Tag: Hunt

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Politics

Biden vows to complete Afghanistan evacuation, search out ISIS leaders after Kabul assault

Biden vows to finish Afghanistan evacuation, hunt down ISIS leaders after Kabul attack

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden promised Thursday to complete the evacuation of Americans and their allies from Afghanistan after a deadly terrorist attack near Kabul airport killed more than a dozen US soldiers and many Afghans.

“We will not be deterred by terrorists. We will not let them stop our mission. We will continue the evacuation,” said Biden from the White House. “We’re going to save Americans, we’re going to get our Afghan allies, and the mission will go on. America won’t be intimidated.”

The US has approximately 5,400 military personnel helping with the evacuation effort in Kabul.

The US Central Command confirmed Thursday evening that the death toll had risen to 13 US soldiers and 18 injured after a suicide bomber detonated an explosive.

U.S. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, commander of U.S. Central Command, said a number of Afghan civilians were also killed in the explosion, but he was unable to provide an exact number. He added that according to the current assessment of the US military, the bomber was an IS fighter.

ISIS has admitted to the attack.

Addressing those responsible for the attack, the president said, “We will not forgive. We will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.”

“I will defend our interests and our people with every measure I command,” said Biden.

“I have also ordered my commanders to develop operational plans to attack ISIS-K facilities, commanders and facilities, indicating that the US had clues about the ISIS leaders who ordered the attack.

“We have reason to believe we know who they are,” Biden said, although he found the US wasn’t sure. “And we’ll find ways of our choosing, without major military operations, to get them wherever they are.”

The president warned on Tuesday that staying in Afghanistan longer than planned poses serious risks to foreign troops and civilians. He said ISIS-K, the Afghanistan-based branch of the terrorist group, posed a growing threat to the airport.

“I have repeatedly said that this mission is extraordinarily dangerous, and that is why I was so determined to limit the duration of this mission,” Biden repeated on Thursday.

Read more about developments in Afghanistan:

Earlier this week, the president told the leaders of the G-7, NATO, the United Nations and the European Union that the United States would withdraw its military from Afghanistan by the end of the month.

In the past 24 hours, Western forces evacuated 13,400 people from Kabul on 91 military cargo plane flights. Since the mass evacuations began on August 14, around 95,700 people have been flown out of Afghanistan.

About 101,300 people have been evacuated since the end of July, including about 5,000 US citizens and their families.

A State Department spokesman said Thursday that the US is now in contact with the 1,000 or so Americans believed to be still in Afghanistan.

“The vast majority – over two-thirds – have told us they are taking steps to exit,” added the spokesman.

Categories
Health

The Perilous Hunt for Coconut Crabs on a Distant Polynesian Island

The Perilous Hunt for Coconut Crabs on a Remote Polynesian Island

We meet Adams Maihota in front of his house in the middle of the night. As a crab hunter, he wears white plastic sandals, board shorts, a tank top, and a cummerbund to keep string lengths up. He takes a sprig of wild mint and puts it behind his ear for good luck.

Photographer Eric Guth and I follow Mr. Maihota’s blazing headlights into the forest in search of coconut crabs, locally known as kaveu. The largest terrestrial invertebrates in the world, they are delicious, cooked or fried with coconut milk. Since phosphate mining stopped here in 1966, they have become one of Makatea’s greatest exports.

It’s ankle-breaking terrain. We negotiate the roots of pandanus trees and the infinite Feo, a Polynesian name for the ancient reef rocks that stand tall everywhere. The vegetation hits us in the face and legs, and our skin becomes drenched in sweat.

The traps Mr Maihota set earlier this week are made of notched coconuts tied to trees with fibers from their own shells. When we reach one, we turn off our lights to quietly approach. Then Mr. Maihota throws himself.

A moment later he stands up with a sky-blue crab that kicks its ten legs in wide circles. Even if its fleshy belly curls under the rest of its body, the animal is much longer than the hunter’s hand.

Makatea, part of the Tuamotu Archipelago in French Polynesia, is located in the South Pacific about 150 miles northeast of Tahiti. It is a small raised coral atoll just under four and a half miles in diameter at its widest point with sheer limestone cliffs rising up to 250 feet straight out of the sea.

