the sixth grade and bury it, not just as a classroom exercise, but with the gnawing feeling that all we knew could be obliterated and that all that future generations might ever know of us could be contained in a single capsule.
Fear became so ambient that it became ordinary; it was defanged. The fear wasn’t debilitating. To the contrary, it seemed to produce a sense of bucket-list adventurousness, even among children. What would you do if the world could end tomorrow? It was simultaneously oppressive and liberating.
Then, in 1991, when I was nearly at the end of college, the Soviet Union collapsed and splintered, and the Cold War came to an abrupt end. That is around when Ukraine and other former Soviet republics became independent states.
That is also, I believe, the last time I thought seriously about mutually assured destruction.
After three decades of freedom from that kind of worry, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, still smarting over the demise of the Soviet Union, has reminded us that many of the nuclear weapons that once terrified us still exist, putting real limits on our ability to confront and control rogue behavior.
In an interview that aired in December, Putin lamented the fall of the Soviet Union, which he had previously called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. “It was a disintegration of historical Russia,” he said in the interview. “We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost.”
Putin wants that back. The invasion of Ukraine is part of that vision.
Putin confessed in the interview that not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, when inflation in Russia reached double digits, he sometimes moonlighted as a taxi driver to supplement his income. “It is unpleasant to talk about this,” he said, “but, unfortunately, this also took place.”
Now, he has reversed the humiliation of those hard times. Some experts believe that he could now be the wealthiest man in the world. I believe this makes the 69-year-old more dangerous, not less.
Putin now has little need of the shallow pleasure he’d get gathering unto himself more material objects than he already owns. Instead, he may now be consumed by the thing that preoccupies many of the world’s greatest men and women late in life: the building of legacy, the making of history, the casting of a long shadow.
Putin doesn’t just want to win a war or take a region, he wants to make a point, he wants to be the wings on which Russia rises again. His ego feeds his aggression, and that is why it is hard to imagine him accepting a loss in Ukraine.
Any form of victory for him will only add to his appetite. Why would he stop with Ukraine, or a portion of Ukraine?
And, of course, the West is restrained by the fact that Russia is not only a nuclear power, with roughly 6,000 nuclear warheads, but it also has the world’s largest nuclear stockpile, an arsenal even larger than that of the United States.
Putin keeps gesturing at the possibility of using those weapons. Those may be hollow threats, but it’s impossible to be 100 percent sure.
What I feel more sure of is this feeling I can’t shake: that we are drifting into a new age of existential uncertainty.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/opin ... 778d3e6de3
I grew up during the Cold War, when, in elementary school, we still participated in bomb drills. A bell would ring or horn would blow and we would duck and cover, or in some teachers’ classrooms, just put our heads down on our desks.
From the videos of utter destruction caused by nuclear weapons, I couldn’t see how any of these drills would be helpful (apparently duck and cover did offer some protection). I simply assumed it would be better to be resting when I died than not.
Although we lived in a small Louisiana town, in the middle of nowhere really, we were about 30 minutes away from Barksdale Air Force Base, where President George W. Bush would, years later, take refuge after the attacks on 9/11. As children, it felt like we were in the military arena, particularly every time the jets overhead latticed the skies with contrails or produced a sonic boom.
Even people of modest means in the area built bomb shelters. Armageddon was in the air.
America and the Soviet Union were locked in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction: There were so many nuclear weapons that if one side used them to launch an attack, we were told the other would immediately respond, prompting the annihilation of both countries and possibly the world.
This idea offered some assurance, but not enough. The idea that a mistake could be made lingered like a combustible fume. It haunted. In the popular 1983 film “WarGames,” a high school hacker accidentally connects with NORAD computers, and, thinking he’s simply playing a game, almost instigates a nuclear war.
I find it hard to explain to younger people what it felt like to live all my formative years with such uncertainty, with the belief that the world might end at any moment. I don’t know how to explain what it felt like to fill a time capsule in the sixth grade and bury it, not just as a classroom exercise, but with the gnawing feeling that all we knew could be obliterated and that all that future generations might ever know of us could be contained in a single capsule.
Fear became so ambient that it became ordinary; it was defanged. The fear wasn’t debilitating. To the contrary, it seemed to produce a sense of bucket-list adventurousness, even among children. What would you do if the world could end tomorrow? It was simultaneously oppressive and liberating.
Then, in 1991, when I was nearly at the end of college, the Soviet Union collapsed and splintered, and the Cold War came to an abrupt end. That is around when Ukraine and other former Soviet republics became independent states.
That is also, I believe, the last time I thought seriously about mutually assured destruction.
After three decades of freedom from that kind of worry, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, still smarting over the demise of the Soviet Union, has reminded us that many of the nuclear weapons that once terrified us still exist, putting real limits on our ability to confront and control rogue behavior.
In an interview that aired in December, Putin lamented the fall of the Soviet Union, which he had previously called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century. “It was a disintegration of historical Russia,” he said in the interview. “We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost.”
Putin wants that back. The invasion of Ukraine is part of that vision.
Putin confessed in the interview that not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, when inflation in Russia reached double digits, he sometimes moonlighted as a taxi driver to supplement his income. “It is unpleasant to talk about this,” he said, “but, unfortunately, this also took place.”
Now, he has reversed the humiliation of those hard times. Some experts believe that he could now be the wealthiest man in the world. I believe this makes the 69-year-old more dangerous, not less.
Putin now has little need of the shallow pleasure he’d get gathering unto himself more material objects than he already owns. Instead, he may now be consumed by the thing that preoccupies many of the world’s greatest men and women late in life: the building of legacy, the making of history, the casting of a long shadow.
