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Tag: Weekend Reads

  • Lessons from Hurricane Michael being applied to Ian recovery

    Lessons from Hurricane Michael being applied to Ian recovery

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    FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) — Four years before Category 4 Ian wiped out parts of southwest Florida, the state’s Panhandle had its own encounter with an even stronger hurricane, Michael. The Category 5 storm all but destroyed one town, fractured thousands of homes and businesses and did some $25 billion in damage.

    With damage from Ian estimated at several times that and the Fort Myers area beginning a cleanup that will be even larger than after Michael, the two areas are collaborating on a way forward as south Florida residents wonder what their area will look like in a few years.

    Mayor Greg Brudnicki and other leaders from a rebuilt Panama City traveled to the southwestern coast this week at the request of Gov. Ron DeSantis to help officials plan a way forward. Keeping crews and trucks in the area to remove mountains of debris is job No. 1 because all other progress hinges on that, Brudnicki said, and that can mean obtaining loans as a bridge until federal reimbursement money shows up.

    “You can’t fix anything until you get it cleaned up,” Brudnicki said.

    Tiny Mexico Beach, which was nearly leveled by Michael in 2018, still has fewer structures and people than it did before the storm. The town’s mayor, Al Cathey, said one of the biggest challenges recovering from a natural disaster is fundamental: looking ahead, not back.

    With little left in town after Michael, Cathey said, residents gathered daily at a portable kitchen to map out the way forward after the hurricane, and there was an unwritten rule.

    “When we had our afternoon meetings at the food truck, all we talked about is, ‘What are we going to do tomorrow?’ — not what didn’t get done four days ago,” Cathey said.

    Michael was blamed for more than 30 deaths. With more than 100 fatalities, Ian was the third-deadliest storm to hit the U.S. mainland this century behind Hurricane Katrina, which left about 1,400 people dead, and Hurricane Sandy, which killed 233 despite weakening to a tropical storm just before landfall.

    Recovery will be more complicated in southwest Florida than it was in the Panhandle because of population, Cathey said. Bay County, which includes Panama City and Mexico Beach, has only 180,000 residents, while Lee County, where the Fort Myers area is located, is home to almost 790,000 people, many of whom are retirees.

    Simply removing the boats that were thrown onto land around Lee County could take months, and there are the remains of homes and businesses scattered by 155 mph (250 kph) winds or flooded by seawater that surged miles inland along creeks and canals.

    One of the damaged vessels and waterlogged homes belongs to Mike Ford, who is braced for a prolonged recovery that could change the character of the area.

    The flooded-out mobile home park where Ford lives — one of hundreds of such communities in the region — would be better off as an RV park where people can come and go than as a permanent neighborhood, he said. Residents might be ripe for a buyout or conversion after Ian, particularly since he and others had to repair damage after Hurricane Irma in 2017.

    “I’ve got enough money to rebuild, but I can’t see it because what I’ve (already) done is rebuild, and now this happened,” said Ford, who lost a valuable collection of guitars and Beatles records to Ian. “It kind of takes the wind out of you.”

    A neighbor of Ford’s, Chuck Wagner, said some people already are getting frustrated after Ian. Many southwest Florida residents are retirees who only live in the area half the year, spending the hot summers in the north, and they’re hearing that aid might not be available to part-time residents.

    “Everything is up in the air,” he said. “It might take years. Who knows?”

    Progress is measured in incremental steps. Over the weekend, officials announced that power had been restored to the first few homes on Fort Myers Beach, one of the hardest hit places. As of Sunday, FEMA had approved $420 million statewide for lodging and home repair assistance for residents unable to live in their homes following Ian.

    In Mexico Beach, Tom Wood, 82, is proof that progress will happen — slowly and painfully.

    His beachfront business, the Driftwood Inn, was blown apart and filled with ocean water when Michael made landfall with sustained winds of 160 mph (258 kph) on Oct. 10, 2018. Initially, he said, the only logical step seemed to be giving up.

    But the storm passed and the Gulf still beckoned, Wood said, so he decided to rebuild. The new Driftwood Inn reopened in June with 24 rooms at its original location after a $13 million outlay and a lot headaches from insurance, government regulations and contractors.

    Mexico Beach still desperately needs a grocery store to avoid the more than 10-mile (16-kilometer) drive to the nearest one, he said, and a pharmacy and more restaurants would be good. But looking back, Wood said, he believes he made the right decision to rebuild and hopes people in Fort Myers Beach do the same.

    “I am so glad that we did it, not only us but for the town,” he said. “It just makes the town better, I think.”

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  • EXPLAINER: Who is leading the crackdown on Iran’s protests?

    EXPLAINER: Who is leading the crackdown on Iran’s protests?

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    They show up at the first signs of protest in Iran — men in black, riding motorcycles, often wielding guns or batons.

    They are members of what’s known as the Basij, paramilitary volunteers who are fiercely loyal to the Islamic Republic. The shock troops of the ayatollahs have taken on a leading role in quashing dissent for more than two decades.

    During the latest protests, which erupted after a young woman died in the custody of the country’s morality police last month, the Basij (ba-SEEJ’) have deployed in major cities, attacking and detaining protesters, who in many cases have fought back.

    One widely-circulated video appears to show dozens of schoolgirls removing their mandatory Islamic headscarves, known as hijab, and shouting at a visiting Basiji official to get lost.

    It remains to be seen if the latest round of unrest will eventually fizzle, but much could depend on how the Basij and other security forces respond to further protests.

    Here’s a look at the Basij:

    ___

    WHEN WAS IRAN’S BASIJ ESTABLISHED?

    The Basij, whose official name translates to the Organization for the Mobilization of the Oppressed, was established by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution to Islamize Iranian society and combat enemies from within.

    During the ruinous Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the Basij led notorious “human wave” attacks against Saddam Hussein’s army, with large numbers of poorly armed fighters, many of them teenagers, perishing as they raced across mine fields and into artillery fire.

    Beginning with the student revolts of the late 1990s, the Basij took on a domestic role roughly akin to the ruling party of an authoritarian state. It’s under the command of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and fiercely loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who routinely praises the Basij as a pillar of the Islamic Republic.

    They have established branches across the country, as well as student organizations, trade guilds, and medical faculties. The U.S. Treasury has imposed sanctions on what it says is a multi-billion-dollar network of businesses covertly run by the Basij.

    The security apparatus of the Basij includes armed brigades, anti-riot forces and a vast network of informers who spy on their neighbors.

    Saeid Golkar, an Iranian scholar at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga who has written a book about the Basij, estimates their total membership is around 1 million, with the security forces numbering in the tens of thousands.

