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  • ‘A time bomb’: India’s sinking holy town faces grim future

    ‘A time bomb’: India’s sinking holy town faces grim future

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    By KRUTIKA PATHI and SHONAL GANGULY

    February 28, 2023 GMT

    JOSHIMATH, India (AP) — Inside a shrine overlooking snow-capped mountains, Hindu priests heaped spoonfuls of puffed rice and ghee into a crackling fire. They closed their eyes and chanted in Sanskrit, hoping their prayers would somehow turn back time and save their holy — and sinking — town.

    For months, the roughly 20,000 residents in Joshimath, burrowed in the Himalayas and revered by Hindu and Sikh pilgrims, have watched the earth slowly swallow their community. They pleaded for help that never arrived, and in January their desperate plight made it into the international spotlight.

    But by then, Joshimath was already a disaster zone. Multistoried hotels slumped to one side; cracked roads gaped open. More than 860 homes were uninhabitable, splayed by deep fissures that snaked through ceilings, floors and walls. And instead of saviors they got bulldozers that razed whole lopsided swaths of the town.

    Full Coverage: Photography

    The holy town was built on piles of debris left behind by years of landslides and earthquakes. Scientists have warned for decades, including in a 1976 report, that Joshimath could not withstand the level of heavy construction that has recently been taking place.

    “Cracks are widening every day and people are in fear. We have been saying for years this is not just a disaster, but a disaster in the making… it’s a time bomb,” said Atul Sati, an activist with the Save Joshimath Committee.

    Joshimath’s future is at risk, experts and activists say, due in part to a push backed by the prime minister’s political party to grow religious tourism in Uttarakhand, the holy town’s home state. On top of climate change, extensive new construction to accommodate more tourists and accelerate hydropower projects in the region is exacerbating subsidence — the sinking of land.

    Located 1,890 meters (6,200 feet) above sea level, Joshimath is said to have special spiritual powers and believed to be where Hindu guru Adi Shankaracharya found enlightenment in the 8th century before going on to establish four monasteries across India, including one in Joshimath.

    Visitors pass through the town on their way to the famous Sikh shrine, Hemkund Sahib, and the Hindu temple, Badrinath.

    “It must be protected,” said Brahmachari Mukundanand, a local priest who called Joshimath the “brain of North India” and explained that “Our body can still function if some limbs are cut off. But if anything happens to our brain, we can’t function. … Its survival is extremely important.”

    The town’s loose topsoil and soft rocks can only support so much and that limit, according to environmentalist Vimlendu Jha, may have already been breached.

    “You can’t just construct anything anywhere just because it is allowed,” he said. “In the short term, you might think it’s development. But in the long term, it is actually devastation.”

    At least 240 families have been forced to relocate without knowing if they would be able to return.

    Prabha Sati, who fled Joshimath in a panic last month when her home began to crack and tilt, came back to grab the television, idols of Hindu gods and some shoes before state officials demolished her home.

    “We built this house with so much difficulty. Now I will have to leave everything behind. Every small piece of it will be destroyed,” she said, blinking back tears.

    Authorities, ignoring expert warnings, have continued to move forward with costly projects in the region, including a slew of hydropower stations and a lengthy highway. The latter is aimed at further boosting religious tourism, a key plank of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.

    In 2021, Modi promised a prosperous decade ahead for Uttarakhand. It is dotted with several holy shrines and improving the state’s infrastructure has already led to a steady rise in pilgrims over the decades. Nearly 500,000 passed through Joshimath in 2019, state data shows.

    “In the next 10 years, the state will receive more tourists than it did in the last 100 years,” Modi said.

    A big Uttarakhand tourism draw is the Char Dham pilgrimage, one of the toughest in India.

    The route takes people to four, high-altitude Hindu temples. Pilgrims traverse challenging terrain, dropping oxygen levels and harsh weather between Badrinath, Gangotri, Kedarnath and Yamunotri temples. In 2022, over 200 out of the 250,000 pilgrims died while making the journey. Authorities said the rise in visitors was straining existing infrastructure.

    Already underway, the Char Dham infrastructure project, aims to make the journey more accessible via a 10-meter (32-foot) wide and 889-kilometer (552 miles) long all-weather highway as well as a 327-kilometer (203-mile) railway line that would crisscross through the mountains.

    It is a controversial project with some experts saying it will exacerbate the fragile situation in the upper Himalayas where several towns are built atop landslide debris.

    Veteran environmentalist Ravi Chopra called the project a desecration when he resigned from a court-ordered committee studying its impact. To create such wide roads, engineers would need to smash boulders, cut trees and strip shrubbery, which he said will weaken slopes and make them “more susceptible to natural disasters.”

    Urban planning expert Kiran Shinde suggested a pedestrian corridor instead, noting these places were never meant for cars nor crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

    “The highway is the most disastrous thing to happen to the Char Dham,” said Shinde, a professor at Australia’s La Trobe University who has written on religious tourism. “Let people walk.”

    Cracks continue to form. Located near a rail line construction site, Sangeeta Krishali’s home in Lachmoli, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from Joshimath, has them. She fears for her safety: “It happened there, it can happen here, too.”

    In Joshimath’s foothills, construction was paused on a road for the Char Dham project that would ferry tourists faster to the Badrinath temple after cracks emerged in people’s homes.

    Locals feared it was too late. A long, jagged crack running across one of the front walls in the famed Adi Shankaracharya monastery had deepened worryingly in recent weeks, said Vishnu Priyanand, one of the priests.

    “Let places of worship remain as places of worship. Don’t make them tourist spots,” he pleaded.

    It’s not just the highways. For the past 17 years, Atul Sati, the Save Joshimath Committee member, has been convinced that a hydropower station located near his town could one day ruin it. He isn’t alone. In late January, hundreds of residents protested against the National Thermal Power Corporation’s Tapovan project. Posters reading ‘Go back NTPC’ are plastered across the town’s main market.

    “Our town is on the verge of destruction because of this project,” Sati said.

    Locals say construction blasts for a 12-kilometer (7-mile) tunnel for the station are causing their homes to crumble. Work has been suspended but NTPC officials deny any link to Joshimath’s subsidence. An expert committee is still investigating the cause, but state officials earlier blamed faulty drainage systems.

    The state government announced interim relief packages, including compensation worth 150,000 rupees ($1,813) to each affected family, said Himanshu Khurana, the officer in charge of Chamoli district where Joshimath is located. Various government agencies were conducting surveys to determine what caused the damage, he added.

    The crisis in Joshimath has reignited questions over whether India’s quest for more hydropower in the mountains to cut its reliance on coal can be achieved sustainably. Uttarakhand, home to more than 30 rivers and surrounded by melting glaciers, has around 100 hydropower projects in varying stages.

    In 2021, 200 people died after the Tapovan plant near Joshimath was submerged by severe floods caused in part by fast shrinking glaciers, and over 6,000 were killed in the state after a devastating cloudburst in 2013.

    The heavy construction required for hydropower, like blasting boulders, diverting river flows and cutting through forests, in a region already vulnerable to climate change, could do irreparable damage, experts warn.

    It could also displace entire villages, as residents of a hamlet near Joshimath found out.

    Haat, a village along the Alaknanda River, was once a sacred hamlet that traced its origins to the guru Adi Shankaracharya, who is said to have established another temple here in the 8th Century.

    Today, it is a dumping site for waste and a storage pit for construction materials after the village was acquired in 2009 by an energy enterprise to build a hydropower project.

    The Laxmi Narayan temple, encircled by grey stacks of cement, is the only part of the village still standing. All of its residents left over the years as authorities began razing down their homes, said Rajendra Hatwal, once the village chief who now lives in another town nearby.

    The project, he fumed, had killed Haat.

    “What sort of development requires destroying these priceless places? We don’t want any part of it.”

    A court last year directed authorities to stop dumping waste near the historic temple, which was once the last rest stop for devotees on their pilgrimage to Badrinath.

    Hatwal and a few others still check in on the temple often. A caretaker, who refused to leave, lives in a makeshift room next to it. He sweeps the grounds, cleans the idols and prepares tea for the odd guest who comes through.

    They feared its days, like their homes, were also numbered.

    “We are fighting to protect the temple. We want to preserve our ancient culture to pass on to a new generation,” said Hatwal. “They have not only destroyed a village – they have finished a 1,200 year old culture.”

    ___

    AP photojournalist Rajesh Kumar Singh contributed to this report.

    ——

    Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

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  • Borsch without a ‘t’: Kyiv chef uses food to reclaim culture

    Borsch without a ‘t’: Kyiv chef uses food to reclaim culture

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    KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Don’t tell Ievgen Klopotenko that borsch is just food. For him, that bowl of beet-and-meat soup is the embodiment of everything Ukraine is fighting for.

    “Food is a powerful social instrument by which you can unite or divide a nation,” said Klopotenko, Ukraine’s most recognizable celebrity chef and the man who in the midst of a bloody war spearheaded what would become an unlikely cultural victory over Russia.

    “It’s our symbol,” Klopotenko said. “Borsch is our leader.”

    If that seems hyperbolic, you underestimate how intrinsic borsch (the preferred Ukrainian spelling) is to this country’s soul. More than a meal, it represents history, family and centuries of tradition. It is eaten always and everywhere, and its preparation is described almost reverentially.

    And now, at the one-year mark of the war with Russia, Klopotenko uses the dish as a rallying call for preserving Ukrainian identity. It’s an act of culinary defiance against one of Moscow’s widely discredited justifications of the war — that Ukraine is culturally indistinct from Russia.

    Thanks to a lobbying effort that Klopotenko helped lead, UNESCO issued a fast-track decision last July declaring Ukrainian borsch an asset of “intangible cultural heritage” in need of preservation. Although the declaration noted borsch is consumed elsewhere in the region, and that no exclusivity was implied, the move infuriated Russia.

    A Russian foreign ministry spokesperson accused Ukraine of appropriating the dish and called the move an act of xenophobia and Nazism.

    But in Ukraine, where until a year ago Russian was as widely spoken as Ukrainian, the declaration legitimized a notion that many had struggled to express.

    “People started to understand that they are Ukrainians,” Klopotenko said recently while preparing borsch at his Kyiv apartment. From his living room window, the husk of a high-rise gutted by Russian missiles dominated the view.