Putin doesn’t just want to win a war or take a region, he wants to make a point, he wants to be the wings on which Russia rises again. His ego feeds his aggression, and that is why it is hard to imagine him accepting a loss in Ukraine.
Any form of victory for him will only add to his appetite. Why would he stop with Ukraine, or a portion of Ukraine?
And, of course, the West is restrained by the fact that Russia is not only a nuclear power, with roughly 6,000 nuclear warheads, but it also has the world’s largest nuclear stockpile, an arsenal even larger than that of the United States.
Putin keeps gesturing at the possibility of using those weapons. Those may be hollow threats, but it’s impossible to be 100 percent sure.
What I feel more sure of is this feeling I can’t shake: that we are drifting into a new age of existential uncertainty.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/opin ... 778d3e6de3
At Least 151 Killed in Halloween Crowd Surge in Seoul
As many as 100,000 people were celebrating in a popular nightlife district in the center of the South Korean capital.
Medical workers early Sunday transporting a victim of the Halloween crush in the Itaewon district of Seoul.Credit...Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
SEOUL — A raucous Halloween celebration in the swinging center of the South Korean capital morphed on Saturday night into a grim procession of bodies after at least 151 people were killed in the crush of a crowd stuck in a narrow roadway, officials said.
Dozens more were injured, many of them seriously, according to a fire department spokesman.
As many as 100,000 people were celebrating Halloween in Itaewon, an area of central Seoul popular for its nightlife. The holiday had long been a neighborhood favorite before being interrupted by coronavirus restrictions imposed on the city two years ago, and young people flocked to parties on Saturday night.
By Sunday morning, costume-clad partygoers had fled a scene strewn with the bodies of young revelers as chaos and confusion reigned. At news conferences, officials said they had no clear idea of what caused the crush, or how the annual festival had devolved so quickly into the country’s worst peacetime tragedy since 2014.
As images of lifeless bodies piled atop each other and queues of emergency workers pushing gurneys loaded with the dead circulated across social media, Koreans demanded answers and accountability.
Kim Geun-jin, a division commander for the Seoul police, said that little could be reported about the cause of the disaster as of 4 a.m. on Sunday because “identifying the victims is our top priority.” He added: “Our forensic teams are focused on identifying victims and collecting evidence from the site.”
In the early hours of Sunday morning, residents congregated at hospitals and makeshift mortuaries looking for their loved ones. Most of the killed were teenagers or in their 20s, Mr. Choi said. The dead included two foreigners, added Mr. Choi, who did not specify their nationalities.
At one ad hoc mortuary, at the Wonhyoro Multipurpose Indoor Gymnasium, just west of Itaewon, the bodies of 45 young people were arrayed on the floor beneath plastic sheets. Many still wore the costumes they had donned for a night of partying, one way distraught relatives would be able to identify them.
Kim Seo-jeong, 17, a high school student who dressed in a traditional Chinese qipao to go clubbing in the area, said that by 8 p.m. the alley near the Itaewon subway station was already too crowded to walk.
“We gave up an hour later and tried to turn around to go home but we could not move in the other direction either,” Ms. Kim said in a telephone interview. “There were people pushing from behind us. There were people in front of us pushing down the hill to go in the other direction.”
Later, a group of young men made a hard shove down the hill, chanting “Push! Push!”
“A person in front of me slipped and fell, pushing me down as well. People behind me fell like dominoes,” Ms. Kim said. “There were people beneath me and people falling on top of me. I could hardly breathe. We shouted and screamed for help, but the music was so loud in the alley our shouts were drowned.”
The crush began at a narrow roadway right outside Exit 2 of the Itaewon subway station, in Itaewon, one of Seoul’s more international and freewheeling neighborhoods, near a row of bars that included, among others, Oasis Bar & Cafe, Gathering and Ravo — a blazing neon magnet for young people looking for a good time. A big sign in yellow, red, pink and blue letters read, “Happy Halloween.”
South Korea Crowd Surge News
Updated
Oct. 29, 2022, 7:06 p.m. ETOct. 29, 2022
Oct. 29, 2022
‘I could hardly breathe’: A survivor of the crowd surge describes a scene of chaos.
Families come to a makeshift morgue, waiting for news in a predawn vigil.
‘We couldn’t move,’ says a witness to the tragedy in Seoul.
Around 11 p.m., officials began sending alerts urging people to avoid Itaewon. Benedict Manlapaz, a filmmaker visiting from New York, arrived at the station about an hour later to see the streets jammed with crowds. The people, he said, were “irritated,” with some crying.
“People were shoulder to shoulder,” said Mr. Manlapaz, 23.
Witnesses said the police appeared to have trouble maintaining control of the crowds. And images posted to social media showed scores of bodies piled atop one another in the narrow alley as emergency crews worked to pull them free.
“Our people are so insensitive about public safety,” Ms. Kim said. “The government should have sent more police to control the crowd. There was a Halloween crowd in Itaewon last year despite the pandemic. The government should have anticipated a much bigger crowd this year because most of the pandemic restrictions are gone.”
Officials initially said that many of those killed had lapsed into cardiac arrest. Citizens, police officers and emergency medical workers were seen performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on people sprawled on the pavement. Later, a grim lineup of bodies covered by sheets or towels appeared before rescue workers could begin carrying them away.
More than 800 emergency workers and police officers from around the nation, including all available personnel in Seoul, were deployed to the streets to treat the injured.
But ambulances and police vehicles struggled to make their way to and from the site, with roads jammed and pedestrians spilling into traffic.
“It was so bad we couldn’t even see the road,” said Jeong Sol, 30, of Seoul. “The crowd was so large that it had spilled off the sidewalks onto the street.”