    “Because they are ordinary Iranians without a uniform, the Islamic Republic is billing them as pro-regime supporters,” he said, referring to those who confront the protesters. “At the same time, most of these people are receiving salaries from the Islamic Republic.”

    ___

    WHY DO IRANIAN FORCES ATTACK THE PROTESTERS?

    Experts say many of those who join the Basij do so because of economic opportunities, with membership providing a leg up in university admissions and public sector employment.

    But recruits are also put through heavy indoctrination, including an initial 45 days of military and ideological training. They are taught that the Islamic revolution is a godly struggle against injustice, one that is threatened by myriad enemies — from the United States and Israel to exiled Iranian opposition groups and even Western culture itself.

    Even if new recruits are initially driven by personal gain, Golkar says, “the indoctrination can help to modify these motivations.”

    In the eyes of the Basijis, the Islamic headscarf, or hijab, is a bulwark against gender mixing, adultery and corruption — its removal a sign of decadent Western culture. Iran’s leaders have cast the latest protests as part of a foreign conspiracy to foment unrest.

    Protesters reject that characterization, saying the demonstrations are a spontaneous outpouring of anger at decades of repressive rule, poor governance and international isolation.

    ___

    HOW DO IRANIAN FORCES CLAMP DOWN ON PROTESTS?

    The policing of dissent in Iran begins with heavy surveillance of its citizenry, much of it done by Basijis, who have a presence in nearly every public institution. Iran also restricts internet access, especially during times of protest, and the Basij have a cyber division devoted to hacking perceived enemies.

    “There are different strategies. Of course the more visible is the violent one,” said Sanam Vakil, an Iran expert at the Chatham House think tank in London.

    When protests break out, Basijis wearing black or commando fatigues ride in on motorcycles, sometimes charging directly into the demonstrators in order to disperse them. They operate alongside the regular police and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, who are also taking part in the crackdown.

    “They have been chasing, clubbing, shooting protesters, trying to round them up, beat them up, throw them into vans to take them to detention centers where protesters are roughed up and pressured,” Vakil said.

    Basijis can also be found among the protesters themselves, as informers trying to identify ringleaders. Amnesty International said in a report last month that four individuals identified by Iranian authorities as Basijis appear to have been shot and killed by security forces while mingling with protesters.

    ___

    WILL IRAN SUCCEED IN QUASHING THE PROTESTS?

    Iran has stamped out several waves of protests over the years, including the Green Movement of 2009, when millions took to the streets after a disputed presidential election. Hundreds were killed in 2019 when Iran put down demonstrations over the heavily-sanctioned country’s prolonged economic crisis.

    But the latest protests have a different feel, which could make them harder to extinguish.

    They are led by young women fed up with the increasingly heavy-handed enforcement of the country’s conservative Islamic dress code. But they draw support from a much wider swath of society, including ethnic minorities and even some workers in Iran’s crucial oil industry.

    The protesters accuse Iran’s morality police of beating 22-year-old Mahsa Amini to death for wearing the hijab too loosely. Authorities deny she was mistreated, saying she died of a heart attack linked to underlying health conditions, an account disputed by her family.

    Videos of recent protests show young women twirling their hijabs in the air and cutting their hair, as demonstrators chant “death to the dictator.” and other slogans.

    When the Basij arrive, the protesters can often be seen fighting back, and sometimes succeeding in driving them off.

    But no one expects Iranian authorities to back down anytime soon.

    “It’s a little to early to say from the outside, with the level of internet censorship, exactly what’s happening,” Vakil said. “But I think the (government’s) hope at the beginning was that the protests would fizzle out, and now the repressive capacity is stepping up.”

    ___

    Follow Joseph Krauss on Twitter at www.twitter.com/josephkrauss

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  • National Guard struggles as troops leave at faster pace

    National Guard struggles as troops leave at faster pace

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — Soldiers are leaving the Army National Guard at a faster rate than they are enlisting, fueling concerns that in the coming years units around the country may not meet military requirements for overseas and other deployments.

    For individual states, which rely on their Guard members for a wide range of missions, it means some are falling short of their troop totals this year, while others may fare better. But the losses comes as many are facing an active hurricane season, fires in the West and continued demand for units overseas, including combat tours in Syria and training missions in Europe for nations worried about threats from Russia.

    According to officials, the number of soldiers retiring or leaving the Guard each month in the past year has exceeded those coming in, for a total annual loss of about 7,500 service members. The problem is a combination of recruiting shortfalls and an increase in the number of soldiers who are opting not to reenlist when their tour is up.

    The losses reflect a broader personnel predicament across the U.S. military, as all the armed services struggled this year to meet recruiting goals. And they underscore the need for sweeping reforms in how the military recruits and retains citizen soldiers and airmen who must juggle their regular full-time jobs with their military duties.

    Maj. Gen. Rich Baldwin, chief of staff of the Army National Guard, said the current staffing challenges are the worst he’s seen in the last 20 years, but so far the impact on Guard readiness is “minimal and manageable.”

    “However, if we don’t solve the recruiting and retention challenges we’re currently facing, we will see readiness issues related to strength begin to emerge within our units within the next year or two,” he said.

    According to Gen. Daniel Hokanson, head of the National Guard Bureau, both the Army and Air Guards failed to meet their goals for the total number of service members in the fiscal year that ended last Friday. The Army Guard’s authorized total is 336,000, and the Air Guard is 108,300.

    Baldwin said the Army Guard started the year with a bit more than its target total, but ends the fiscal year about 2% below the goal. Fueling that decline was a 10% shortfall in the number of current soldiers who opted to reenlist. Hokanson said the Air Guard missed its total goal by nearly 3%.

    The reasons are many. But Guard officials suggest that young people may not be hearing the strong call to service that they did when the U.S. was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

    Baldwin said that as operations in Iraq and Afghanistan began to decline several years ago, states started to see higher than expected losses in personnel. In exit interviews, he said, troops cited a number of reasons why they weren’t reenlisting. “But, unexpectedly, they found that one reason common to many of their soldiers was based on the perception that the war was over,” said Baldwin, adding that they had joined to serve their country, not make the Army Guard their career.

    The same may be true now, he said. In 2020 and 2021, Guard members were heavily involved in a range of domestic emergencies, from natural disasters and civil unrest to the pandemic, including medical care, COVID-19 testing and vaccines.

    “Today, we have a much lower overseas deployment tempo than we’ve been used to and almost all of the COVID support missions have been ramped down,” Baldwin said. “We join to make a difference by serving others and by being part of something bigger than ourselves. … There may be a perception among both our soldiers and the civilians we are trying to recruit that we are on the backside of all of that and it’s time to take advantage of the hot job market we have right now.”