From 1908 to 1966, Makatea was home to the largest industrial project in French Polynesia: eleven million tons of phosphate-rich sand were excavated and exported for agriculture, pharmaceuticals and ammunition. When mining stopped, the population fell from around 3,000 to less than 100. Today, there are around 80 full-time residents. Most of them live in the central part of the island, near the ruins of the old mining town that is now rotting in the jungle.

A third of Makatea is made up of a maze of more than a million deep, circular holes known as the Extraction Zone – a legacy of mining. Crossing this area, especially at night when coconut crabs are active, can be fatal. Many of the holes are over 30 meters deep and the ledges between them are narrow. Even so, some hunters do it to get to the rich crab habitat on the other side.

One evening before sunset, a hunter named Teiki Ah-scha meets us in a notoriously dangerous area called Le Bureau, named after the mining buildings that used to be there. Mr Ah-scha wears flip-flops and trudges around the holes and balances on their edges. When he chases through the extraction zone, he comes home in the dark with a sack full of crabs on his back.

Mr. Maihota hunted this way too – and he tells me he misses it. However, since his wife fell into a shallow hole a few months before our 2019 visit, she has forbidden him to cross the extraction zone. Instead, he sets traps around the village.

Coconut crabs live in a wide range, from the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean to the Pitcairn Islands in the southern Pacific. They were part of the local diet long before mining. The largest specimens, “les monstres”, can be the length of your arm and live for a century.

There is no population study of Makatea, so the crabs’ conservation status is unclear – although they seem to be everywhere at night when they rattle over the rocks.

If we catch crabs that are not legal – either women or those less than six centimeters above the shell – Mr Maihota lets them go.

If the islanders aren’t careful, the crabs might not be there for future generations. In many locations in the Indo-Pacific, the animals were hunted to extinction or local extinction.

Makatea is at a crossroads. Half a century after the first mining era, a proposal for more phosphate extraction is pending. Although the island’s mayor and other supporters cite the economic benefits of labor and income, opponents say new industrial activity will destroy the island, including its fledgling tourism industry.

“We can’t let her suffer again,” a woman says to me, referring to the island as a living being.

Still, it’s hard to make a living here. “There’s no work,” says Mr. Maihota as we stand under the stars and sweat drips onto the forest floor. He doesn’t want to talk about the mine. The previous month, he shipped 70 coconut crabs to buyers in Tahiti for $ 10 each.

In popular hunting areas, hunters say the crabs are smaller or smaller, but hunters depend on income and no one has a complete picture of how the population as a whole is doing.

The next morning we visit Mr. Maihota’s garden, where the crabs are confiscated in individual boxes so that they do not attack each other. He will feed them coconut and water to cleanse their systems as they eat all kinds of foods in the wild, including carrion.

In daylight, their shells are rainbows of purple, white, orange, and many shades of blue. For now, at least – with no mining and although the crops are still sustainable – they seem perfectly adapted to makatea, holes and everything.

Categories
Health

I’m Not Eligible for the Vaccine But. Can I Hunt for a Surplus Dose?

I’m Not Eligible for the Vaccine Yet. Can I Hunt for a Surplus Dose?

I am a college student and I recently learned that my city will open places on the Ministry of Health website to anyone who can be vaccinated if there is an excess of vaccines. We’re still in the first stage of vaccination, but if I check the vaccination website a lot, I could theoretically get an appointment.

Since I am a healthy young person, not an essential worker or at risk, should I wait to be vaccinated in hopes that someone at higher risk or greater risk could take the place? Or should I keep checking this website and taking the dose as soon as it appears? I’m not taking someone else’s place, am I? Ben, Montana

With something perishable – whether it is a lettuce or a thawed carton of Covid-19 vaccines – you can have excess and spoilage with a general deficiency. The minimum order quantity for Pfizer vaccines is one tray of approximately 1,200 doses. Once the vials begin to thaw, they will need to be used in five days. For all approved vaccines, a vial that has been opened once must be used within six hours – Johnson & Johnson uses two hours at room temperature. Each Pfizer vial contains up to six doses. Johnson & Johnson, which has a minimum order of 100 doses, puts five doses in one vial; Moderna will shortly be dispensing 14 doses in each vial.