She added: “We were shoved around a lot. People were pushed and dragged, irrespective of who they were.”
Officials batted down speculative theories, including that a gas leak had spurred people into the alleyway, but they proffered no alternative explanation as to what happened. Instead, residents were left to blame the police and the country’s already embattled president.
The disaster, South Korea’s worst since the Sewol ferry sank in 2014, killing more than 300 people, will likely add to the litany of political woes facing President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, who has dealt with low approval ratings and diplomatic misfires since taking office in May.
“The top priority is to evacuate and save the victims,” Mr. Yoon told his cabinet, according to his office. “We should take them to urgent medical treatment as quickly as possible.”
The tragedy was Asia’s second crowd disaster in less than a month, after a soccer match on Oct. 1, in Malang, Indonesia, ended with 125 people dead. Spectators trying to flee a stadium were crushed after police officers clashing with unruly fans fired tear gas into the crowd.
Condolences poured into South Korea, including from President Joseph R. Biden. “The alliance between our two countries has never been more vibrant or more vital — and the ties between our people are stronger than ever,” he said in a statement. “The United States stands with the Republic of Korea during this tragic time.”
Reporting was contributed by Paul Mozur, Matej Leskovsek and Lauretta Charlton Seoul, Matthew Mpoke Bigg from London, and Russell Goldman and Ben Shpigel from New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Medical workers early Sunday transporting a victim of the Halloween crush in the Itaewon district of Seoul.Credit...Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
SEOUL — A raucous Halloween celebration in the swinging center of the South Korean capital morphed on Saturday night into a grim procession of bodies after at least 151 people were killed in the crush of a crowd stuck in a narrow roadway, officials said.
Dozens more were injured, many of them seriously, according to a fire department spokesman.
As many as 100,000 people were celebrating Halloween in Itaewon, an area of central Seoul popular for its nightlife. The holiday had long been a neighborhood favorite before being interrupted by coronavirus restrictions imposed on the city two years ago, and young people flocked to parties on Saturday night.
By Sunday morning, costume-clad partygoers had fled a scene strewn with the bodies of young revelers as chaos and confusion reigned. At news conferences, officials said they had no clear idea of what caused the crush, or how the annual festival had devolved so quickly into the country’s worst peacetime tragedy since 2014.
As images of lifeless bodies piled atop each other and queues of emergency workers pushing gurneys loaded with the dead circulated across social media, Koreans demanded answers and accountability.
Kim Geun-jin, a division commander for the Seoul police, said that little could be reported about the cause of the disaster as of 4 a.m. on Sunday because “identifying the victims is our top priority.” He added: “Our forensic teams are focused on identifying victims and collecting evidence from the site.”
In the early hours of Sunday morning, residents congregated at hospitals and makeshift mortuaries looking for their loved ones. Most of the killed were teenagers or in their 20s, Mr. Choi said. The dead included two foreigners, added Mr. Choi, who did not specify their nationalities.
At one ad hoc mortuary, at the Wonhyoro Multipurpose Indoor Gymnasium, just west of Itaewon, the bodies of 45 young people were arrayed on the floor beneath plastic sheets. Many still wore the costumes they had donned for a night of partying, one way distraught relatives would be able to identify them.
Kim Seo-jeong, 17, a high school student who dressed in a traditional Chinese qipao to go clubbing in the area, said that by 8 p.m. the alley near the Itaewon subway station was already too crowded to walk.
“We gave up an hour later and tried to turn around to go home but we could not move in the other direction either,” Ms. Kim said in a telephone interview. “There were people pushing from behind us. There were people in front of us pushing down the hill to go in the other direction.”
Later, a group of young men made a hard shove down the hill, chanting “Push! Push!”
“A person in front of me slipped and fell, pushing me down as well. People behind me fell like dominoes,” Ms. Kim said. “There were people beneath me and people falling on top of me. I could hardly breathe. We shouted and screamed for help, but the music was so loud in the alley our shouts were drowned.”
The crush began at a narrow roadway right outside Exit 2 of the Itaewon subway station, in Itaewon, one of Seoul’s more international and freewheeling neighborhoods, near a row of bars that included, among others, Oasis Bar & Cafe, Gathering and Ravo — a blazing neon magnet for young people looking for a good time. A big sign in yellow, red, pink and blue letters read, “Happy Halloween.”
South Korea Crowd Surge News
Updated
Oct. 29, 2022, 7:06 p.m. ETOct. 29, 2022
Oct. 29, 2022
‘I could hardly breathe’: A survivor of the crowd surge describes a scene of chaos.
Families come to a makeshift morgue, waiting for news in a predawn vigil.
‘We couldn’t move,’ says a witness to the tragedy in Seoul.
Around 11 p.m., officials began sending alerts urging people to avoid Itaewon. Benedict Manlapaz, a filmmaker visiting from New York, arrived at the station about an hour later to see the streets jammed with crowds. The people, he said, were “irritated,” with some crying.
“People were shoulder to shoulder,” said Mr. Manlapaz, 23.
Witnesses said the police appeared to have trouble maintaining control of the crowds. And images posted to social media showed scores of bodies piled atop one another in the narrow alley as emergency crews worked to pull them free.
“Our people are so insensitive about public safety,” Ms. Kim said. “The government should have sent more police to control the crowd. There was a Halloween crowd in Itaewon last year despite the pandemic. The government should have anticipated a much bigger crowd this year because most of the pandemic restrictions are gone.”
Officials initially said that many of those killed had lapsed into cardiac arrest. Citizens, police officers and emergency medical workers were seen performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on people sprawled on the pavement. Later, a grim lineup of bodies covered by sheets or towels appeared before rescue workers could begin carrying them away.