    While the shortfalls for 2022 may be small percentages, the Guard is facing increasing losses over the next year due to the U.S. military’s requirement that all troops get the COVID-19 vaccine. Currently about 9,000 Guard members are refusing to get the shot, and another 5,000 have sought religious, medical or administrative exemptions.

    So far, no Guard members have been discharged for refusing the vaccine order. The National Guard is awaiting final instructions from the Army on how to proceed. Officials have said it’s not clear when they will get that guidance.

    With more losses likely on the horizon, Guard leaders are looking for ways to entice service members to join or reenlist. Hokanson said a critical change would be to provide Guard members with healthcare coverage. Currently, he said, about 60,000 Guardsmen don’t have health insurance. And those who have insurance through their civilian employer have to go through a difficult process to move to the military’s TRICARE program when they are on active-duty status.

    The cost of providing health care coverage to those who don’t have it would be about $719 million a year, he said.

    Other changes that could help, he said, would include expanding educational benefits and giving Guard members a financial bonus when they bring in new recruits. Such bonuses were used during the peak of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but there were some problems that Hokanson and others said could be avoided now.

    “We need to make adjustments based on the current environment because for the long term, our nation needs a National Guard the size that we are, or maybe even larger to meet all the requirements that we have,” said Hokanson. “It’s up to us to make sure that we fill our formations so that they’re ready when our nation needs us.”

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  • Silent films to live on in movie theater lobby card project

    Silent films to live on in movie theater lobby card project

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    By KATHY McCORMACK

    October 6, 2022 GMT

    CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — “Missing Millions” is a 1922 silent film with a darkly prescient title — like the vast majority from that era, the movie all but vanished in the ensuing century, survived mostly by lobby cards.

    The cards, scarcely bigger than letter paper, promoted the cinematic romances, comedies and adventures of early Hollywood. More than 10,000 of the images once hung in movie theater foyers are now being digitized for preservation and publication, thanks to an agreement between Chicago-based collector Dwight Cleveland and Dartmouth College that all started when he ran into a film professor at an academic conference in New York.

    “Ninety percent of all silent films have been lost because they were made on nitrate film, which is flammable and explodable,” Cleveland told The Associated Press. “What that means is that these lobby cards are the only tangible example that these films even existed.”

    The cards, traditionally 11 by 14 inches (28 by 35 centimeters) and arranged in sets of eight or more, displayed a film’s title, production company, cast and scenes that could convey a sense of the plot. Movie screen trailers didn’t become a common practice until the rise of the movie “studio system” era in the 1920s, said Mark Williams, associate professor of film and media studies at Dartmouth and the project’s director.

    Often displayed on an easel or framed and meant to be seen up close, the lobby cards promoted current films that were playing, as well as coming attractions.

    Today, the cards, many of them more than 100 years old, play an even bigger role, reflecting the stars, styles and storytelling of a bygone era. The legacy of the Paramount Pictures-released “Missing Millions,” for example, rests in an image of actress Alice Brady and her accomplice, who plot to steal the gold of the financier who sent her father to prison. Brady made the transition to talkies, but that film and a number of others she made during the silent era are lost.

    Cleveland, a real estate developer and historic preservationist, became interested in the cards as a high school student in the 1970s. His art teacher had collected some, including one of Lupe Velez and Gary Cooper from the 1929 Western romance, “Wolf Song.”

    “I just fell in love with the color and the deco graphics, and this romantic embrace, and everything about it, which just was incredibly appealing,” he said, “and it just sort of screamed out ‘Take me home!’”

    The early lobby cards were produced using a process that produced black-and-white, sepia, or brown-toned images, with color added to some by hand or stencil, according to a post by Josie Walters-Johnston, reference librarian in the Moving Image Research Center at the Library of Congress.

    By the 1920s, the images became more photograph-like and featured details such as decorative borders and tinting. They endured for decades, with production of lobby cards ending in the late 1970s or early 1980s, Walters-Johnston wrote. But in 2015, the practice was revived when Quentin Tarantino put out a special set for his Western, “The Hateful Eight.”

    Cleveland has been shipping boxes from his collection to Dartmouth’s Media Ecology Project, where a small group of students is charged with gingerly removing each card from its protective sleeve to scan and digitize. The students, assembled by Williams, are also creating metadata.

    Williams said the project — which began in September and is expected to be finished later this fall — will provide insight into how the films were promoted and what kind of design features went into the marketing of a film from a given studio, among other information that would be difficult to find.

    “We’ll be able to restore access to a really fundamental visual culture related to these different performers and studios, and genres,” he said.

    Williams said that the project is invested in both cultivating new scholarship, and an awareness about how endangered media history is.

    “People, they link up to YouTube, and they think that media history is inexhaustible and eternal. And both of those statements are false,” Williams said.

    When the movies now considered lost or surviving incomplete were produced, the art form’s shelf life was short, Williams said. Only over time did people start to appreciate film as a significant art and a force in popular culture worthy of preservation.

    The lobby cards validate the existence of a range of movies — from major studios still in existence and smaller ones that only endured for a handful of years — and memorialize what Williams described as “a great number of stars — many of whom have been forgotten.”

    “There’s so much media that is in danger of disintegrating, just literally turning to dust,” he added, extolling the importance of the endangered “historical, vulnerable, ephemeral, extraordinary material.”

    Cleveland also had donated 3,500 lobby cards of silent-era Westerns — featuring stars such as William S. Hart, Jack Hoxie, and Buck Jones — to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. He arranged for their loan to Dartmouth for the project.

    When completed, the lobby card collection will become part of Dartmouth’s Early Cinema Compendium, which will feature 15 collections of rare and valuable archival and scholarly resources. The compendium, which will be published online as part of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will also include more than 7,000 frame samples from early and mostly lost U.S. films, plus access to more than 2,500 archival films across the genres of early cinema.

    The ultimate goal, Williams said, is “so that people who are fans or casual fans or true scholars will have access to this material and catapult new interest in it.”

    Cleveland — certainly no casual fan — once owned an archive that had 45,000 movie posters from 56 countries. He wrote a book, “Cinema on Paper: The Graphic Genius of Movie Posters,” in 2019. In addition to the Dartmouth project, his lobby card collection formed the basis for an exhibit in New York focused on the women who were prolific filmmakers, writers and producers during the silent-film era. He’s planning a book on the subject.

    “I’ve loved finding and preserving and cataloguing these historical documents,” Cleveland said.

    With Williams applying computer science, “it just takes it into a whole other realm in the future with metaverse and everything else,” Cleveland said. “I feel like I’ve been sort of stuck in nostalgia, if you will, and now I feel like I’m being propelled into the future with him and that’s a very exciting prospect.”