    “A lot of people started to eat Ukrainian food. A lot of people began to discover Ukrainian traditions,” he said.

    Klopotenko, 36, is an unlikely figure to grab headlines during a war that has left hundreds of thousands from all sides dead or wounded. But the television chef and restaurateur — recognizable by an unruly head of curls, rapid-fire dialogue and lively fashion sense — began his mission to elevate Ukrainian food years before Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

    Though born in Kyiv, Klopotenko had by age 5 spent months at a time living with his grandmother, who had moved just outside Manchester, England. He’d been raised on bland Soviet-era cuisine, and this was a culinary awakening. He encountered waves of new flavors and ingredients, experiences that set him on a path to restaurant work.

    His break came in 2015 when he won the television competition “MasterChef Ukraine.” He parlayed that into study at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and later a successful campaign to overhaul the Soviet-influenced cafeteria menus in Ukrainian schools.

    Always in the background was his sense that Ukrainian food — ditto the country’s culture writ large — wasn’t being true to itself. Much of Ukraine’s identity, he felt, from language and food to fashion and architecture, had been subjugated to Russian influences. Before the start of Soviet rule in 1917, Ukrainian cuisine was more diverse and robustly seasoned. That was quashed in favor of a more uniform palate with socialist sensibilities.

    Even after the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Ukraine’s cuisine didn’t quite bounce back. But Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 was a trigger. Trying to identify and hold onto Ukrainian heritage, Klopotenko and others began researching pre-Soviet Ukrainian cooking, hoping to return it to the mainstream and give people another toehold for reclaiming their culture.

    In 2019, he opened his Kyiv restaurant, 100 Rokiv Tomu Vpered (100 Years Ago Ahead), a reference to what Ukrainian cuisine was before Soviet rule, and what it could be again. The menu draws heavily on flavors and ingredients many have forgotten.

    Roasted parsnips with smoked sour cream. Buckwheat bread flavored with chamomile. Banosh, a sort of corn porridge topped with cottage cheese, mushrooms and apples.

    And, of course, borsch seasoned with the traditional smoked pears. Written records tie the recipe to Ukraine over many centuries. The effort to have it declared a cultural asset began in 2018, when Klopotenko enlisted the help of Maryna Sobotiuk, an adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Information Policy and co-founder of the Institute of Culture of Ukraine.

    They assembled a dossier that would become the country’s application to UNESCO. Their work took on greater urgency after Russia’s invasion a year ago and received the blessing of Ukraine’s government.

    Like Klopotenko, Sobotiuk said it’s a cause much deeper than dinner.

    “Our neighbors want to not just take our territory, but also our culture and our history,” she said, calling culinary heritage a soft power with tremendous potential to motivate and inspire. “It is important to give people something they can align with Ukraine except war.”

    Darra Goldstein, a food historian and expert in Eastern European cuisines, agreed, noting that the difficulty of delineating culinary boundaries doesn’t diminish the cultural import of the dishes.

    “It’s not simply a matter of claiming ownership of a dish, since the precise origins of any given dish are often difficult to trace. Instead, food goes to the heart of national belonging, how people define who they are,” she said.

    Borsch, of course, was just the start for Klopotenko. As more Ukrainians have rejected Russian culture since the war began, and consumption of traditional Ukrainian foods has spiked, he and others see an opening for codifying and celebrating more of their own.

    Though UNESCO is unlikely to grant similar status to other Ukrainian dishes — chicken Kyiv, garlicky pampushky bread and latke-like deruny enjoy similar popularity — Klopotenko said the next step is to raise the profile of the country’s cuisine as a whole, at home and abroad.

    To that end, his cookbook, “The Authentic Ukrainian Kitchen,” which offers modern takes on traditional Ukrainian cooking, will be released this fall in the U.S.

    “The war accelerated the growth of Ukrainian culture,” he said. “Russia wanted to kill the culture with the huge invasion, but it’s worked the other way.”

    It’s a sentiment shared widely on the streets of the nation’s capital, where restaurants have revamped menus to replace Russian dishes with Ukrainian ones. They’ve been rewarded with packed dining rooms despite rolling blackouts and frequent air-raid warnings.

    At Kyiv’s bustling Volodymirsky market — a warren of stalls offering beets, smoked seafood, caviar and mounds of the local, crumbly cottage cheese — Tetyana Motorna has sold pickled fruit and vegetables for decades. She held back tears as she discussed the war and why Klopotenko’s work to secure borsch as a national treasure for her country matters.

    “Borsch is everything for Ukrainians,” she said. “The war has made borsch even more important. … With borsch, we prove that we are a separate nation. It confirms us as a nation.”

    —-

    J.M. Hirsch is the editorial director of Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street and the former food editor of The Associated Press. This reporting was a collaborative effort between AP and Milk Street. Hirsch can be followed @jm_hirsch.

    —-

    For more AP stories about Ukraine, go to https://apnews.com/hub/ukraine.

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  • Man hangs self in Bulawayo CBD – Medical Marijuana Program Connection

    Man hangs self in Bulawayo CBD – Medical Marijuana Program Connection

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    News / National by Staff reporter 11 hrs ago | Views A man believed to be in his early 20s … Read More

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  • IS attacks on Syria truffle hunters are deadliest in a year

    IS attacks on Syria truffle hunters are deadliest in a year

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    BEIRUT (AP) — The Islamic State group has carried out its deadliest attacks in more than a year, killing dozens of civilians and security officers in the deserts of central Syria, even as people of northern Syria have been digging out of the wreckage from the region’s devastating earthquake.

    The bloodshed was a reminder of the persistent threat from IS, whose sleeper cells still terrorize populations nearly four years after the group was defeated in Syria.

    The attacks also underscored the extremists’ limitations. IS militants have found refuge in the remote deserts of Syria’s interior and along the Iraqi-Syrian border. From there, they lash out against civilians and security forces in both countries. But they are also hemmed in by opponents on all sides: Syrian government troops as well as Kurdish-led fighters who control eastern Syria and are backed by U.S. forces. American raids with their Kurdish-led allies have repeatedly killed or caught IS leaders and, earlier this month, killed two senior IS figures.

    The IS attacks this month were largely against a very vulnerable target: Syrians hunting truffles in the desert.

    The truffles are a seasonal delicacy that can be sold for a high price. Since the truffle hunters work in large groups in remote areas, IS militants in previous years have repeatedly preyed on them, emerging from the desert to abduct them, kill some and ransom others for money.

    On Feb. 11, IS fighters kidnapped about 75 truffle hunters outside the town of Palmyra. At least 16 were killed, including a woman and security officers, 25 were released and the rest remain missing.

    Six days later, on Friday, they attacked a group of truffle hunters outside the desert town of Sukhna, just up the highway from Palmyra, and fought with troops at a security checkpoint close by. At least 61 civilians and seven soldiers were killed. Many of the truffle hunters in the group work for three local businessmen close to the Syrian military and pro-government militias, which may have prompted IS to target them, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition war monitor, and the Palmyra News Network, an activist collective that covers developments in the desert areas.

    Smaller attacks around the area killed 12 other people, including soldiers, pro-government fighters and civilians.

    The area is far from the northern regions devastated by the Feb. 6 earthquake that killed more than 46,000 people in Turkey and Syria. Still, IS fighters “took advantage of the earthquake to send a message that the organization is still present,” said Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Observatory.

    Friday’s attack in Sukhna was the group’s deadliest since January 2022, when IS gunmen stormed a prison in the northeastern city of Hassakeh that held some 3,000 militants and juveniles. Ten days of battles between the militants and U.S.-backed fighters left nearly 500 dead.

    The prison attack raised fears IS was staging a comeback. But it was followed by a series of blows against the group, which reverted to its drumbeat of smaller-scale shootings and bombings.

    It’s too early to say if the new spate of attacks marks a new resurgence, said Aaron Y. Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

    “It’s the biggest attack in a while. So the question is if it’s just a one-off attack or if they are reactivating capabilities,” said Zelin, who closely follows militant Islamic groups and founded Jihadology.net.

    He said IS fighters have been less active every year since 2019 and noted that the recent attacks hit civilians, not tougher security targets.

    In 2014, IS overran large swaths of Syria and Iraq and declared the entire territory a “caliphate,” where it imposed a radically brutal rule. The U.S. and its allies in Syria and Iraq, as well as Syria’s Russian-backed government troops, fought against it for years, eventually rolling it back but also leaving tens of thousands dead and cities in ruins. The group was declared defeated in Iraq in 2017, then in Syria two years later.

    In 2019, many thought that IS was finished after it lost the last sliver of land it controlled, its founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a U.S. raid and an international crackdown on social media pages linked to the extremists limited its propaganda and recruitment campaigns.

    Another U.S. raid about a year ago killed al-Baghdadi’s successor, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi. His replacement was killed in battle with rebels in southern Syria in October.

    The newest IS leader, Abu al-Hussein al-Husseini al-Qurayshi, may be trying to show his strength with the latest attacks, said Abdullah Suleiman Ali, a Syrian researcher who focuses on jihadi groups. The leaders’ names are pseudonyms and don’t refer to a family relation.

    “The new leader has to take measures to prove himself within the organization … (to show) that the group under the new leadership is capable and strong,” Ali said.

    American troops and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces eliminated a series of senior IS figures this month, according to the U.S. military. On Feb, 10, they killed Ibrahim Al Qahtani, suspected of planning last year’s prison attack, then eight days later they captured an IS official allegedly involved in planning attacks and manufacturing bombs. Last week, a senior IS commander, Hamza al-Homsi, was killed in a raid that also left four American service-members wounded.

    But IS remains a threat, according to U.N., U.S. and Kurdish officials.

    It is estimated to have 5,000 to 7,000 members and supporters – around half of them fighters — in Iraq and Syria, according to a U.N. report this month. IS uses desert hideouts “for remobilization and training purposes” and has spread cells of 15 to 30 people each to other parts of the country, particularly the southern province of Daraa.

    SDF spokesman Siamand Ali said IS persistently plots attacks in Kurdish-run eastern Syria. He pointed to an attempted attack by IS fighters on SDF security headquarters in the city of Raqqa in December. SDF sweeps since then have captured IS operatives and weapons caches, he said. This is a sign the group was close to carrying out large operations, he said.