More than 800 emergency workers and police officers from around the nation, including all available personnel in Seoul, were deployed to the streets to treat the injured.
But ambulances and police vehicles struggled to make their way to and from the site, with roads jammed and pedestrians spilling into traffic.
“It was so bad we couldn’t even see the road,” said Jeong Sol, 30, of Seoul. “The crowd was so large that it had spilled off the sidewalks onto the street.”
She added: “We were shoved around a lot. People were pushed and dragged, irrespective of who they were.”
Officials batted down speculative theories, including that a gas leak had spurred people into the alleyway, but they proffered no alternative explanation as to what happened. Instead, residents were left to blame the police and the country’s already embattled president.
The disaster, South Korea’s worst since the Sewol ferry sank in 2014, killing more than 300 people, will likely add to the litany of political woes facing President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, who has dealt with low approval ratings and diplomatic misfires since taking office in May.
“The top priority is to evacuate and save the victims,” Mr. Yoon told his cabinet, according to his office. “We should take them to urgent medical treatment as quickly as possible.”
The tragedy was Asia’s second crowd disaster in less than a month, after a soccer match on Oct. 1, in Malang, Indonesia, ended with 125 people dead. Spectators trying to flee a stadium were crushed after police officers clashing with unruly fans fired tear gas into the crowd.
Condolences poured into South Korea, including from President Joseph R. Biden. “The alliance between our two countries has never been more vibrant or more vital — and the ties between our people are stronger than ever,” he said in a statement. “The United States stands with the Republic of Korea during this tragic time.”
Reporting was contributed by Paul Mozur, Matej Leskovsek and Lauretta Charlton Seoul, Matthew Mpoke Bigg from London, and Russell Goldman and Ben Shpigel from New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/29/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Carnage in India
How a Festive Stroll Over a Historic Bridge Turned to Carnage in India
After the deaths of at least 134 pedestrians, the country is asking why its infrastructure has failed so calamitously once again.
Watch video at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/worl ... 778d3e6de3
They had flocked to the newly reopened suspension bridge on a Sunday evening during India’s most festive season, buying a ticket costing the equivalent of about 20 cents or less to experience the sensation of swaying across the wide Machchhu River in the western Indian state of Gujarat.
The 755-foot-long pedestrian bridge, built during the Victorian era, had long been a tourist attraction, and it was packed with people as the sun set on Sunday and the intense heat eased. As countless others had done before them, some on the span spread their arms across its four-foot width, grabbing the green netting on either side and making the bridge shimmy from side to side.
Then, suddenly, the cables snapped, and the bridge spilled its human cargo into the river, like a fishing net releasing its catch. Once in the dark water, some tried to swim to the fallen structure and climb up its tangled netting. Others were swept away.
The regional police chief, Ashok Yadav, said Monday morning that at least 140 people had been killed, but later revised that number to 134. He gave no reason for the new number. Many of the victims were schoolchildren on vacation during the Diwali holiday and migrant workers celebrating a Hindu festival, leaving India to ask once again why its infrastructure keeps failing so calamitously.
Mr. Yadav said that a police case had been filed, and that nine people — including two company managers, two ticket takers, two bridge repairmen and three security guards — had been arrested on charges of attempting to commit culpable homicide and of causing death by negligence.
On Monday, platoons of disaster response workers and members of India’s armed forces combed the fast-moving river in small boats, paddling through the mangroves next to the riverbanks, searching for the missing. In the afternoon, Indian Navy rescue divers were still looking for victims 12 hours after the last body had been recovered.
“The scene is rotating in my head, bodies lying here and there, being taken out, everyone shouting, ‘Save me, save me, save me,’” one survivor, Mahesh Bhai, told a TV reporter from his hospital bed. He was among the dozens of people who had been injured in the collapse but had survived; more than 180 people were rescued in all.
Relatives of victims mourned in Morbi early Monday. Among the dead were schoolchildren on vacation during the Diwali holiday and migrant workers celebrating a Hindu festival.Credit...Ajit Solanki/Associated Press
The colonial-era bridge is among a collection of attractions in the quaint town of Morbi, whose ceramic tile industry draws workers from across India. It was a favorite meeting place for young lovers to escape parents’ prying eyes, said Devyesh Pithva, who a decade ago met the woman who became his wife on the bridge. He had visited the structure on Friday, and, out of a sense of poignancy, returned to the site of the disaster on Monday.
In March, the bridge’s operations were awarded to Ajanta Manufacturing, a local clock and electronics manufacturer.
Ajanta’s founder, Odhavaji Patel, was known in India as the “father of wall clocks.” The company he ran before his death also makes light bulbs and toothpaste. What is unclear from business records is whether Ajanta had any experience operating bridges before taking over the one in Morbi.
After winning the contract, Ajanta, which also goes by the name Oreva Group, managed seven months of repairs on the bridge, which had been in poor condition. The structure reopened four days before the disaster, timed to coincide with the Gujarati New Year, on Oct. 26.
When Mr. Pithva visited the bridge on Friday, two days before the disaster, he said, there were as many as 500 people crowded onto it. He waited 20 minutes for a clearing to take a photograph with his family.
“You could actually hear people breathing, it was so tight,” Mr. Pithva said. “I have an emotional bond with this bridge, and when I heard the news, I felt like I was going down with my family.”