The point is, vaccines don’t come as “loosies”. Vaccination centers can misjudge the number of registrations, and even when everything is planned correctly, there are sometimes no-shows. Even if a site has a standby list of qualified recipients, there are occasions when a vaccine is wasted unless the eligibility rules are suspended.

Perhaps the question is not whether you would take someone else’s place, but whose place you would take. I think of the verse that we apparently owe to the 19th century English lawyer and joke of Charles Bowen:

The rain, it rains on the righteous
And the unjust guy too.
But mainly to the righteous because
The unrighteous steal the umbrella of the righteous.

In a situation where expired vaccine doses are being offered to all comers – so they don’t just go to waste – you have no reason to believe that the dose you are avoiding will go to someone in greater need. When those concerned with justice demure, the dose can simply go to those who are not so concerned, provided it goes to anyone. There will always be a tradeoff between vaccinating the country quickly and exquisitely fine-tuning the rollout to reflect each person’s risk profile. If a sporadic all-comer approach is the best way to avoid wasted doses, then it’s not unfair and you are not wrong to be part of it.

There will always be a tradeoff between vaccinating the country quickly and exquisitely fine-tuning the rollout to reflect each person’s risk profile.

Updated

March 18, 2021, 8:24 p.m. ET

There is one other thing to note. Although your age is very unlikely to get seriously ill with Covid-19, you can still spread it. In fact, it is not uncommon for people who never show serious symptoms of the disease to transmit the virus. The evidence available suggests that post-vaccination transmission is less likely, perhaps much less likely. Like wearing a mask, your vaccination will help protect you and others. It’s much better for a dose to go in your arm than in the trash.

I live in a state where vaccinations are a priority for people over 65 and people over 16 with chronic illnesses. As elsewhere, the rollout was far from smooth: it was reported that the county received over 30,000 simultaneous phone calls last weekend when it announced that 9,000 appointments were available. No “evidence of chronic condition” is required and our state has made it clear that it relies on the honor system for vaccination seekers.

I am 44 years old and reasonably healthy. I have been overweight since I was a child. At times in my adult life I have been much heavier than I am now, which is exactly the line between “overweight” and “obesity” (classified as a BMI of 30 or higher; I am about 29 years old now). My state regards anyone classified as “obese” as a priority group for vaccination. Is it ethically correct for me to change the definition of the term “chronic condition” and theoretically be one step ahead of someone else who may be in a much higher risk category? Name withheld

You ask if You can lie to get vaccinated faster. My answer is no. But there is an interesting question that you did not ask. Would it be okay to have an eating binge to bring your BMI to 30? In this scenario, you would not be able to assert yourself when requesting an appointment. Surely you would still abuse the system. Any criterion that can be hacked in this way is problematic precisely for this reason. Of course, the BMI thresholds used by states (30 in some cases, 40 in others) are inherently arbitrary: a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last fall found the rate of hospital admissions for Covid-19 increased with our BMI increases linearly, starting with those who are only slightly overweight. This suggests that maintaining yourself at a healthy weight may be a better option than increasing it.

I’ve worked at farmers markets in New York City for many years, but since the pandemic, I’ve moved to full-time communication work at a church (including producing their new livestream) and only invested a day a week in the market. As a market worker, I am now eligible for the Covid vaccine. I want to get vaccinated as soon as possible, for my own safety and for the good of all, but the truth is, my job and lifestyle allow me to stay fairly isolated and protected from infection. Aside from my obvious advantages – or rather the privileges – of being highly computer literate, fluent in English, and having the time to navigate the Byzantine vaccination system, I feel like my exposure is limited than a day-a-week -Worker is essential My entitlement to vaccination is in doubt. I want this vaccine to be introduced ethically, and ideally, privilege doesn’t matter. But is eligibility pure and simple? Damon, New York

What is important is try to remove barriers to vaccination – including those created by lack of access to transport, the internet, or English. Recruiting churches and other community organizations can help reach the city’s underserved and sometimes vaccine reluctant population. Indeed, your work with the Church could enable you to help here. However, once a reasonable system is in place, the authorization is actually the authorization. They don’t suggest using internal connections to skip the line. You will have the advantage of your skills and abilities, but you will likely not qualify for the FEMA zip code restricted vaccination centers, which are specifically targeted at the city’s vulnerable communities. All of this means that your laudable concern for justice does not mean that you should refuse the umbrella that is offered.