    IS in particular aims to storm SDF-run prisons to free militants, he said. Some 10,000 IS fighters, including about 2,000 foreigners, are held in the more than two dozen Kurdish-run detention facilities.

    Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, commander of the U.S. Central Command or CENTCOM, said in a statement this month that IS “continues to represent a threat to not only Iraq and Syria, but to the stability and security of the region.”

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  • Mexico’s Senate approves controversial electoral reform

    Mexico’s Senate approves controversial electoral reform

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    MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s Senate on Wednesday approved a reform of the country’s electoral institute, a move that opponents say will undercut democracy but which the president contends will save money and reduce political privileges.

    Lawmakers voted 72-50 in favor of the controversial overhaul of the body overseeing Mexico’s elections. Opponents immediately said they will challenge the changes in the supreme court. Protests are planned in multiple cities.

    The reform still needs to be enacted by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, but that is seen as a formality since he backs the initiative, which would reduce the size of the institute and limit its supervisory and sanctioning powers.

    Some opposition lawmakers held up posters reading: “Morena wants to steal the elections,” referring to López Obrador’s ruling Morena party. Mexico has presidential elections scheduled for next year.

    The legislative initiative, known as “Plan B”, was proposed by the president in December after he did not obtain enough votes in Congress for a constitutional reform that carried deeper electoral changes.

    The president has repeatedly denied that the reform package could put the elections in Mexico at risk, saying the initiative seeks to cut the National Electoral Institute’s large budget and end its privileges.

    López Obrador and his supporters have been critical of the electoral institute since 2006 when he came within 0.56% of the vote of winning the presidency and denounced his loss as fraudulent. He and his supporters launched a mass protest movement.

    Despite the institute confirming his landslide victory in 2018, López Obrador has repeatedly complained of how costly it is to run elections in Mexico and sought to curtail the institute’s budget. He frequently says that the independent body is in the hands of the elite.

    Some Mexicans see similarities to the rhetoric used by former U.S. President Donald Trump and ex-Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro ahead of elections in those countries that aimed to erode confidence in the process.

    Many in Mexico see the electoral institute as a key pillar of the country’s modern democracy. After 71 years of uninterrupted single-party rule, the opposition finally broke through in 2000.

    López Obrador’s ruling Morena party is favored in next year’s national elections and the opposition is in disarray, which would seem to give the president little incentive to attack the electoral institute. He remains highly popular in Mexico, but is not eligible for re-election.

    Lorenzo Córdova, the institute’s leader, has aggressively defended it in public and framed the reforms as a threat to Mexico’s democracy. His outspokenness has made him a frequent target of López Obrador.

    After Wednesday’s vote, the institute said via Twitter that the reform “puts at risk the equity and transparency of the elections” by weakening the sanctions the institute can apply to candidates and parties that violate campaign finance rules.

    Even before Wednesday night’s vote, the opposition had called a march in Mexico City Sunday in defense of the institute. The opposition held a similar march in November, which was ridiculed by López Obrador who led an even larger march days later.

    The president had already worried some observers by frequently attacking Mexico’s judiciary and concentrating enormous responsibility in the hands of the military, raising questions about his respect for the country’s democratic institutions.

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  • New quake brings fresh losses to residents of Turkey, Syria

    New quake brings fresh losses to residents of Turkey, Syria

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    ISTANBUL (AP) — Survivors of the earthquake that jolted Turkey and Syria 15 days ago, killing tens of thousands of people and leaving hundreds of thousands of others homeless, dealt with more trauma and loss Tuesday after another deadly quake and aftershocks rocked the region.

    The 6.4 magnitude earthquake that struck Monday evening had its epicenter in the Defne district of Turkey’s Hatay province, which was of the area’s worst affected by the Feb. 6 magnitude 7.8 quake that killed nearly 46,000 people in the two countries.

    Turkey’s disaster management authority, AFAD, said the new quake killed six people and injured 294 others, including 18 who were in critical condition. In Syria, a woman and a girl died as a result of panic during the earthquake in the provinces of Hama and Tartus, pro-government media said.

    Monday’s quake was felt in Jordan, Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon and Egypt. A magnitude 5.8 quake followed, along with dozens of aftershocks. The White Helmets, northwest Syria’s civil defense organization, said about 190 people suffered injuries in rebel-held areas and that several flimsy buildings collapsed but there were no reports of anyone trapped under the debris.

    In Turkey, teacher Zuher Capar, 42, said he was mourning the loss of relatives in the original earthquake and having a meal with his aunt and uncle near the Hatay town of Samandag when they felt Monday’s temblor.

    “It shook a little, then it grew strong,” he said. “The electricity went and there were screams everywhere. There were small children in the house. They were screaming, my aunt was crying.”

    On Feb. 6, Capar rushed to try to help his cousin, the cousin’s wife and the couple’s small children out of the rubble of their collapsed home, but they did not survive.

    “We had barely overcome the sadness (from the first earthquake),” he said.

    While his large family’s home withstood the quake earlier in the month, it was damaged on Monday. Capar said they are too frightened to sleep there and plan to stay in a large tent and cars.

    “We are trying to stay strong but it is a terrifying process. The cities we knew, the memories we had, have been destroyed,” he said. “When we go in the streets, there is only rubble and heavy machinery. It’s like a horror movie scene.”

    Turkish officials warned residents not to go into the remains of their homes, but people have done so to retrieve what they can. Three of the people killed Monday were inside a damaged four-story building when the new quake hit.

    Aftershocks and the instability of the structure complicated the rescue effort, and it took several hours for search crews to find the bodies, Turkish news agency DHA said.

    Dr. Tahsin Cinar, an anesthesiologist using vacation time to help provide medical care in Hatay as a representative of the Turkish Medical Association, said earthquake survivors need serious help with their mental health.

    “They feel so alone, so deserted and very anxious. Even a small tremor leads to a big anxious reaction,” he said.

    Cinar and other volunteers initially provided emergency care for people with physical injuries. Now, they are seeing more signs of psychological trauma, depression and the stress that comes with a lack of safe housing, winter weather and a pause in education.

    “There is nearly nothing to create social well-being,” he said.

    The U.N.’s World Food Program said Monday’s quake frightened employees who were distributing food to hundreds of thousands of people in northwest Syria and Turkey. The employees are sleeping in their cars in freezing temperatures while still trying to do their jobs, the program said.

    Kamal Abuhassan’s small house in Jinderis, Syria, was damaged in the the first earthquake, but after a few days, he and his family returned. They ran out when Monday’s quake hit; the dwelling is now partially collapsed into piles of rubble.

    “Our house is ruined, but at least our kids are OK,“ Abuhassan said.

    He has set up a tent just outside the house, too afraid to go back inside.

    “We just don’t know when the next earthquake is going to happen. Where else are we supposed to go other than tents?” he said.

    Some 13.5 million people live in Turkey’s 11 quake-hit provinces, where authorities said more than 139,000 buildings were either destroyed or so severely damaged that they need to be torn down.

    Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said 865,000 people were living in tents as of Tuesday. Some 270 tent cities have been set up in the affected provinces, and winter weather added to the suffering of displaced citizens.

    Umit Ozalp, who has lived for 40 years in Antakya, a historic city that’s now devastated, was preparing to leave, joining others carrying just a few small bags at a bus station.

    “We have nothing left. Our home, our homeland, our children. We lost our work. Our situation is painful,” Ozalp told the IHA news agency.

    Kenan Caglar, a bus company employee, said the company was transporting at least 2,000 passengers a day, most bound for Istanbul or the Mediterranean cities of Antalya and Mersin.

    The majority of deaths in the massive Feb. 6 quake, which was followed by a magnitude 7.5 temblor nine hours later, were in Turkey, where at least 42,310 people died, according to the disaster management agency.

    Turkey’s defense minister said about 20,000 Syrians living in Turkey had returned to Syria after the quakes.

    “They are returning to their lands because they lost their homes and their relatives,” Hulusi Akar said from Hatay on Tuesday.

    ___

    Fraser reported from Ankara, Turkey. Omar Alham in Jinderis, Syria contributed.

    ___

    Follow AP’s earthquake coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/earthquakes

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  • What’s next for city CBD amid firms’ exodus? – Medical Marijuana Program Connection

    What’s next for city CBD amid firms’ exodus? – Medical Marijuana Program Connection

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    What's next for city CBD amid firms' exodus? Original Author Link click here to read complete story.. … Read More

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  • U.S.: Russia Has Committed Crimes Against Humanity In Ukraine

    U.S.: Russia Has Committed Crimes Against Humanity In Ukraine

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    MUNICH (AP) — The United States has determined that Russia has committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine, Vice President Kamala Harris said Saturday, insisting that “justice must be served” to the perpetrators.

    Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, Harris said the international community has both a moral and a strategic interest in pursuing those crimes, pointing to a danger of other authoritarian governments taking advantage if international rules are undermined.

    “Russian forces have pursued a widespread and systemic attack against a civilian population — gruesome acts of murder, torture, rape, and deportation,” Harris said. She also cited “execution-style killings, beatings, and electrocution.”

    The Biden administration formally determined last March that Russian troops had committed war crimes in Ukraine and said it would work with others to prosecute offenders. A determination of crimes against humanity goes a step further, indicating that attacks against civilians are being carried out in a widespread and systematic manner.

    dpatop – 18 February 2023, Bavaria, Munich: Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States, attends the Security Conference. The 59th Munich Security Conference (MSC) will take place from February 17 to 19, 2023, at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel in Munich. Photo: Sven Hoppe/dpa (Photo by Sven Hoppe/picture alliance via Getty Images)

    picture alliance via Getty Images

    “Russian authorities have forcibly deported hundreds of thousands of people, from Ukraine to Russia, including children,” Harris said. “They have cruelly separated children from their families.”

    She also pointed to the attack in mid-March on a theater in the strategic port city of Mariupol where civilians had been sheltering, which killed hundreds, and to the images of civilians’ bodies left on the streets of Bucha after the Russian pullback from the Kyiv area last spring.