On Monday, scrutiny turned to how Ajanta had won the contract, and to whether the company had ties to the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which has governed Gujarat for more than two decades and which also controls the national government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Rescue operations on the Machchhu River on Monday. Indian Navy divers were still searching for victims 12 hours after the last body had been recovered.Credit...Sam Panthaky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A municipal official told the Indian news media that the bridge had been opened without a “fitness certificate” or the authorities’ permission. Unaddressed was why the authorities did not shut down the bridge if it had been reopened without approval.
Arjun Modhwadia, a member of the Congress party and a former opposition leader in Gujarat, said that B.J.P. leaders had announced the bridge’s opening as a “Diwali gift to the people of Morbi,” without ensuring its safety.
Yamal Vyas, a spokesman for the B.J.P. in Gujarat, said that the national government had appointed a “high-powered committee” to investigate the disaster. Mr. Modi, who was campaigning in Gujarat, his home state, ahead of fiercely contested state assembly elections, canceled at least some of the rest of the week’s campaign events.
“Congress wants to ply politics in everything,” Mr. Vyas said.
Ajanta blamed the victims. “Too many people in the midsection of the bridge were trying to sway it from one side to the other,” a newspaper, The Indian Express, quoted a company spokesman as saying. It was unclear why the company had allowed so many people on the bridge at once; Ajanta did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The New York Times.
The company’s chairman, Jaysukh Patel, spoke at a news conference Monday.
“This hanging bridge is a historical treasure of Morbi,” Mr. Patel said, adding that Ajanta had hired a subcontractor with experience repairing bridges to meet “technical specifications” and other requirements.
If history holds, it may be unlikely that any companies or municipal officials face serious consequences. Infrastructure failures caused by overcrowding are common in India and rarely result in accountability or change.
Soldiers in Morbi with the body of a victim on Monday. Infrastructure failures caused by overcrowding are common in India.Credit...Reuters
Building contracts are often awarded to relatives or associates of political leaders, who can acquire necessary permissions but may not be competent builders. Planning is piecemeal. On-site supervision is weak. Safety measures are haphazard. And life, when it is lost, costs the government very little.
When things go wrong, officials offer cash compensation. On Sunday, within hours of the disaster, Gujarat’s chief minister, Bhupendra Patel, announced payments of about $4,800 for each of the families of the dead and about $600 for the injured.
In India, hundreds of people have been killed over the past decade in infrastructure disasters.
In 2013, after the police failed to control crowding on a bridge in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, one of its railings snapped, resulting in more than 100 deaths.
In 2014, an overpass that was under construction collapsed in Gujarat, killing at least 10 people. A police investigation found that both the design and the construction materials were faulty.
In 2016, part of an unfinished overpass, in the works for over seven years in the eastern city of Kolkata, came crashing down on a busy street, killing more than two dozen people. Mr. Modi described that disaster, in an opposition-controlled state, as an “act of fraud” rather than an “act of God.”
That same year, at least 42 people were killed in the collapse of a British-era bridge along a scenic landscape in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.
On Monday, Randeep Surjewala, a Congress party lawmaker, echoed Mr. Modi’s 2016 statement to turn it against him, calling the latest bridge collapse a “man-made tragedy.”
Sameer Yasir reported from Morbi, India; and Hari Kumar, Suhasini Raj and Emily Schmall from New Delhi.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/worl ... 778d3e6de3
After the deaths of at least 134 pedestrians, the country is asking why its infrastructure has failed so calamitously once again.
Watch video at: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/worl ... 778d3e6de3
They had flocked to the newly reopened suspension bridge on a Sunday evening during India’s most festive season, buying a ticket costing the equivalent of about 20 cents or less to experience the sensation of swaying across the wide Machchhu River in the western Indian state of Gujarat.
The 755-foot-long pedestrian bridge, built during the Victorian era, had long been a tourist attraction, and it was packed with people as the sun set on Sunday and the intense heat eased. As countless others had done before them, some on the span spread their arms across its four-foot width, grabbing the green netting on either side and making the bridge shimmy from side to side.
Then, suddenly, the cables snapped, and the bridge spilled its human cargo into the river, like a fishing net releasing its catch. Once in the dark water, some tried to swim to the fallen structure and climb up its tangled netting. Others were swept away.
The regional police chief, Ashok Yadav, said Monday morning that at least 140 people had been killed, but later revised that number to 134. He gave no reason for the new number. Many of the victims were schoolchildren on vacation during the Diwali holiday and migrant workers celebrating a Hindu festival, leaving India to ask once again why its infrastructure keeps failing so calamitously.
Mr. Yadav said that a police case had been filed, and that nine people — including two company managers, two ticket takers, two bridge repairmen and three security guards — had been arrested on charges of attempting to commit culpable homicide and of causing death by negligence.
On Monday, platoons of disaster response workers and members of India’s armed forces combed the fast-moving river in small boats, paddling through the mangroves next to the riverbanks, searching for the missing. In the afternoon, Indian Navy rescue divers were still looking for victims 12 hours after the last body had been recovered.
“The scene is rotating in my head, bodies lying here and there, being taken out, everyone shouting, ‘Save me, save me, save me,’” one survivor, Mahesh Bhai, told a TV reporter from his hospital bed. He was among the dozens of people who had been injured in the collapse but had survived; more than 180 people were rescued in all.
Relatives of victims mourned in Morbi early Monday. Among the dead were schoolchildren on vacation during the Diwali holiday and migrant workers celebrating a Hindu festival.Credit...Ajit Solanki/Associated Press
The colonial-era bridge is among a collection of attractions in the quaint town of Morbi, whose ceramic tile industry draws workers from across India. It was a favorite meeting place for young lovers to escape parents’ prying eyes, said Devyesh Pithva, who a decade ago met the woman who became his wife on the bridge. He had visited the structure on Friday, and, out of a sense of poignancy, returned to the site of the disaster on Monday.