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  • Silent films to live on in movie theater lobby card project

    Silent films to live on in movie theater lobby card project

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    By KATHY McCORMACK

    October 6, 2022 GMT

    CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — “Missing Millions” is a 1922 silent film with a darkly prescient title — like the vast majority from that era, the movie all but vanished in the ensuing century, survived mostly by lobby cards.

    The cards, scarcely bigger than letter paper, promoted the cinematic romances, comedies and adventures of early Hollywood. More than 10,000 of the images once hung in movie theater foyers are now being digitized for preservation and publication, thanks to an agreement between Chicago-based collector Dwight Cleveland and Dartmouth College that all started when he ran into a film professor at an academic conference in New York.

    “Ninety percent of all silent films have been lost because they were made on nitrate film, which is flammable and explodable,” Cleveland told The Associated Press. “What that means is that these lobby cards are the only tangible example that these films even existed.”

    The cards, traditionally 11 by 14 inches (28 by 35 centimeters) and arranged in sets of eight or more, displayed a film’s title, production company, cast and scenes that could convey a sense of the plot. Movie screen trailers didn’t become a common practice until the rise of the movie “studio system” era in the 1920s, said Mark Williams, associate professor of film and media studies at Dartmouth and the project’s director.

    Often displayed on an easel or framed and meant to be seen up close, the lobby cards promoted current films that were playing, as well as coming attractions.

    Today, the cards, many of them more than 100 years old, play an even bigger role, reflecting the stars, styles and storytelling of a bygone era. The legacy of the Paramount Pictures-released “Missing Millions,” for example, rests in an image of actress Alice Brady and her accomplice, who plot to steal the gold of the financier who sent her father to prison. Brady made the transition to talkies, but that film and a number of others she made during the silent era are lost.

    Cleveland, a real estate developer and historic preservationist, became interested in the cards as a high school student in the 1970s. His art teacher had collected some, including one of Lupe Velez and Gary Cooper from the 1929 Western romance, “Wolf Song.”

    “I just fell in love with the color and the deco graphics, and this romantic embrace, and everything about it, which just was incredibly appealing,” he said, “and it just sort of screamed out ‘Take me home!’”

    The early lobby cards were produced using a process that produced black-and-white, sepia, or brown-toned images, with color added to some by hand or stencil, according to a post by Josie Walters-Johnston, reference librarian in the Moving Image Research Center at the Library of Congress.

    By the 1920s, the images became more photograph-like and featured details such as decorative borders and tinting. They endured for decades, with production of lobby cards ending in the late 1970s or early 1980s, Walters-Johnston wrote. But in 2015, the practice was revived when Quentin Tarantino put out a special set for his Western, “The Hateful Eight.”

    Cleveland has been shipping boxes from his collection to Dartmouth’s Media Ecology Project, where a small group of students is charged with gingerly removing each card from its protective sleeve to scan and digitize. The students, assembled by Williams, are also creating metadata.

    Williams said the project — which began in September and is expected to be finished later this fall — will provide insight into how the films were promoted and what kind of design features went into the marketing of a film from a given studio, among other information that would be difficult to find.

    “We’ll be able to restore access to a really fundamental visual culture related to these different performers and studios, and genres,” he said.

    Williams said that the project is invested in both cultivating new scholarship, and an awareness about how endangered media history is.

    “People, they link up to YouTube, and they think that media history is inexhaustible and eternal. And both of those statements are false,” Williams said.

    When the movies now considered lost or surviving incomplete were produced, the art form’s shelf life was short, Williams said. Only over time did people start to appreciate film as a significant art and a force in popular culture worthy of preservation.

    The lobby cards validate the existence of a range of movies — from major studios still in existence and smaller ones that only endured for a handful of years — and memorialize what Williams described as “a great number of stars — many of whom have been forgotten.”

    “There’s so much media that is in danger of disintegrating, just literally turning to dust,” he added, extolling the importance of the endangered “historical, vulnerable, ephemeral, extraordinary material.”

    Cleveland also had donated 3,500 lobby cards of silent-era Westerns — featuring stars such as William S. Hart, Jack Hoxie, and Buck Jones — to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. He arranged for their loan to Dartmouth for the project.

    When completed, the lobby card collection will become part of Dartmouth’s Early Cinema Compendium, which will feature 15 collections of rare and valuable archival and scholarly resources. The compendium, which will be published online as part of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, will also include more than 7,000 frame samples from early and mostly lost U.S. films, plus access to more than 2,500 archival films across the genres of early cinema.

    The ultimate goal, Williams said, is “so that people who are fans or casual fans or true scholars will have access to this material and catapult new interest in it.”

    Cleveland — certainly no casual fan — once owned an archive that had 45,000 movie posters from 56 countries. He wrote a book, “Cinema on Paper: The Graphic Genius of Movie Posters,” in 2019. In addition to the Dartmouth project, his lobby card collection formed the basis for an exhibit in New York focused on the women who were prolific filmmakers, writers and producers during the silent-film era. He’s planning a book on the subject.

    “I’ve loved finding and preserving and cataloguing these historical documents,” Cleveland said.

    With Williams applying computer science, “it just takes it into a whole other realm in the future with metaverse and everything else,” Cleveland said. “I feel like I’ve been sort of stuck in nostalgia, if you will, and now I feel like I’m being propelled into the future with him and that’s a very exciting prospect.”

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  • NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week

    NOT REAL NEWS: A look at what didn’t happen this week

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    A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

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    Ukrainian family killed in Russian attack, despite denials

    CLAIM: Grave markers for a Ukrainian family that say they died on March 9 in Izium prove they were not killed by Russian forces, because Russian troops did not enter the Ukrainian city until weeks later.