    Harris said that, as a former prosecutor and former head of California’s Department of Justice, she knows “the importance of gathering facts and holding them up against the law.”

    “In the case of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, we have examined the evidence, we know the legal standards, and there is no doubt,” she said. “These are crimes against humanity.”

    U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who also was attending the Munich conference, said in a statement issued as Harris spoke that “we reserve crimes against humanity determinations for the most egregious crimes.”

    The new determination underlines the “staggering extent” of suffering inflicted on Ukrainian civilians and “also reflects the deep commitment of the United States to holding members of Russia’s forces and other Russian officials accountable for their atrocities,” he said.

    Russia’s nearly yearlong invasion of Ukraine, has dominated discussions at the Munich conference, an annual gathering of security and defense officials from around the world. Harris told the assembled participants: “Let us all agree — on behalf of all the victims, both known and unknown, justice must be served.”

    Ukrainian emergency services employees prepare to load the remains of an S-300 missile fired by Russian forces onto a truck in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 17, 2023. Russia pummeled Ukraine with a barrage of cruise and other missiles on Thursday, hitting targets from east to west as the war's one-year anniversary nears, one of the strikes killed a 79-year-old woman and injured at least seven other people, Ukrainian authorities said. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)
    Ukrainian emergency services employees prepare to load the remains of an S-300 missile fired by Russian forces onto a truck in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 17, 2023. Russia pummeled Ukraine with a barrage of cruise and other missiles on Thursday, hitting targets from east to west as the war’s one-year anniversary nears, one of the strikes killed a 79-year-old woman and injured at least seven other people, Ukrainian authorities said. (AP Photo/Vadim Ghirda)

    “Such is our moral interest,” she said. “We also have a significant strategic interest.”

    “No nation is safe in a world where one country can violate the sovereignty and territorial integrity of another, where crimes against humanity are committed with impunity, where a country with imperialist ambitions can go unchecked,” Harris added.

    If Russian President Vladimir Putin succeeds in attacking international rules and norms, “other nations could feel emboldened to follow his violent example,” she said. “Other authoritarian powers could seek to bend the world to their will, through coercion, disinformation and even brute force.”

    Harris’ audience Saturday didn’t include any Russian officials. Conference organizers decided not to invite them this year.

    Amid the Western officials defending arms supplies to Ukraine, China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, stood out by calling for an end to the war through peace talks, saying Beijing was “deeply worried about the expansion and long-term effect of this war.”

    China has refused to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or to impose sanctions on Moscow like Western nations have done. Without naming any countries, Wang said “there may be forces” that don’t want the war to stop anytime soon.

    “What they care about is not the life and death of the Ukrainian people, nor the increasing damage to Europe. They probably have bigger strategic goals than Ukraine,” he said.

    A building destroyed by shelling is covered by snow in Siversk on February 17, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA / AFP) (Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images)
    A building destroyed by shelling is covered by snow in Siversk on February 17, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA / AFP) (Photo by YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AFP via Getty Images)

    YASUYOSHI CHIBA via Getty Images

    Wang said Beijing planned to present a “position paper on the political settlement of the Ukraine issue” that would reiterate proposals made by President Xi Jinping.

    Asked on the sidelines of the event about the U.S. determination of crimes against humanity, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba replied that “Russia waged a genocidal war against Ukrainians because they do not recognize our identity and they do not think we deserve to exist as a sovereign nation.”

    “Everything that stems from that is crimes against humanity, war crimes and various other atrocities committed by the Russian army in the territory of Ukraine,” he said. “Let lawyers sort out specifically which act belongs where in terms of legal qualification.”

    Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy urged Western allies in a video address to the Munich conference on Friday to quicken their military support for Ukraine, declaring that “it’s speed that life depends on.”

    Kuleba voiced confidence that Ukraine would eventually receive fighter jets from its partners, despite their current reluctance. He noted that they initially pushed back on providing other heavy weapons that were later delivered or promised, “so the only outstanding type of weapon is planes.”

    In Munch on Friday, a Ukrainian deputy prime minister, Oleksandr Kubrakov, called for cluster munitions and phosphorous bombs, German media reported. Cluster munitions are banned by an international treaty.

    Asked whether he supported calling for such weapons, Kuleba said Ukraine has evidence that Russia uses them.

    “We are not party to the convention on the prohibition of cluster ammunition, so legally there are no obstacles for that,” he said. “And if we receive one, we will be using it exclusively against military forces of the Russian Federation.”

    Geir Moulson contributed to this report from Berlin.

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  • Study: Don’t blame climate change for South American drought

    Study: Don’t blame climate change for South American drought

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    Climate change isn’t causing the multi-year drought that is devastating parts of Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Bolivia, but warming is worsening some of the dry spell’s impacts, a new study says.

    The natural three-year climate condition La Nina – a cooling of the central Pacific that changes weather worldwide temporarily but lasted much longer than normal this time – is the chief culprit in a drought that has devastated central South America and is still going on, according to a flash study released Thursday by international scientists at World Weather Attribution. The study has not been peer reviewed yet.

    Drought has hit the region since 2019 with last year seeing the driest year in Central Argentina since 1960, widespread crop failures and Uruguay declaring an agricultural emergency in October. Water supplies and transportation were hampered, too.

    “There is no climate change signal in the rainfall,” said study co-author Friederike Otto of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College in London. “But of course, that doesn’t mean that climate change doesn’t play an important role in the context of these droughts. Because of the extreme increase in heat that we see, the soils do dry faster and the impacts are more severe they would have otherwise been.”

    The heat has increased the evaporation of what little water there is, worsened a natural water shortage and added to crop destruction, scientists said. The same group of scientists found that climate change made the heat wave last December 60 times more likely.

    And cutting down trees in the southern Amazon in 2020 reached the highest rate in a decade and that translates to less moisture being available farther south in Argentina, said study lead author Paola Arias, a climate scientist and professor at the Environmental School of the University of Antioquia in Colombia.

    The team of scientists at World Weather Attribution use observations and climate models to see if they find a climate change factor in how frequent or how strong extreme weather is. They compare what happened to how often it happened in the past, and they run computer simulations that contrast reality to what would have happened in a world without human-caused climate change from burning of fossil fuels.

    In this drought’s case, the models actually show a slight, not significant, increase in moisture from climate change but a clear connection to La Nina, which scientists say is waning. It will still take months if not longer for the region to get out of the drought — and that depends on whether the flip side of La Nina — El Nino — appears, said study co-author Juan Rivera, a scientist at the Argentine Institute for Snow Research, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences.

    In the past, the team of scientists has found no obvious climate change connection in some droughts and floods, but they do find global warming is a factor in most of the severe weather they investigate.

    “One of the reasons why we do these attribution studies is to show what the realistic impacts of climate change are. And it’s not that climate change makes everything worse,” Otto said. “Not every bad thing that’s happening now is because of climate change.”

    ___

    See more of AP’s climate and environment coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

    ___

    Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

    ___

    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Dubai boom sees Russian cash, high rents and reborn projects

    Dubai boom sees Russian cash, high rents and reborn projects

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    DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Fourteen years after a financial crisis nearly brought Dubai to its knees, several major abandoned real estate projects are finally showing signs of life as part of a new economic boom in the city-state.

    As with previous upturns in Dubai, war is a driving force. But this time it’s Russian investors fleeing Moscow’s war on Ukraine, rather than people escaping Mideast battlefields.

    “There’s lots of parts of the world where there are real challenges and people looking for a safe haven,” said Richard Waind, group managing director for Betterhomes, a real estate brokerage in the emirate. “I think that’s a safe haven both for the capital but also for their families.”

    While there’s no sign the market could be in similar trouble as in 2009, some concerns have started to surface. Skyrocketing rental costs are worsening a cost-of-living squeeze for the foreign workforce that powers the emirate.

    Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury is worried about the amount of Russian money flowing into the real estate market of the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates.

    “In theory, there should be significant reputational risk with the UAE apparently acting as a willing bridge, enabling Russian oligarchs to use the Emirates as a waystation between the Russian financial system and that of the West,” said Jodi Vittori, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has written extensively on Dubai being a money-laundering haven.

    “But the reality seems to point otherwise,” she said.

    Dubai’s government and the UAE’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to detailed questions from The Associated Press.

    It’s hard to overstate just how much the Emirates has changed over the last half century. Since 1968, the seven sheikdoms that make up the UAE have grown from a British protectorate of some 180,000 people to a federation that’s home to more than 9.2 million. Government statisticians say 3.5 million people live in Dubai alone, with an additional 1.1 million who temporarily live in the city or commute there for work each day.

    Oil, much of it from Abu Dhabi’s vast reserves, fueled the UAE’s initial modernization. After Dubai began allowing foreign ownership of “freehold” properties in 2002, the world’s tallest building, cavernous malls and sprawling subdivisions emerged from what once were uninterrupted stretches of windblown sand dunes.

    Real estate now represents some 10% of Dubai’s overall gross domestic product. After a slump due to COVID-19 restrictions, Dubai saw 86,849 residential sales in 2022, beating a previous record of 80,831 set in 2009.

    Buyers and renters have filled exclusive neighborhoods such as the Palm Jumeirah, a man-made archipelago in the shape of a palm tree that juts into the Persian Gulf.

    The average asking rent for an apartment there is over $67,600 per year, with a villa renting for $276,000 annually, according to real estate firm CBRE. Analysts attribute growth in the luxury market to the wealthy fleeing pandemic restrictions elsewhere.

    That pressure has grown even outside the world of the ultra-wealthy. Rents on average across Dubai are up 26.9% year-on-year, even with anti-price-gouging protections. Families living in villas can expect to pay median rents of $76,000 a year.

    The sudden increase in rent prompted Gavin Hill, a 34-year-old car salesman from Essex, England, to move with his partner from a villa in the Dubai Hills neighborhood near downtown to a smaller apartment some 20 kilometers (12 miles) south.

    “In terms of looking for a new place, previously it was reasonably easy,” said Hill, who has moved four times in the six years he has lived in Dubai. “This time it’s a minefield”

    Russian money has helped fuel this.

    Betterhomes, which has operated here since 1986, saw Russians lead all other nationalities in purchases by non-residents for the first time last year. Other real estate brokers have also acknowledged anecdotally the influence Russians have had.