In March, the bridge’s operations were awarded to Ajanta Manufacturing, a local clock and electronics manufacturer.
Ajanta’s founder, Odhavaji Patel, was known in India as the “father of wall clocks.” The company he ran before his death also makes light bulbs and toothpaste. What is unclear from business records is whether Ajanta had any experience operating bridges before taking over the one in Morbi.
After winning the contract, Ajanta, which also goes by the name Oreva Group, managed seven months of repairs on the bridge, which had been in poor condition. The structure reopened four days before the disaster, timed to coincide with the Gujarati New Year, on Oct. 26.
When Mr. Pithva visited the bridge on Friday, two days before the disaster, he said, there were as many as 500 people crowded onto it. He waited 20 minutes for a clearing to take a photograph with his family.
“You could actually hear people breathing, it was so tight,” Mr. Pithva said. “I have an emotional bond with this bridge, and when I heard the news, I felt like I was going down with my family.”
On Monday, scrutiny turned to how Ajanta had won the contract, and to whether the company had ties to the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which has governed Gujarat for more than two decades and which also controls the national government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Rescue operations on the Machchhu River on Monday. Indian Navy divers were still searching for victims 12 hours after the last body had been recovered.Credit...Sam Panthaky/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A municipal official told the Indian news media that the bridge had been opened without a “fitness certificate” or the authorities’ permission. Unaddressed was why the authorities did not shut down the bridge if it had been reopened without approval.
Arjun Modhwadia, a member of the Congress party and a former opposition leader in Gujarat, said that B.J.P. leaders had announced the bridge’s opening as a “Diwali gift to the people of Morbi,” without ensuring its safety.
Yamal Vyas, a spokesman for the B.J.P. in Gujarat, said that the national government had appointed a “high-powered committee” to investigate the disaster. Mr. Modi, who was campaigning in Gujarat, his home state, ahead of fiercely contested state assembly elections, canceled at least some of the rest of the week’s campaign events.
“Congress wants to ply politics in everything,” Mr. Vyas said.
Ajanta blamed the victims. “Too many people in the midsection of the bridge were trying to sway it from one side to the other,” a newspaper, The Indian Express, quoted a company spokesman as saying. It was unclear why the company had allowed so many people on the bridge at once; Ajanta did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The New York Times.
The company’s chairman, Jaysukh Patel, spoke at a news conference Monday.
“This hanging bridge is a historical treasure of Morbi,” Mr. Patel said, adding that Ajanta had hired a subcontractor with experience repairing bridges to meet “technical specifications” and other requirements.
If history holds, it may be unlikely that any companies or municipal officials face serious consequences. Infrastructure failures caused by overcrowding are common in India and rarely result in accountability or change.
Soldiers in Morbi with the body of a victim on Monday. Infrastructure failures caused by overcrowding are common in India.Credit...Reuters
Building contracts are often awarded to relatives or associates of political leaders, who can acquire necessary permissions but may not be competent builders. Planning is piecemeal. On-site supervision is weak. Safety measures are haphazard. And life, when it is lost, costs the government very little.
When things go wrong, officials offer cash compensation. On Sunday, within hours of the disaster, Gujarat’s chief minister, Bhupendra Patel, announced payments of about $4,800 for each of the families of the dead and about $600 for the injured.
In India, hundreds of people have been killed over the past decade in infrastructure disasters.
In 2013, after the police failed to control crowding on a bridge in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, one of its railings snapped, resulting in more than 100 deaths.
In 2014, an overpass that was under construction collapsed in Gujarat, killing at least 10 people. A police investigation found that both the design and the construction materials were faulty.
In 2016, part of an unfinished overpass, in the works for over seven years in the eastern city of Kolkata, came crashing down on a busy street, killing more than two dozen people. Mr. Modi described that disaster, in an opposition-controlled state, as an “act of fraud” rather than an “act of God.”
That same year, at least 42 people were killed in the collapse of a British-era bridge along a scenic landscape in the western Indian state of Maharashtra.
On Monday, Randeep Surjewala, a Congress party lawmaker, echoed Mr. Modi’s 2016 statement to turn it against him, calling the latest bridge collapse a “man-made tragedy.”
Sameer Yasir reported from Morbi, India; and Hari Kumar, Suhasini Raj and Emily Schmall from New Delhi.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War Near 500,000, U.S. Officials Say
Ukraine and Russia have lost a staggering number of troops as Kyiv’s counteroffensive drags on. A lack of rapid medical care has added to the toll.
U.S. officials said Ukraine had suffered close to 70,000 killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
The total number of Ukrainian and Russian troops killed or wounded since the war in Ukraine began 18 months ago is nearing 500,000, U.S. officials said, a staggering toll as Russia assaults its next-door neighbor and tries to seize more territory.
The officials cautioned that casualty figures remained difficult to estimate because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, and Kyiv does not disclose official figures. But they said the slaughter intensified this year in eastern Ukraine and has continued at a steady clip as a nearly three-month-old counteroffensive drags on.
Russia’s military casualties, the officials said, are approaching 300,000. The number includes as many as 120,000 deaths and 170,000 to 180,000 injured troops. The Russian numbers dwarf the Ukrainian figures, which the officials put at close to 70,000 killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.
But Russians outnumber Ukrainians on the battlefield almost three to one, and Russia has a larger population from which to replenish its ranks.
Ukraine has around 500,000 troops, including active-duty, reserve and paramilitary troops, according to analysts. By contrast, Russia has almost triple that number, with 1,330,000 active-duty, reserve and paramilitary troops — most of the latter from the Wagner Group.