    THE FACTS: The Ukrainian city of Izium was being heavily bombarded by Russian forces on March 9 and the family was killed in the attack, according to people with direct knowledge of the attack on the high-rise building where the family lived, as well as reports from humanitarian groups and Ukrainian officials who documented the destruction. After Ukrainian authorities discovered a mass grave in Izium this month, social media accounts for the Russian embassy in South Africa openly questioned whether one of the families buried at the site had been truly killed in a Russian offensive on the northeastern city. On its social media accounts, the embassy shared a screenshot of a tweet by Andrii Yermak, head of the office of the president of Ukraine, featuring a photo of the Stolpakov family’s grave site. The simple wooden crosses, found in a wooded area among scores of others, mark the date of their deaths as March 9, 2022. “The Russians are killing entire Ukrainian families,” Yermak had tweeted. “Izyum. Olesya, 6 years old. Murdered by the Russian uniformed terrorists. Her parents are buried nearby.” The Russian embassy in its posts falsely claimed that the family could not have been killed by Russian troops, because they were not in the area at the time. But Russian forces did carry out several strikes on Izium on March 9, including one that destroyed a high rise on the east bank of the Severodonetsk River, according to a dozen people with direct knowledge that AP journalists have spoken to in recent days. A woman who previously lived in the building and whose mother died in the blast told the AP the Stolpakovs lived in the high rise and were among those killed. Tetiana Pryvalikhina, a 40-year-old who now lives in Kladno in the Czech Republic with her daughter, said in messages on Instagram written in Ukrainian that many of the bodies couldn’t be removed until about a month after the attack, making identification difficult. Izium’s deputy mayor Volodymyr Matsokin told the AP that about 50 people died in the attack, including the Stolpakov family. Matsokin was among those who posted numerous photos and videos of the destroyed city on social media during those weeks. Ukrainian news outlets also reported that the family died in the March 9 attack, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense said in a Sept. 17 tweet that they died in an aerial attack on their home that day. Denis Krivosheev, a deputy director at Amnesty International, called the Russian embassy’s comment “totally disingenuous.” While it’s true that Russian forces did not establish full control of Izium until much later, they were clearly heavily shelling the city at the time the family was killed, he said. “The timing totally fits: our respondents were telling us about events at the time including on and close to 9 March,” he said in an email. George Barros, a Russia expert at the Institute for the Study of War, a D.C.-based group that’s been tracking major developments in the war, agreed. “There is ample documentation of Russian indirect fire against civilian infrastructure in Izyum since at least March 3, several days before Russian forces occupied Izyum,” he wrote in an email Monday. During a media briefing on Thursday, Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow, repeated claims that Russian forces weren’t responsible for the March 9 deaths.

    — Associated Press writers Philip Marcelo and Beatrice DuPuy in New York, Lori Hinnant in Ukraine and Dasha Litvinova in Tallinn, Estonia, contributed to this report.

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    Biden’s 2021 comments on hurricane preparedness misrepresented

    CLAIM: President Joe Biden called for people in Florida to prepare for Hurricane Ian by getting vaccinated against COVID-19.

    THE FACTS: Social media users are misrepresenting an August 2021 video in which Biden urged people in hurricane-prone states to get vaccinated in case they needed to evacuate or stay in a shelter. As Hurricane Ian on Tuesday approached the southwest coast of Florida, where 2.5 million people had been ordered to evacuate, the out-of-context clip of Biden spread widely on social media. “If you’re in a state where hurricanes often strike, like Florida or the Gulf Coast or into Texas, a vital part of preparing for hurricane season is to get vaccinated now,” Biden says in the video clip. “Everything is more complicated if you’re not vaccinated and a hurricane or a natural disaster hits.” Some social media users who shared the clip suggested that Biden’s comments were in reference to Hurricane Ian’s expected landfall in Florida. “Protect yourself from incoming hurricanes by getting vaccinated… right now!” wrote a Twitter user who shared the video on Tuesday. But the video is from Aug. 10, 2021. Biden made the comments prior to a White House briefing from FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell and other officials about how the COVID-19 pandemic was impacting hurricane preparedness. But he didn’t say getting vaccinated would protect against hurricanes. In the full video, Biden discussed what he described as the upcoming “peak” hurricane season in the Atlantic region coinciding with the pandemic. “If you wind up having to evacuate, if you wind up having to stay in a shelter, you don’t want to add COVID-19 to the list of dangers that you’re going to be confronting,” Biden said in the video, later adding: “We can’t prevent hurricanes making landfall, but we can prevent people from getting seriously sick and dying from COVID-19.” Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida on Wednesday as a Category 4 storm, leaving destruction in its wake.

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    Analysts: China flight cancellations follow normal pattern

    CLAIM: There was no flight movement over China as more than 9,000 flights were canceled across the country in a single day last week.

    THE FACTS: While flight tracking estimates show that thousands of flights were canceled on several days last week, this remains consistent with the high cancellation rates the country has experienced amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and multiple experts told the AP that last week’s air patterns weren’t unusual. As baseless claims of a military coup in China spread online recently, social media users asserted that air traffic data showing more than 9,000 flights canceled across the country on a single day was proof that planes were being grounded amid turmoil in the country. “Absolutely no flight movement over China,” wrote one Twitter user on Sept. 24 while posting an image of the global flight tracking service FlightRadar24 that showed a handful of planes crossing the country. Others claimed that about 9,500 flights were canceled across China on Sept. 21, accounting for nearly 60% of flights that day. But experts say these numbers, as well as some images from flight tracking services, are being presented out of context. Ian Petchenik, director of communications for FlightRadar24, said the images appearing to capture the service’s dashboard over the weekend were likely taken during overnight hours of low flight traffic in China. He added that they also may reflect the fact that FlightRadar24’s display can only show so many flights on screen at a time, meaning if a user zooms out far enough, the number of flights in an area will seemingly disappear. Further, China’s population is not evenly distributed across the country. Because flight density varies greatly depending on the region, some areas are left looking sparse while other areas are more heavily trafficked. “If you’re not understanding what you’re looking at or you’re purposefully misrepresenting what you’re seeing, that becomes an unfortunate byproduct,” Petchenik said. FlightRadar24 data shows that just over 6,000 out of nearly 15,000 flights were canceled on Sept. 21, which Petchenik said falls in line with the high level of daily cancellations that China has recorded for more than two years. While airlines in the U.S., Europe and Australia, among others, reduced the number of scheduled flights in their flight programs amid the pandemic, many Chinese airlines opted not to remove any scheduled flights, instead canceling a large number of flights on a daily basis, Petchenik told the AP. “In no way is this surprising, concerning, suspenseful or anything,” he said. FlightRadar24 data also shows that the three Wednesdays preceding Sept. 21 all also logged more than 5,000 canceled flights. FlightAware, another major flight tracking data company, confirmed to the AP in a statement that its data listed more than 8,000 scheduled flights across China on Sept. 21, nearly 2,000 of which were canceled. Spokesperson Kathleen Bangs confirmed that the cancellations reflected normal air traffic patterns in China. “It’s not uncommon, in fact, it’s pretty much business as usual that we see very high cancellations out of China out of a number of major airports every day,” Bangs added. Cirium, an aviation analytics firm, also told the AP in a statement that Cirium found that the rate of flight cancellations in China on Sept. 21 was “very similar to other recent days.” Social media users spread the false claims of a military coup weeks before China’s ruling Communist Party is set to hold a key congress at which leader Xi Jinping is expected to be granted a third five-year term. But Xi reappeared on state television Tuesday after a several-day absence from public view. He was shown visiting a display at the Beijing Exhibition Hall, his first appearance since he returned from a regional summit in Uzbekistan last weekend. Under Chinese pandemic regulations, he would need to stay in quarantine for a week after returning.