    “Since the crisis in Eastern Europe, we have seen a lot of Russians, a lot of Ukrainians as well, looking to both move their family and and money out there,” Waind said.

    Dubai has a history of seeking a business advantage in crises like the Arab Spring, COVID-19 and now Russia’s war on Ukraine. During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, its new Jebel Ali port repaired ships damaged by explosions and gunfire in the Persian Gulf. The U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq saw wealthy émigrés arrive in Dubai and the wider UAE.

    Those booms included what the West would consider dirty money as well. Some of the nearly $1 billion embezzled in the 2010 Kabul Bank scandal in Afghanistan went toward luxury homes on Palm Jumeirah. A cousin of Syrian President Bashar Assad tied to Assad’s sanctioned business dealings also owned property there.

    It remains unclear how many Russians have bought in Dubai — and whether the purchases involve people fleeing potential conscription into the Russian army or mass purchases that can be the work of money launderers. Unlike in the U.S., where property records are public, Dubai does not offer an easily accessible database of transactions.

    A team from the U.S. Treasury stopped in the UAE on a Mideast tour in January.

    A senior U.S. official told The Associated Press that the agency is concerned about the Russian money coming into the Dubai real estate market. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity about discussing sanctions.

    Already, the Treasury has issued an alert aimed at U.S. commercial real estate stating that Russian oligarchs and their intermediaries could use “highly complex financing methods and opaque ownership structures” to hide illicit funds.

    But it remains unclear what, if any, action Treasury would take, considering the defense and economic ties the U.S. has with the Emirates. A global body focused on fighting money laundering put the UAE on its “gray list” over concerns it isn’t doing enough to stop criminals and militants from hiding wealth there.

    Once-abandoned projects that are showing new life include the Dubai Pearl, a planned $4 billion luxury development that was supposed to host multiple hotels and apartments in four, 73-story towers. Those plans collapsed during the 2009 financial crisis, brought on by the Great Recession, that forced Abu Dhabi to provide the city-state a $20 billion bailout.

    Demolition crews are now bringing down the concrete husk of the Dubai Pearl, though plans for the site remain unclear.

    Plans for the development of Palm Jumeirah’s forgotten twin, the Palm Jebel Ali, are also being relaunched.

    One practice that helped fuel Dubai’s 2009 crisis involved speculators buying yet-to-be built properties. “Off-plan” flipping is growing again as initial buyers “are capitalizing on the current market upswing and cashing out with a premium in hand,” local firm Property Monitor said.

    That company and others warn that speculative purchasing could lead to another bubble.

    “This does suggest a rise in speculative activity, which is a feature of any market that is seeing price rises,” said Scott Livermore, the chief economist at Oxford Economics Middle East.

    Hill — the renter from England — would like to buy a place if the market comes down again. But he’s cautious after what he’s seen in this boomtown.

    Dubai “can eat people out and spit them out quite quickly,” Hill said. “I’ve seen too many people go crazy and then go bust very, very fast.”

    ___

    Follow Jon Gambrell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jongambrellAP.

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  • Earthquake in Turkey is only the latest tragedy for refugees

    Earthquake in Turkey is only the latest tragedy for refugees

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    ANTAKYA, Turkey (AP) — When war broke out in Ukraine, Aydin Sisman’s relatives there fled to the ancient city of Antakya, in a southeastern corner of Turkey that borders Syria.

    They may have escaped one disaster, but another found them in their new home.

    They were staying with Sisman’s Ukrainian mother-in-law when their building collapsed last Monday as a 7.8 magnitude earthquake leveled much of Antakya and ravaged the region in what some in Turkey are calling the disaster of the century.

    “We have Ukrainian guests who fled the war, and they are also lying inside. We have had no contact.” said Sisman, whose Turkish father-in-law also was trapped under the rubble of the 10-year-old apartment building.

    As rescuers dig through heaps of rubble, Sisman appeared to have lost hope.

    Millions of refugees, like Sisman’s relatives, have found a haven in Turkey, escaping from wars and local conflicts from countries as close as Syria to as far afield as Afghanistan.

    There are at least 3.6 million Syrians who have fled their homeland’s war since 2011, arriving in trickles or en masse, sometimes overrunning the border, to seek safety from punishing bombardments, chemical attacks and starvation. Over 300,000 others have come to escape their own conflicts and hardships, according to the United Nations.

    For them, the earthquake was just the latest tragedy — one that many are still too shocked to comprehend.

    “This is the greatest disaster we have seen, and we have seen a lot,” said Yehia Sayed Ali, 25, a university student whose family moved to Antakya six years ago to escape Syria’s war at its peak.

    His mother, two cousins and another relative all died in the earthquake. On Saturday, he sat outside his demolished two-story building waiting for rescuers to help him dig out their bodies.

    “Not a single Syrian family has not lost a relative, a dear one” in this earthquake, said Ahmad Abu Shaar, who ran a shelter for Syrian refugees in Antakya that is now a pile of rubble.

    Abu Shaar said people are searching for loved ones and many have refused to leave Antakya even though the quake has left the city with no inhabitable structures, no electricity, water or heating. Many are sleeping on the streets or in the shadows of broken buildings.

    “The people are still living in shock. No one could have imagined this,” Abu Shaar said.

    Certainly not Sisman, who flew from Qatar to Turkey with his wife to help find his in-laws and their Ukrainian relatives.

    “Right now, my mother-in-law and father-in-law are inside. They’re under rubble … There were no rescue teams. I went up by myself, took a look, and walked around. I saw bodies and we pulled them out from under the rubble. Some without heads,” he said.

    Construction workers sifting through the debris told Sisman that although the top of the building was solid, the garage and foundations were not as strong.

    “When those collapsed, that’s when the building was flattened,” a shaken Sisman said. He appeared to have accepted his relatives were not coming out alive.

    Overwhelmed by the trauma, Abdulqader Barakat stood desperately pleading for international aid to help rescue his children trapped under concrete in Antakya.

    “There are four. We took two out and two are still (inside) for hours. We hear their voices and they are reacting. We need (rescue) squads,” he said.

    At the Syrian shelter, Mohammed Aloolo sat in a circle surrounded by his children who escaped the building that swayed and finally folded like an accordion.

    He came to Antakya in May from a refugee camp along the Turkish-Syrian border. He had survived artillery shelling and fighting in his hometown in Syria’s central Hama province, but he called his survival in the earthquake a miracle.

    Other relatives were not so lucky. Two nieces and their families remain under the debris, he said, holding back tears.

    “I wish this on no one. Nothing I can say that would describe this,” Aloolo said.

    Scenes of despair and mourning can be found across the region that only a few days earlier was a peaceful refuge for those fleeing war and conflict.

    At a cemetery in the town of Elbistan, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) north of Antakya, a Syrian family wept and prayed as it buried one of its own. Naziha Al-Ahmad, a mother of four, was pulled dead from the rubble of their new home. Two of her daughters were seriously injured, including one who lost her toes.

    “My wife was good, very good. Affectionate, kind, a good wife, God bless her soul,” said Ahmad Al-Ahmad. “Neighbours died, and we died with them.”

    Graves are quickly filling up.

    At the Turkish and Syria border, people transferred body bags into a truck waiting to take the remains to Syria for burial in their homeland. They included the body of Khaled Qazqouz’s 5-year-old niece, Tasneem Qazqouz.

    Tasneem and her father both died when the quake wracked the border town of Kirikhan.

    “We took her out from under the destruction, from under the rocks. The whole building fell,” Qazqouz said. “We worked for three days to get her out.”

    Qazqouz signed his niece’s name on the body bag before sending her off to the truck heading for Syria.

    He prayed as he let her go.

    “Say hi to your dad and give him my wishes. Say hi to your grandfather and your uncle and everyone,” he cried. “Between the destruction and the rubble, we have nothing now. Life has become so difficult.”

    ___

    Titova reported from Elbistan, Turkey, and Abuelgasim from Cilvegozu, Turkey. Associated Press writer Sarah El Deeb in Antakya contributed to this report.

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  • Australian Defense Department to remove Chinese-made cameras

    Australian Defense Department to remove Chinese-made cameras

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    CANBERRA, Australia (AP) — Australia’s Defense Department will remove surveillance cameras made by Chinese Communist Party-linked companies from its buildings, the government said Thursday after the U.S. and Britain made similar moves.

    The Australian newspaper reported Thursday that at least 913 cameras, intercoms, electronic entry systems and video recorders developed and manufactured by Chinese companies Hikvision and Dahua are in Australian government and agency offices, including the Defense Department and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

    Hikvision and Dahua are partly owned by China’s Communist Party-ruled government.

    Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles said his department is assessing all its surveillance technology.

    “Where those particular cameras are found, they’re going to be removed,” Marles told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “There is an issue here and we’re going to deal with it.”

    Asked about Australia’s decision, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning criticized what she called “wrongful practices that overstretch the concept of national security and abuse state power to suppress and discriminate against Chinese enterprises.”

    Without mentioning Australia by name, Mao said the Chinese government has “always encouraged Chinese enterprises to carry out foreign investment and cooperation in accordance with market principles and international rules, and on the basis of compliance with local laws.”

    “We hope Australia will provide a fair and non-discriminatory environment for the normal operation of Chinese enterprises and do more things that are conducive to mutual trust and cooperation between the two sides,” she told reporters at a daily briefing.

    The U.S. government said in November it was banning telecommunications and video surveillance equipment from several prominent Chinese brands including Hikvision and Dahua in an effort to protect the nation’s communications network.

    Security cameras made by Hikvision were also banned from British government buildings in November.

    An audit in Australia found that Hikvision and Dahua cameras and security equipment were found in almost every department except the Agriculture Department and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

    The Australian War Memorial and National Disability Insurance Agency have said they will remove the Chinese cameras found at their sites, the ABC reported.

    Opposition cybersecurity spokesman James Paterson said he had prompted the audit by asking questions over six months of each federal agency, after the Home Affairs Department was unable to say how many of the cameras, access control systems and intercoms were installed in government buildings.

    “We urgently need a plan from the … government to rip every one of these devices out of Australian government departments and agencies,” Paterson said.