The Biden administration’s last public estimate of casualties came in November, when Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that more than 100,000 troops on each side had been killed or wounded since the war began in February 2022. At the time, officials said privately that the numbers were closer to 120,000 killed and wounded.
But that number soared in the winter and spring, as the two countries turned the eastern city of Bakhmut into a killing field. Hundreds of troops were killed or injured a day for many weeks, U.S. officials said. The Russians took heavy casualties, but so too did the Ukrainians as they tried to hold every inch of ground before losing the city in May.
Ukrainian troops initially tried to break through dug-in Russian lines with mechanized combined arms formations. Equipped with advanced American weapons, the Ukrainians nonetheless became bogged down in dense Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and helicopter gunships.
Image
A destroyed tank on a dirt road.
Russia’s military casualties, U.S. officials said, are approaching 300,000.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
In the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, as much as 20 percent of the weaponry Ukraine sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to U.S. and European officials. The losses included some of the formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers — that the Ukrainians were counting on to beat back the Russians.
More significantly, thousands of troops were killed or wounded, officials said.
A senior U.S. official acknowledged the high number of Ukrainian casualties but said combined arms is “very, very hard.” He added that in recent days, Ukrainian troops have begun to punch through initial rings of Russian defenses.
In recent weeks, Ukraine has shifted its battlefield tactics, returning to its old ways of wearing down Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles instead of plunging into minefields under fire.
American officials are worried that Ukraine’s adjustments will race through precious ammunition supplies, which could benefit President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and disadvantage Ukraine in a war of attrition. But Ukrainian commanders decided the pivot reduced casualties and preserved their frontline fighting force.
American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse, one reason it has been cautious about pressing ahead with the counteroffensive. Almost any big push against dug-in Russian defenders protected by minefields would result in huge numbers of losses.
In just a year and a half, Ukraine’s military deaths have already surpassed the number of American troops who died during the nearly two decades U.S. units were in Vietnam (roughly 58,000) and about equal the number of Afghan security forces killed over the entire war in Afghanistan, from 2001 to 2021 (around 69,000).
The number of dead and wounded reflects the amount of lethal munitions being expended by both sides. Thousands of rounds of artillery are fired every week, tanks batter buildings, land mines are everywhere and drones hover overhead picking off troops below. When close combat does occur, it resembles the battles of World War I: brutal and often taking place in trenches.
The numbers also point to a lack of rapid medical care on the frontline. Wounded soldiers are increasingly hard to evacuate given how much artillery and gunfire bookend each engagement. Unlike the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where American forces strictly adhered to evacuating casualties within an hour to a well-stocked medical facility, there is no such capability in Ukraine.
Instead, injured troops are often thrown into any vehicle available or leave the front on foot. In some cases, the wounded and dead are left on the battlefield, because medics are unable to reach them. Hospitals and aid stations are often overwhelmed.
And across Ukraine, in big cities and rural villages, almost everyone knows a family that has lost someone in the fighting. Dry flowers from funerals litter quiet roads, and graveyards are filling up in every corner of the country.
The estimated figures for Ukraine and Russia are based on satellite imagery, communication intercepts, social media and news media dispatches from reporters in the country, as well as official reporting from both governments. Estimates vary, even within the U.S. government.
According to Pentagon documents leaked in the spring, Russia had suffered 189,500 to 223,000 casualties, including up to 43,000 killed in action. One document said that as of February, Ukraine had suffered 124,500 to 131,000 casualties, with as many as 17,500 killed in action.
Image
A soldier lies on a stretcher bed with medics in military fatigues in attendance.
Wounded soldiers are increasingly hard to evacuate.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times
While several U.S. officials and one former senior Ukrainian official said about 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died in the conflict so far, other American officials said the number could be lower.
The estimates vary so widely partly because of Ukraine’s reluctance to disclose its wartime losses even to the American government. U.S. intelligence analysts have also spent much more time focusing on Russian casualties than those of Ukraine, their ally.
Russia analysts say the loss of life is unlikely to deter Mr. Putin. He has no political opposition at home and has framed the war as the kind of struggle the country faced during World War II, when more than eight million Soviet troops died. U.S. officials have said they believe that Mr. Putin can sustain hundreds of thousands of casualties in Ukraine, although higher numbers could cut into his political support.
While Mr. Putin appears somewhat reluctant to initiate a widespread mobilization, he has raised the upper age limit for men eligible to be conscripted into the army. And should Russia decide to mobilize more people, its larger population could quickly overwhelm Ukrainian reserves of manpower.
The troop deaths could have a greater impact for Ukraine in a war that is far from over. And while combatants are dying in droves, the civilians caught between the guns have died in the thousands while millions have been displaced.
“These are people,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former top Pentagon official for Ukraine who is now the executive director of the McCain Institute.
“Ukraine is a democracy, so the loss of lives could have greater political impact,” Dr. Farkas said. “But even in an autocracy, Vladimir Putin knows that public sentiment can make a difference.”
Andrew E. Kramer contributed to this report.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/us/p ... lties.html
U.S. officials said Ukraine had suffered close to 70,000 killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
The total number of Ukrainian and Russian troops killed or wounded since the war in Ukraine began 18 months ago is nearing 500,000, U.S. officials said, a staggering toll as Russia assaults its next-door neighbor and tries to seize more territory.
The officials cautioned that casualty figures remained difficult to estimate because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, and Kyiv does not disclose official figures. But they said the slaughter intensified this year in eastern Ukraine and has continued at a steady clip as a nearly three-month-old counteroffensive drags on.