    — Associated Press writer Sophia Tulp in New York contributed this report.

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    Video of EU flag removal in Italy is from 2013, not 2022

    CLAIM: Video shows Italians taking down the European Union flag and replacing it with Italy’s flag after a right-wing group, Brothers of Italy, won its national election.

    THE FACTS: The video, filmed on Dec. 14, 2013, in Rome, shows a member of a neo-fascist group tearing down the E.U. flag, not Italians demonstrating after the election this week. Following the victory of a party with neo-fascist roots in the country’s national election on Monday, social media users are sharing a nearly 10-year-old video to falsely claim it shows a crowd’s reaction to what is set to be Italy’s first far-right-led government since World War II. The video shows a man climbing up a ladder to a balcony to remove the E.U. flag, displayed outside the E.U. Commission office in Rome. A crowd of people chant and wave Italian flags before police break up the group. “EU Flag Ripped Down as Right-Wing Party sweeps Italian elections,” an Instagram post, which features a screenshot of the video states. But the video was filmed and uploaded to YouTube on Dec. 14, 2013. It shows a member of CasaPound, a neo-fascist group, removing the flag. CasaPound said in a statement on its website on Dec. 14, 2013, that its then-vice president, Simone Di Stefano, had been arrested for taking the E.U. flag. The group stated that Di Stefano wanted to replace the E.U. flag with the tricolor flag to protest Italian involvement in the international organization. While it’s not immediately clear who first filmed the video, dozens of local news outlets picked up the footage and reposted it that year. CasaPound also used a still frame from the same footage in its statement about the event, showing a man in a red, white and green mask and black jacket holding the blue E.U. flag from a balcony of the commission office. The group shared the video on its YouTube page, with the caption in Italian: “CasaPound blitz at European Union headquarters – flag stolen, police charges – December 14, 2013.” On Monday, Brothers of Italy won the most votes in Italy’s national election, making Giorgia Meloni the country’s first woman premier, the AP reported. Italy’s move to the far right places a eurosceptic party in a position to lead a founding member of the European Union and its third-largest economy.

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  • Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes’ path: From Yale to jail

    Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes’ path: From Yale to jail

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    PHOENIX (AP) — Long before he assembled one of the largest far-right anti-government militia groups in U.S. history, before his Oath Keepers stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Stewart Rhodes was a promising Yale Law School graduate.

    He secured a clerkship on the Arizona Supreme Court, in part thanks to his unusual life story: a stint as an Army paratrooper cut short by a training accident, followed by marriage, college and an Ivy League law degree.

    The clerkship was one more rung up from a hardscrabble beginning. But rather than fitting in, Rhodes came across as angry and aggrieved.

    He railed to colleagues about how the Patriot Act, which gave the government greater surveillance powers after the Sept. 11 attacks, would erase civil liberties. He referred to Vice President Dick Cheney as a fascist for supporting the Bush administration’s use of “enemy combatant” status to indefinitely detain prisoners.

    “He saw this titanic struggle between people like him who wanted individual liberty and the government that would try to take away that liberty,” said Matt Parry, who worked with Rhodes as a clerk for Arizona Supreme Court Justice Mike Ryan.

    Rhodes alienated his moderate Republican boss and eventually left the steppingstone job. Since then he has ordered his life around a thirst for greatness and deep distrust of government.

    He turned to forming a group rooted in anti-government sentiment, and his message resonated. He gained followers as he went down an increasingly extremist path that would lead to armed standoffs, including with federal authorities at Nevada’s Bundy Ranch. It culminated last year, prosecutors say, with Rhodes engineering a plot to violently stop Democrat Joe Biden from becoming president.

    Rhodes, 57, will be back in court Tuesday, but not as a lawyer. He and four others tied to the Oath Keepers are being tried on charges of seditious conspiracy, the most serious criminal allegation leveled by the Justice Department in its far-reaching prosecution of rioters who attacked the Capitol. The charge carries a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison upon conviction.

    Rhodes, Jessica Watkins, Thomas Caldwell, Kenneth Harrelson and Kelly Meggs are the first Jan. 6 defendants to stand trial under a rarely used, Civil War-era law against attempting to overthrow the government or, in this case, block the transfer of presidential power.

    The trial will put a spotlight on the secretive group Rhodes founded in 2009 that has grown to include thousands of claimed members and loosely organized chapters across the country, according to Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim deputy director of research with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project.

    For Rhodes, it will be a position at odds with the role of greatness that he has long envisioned for himself, said his estranged wife, Tasha Adams.

    “He was going to achieve something amazing,” Adams said. “He didn’t know what it was, but he was going to achieve something incredible and earth shattering.”

    Rhodes was born in Fresno, California. He shuttled between there and Nevada, sometimes living with his mother and other times with grandparents who were migrant farm workers, part of a multicultural extended family that included Mexican and Filipino relatives. His mother was a minister who had her own radio show in Las Vegas and went by the name Dusty Buckle, Adams said.

    Rhodes joined the Army fresh out of high school and served nearly three years before he was honorably discharged in January 1986 after breaking his back in a parachuting accident.

    He recovered and was working as a valet in Las Vegas when he met Adams in 1991. He was 25, she was 18.

    He had a sense of adventure that was attractive to a young woman brought up in a middle-class, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints family. A few months after the couple started dating, Rhodes accidentally dropped a gun and shot out his eye. He now wears an eye patch.

    Adams’ family had set aside money for her to go to college, but after their wedding Rhodes decided he should be the first to attend school. He told her she would need to quit her job teaching ballroom and country dancing and instead support them both by working full time as a stripper so he could focus on doing an excellent job in school, according to Adams. They married, but she found stripping degrading and it clashed with her conservative Mormon upbringing, she said.

    “Every night the drive was just so bad. I would just throw up every single night before I went in, it was just so awful,” Adams said. Rhodes would pressure her to go further, increase her exposure or contact with men to make more money, she said. “It was never enough … I felt like I had given up my soul.”

    She quit when she got pregnant with their first child, and the couple moved back in with her family. They worried about her but didn’t want to push too far for fear of losing her altogether. By then, Rhodes was the center of her orbit.

    Rhodes’ lawyer declined to make him available for an interview and Rhodes declined to answer a list of questions sent by The Associated Press.

    After finishing college at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Rhodes went to work in Washington as a staffer for Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican congressman, and later attended Yale, with stints in between as an artist and sculptor. Paul did not respond to a request for comment.