    Both companies are subject to China’s National Intelligence Law which requires them to cooperate with Chinese intelligence agencies, he said.

    “We would have no way of knowing if the sensitive information, images and audio collected by these devices are secretly being sent back to China against the interests of Australian citizens,” Paterson said.

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  • Musk deputy’s words on Starlink ‘weaponization’ vex Ukraine

    Musk deputy’s words on Starlink ‘weaponization’ vex Ukraine

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    BOSTON (AP) — Ukrainians reacted Thursday with puzzlement and some ire to comments by a top Starlink official that their country has “weaponized” the satellite internet service, which has been pivotal to their national survival.

    President Gwynne Shotwell of SpaceX, which runs Starlink, was also reported to have said at the same venue Wednesday that the Elon Musk-controlled company has taken unspecified action to prevent Ukraine’s military from using Starlink technology against Russian invaders.

    The network of low-orbiting satellites has been crucial to Ukraine’s use of battlefield drones — a central fixture of the year-old war — and the country’s defenders have no viable alternative. The satellite links help Ukrainian fighters locate the enemy and target long-range artillery strikes.

    Onstage at a conference in Washington, D.C., Shotwell said: “We were really pleased to be able to provide Ukraine connectivity and help them in their fight for freedom. It was never intended to be weaponized. However, Ukrainians have leveraged it in ways that were unintentional and not part of any agreement.”

    Speaking separately to reporters from The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations afterward, Shotwell said SpaceX has worked to restrict Ukraine’s use of Starlink for military purposes.

    “There are things that we can do to limit their ability to do that,” they quoted her as saying without offering details. “There are things that we can do, and have done.”

    That drew the ire of a top aide to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In a tweet, Mykhailo Podolyak said SpaceX needs to decide whether it is on the side of Ukraine’s right to freedom or Russia’s “‘right’ to kill & seize territories.”

    It was not clear whether Shotwell’s comments Wednesday were made at the urging of Musk, the founder, CEO and chief engineer of SpaceX. An email to SpaceX seeking comment was not immediately returned.

    There was no indication of any interruption to Starlink service in Ukraine.

    In a statement, the country’s Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov reported “no problems with the operation of Starlink uplink terminals in Ukraine.” A ministry official familiar with the situation said checks Thursday of cities near the war’s front lines found no indications of trouble with Starlink coverage. The official spoke on condition they not be further identified.

    The 2,200-satellite constellation has been a lifeline for the country since Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion, especially vital as Ukraine struggles to keep electrical power and telecommunications operating under withering Russian missile and drone attacks on civilian targets.

    In the statement, Fedorov touted the arrival of the first of a new batch of 10,000 terminals provided by the German government, adding: “Starlinks help save thousands of lives daily. The energy infrastructure continues to work due to Starlinks. Doctors perform complex surgeries thanks to the connection that Starlinks provide.”

    The Thursday statement called Musk “one of the biggest private donors of our future victory,” estimating SpaceX’s contributions as worth more than $100 million. “We hope for further stable work of Starlinks in Ukraine.”

    A Ukrainian military official called Shotwell’s statements “strange” given the well-established fact of the country’s use of Starlink as a combat tool.

    Musk caused a stir in October when he publicly called on the Pentagon to take over funding of Starlink’s Ukraine effort.

    The billionaire and Twitter owner later backed down. Earlier that month he raised Zelenskyy’s hackles by arguing on Twitter that to achieve peace, Russia should be allowed to keep the Crimean Peninsula, which it seized in 2014. He also said Ukraine should adopt a neutral status, dropping a bid to join NATO.

    About the same time, Starlink terminals stopped working in newly liberated territories at the Ukraine-Russia front lines in the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials later said that was because the speed of their reconquest had pushed forces into areas Starlink that had “geo-fenced” to prevent Russia from using the service.

    In a late December interview, Fedorov told The Associated Press that 24,000 Starlink terminals were operating in the country, most provided by donors.

    —-

    AP military writer Tara Copp in Washington contributed to this report.

    Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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  • Nicaraguan bishop who refused exile gets 26 years in prison

    Nicaraguan bishop who refused exile gets 26 years in prison

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    MEXICO CITY (AP) — Roman Catholic Bishop Rolando Álvarez, an outspoken critic of Nicaragua’s government, was sentenced to 26 years in prison and stripped of his Nicaraguan citizenship Friday, the latest move by President Daniel Ortega against the Catholic church and his opponents.

    A day after he refused to get on a flight to the United States with 222 other prisoners, all opponents of Ortega, a judge sentenced Álvarez for undermining the government, spreading false information, obstruction of functions and disobedience, according to a government statement published in official outlets.

    The sentence handed down by Octavio Ernesto Rothschuh, chief magistrate of the Managua appeals court, is the longest given to any of Ortega’s opponents over the last couple years.

    Álvarez was arrested in August along with several other priests and lay people. When Ortega ordered the mass release of political leaders, priests, students and activists widely considered political prisoners and had some of them put on a flight to Washington Thursday, Alvarez refused to board without being able to consult with other bishops, Ortega said.

    Nicaragua’s president called Álvarez’s refusal “an absurd thing.” Álvarez, who had been held under house arrest, was then taken to the nearby Modelo prison.

    Álvarez had been one of the most outspoken religious figures still in Nicaragua as Ortega intensified his repression of the opposition.

    Nicaragua’s Episcopal Conference did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the sentence. Reached by the AP, Managua vicar Mons. Carlos Avilés said he hadn’t heard anything official. “Maybe tomorrow.”

    The church is essentially the last independent institution trusted by a large portion of Nicaraguans and that makes it a threat to Ortega’s increasingly authoritarian rule.

    Andrew Chesnut, a professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, said Álvarez’s sentence “constitutes the most severe repression against the Catholic Church in Latin America since the assassination of Guatemalan Bishop Juan José Gerardi in 1998.”

    “Since first becoming the ruling party in 1979 the Sandinistas have repressed the Catholic Church like few other regimes in Latin America,” Chesnut said. “Pope Francis has refrained from criticizing President Ortega for fear of inflaming the situation, but many believe that now is the time for him to speak out prophetically in defense of the most persecuted Church in Latin America.”

    Monsignor Silvio Báez, the former outspoken Managua auxiliary bishop who was recalled to the Vatican in 2019, said on Twitter “the Nicaraguan dictatorship’s hatred toward Mons. Rolando Álvarez is irrational and out of control.”

    Álvarez, the bishop of Matagalpa about 80 miles (130 kilometers) north of Managua, has been a key religious voice in discussions of Nicaragua’s future since 2018, when a wave of protests against Ortega’s government led to a sweeping crackdown on opponents.

    When the protests first erupted, Ortega asked the church to serve as mediator in peace talks.

    On April 20, 2018, hundreds of student protesters sought refuge at Managua’s cathedral. When police and Sandinista Youth descended, the students retreated inside, leaving only after clergy negotiated their safe passage.

    “We hope there would be a series of electoral reforms, structural changes to the electoral authority — free, just and transparent elections, international observation without conditions,” Álvarez said a month after the protests broke out. “Effectively the democratization of the country.”

    By that summer, the Church was under attack by Ortega’s supporters.

    A pro-government mob shoved, punched and scratched at Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes and other Catholic leaders as they tried to enter the Basilica San Sebastian in Diriamba on July 9, 2018.

    For nearly 15 hours overnight on July 13-14, 2018, armed government backers fired on a church in Managua while 155 student protesters who had been dislodged from a nearby university lay under the pews. A student who was shot in the head at a barricade outside died on the rectory floor.

    More recently, Ortega has accused the Church of being in on an alleged foreign-backed plot to depose him.

    Last summer, the government seized several radio stations owned by the diocese. At the time, it appeared Ortega’s administration wanted to silence critical voices ahead of municipal elections.

    The Holy See has been largely silent on the situation in Nicaragua, believing that any public denunciation will only inflame tensions further between the government and the local church.

    The Vatican’s last comment came in August when Pope Francis expressed concern about the raid of Álvarez’s residence and called for dialogue.

    Earlier this week, judges sentenced five other Catholic priests to prison. They were all aboard Thursday’s flight.

    Before the sentence was announced Friday, Emily Mendrala, a deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, said “we see yesterday’s event as a positive step that could put the (bilateral) relationship on a more constructive trajectory.” But she added that “we still have concerns with the human rights situation and the situation with democracy in Nicaragua.”

    The State Department said Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke by phone Friday with Nicaragua Foreign Minister Denis Moncada about the prisoners’ release and “the importance of constructive dialogue between the United States to build a better future for the Nicaraguan people.” Presumably the conversation occurred before Álvarez’s sentence was announced.

    Vilma Núñez, director of the Nicaragua Center for Human Rights, which had been supporting prisoners in their cases, called the sentence “arbitrary and last minute,” noting that it included crimes that were not part of his original conviction.

    “The personal well-being and life of the Monsignor is in danger,” Núñez said.

    After expelling nearly all of his most vocal critics, Ortega found himself stuck with the bishop in a still heavily Catholic country.

    “The Catholic Church, I think, is one of the main institutions that the Ortega regime really, really fears,” Antonio Garrastazu, regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Republican Institute in Washington, said before the the sentencing. “The Catholic Church are really the ones that can actually change the hearts and minds of the people.”

    Prior to the release of prisoners, sanctions and public criticism of Ortega had been building for months, but both United States and Nicaraguan officials say the decision to put 222 dissidents on a plane to Washington came suddenly.

    The majority had been sentenced in the past couple years to lengthy prison terms. The release came together in a couple of days and the prisoners had no idea what was happening until their buses turned into Managua’s international airport.

    “I think the pressure, the political pressure of the prisoners, the political prisoners became important to the Ortega regime, even for the people, the Sandinista people who were tired of abuses,” opposition leader Juan Sebastian Chamorro, who was among those released, said during a press conference Friday. “I think (Ortega) wanted to basically send the opposition outside of the country into exile.”

    In Ortega’s mind, they are terrorists. Funded by foreign governments, they worked to destabilize his government after huge street protests broke out in April 2018, he maintains.

    Ortega said Vice President Rosario Murillo, his wife, first came to him with the idea of expelling the prisoners.