Russia’s military casualties, the officials said, are approaching 300,000. The number includes as many as 120,000 deaths and 170,000 to 180,000 injured troops. The Russian numbers dwarf the Ukrainian figures, which the officials put at close to 70,000 killed and 100,000 to 120,000 wounded.
But Russians outnumber Ukrainians on the battlefield almost three to one, and Russia has a larger population from which to replenish its ranks.
Ukraine has around 500,000 troops, including active-duty, reserve and paramilitary troops, according to analysts. By contrast, Russia has almost triple that number, with 1,330,000 active-duty, reserve and paramilitary troops — most of the latter from the Wagner Group.
The Biden administration’s last public estimate of casualties came in November, when Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that more than 100,000 troops on each side had been killed or wounded since the war began in February 2022. At the time, officials said privately that the numbers were closer to 120,000 killed and wounded.
But that number soared in the winter and spring, as the two countries turned the eastern city of Bakhmut into a killing field. Hundreds of troops were killed or injured a day for many weeks, U.S. officials said. The Russians took heavy casualties, but so too did the Ukrainians as they tried to hold every inch of ground before losing the city in May.
Ukrainian troops initially tried to break through dug-in Russian lines with mechanized combined arms formations. Equipped with advanced American weapons, the Ukrainians nonetheless became bogged down in dense Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and helicopter gunships.
Image
A destroyed tank on a dirt road.
Russia’s military casualties, U.S. officials said, are approaching 300,000.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
In the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, as much as 20 percent of the weaponry Ukraine sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to U.S. and European officials. The losses included some of the formidable Western fighting machines — tanks and armored personnel carriers — that the Ukrainians were counting on to beat back the Russians.
More significantly, thousands of troops were killed or wounded, officials said.
A senior U.S. official acknowledged the high number of Ukrainian casualties but said combined arms is “very, very hard.” He added that in recent days, Ukrainian troops have begun to punch through initial rings of Russian defenses.
In recent weeks, Ukraine has shifted its battlefield tactics, returning to its old ways of wearing down Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles instead of plunging into minefields under fire.
American officials are worried that Ukraine’s adjustments will race through precious ammunition supplies, which could benefit President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and disadvantage Ukraine in a war of attrition. But Ukrainian commanders decided the pivot reduced casualties and preserved their frontline fighting force.
American officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse, one reason it has been cautious about pressing ahead with the counteroffensive. Almost any big push against dug-in Russian defenders protected by minefields would result in huge numbers of losses.
In just a year and a half, Ukraine’s military deaths have already surpassed the number of American troops who died during the nearly two decades U.S. units were in Vietnam (roughly 58,000) and about equal the number of Afghan security forces killed over the entire war in Afghanistan, from 2001 to 2021 (around 69,000).
The number of dead and wounded reflects the amount of lethal munitions being expended by both sides. Thousands of rounds of artillery are fired every week, tanks batter buildings, land mines are everywhere and drones hover overhead picking off troops below. When close combat does occur, it resembles the battles of World War I: brutal and often taking place in trenches.
The numbers also point to a lack of rapid medical care on the frontline. Wounded soldiers are increasingly hard to evacuate given how much artillery and gunfire bookend each engagement. Unlike the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where American forces strictly adhered to evacuating casualties within an hour to a well-stocked medical facility, there is no such capability in Ukraine.
Instead, injured troops are often thrown into any vehicle available or leave the front on foot. In some cases, the wounded and dead are left on the battlefield, because medics are unable to reach them. Hospitals and aid stations are often overwhelmed.
And across Ukraine, in big cities and rural villages, almost everyone knows a family that has lost someone in the fighting. Dry flowers from funerals litter quiet roads, and graveyards are filling up in every corner of the country.
The estimated figures for Ukraine and Russia are based on satellite imagery, communication intercepts, social media and news media dispatches from reporters in the country, as well as official reporting from both governments. Estimates vary, even within the U.S. government.
According to Pentagon documents leaked in the spring, Russia had suffered 189,500 to 223,000 casualties, including up to 43,000 killed in action. One document said that as of February, Ukraine had suffered 124,500 to 131,000 casualties, with as many as 17,500 killed in action.
Image
A soldier lies on a stretcher bed with medics in military fatigues in attendance.
Wounded soldiers are increasingly hard to evacuate.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times
While several U.S. officials and one former senior Ukrainian official said about 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died in the conflict so far, other American officials said the number could be lower.
The estimates vary so widely partly because of Ukraine’s reluctance to disclose its wartime losses even to the American government. U.S. intelligence analysts have also spent much more time focusing on Russian casualties than those of Ukraine, their ally.
Russia analysts say the loss of life is unlikely to deter Mr. Putin. He has no political opposition at home and has framed the war as the kind of struggle the country faced during World War II, when more than eight million Soviet troops died. U.S. officials have said they believe that Mr. Putin can sustain hundreds of thousands of casualties in Ukraine, although higher numbers could cut into his political support.
While Mr. Putin appears somewhat reluctant to initiate a widespread mobilization, he has raised the upper age limit for men eligible to be conscripted into the army. And should Russia decide to mobilize more people, its larger population could quickly overwhelm Ukrainian reserves of manpower.
The troop deaths could have a greater impact for Ukraine in a war that is far from over. And while combatants are dying in droves, the civilians caught between the guns have died in the thousands while millions have been displaced.
“These are people,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former top Pentagon official for Ukraine who is now the executive director of the McCain Institute.
“Ukraine is a democracy, so the loss of lives could have greater political impact,” Dr. Farkas said. “But even in an autocracy, Vladimir Putin knows that public sentiment can make a difference.”
Andrew E. Kramer contributed to this report.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/18/us/p ... lties.html