    Rhodes’ college transcripts earned him entry to several top schools, Adams said. While at Yale, Adams took care of their growing family in a small apartment while he distinguished himself with an award for a paper arguing that the George W. Bush administration’s use of enemy combatant status to hold people suspected of supporting terrorism indefinitely without charge was unconstitutional.

    After the Arizona clerkship, the family bounced to Montana and back to Nevada, where he worked on Paul’s presidential campaign in 2008. That’s when Rhodes also began to formulate his idea of starting the Oath Keepers. He put a short video and blog post on Blogspot and “it went viral overnight,” Adams said. Rhodes was interviewed by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, but also more mainstream media figures such as Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly.

    He formally launched the Oath Keepers in Lexington, Massachusetts, on April 19, 2009, where the first shot in the American Revolution was fired.

    “We know that if a day should come in this country when a full-blown dictatorship would come or tyranny, from the left or from the right, we know that it can only happen if those men, our brothers in arms, go along and comply with unconstitutional, unlawful orders,” Rhodes said in his Lexington speech, which didn’t garner any news coverage.

    The group’s stated goal was to get past and present members of the military, first responders and police officers to honor the promise they made to defend the Constitution against enemies. The Oath Keepers issued a list of orders that its members wouldn’t obey, such as disarming citizens, carrying out warrantless searches and detaining Americans as enemy combatants in violation of their right to jury trials.

    Rhodes was a compelling speaker and especially in the early years framed the group as “just a pro-Constitution group made up of patriots,” said Sam Jackson, author of the book “Oath Keepers” about the group.

    With that benign-sounding framing and his political connections, Rhodes harnessed the growing power of social media to fuel the Oath Keepers’ growth during the presidency of Barack Obama. Membership rolls leaked last year included some 38,000 names, though many people on the list have said they are no longer members or were never active participants. One expert last year estimated membership to be a few thousand.

    The internal dialogue was much darker and more violent about what members perceived as imminent threats, especially to the Second Amendment, and the idea that members should be prepared to fight back and recruit their neighbors to fight back, too.

    “Time and time again, Oath Keepers lays the groundwork for individuals to decide for themselves, violent or otherwise criminal activity is warranted,” said Jackson, an assistant professor at the University at Albany.

    A membership fee was a requirement to access the website, where people could join discussion forums, read Rhodes’ writing and hear pitches to join militaristic trainings. Members willing to go armed to a standoff numbered in the low dozens, though, said Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the group.

    Showdowns with the government began in 2011 in the small western Arizona desert town of Quartzsite, where local government was in turmoil as officials feuded among themselves, the police chief was accused of misconduct and several police employees had been suspended. A couple years later, Rhodes started calling on members to form “community preparedness teams,” which included military-style training.

    The Oath Keepers also showed up at a watershed event in anti-government circles: the standoff with federal agents at Nevada’s Bundy Ranch in 2014. Later that year, members stationed themselves along rooftops in Ferguson, Missouri, armed with AR-15-style weapons, to protect businesses from rioting after a grand jury declined to charge a police officer in the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown.

    The following year Oath Keepers guarded a southern Oregon gold mine whose mining claim owners were in a dispute with the government. Still, Rhodes was never arrested.

    As the Oath Keepers escalated their public profile and confrontations with the government, Rhodes was leaving behind some of those he once championed. Jennifer Esposito hired him as her lawyer after the group’s early outing in Quartzsite, but he missed a hearing in her case because he was at the Bundy Ranch standoff. A judge kicked Rhodes off the case, and no lawyer would represent her.

    She has no hard feelings, but Michael Roth, also represented by Rhodes in Quartzsite lawsuits, is less forgiving. He compared Rhodes’s handling of his case to a doctor walking out of an operating room in the middle of surgery.

    “He clearly just used us for publicity to gain membership in the Oath Keepers,” Roth said.

    The neglect culminated in a disbarment case eventually brought against Rhodes. He ignored the allegations, missed a hearing and wasn’t even represented by a lawyer. The commission examining the case in 2015 found his conduct as an attorney wouldn’t normally get someone disbarred, but his refusal to cooperate did.

    Meanwhile, on the national stage, Donald Trump’s political star was taking off. His grievances about things such as the “deep state” aligned with the Oath Keeper’s anti-governmental stance. While Rhodes didn’t agree with Trump on everything, the group’s rhetoric began to shift.

    “With the election of Trump, now the Oath Keepers have an ally in the White House,” Jackson said.

    For much of the the Oath Keepers’ history, the federal government was the enemy, but gradually the enemy became left-leaning people in the United States and antifa, or anti-fascist groups, became the primary menace, he said.

    Rhodes wanted Oath Keepers to go to Cleveland to provide security for Trump — then set to be the GOP presidential nominee — at the 2016 Republican National Convention, even though no one had asked the group for protection, said Richard Mack, a former Arizona sheriff who served on the Oath Keepers’ board for about six years.

    “I said, ‘Why are we going — so we can say we protected Trump? We are not going to get anywhere near Trump,’” Mack said. “I said, ‘This was crazy.’ All the other board members voted with me, and Stewart was mad.”

    That was a breaking point last straw for Mack.

    He wasn’t the only board member to walk away as they saw the direction of the group close up, Van Tatenhove said.

    “Once they saw where he was going, they were a lot less comfortable,” he said. But Rhodes always managed to weather the disagreements and hold onto power. “He was always going to be the start and finish of the Oath Keepers.”

    A voracious reader and charismatic speaker, Rhodes drew people in and had a talent for molding his message to his audience and holding onto power. He warmed to the “alt-right” movement as its profile rose. Van Tatenhove knew he had to leave when in 2017 he overheard a group of Oath Keepers, in a discussion in a grocery store, denying that the Holocaust happened.

    In 2018, Rhodes went too far for Jim Arroyo, a former Army Ranger who serves as president of an Oath Keepers chapter in Yavapai County, Arizona. He rejected a push to send group members to the U.S.-Mexico border for an armed operation to support the U.S. Border Patrol.

    Arroyo said that hadn’t been approved by any authority and argued that pointing a gun in the wrong direction along the border could stir an international problem. He refused to go.

    “That’s when he pretty much didn’t want anything to do with us,” said Arroyo, who eventually broke away from the national Oath Keepers and hasn’t had contact with Rhodes in over four years.

    When Biden won the 2020 election, prosecutors say, Rhodes started preparing for battle. Rhodes and the Oath Keepers spent weeks plotting to block the transfer of power, amassing weapons and setting up “quick reaction force” teams with weapons to be on standby outside the nation’s capital, prosecutors say.