    “Rosario says to me, ‘Why don’t we tell the ambassador to take all of these terrorists,’” Ortega recounted in a rambling speech Thursday night. In a matter of days, it was done.

    __

    AP reporters Gisela Salomon in Miami, Ciaran Giles in Madrid, Spain and Nicole Winfield in Rome and E. Eduardo Castillo in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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  • Wagner owner says war in Ukraine could drag on for years

    Wagner owner says war in Ukraine could drag on for years

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    KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The owner of the Russian Wagner Group private military contractor actively involved in the fighting in Ukraine has predicted that the war could drag on for years.

    Yevgeny Prigozhin said in a video interview released late Friday that it could take 18 months to two years for Russia to fully secure control of Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland of Donbas. He added that the war could go on for three years if Moscow decides to capture broader territories east of the Dnieper River.

    The statement from Prigozhin, a millionaire who has close links to Russian President Vladimir Putin and was dubbed “Putin’s chef” for his lucrative Kremlin catering contracts, marked a recognition of the difficulties that the Kremlin has faced in the campaign, which it initially expected to wrap up within weeks when Russian troops invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24.

    Russia suffered a series of humiliating setbacks in the fall when the Ukrainian military launched successful counteroffensives to reclaim broad swaths of territory in the east and the south. The Kremlin has avoided making forecasts on how long the fighting could continue, saying that what it called the “special military operation” will continue until its goals are fulfilled.

    The Russian forces have focused on Ukraine’s Luhansk and Donetsk provinces that make up the Donbas region where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014.

    Ukrainian and Western officials have warned that Russia could launch a new broad offensive to try to turn the tide of the conflict as the war approaches the one-year mark. But Ukraine’s military intelligence spokesman, Andriy Chernyak, told Kyiv Post that “Russian command does not have enough resources for large-scale offensive actions.”

    “The main goal of Russian troops remains to achieve at least some tactical success in eastern Ukraine,” he said.

    Prigozhin said that the Wagner Group mercenaries were continuing fierce battles for control of the Ukrainian stronghold of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region. He acknowledged that the Ukrainian troops were mounting fierce resistance.

    As Russian troops have pushed their attacks in the Donbas, Moscow has also sought to demoralize Ukrainians by leaving them without heat and water in the bitter winter.

    On Friday, Russia launched the 14th round of massive strikes on Ukrainian energy facilities and other vital infrastructure. High-voltage infrastructure facilities were hit in the eastern, western and southern regions, resulting in power outages in some areas.

    Ukraine’s energy company, Ukrenergo, said Saturday that the situation was “difficult but controllable,” adding that involved backups to keep up power supplies but noting that power rationing will continue in some areas. Head of Ukraine’s state nuclear operator Energoatom Petro Kotin said Saturday that more power will come into the country’s energy system after two nuclear reactors have been repaired.

    Ukraine’s military chief, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, said that Russian forces launched 71 cruise missiles, 35 S-300 missiles and seven Shahed drones between late Thursday and midday Friday, adding that Ukrainian air defenses downed 61 cruise missiles and five drones.

    The Ukrainian authorities reported more attacks by killer drones later on Friday. The Ukrainian air force said the military downed 20 Shahed drones in the evening.

    Russia’s Defense Ministry said that Friday’s strikes hit all the designated targets, halting the operation of Ukraine’s defense factories and blocking the delivery of supplies of Western weapons and ammunition. The claim couldn’t be independently verified.

    Late Friday, Russian military bloggers and some Ukrainian news outlets posted a video showing an attack by a sea drone on a strategic railway bridge in the Odesa region. The grainy video showed a fast-moving object on the surface of the water approaching the bridge in Zatoka, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) southwest of Odesa, and exploding in a powerful blast.

    The authenticity of the video couldn’t be verified, but the Ukrainian military on Saturday confirmed the use of sea drones by Russian forces.

    Ukraine’s military chief Zaluzhnyi said in an online statement that he has expressed concern about the use of such drones in a phone conversation with the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, on Saturday, adding that it “poses a threat to civilian navigation in the Black Sea.”

    The attack marks the first combat use of a sea drone by Russia in the conflict. Igor Korotchenko, a retired colonel of the Russian armed forces who frequently comments on the conflict on Russian state TV, noted Saturday that such drones should be equipped with a more powerful load of explosives to inflict more significant damage.

    The bridge, which was targeted by Russian missile strikes early in the war, serves the railway link to Romania, which is a key conduit for Western arms supplies.

    In other developments, the governor of Russia’s Kursk region along the border with Ukraine said that a group of construction workers was hit by Ukrainian shelling that killed one of them and wounded another.

    The governor of another Russian border region, Belgorod, reported the shelling of the town of Shebekino, saying it damaged two buildings but no one was hurt.

    ___

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  • Hilltop coal-mining town a tactical prize in Ukraine war

    Hilltop coal-mining town a tactical prize in Ukraine war

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    KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — In a small coal-mining town on Ukraine’s eastern front line, a fight for strategic superiority is being waged in a battlefield steeped with symbolism as the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion nears.

    The town of Vuhledar — meaning “gift of coal” — has emerged as a critical hot spot in the fight for Donetsk province that would give both sides, the Ukrainian forces who hold the urban center, and the Russians positioned in the suburbs, a tactical upper hand in the greater battle for the Donbas region.

    Located on an elevated plane that is one of the few high-terrain spots in the area, its capture would be an important step for Russia to disrupt Ukrainian supply lines. Securing Vuhledar would give Ukraine a potential launching pad for future counter-offensives south.

    Then there is the symbolic weight: Vuhledar is close to the administrative border of Donetsk province, and winning it would play into Russia’s greater aim of controlling the region as a whole.

    “The center of gravity of the Russian military effort is in Donetsk, and Vuhledar is basically the southern flank of that,” said Gustav Gressel, a senior policy fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relation’s Berlin office.

    The grinding fight to win the area has cost Russia manpower and weapons, as Ukrainians continue to hold up defensive lines. Russia sends battalion-sized scout groups to probe Ukrainian lines and shoot artillery toward their positions with an eye to pushing north toward the critical N15 highway, a key supply route.

    In remarks this week, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russian troops were advancing “with success” in Vuhledar. Meanwhile, a British defense intelligence briefing said Russia’s aim was to capture unoccupied areas of Ukrainian-held Donetsk but it was unlikely to build up the forces required to change the outcome of the war.

    Vuhledar’s pre-war population of 14,000 has dwindled to about 300. The majority of the town’s residents worked in the coal mine and nearby factories before the war.

    Olha Kyseliova, who was recently evacuated, worked in a brick factory before the fighting upended her life.

    Russian forces ramped up attacks beginning on Jan. 24, residents said. That day, a missile tore through Kyseliova’s nine-story building. She was sheltering in the basement with her three children and emerged to find a gaping hole through the roof of her third-floor apartment.

    That was the moment she decided she had to leave her hometown. “I cried the entire way out, I didn’t want to leave,” she said.

    Three Ukrainian brigades are positioned in Vuhledar and on the outskirts of the town. The Associated Press spoke to five commanders in units from all three, who provided only their first names in keeping with Ukraine’s military policy. Russia’s 155 Marine infantry troops are positioned just four kilometers (two miles) away in Vuhledar’s suburbs.

    For both sides, the town is tactically important.

    “It’s one of the main logistics points of the Donbas region, and also one of the main points of elevation,” said Maksym, the deputy commander of a Ukrainian marine infantry battalion. “By capturing Vuhledar, Russians can easily occupy the entire Donetsk region.”

    Seizing Vuhledar would enable Russia to push forward and threaten Ukrainian supply lines feeding into the fierce Marinka front line to the north, said Gressel of the European Council on Foreign Relations. For Ukraine, Vuhledar would be a launching pad for future counter-offensives toward Mariupol and Berdiansk.

    From their perch in the town, Ukrainian forces can see into Russian lines and have so far been able to repel Russian attempts to encircle Vuhledar. Columns of Russian tanks and armored vehicles transporting infantrymen continuously assault and attempt to break Ukrainian defenses. Aviation, rockets and artillery target the town.

    “But with our fighters and anti-tank equipment their attempts have not been successful,” said Maksym, the Ukrainian deputy commander. “The situation is strained, but controlled.”

    Similar to other front lines along the east, the Russians are losing scores of infantrymen in an attempt to tire and weaken Ukrainian defensive lines. Serhii, the commander of a Ukrainian intelligence unit, said he saw Russian soldiers sent straight through fields mined by the Ukrainians following Russia’s capture of the village of Pavlivka, south of Vuhledar, in November.

    “They de-mine our fields by using their own people,” he said.

    Ukrainian commanders said some of their units are suffering from dire ammunition shortages.

    That view was not shared across brigades, suggesting some are better supplied than others. Taras, the commander of a mortar unit, said his forces were suffering very serious shortages. Faced with orders to target an enemy position, he said, “I have just two or three rounds of ammunition to do it. It’s nothing.”

    Two commanders of a brigade inside Vuhledar reported the Russians hurled gas-laden projectiles that caused severe disorientation for hours, and burning of the throat and skin. Higher-ranking commanders did not comment on the type of gas used and said an investigation was ongoing.

    “They are probing and testing us across the eastern front line, including in Vuhledar,” said Oleksandr, a commander who was recently rotated out of the town. “They are trying to find our points of weakness.”

    For now, Russia’s activities around Vuhledar are not “operationally significant,” said Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia analyst with the U.S.-based think tank Institute for the Study of War. More combat power is required to execute breakthroughs that would achieve the stated aim of the Russian invasion — the capture of the entire Donetsk province.

    Even in the event of victory in Vuhledar, Russia would still need a lot of combat power to push north. Three months after capturing the village of Pavlivka in November, Russian forces have yet to make breakthroughs in Vuhledar, which is only four kilometers — a six-minute drive — away.

    “It’s not operationally significant because Russians will still have to fight for more territory to make a meaningful disruption of Ukrainian ground lines of communication to western Donetsk,” Stepanenko said. Vuhledar is just “one settlement on their way, where they are already suffering significant losses and where they already seem to have suffered losses in the area before.”

    Meanwhile, the last of Vuhledar’s residents said they are staying put.