    On Jan. 6, 2021, authorities say, two teams of Oath Keepers stormed the Capitol alongside hundreds of other angry Trump supporters.

    Rhodes is not accused of going inside, but he was seen gathered outside the Capitol after the riot with several members who did, prosecutors have said.

    Defense lawyers have accused prosecutors of twisting their clients’ words. They have argued that the militia group went to Washington only to provide security at events before the riot for right-wing figures such as Trump confidant Roger Stone and that there was never a plan to attack the Capitol.

    The case has dealt a major blow to the Oath Keepers, in part because many people associated with it want to be considered respectable in their communities, said Carroll Rivas of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Of the approximately 30 Capitol riot defendants affiliated with the Oath Keepers, nine have pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the attack, including three who have pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy.

    But that doesn’t mean the ideas that Rhodes promoted have faded away.

    “He came up with a blueprint that is going to be used in the future by people we don’t even know about,” Van Tatenhove said. “I think it’s very important for us to pay attention.”

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    Whitehurst reported from Washington.

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    Follow the AP’s coverage of the Capitol riot at https://apnews.com/hub/capitol-siege.

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  • Inflation, unrest challenge Bangladesh’s ‘miracle economy’

    Inflation, unrest challenge Bangladesh’s ‘miracle economy’

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    DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Standing in line to try to buy food, Rekha Begum is distraught. Like many others in Bangladesh, she is struggling to find affordable daily essentials like rice, lentils and onions.

    “I went to two other places, but they told me they don’t have supplies. Then I came here and stood at the end of the queue,” said Begum, 60, as she waited for nearly two hours to buy what she needed from a truck selling food at subsidized prices in the capital, Dhaka.

    Bangladesh’s economic miracle is under severe strain as fuel price hikes amplify public frustrations over rising costs for food and other necessities. Fierce opposition criticism and small street protests have erupted in recent weeks, adding to pressures on the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, which has sought help from the International Monetary Fund to safeguard the country’s finances.

    Experts say Bangladesh’s predicament is nowhere nearly as severe as Sri Lanka’s, where months’ long unrest led its long-time president to flee the country and people are enduring outright shortages of food, fuel and medicines, spending days in queues for essentials. But it faces similar troubles: excessive spending on ambitious development projects, public anger over corruption and cronyism and a weakening trade balance.

    Such trends are undermining Bangladesh’s impressive progress, fueled largely by its success as a garment manufacturing hub, toward becoming a more affluent, middle-income country.

    The government raised fuel prices by more than 50% last month to counter soaring costs due to high oil prices, triggering protests over the rising cost of living. That led authorities to order the subsidized sales of rice and other staples by government-appointed dealers.

    The latest phase of the program, which began Sept. 1, should help about 50 million people, said Commerce Minister Tipu Munshi.

    “The government has taken a number of measures to reduce pressures on low-income earners. That is impacting the market and keeping prices of daily commodities competitive,” he said.

    The policies are a stopgap for bigger global and domestic challenges.

    The war in Ukraine has pushed higher prices of many commodities at a time when they already were surging as demand recovered with a waning of the coronavirus pandemic. In the meantime, countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Laos — among many — have seen their currencies weaken against the dollar, adding to the costs for dollar-denominated imports of oil and other goods.

    To ease the strain on public finances and foreign reserves, the authorities put a moratorium on big, new projects, cut office hours to save energy and imposed limits on imports of luxury goods and non-essential items, such as sedans and SUVs.

    “The Bangladesh economy is facing strong headwinds and turbulence,” said Ahmad Ahsan, an economist and director of the Dhaka-based Policy Research Institute, a thinktank. “Suddenly we are back to the era of rolling power cuts, with the taka and the forex reserves under pressure,” he said.

    Millions of low-income Bangladeshis, like Begum, whose family of five can barely afford to eat fish or meat even once a month, still struggle to put food on the table.

    Bangladesh has made huge strides in the past two decades in growing its economy and fighting poverty. Investments in garment manufacturing have provided jobs for tens of millions of workers, mostly women. Exports of apparel and related products account for more than 80% of its exports.

    But with fuel costs so high, authorities shut diesel-run power plants that produced at least 6% of total production, cutting daily power generation by 1,500 megawatts and disrupting manufacturing.

    Imports in the last fiscal year, ending in June, 2022, rose to $84 billion, while exports have fluctuated, leaving a record current account deficit of $17 billion.

    More challenges are ahead.

    Deadlines are fast approaching for repaying foreign loans related to at least 20 mega infrastructure projects, including the $3.6 billion River Padma bridge built by China and a nuclear power plant mostly funded by Russia. Experts say Bangladesh needs to prepare for when repayment schedules ramp up between 2024 and 2026.

    In July, in a move economists view as a precautionary measure, Bangladesh sought a $4.5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, becoming the third country in South Asia to recently seek its help after Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

    Finance Minister A.H.M. Mustafa Kamal said that the government asked the IMF to begin formal negotiations on loans “for balance of payments and budgetary assistance.” The IMF said it was working with Bangladesh to draw up a plan.

    Bangladesh’s foreign reserves have been falling, potentially undermining its ability to meet its loan obligations. By Wednesday they had dropped to $36.9 billion from $45.5 billion a year earlier, according to the central bank.

    Usable foreign reserves would be about $30 billion, said Zahid Hussain, a former chief economist of the World Bank’s Dhaka office.

    “I would not say this is a crisis situation. This is still enough to meet three months of imports, three and half months of imports. But it also means that … you do not have a lot of room for maneuvering on the reserve front,” he said.

    Still, despite what some economists say is excessive spending on some costly projects, Bangladesh is better equipped to weather hard times than some other countries in the region.

    Its farm sector — tea, rice and jute are major exports — is an effective “shock absorber,” and its economy, four to five times larger than Sri Lanka’s, is less vulnerable to outside calamities like a downturn in tourism.

    The economy is forecast to grow at a 6.6% pace this fiscal year, according to the Asia Development Bank’s latest forecast, and the country’s total debt is still relatively small.

    “I think in the current context, the most important difference between Sri Lanka and Bangladesh is the debt burden, particularly the external debt,” said Hussain.

    Bangladesh’s external debt is under 20% of its gross domestic product, while Sri Lanka’s was around 126% in the first quarter of 2022.

    “So, we have some space. I mean debt as a source of stress on the macroeconomy is not much of a much problem yet,” he said.

    Waiting in a line to buy subsidized food, 48-year-old Mohammed Jamal said he was not feeling such leeway for his own family.

    “It has become unbearable trying to maintain our standard of living,” Jamal said. “Prices are just out of reach for the common people,” he said. “It’s tough living this way.”

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