    Oleksandra Havrylko, police press officer for the Donetsk region, pleads with those who remain to leave the devastated area. Most spend their days hiding in basements, coming out when there are lulls in fighting to charge phones and gather supplies in the town’s points of refuge, called “invincibility centers”.

    All but one of the town’s children have been evacuated. The father of a 15-year-old, the last remaining minor in the town, refuses to part with his son or leave the area, she said.

    “There are people in the city who don’t want to be evacuated, we tried many times,” she said. Most have never ventured far from their hometown.

    ___

    Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

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  • US jet shoots down unknown object flying off Alaska coast

    US jet shoots down unknown object flying off Alaska coast

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — A U.S. military fighter jet shot down an unknown object flying off the remote northern coast of Alaska on Friday on orders from President Joe Biden, White House officials said.

    White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the object was downed because it was flying at about 40,000 feet (13,000 meters) and posed a “reasonable threat” to the safety of civilian flights, not because of any knowledge that it was engaged in surveillance. Asked about the object’s downing, Biden on Friday said only that “It was a success.”

    Commercial airliners and private jets can fly as high as 45,000 feet (13,700 meters).

    Kirby described the object as roughly the size of a small car, much smaller than the massive suspected Chinese spy balloon downed by Air Force fighter jets Saturday off the coast of South Carolina after it transited over sensitive military sites across the continental U.S.

    The twin downings in such close succession are extraordinary, and reflect heightened concerns over China’s surveillance program and public pressure on Biden to take a tough stand against it. Still, there were few answers about the unknown object downed Friday and the White House drew distinctions between the two episodes. Officials couldn’t say if the latest object contained any surveillance equipment, where it came from or what purpose it had.

    The Pentagon on Friday declined to provide a more precise description of the object, only saying that U.S. pilots who flew up to observe it determined it didn’t appear to be manned. Officials said the object was far smaller than last week’s balloon, did not appear to be maneuverable and was traveling at a much lower altitude.

    Kirby maintained that Biden, based on the advice of the Pentagon, believed it posed enough of a concern to shoot it out of the sky — primarily because of the potential risk to civilian aircraft.

    “We’re going to remain vigilant about our airspace,” Kirby said. “The president takes his obligations to protect our national security interests as paramount.”

    The president was briefed on the presence of the object Thursday evening after two fighter jets surveilled it.

    Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary, told reporters Friday that an F-22 fighter aircraft based at Alaska’s Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson shot down the object using an AIM-9X short-range air-to-air missile, the same type used to take down the balloon nearly a week ago.

    The object flew over one of the most desolate places on the nation. Few towns dot Alaska’s North Slope, with the two apparently closest communities — Deadhorse and Kaktovik — combining for about 300 people. The Prudhoe Bay oil field on the North Slope is the largest such field in the United States.

    Unlike the suspected spy balloon, which was downed to live feeds and got U.S. residents looking up to the skies, it’s likely few people saw this object given the blistering frigid conditions of northern Alaska this time of the year, since there are few people outside for a prolonged period of time.

    Ahead of the the shoot-down, the Federal Aviation Administration restricted flights over a roughly 10-square mile (26-square kilometer) area within U.S. airspace off Alaska’s Bullen Point, the site of a disused U.S. Air Force radar station on the Beaufort Sea about 130 miles (210 kilometers) from the Canadian border, inside the Arctic Circle.

    Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a tweet Friday that he had been briefed and supported the decision. “Our military and intelligence services will always work together,” he said.

    The object fell onto frozen waters and officials expected they could recover debris faster than from last week’s massive balloon. Ryder said the object was traveling northeast when it was shot down. He said several U.S. military helicopters have gone out to begin the recovery effort.

    Later Friday, the Pentagon said: “Recovery is happening in a mix of ice and snow. Units located in Alaska under the direction of U.S. Northern Command, along with the Alaska National Guard, are involved in the response.”

    The unknown object was shot down in an area with harsh weather conditions and about six and a half hours of daylight at this time of year. Daytime temperatures Friday were about minus 17 degrees Fahrenheit (27 degrees Celsius).

    After the object was detected Thursday, NORAD — North American Aerospace Defense Command —sent F-35s to observe it, a U.S. official said, adding that the military queried U.S. government agencies to make sure it did not belong to any of them, and had confidence it was not a U.S. government or military asset. The official was not authorized to speak publicly about sensitive national security matters and spoke on condition of anonymity.

    Because it was much smaller than the suspected Chinese spy balloon, there were fewer safety concerns about downing it over land, so the decision was made to shoot it down when it was possible. That happened over water.

    The mystery around what exactly the flying object was lingered late into Friday night. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a statement saying it was “not a National Weather Service balloon.”

    “They do not hover,” said NOAA spokesperson Scott Smullen.

    The development came almost a week after the U.S. shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon off the Carolina coast after it traversed sensitive military sites across North America. China insisted the flyover was an accident involving a civilian craft and threatened repercussions.

    Biden issued the order but had wanted the balloon downed even earlier. He was advised that the best time for the operation would be when it was over water. Military officials determined that bringing it down over land from an altitude of 60,000 feet would pose an undue risk to people on the ground.

    The balloon was part of a large surveillance program that China has been conducting for “several years,” the Pentagon has said. The U.S. has said Chinese balloons have flown over dozens of countries across five continents in recent years, and it learned more about the balloon program after closely monitoring the one shot down near South Carolina.

    China responded that it reserved the right to “take further actions” and criticized the U.S. for “an obvious overreaction and a serious violation of international practice.”

    ___

    Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani in Washington, Becky Bohrer in Juneau, Alaska, and Mark Thiessen in Anchorage contributed to this report.

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  • China says it was smeared in Biden State of the Union speech

    China says it was smeared in Biden State of the Union speech

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    BEIJING (AP) — China says it was smeared in U.S. President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address that repeatedly mentioned competition between the two countries.

    China does not fear competing with the U.S. but is “opposed to defining the entire China-U.S. relationship in terms of competition,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a daily briefing Wednesday.

    “It is not the practice of a responsible country to smear a country or restrict the country’s legitimate development rights under the excuse of competition, even at the expense of disrupting the global industrial and supply chain,” Mao said.

    China will defend its interests and the U.S. should work with it to “promote the return of bilateral relations to a track of sound and stable development,” she said.

    Mao’s comments came against a background of raging disputes over trade, Taiwan, human rights and access to advanced technologies.

    Biden mentioned China and its leader, Xi Jinping, at least seven times in his address Tuesday night, focusing mainly on how the U.S. was increasingly prepared to compete with Beijing while also seeking to avoid conflict.

    “I’ve made clear with President Xi that we seek competition, not conflict,” Biden said.

    “I will make no apologies that we are investing to make America strong. Investing in American innovation, in industries that will define the future, and that China’s government is intent on dominating,” he said.

    Biden said his administration is “committed to work with China where it can advance American interests and benefit the world.”

    However, he also warned that “if China threatens our sovereignty, we will act to protect our country,” a pointed reference to the shooting down on Saturday of a suspected Chinese spy balloon that had traversed the continental United States.

    China says the balloon was an unmanned civilian airship used for meteorological research and has strongly protested the U.S. action while threatening unspecified countermeasures.

    The incident prompted U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to cancel a trip to China this week that had stirred hopes of reversing the continued deterioration of relations between Beijing and Washington.

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  • Avalanches kill 9 in Italy, Austria as heavy snow hits Alps

    Avalanches kill 9 in Italy, Austria as heavy snow hits Alps

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    FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — Nine people died in avalanches in Austria and Italy over the weekend as heavy snow and school holidays drew skiers into the Alps, with some of the victims dying after skiing in unmarked areas despite warnings of elevated avalanche risk, police said.

    On Sunday a snow plow driver in East Tirol in Austria was recovered dead after being swept away. In Oetztal a 32-year-old Chinese skier died, while in Zillertal a 17-year old male from New Zealand was buried and in Kleinwalsertal a 55-year-old German man missing since Friday was found dead.

    More than a dozen avalanches were reported in the Tirol region of Austria alone and authorities had set the warning level at four on a scale of five and urged caution.

    A 31-year-old German woman was killed Saturday in the South Tirol region of Italy when a snowmass broke loose at 2,200 meters (7,200 feet) near the Limo Pass some 80 kilometers (50 miles) east of Bolzano, the dpa news agency reported. Rescue efforts were complicated by 120-kilometer-per-hour (75-mile-per-hour) winds; her body was recovered from under 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) of snow. Another woman skiing with her was freed from the snow unharmed.

    Other victims Saturday included a 29-year-old ski guide and his 33-year-old male guest who were skiing away from prepared ski runs when a snowboarder set off an avalanche above them in St. Anton in Austria. And in Kaunertal a 62-year old man was killed by another snowslide.

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  • African countries lack ‘immediate access’ to cholera vaccine

    African countries lack ‘immediate access’ to cholera vaccine

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    NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Africa’s public health agency says countries with deadly cholera outbreaks on the continent have no “immediate access” to vaccines amid a global supply shortage.

    The acting director of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Ahmed Ogwell, told journalists on Thursday that the agency is working with the World Health Organization and the vaccine alliance GAVI on ways to obtain more doses.

    The Africa CDC is also working with two local manufacturers to explore if their facilities can be repurposed to manufacture cholera vaccines, Ogwell said. He didn’t say which ones.

    WHO and its partners recommended in October that countries temporarily switch to using a single dose of the cholera vaccine instead of two because of the supply shortage as outbreaks of the water-borne disease surge globally. They said one dose of vaccine has proven effective in stopping outbreaks “even though evidence on the exact duration of protection is limited” and appears to be lower in children.

    WHO noted that Haiti and Syria also are trying to contain large outbreaks. WHO and partner agencies manage a stockpile of cholera vaccines that are dispensed free to countries that need them.

    Malawi in southern Africa especially is struggling with a cholera outbreak. The country has recorded 3,577 new cases including 111 deaths in the past week, Ogwell said. They make up the bulk of the new cholera cases on the continent.

    Since the beginning of 2023, there have been 27,300 new cases of cholera including 687 deaths in five African countries, Ogwell said.

    The WHO has said climate change could make cholera epidemics more common, as the bacteria that causes the disease can reproduce more quickly in warmer water.

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