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Entertainment

A Celebrated Afghan College Fears the Taliban Will Cease the Music

A Celebrated Afghan School Fears the Taliban Will Stop the Music

For more than a decade, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music has stood as a symbol of the country’s changing identity. The school trained hundreds of young artists, many of them orphans and street hawkers, in artistic traditions that were once forbidden by the Taliban. It formed an all-female orchestra that performed widely in Afghanistan and abroad.

But in recent days, as the Taliban have been consolidating control over Afghanistan again, the school’s future has come into doubt.

In interviews, several students and teachers said they feared the Taliban, who have a history of attacking the school’s leaders, would seek to punish people affiliated with the school as well as their families. Some said they worried the school will be shut down and they will not be allowed to play again. Several female students said they had been staying inside their homes since the capital was seized on Sunday

“It’s a nightmare,” Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the head of the school, said in a telephone interview from Melbourne, Australia, where he arrived last month for medical treatment.

The Taliban banned most forms of music when they previously ruled Afghanistan, from 1996 to 2001. This time, they have promised a more tolerant approach, vowing not to carry out reprisals against their former enemies and saying that women will be allowed to work and study “within the bounds of Islamic law.”

But the Taliban’s history of violence toward artists and its general intolerance for music without religious meaning has sowed doubts among many performers.

“My concern is that the people of Afghanistan will be deprived of their music,” Mr. Sarmast said. “There will be an attempt to silence the nation.”

In 2010, Mr. Sarmast, an Afghan music scholar who was trained in Australia and plays trumpet and piano, opened the school, which has more than 400 students and staff members, with the support of the American-backed government. It was a rarity: a coeducational institution devoted to teaching music from both Afghanistan and the West.

The school’s musicians were invited to perform on many of the world’s most renowned stages, including Carnegie Hall. They played Western classical music as well as traditional Afghan music and instruments, like the rubab, which resembles the lute and is one of the national instruments of Afghanistan.

The school placed special emphasis on supporting young women, who make up a third of the student body. The school’s all-female orchestra, Zohra, founded in 2015, earned wide acclaim. Many were the first women in their families to receive formal training. In a symbol of its modern ways, head scarves for girls at the school’s campus in Kabul were optional.

Updated 

Aug. 20, 2021, 5:22 p.m. ET

The school’s habit of challenging tradition made it a target. In 2014, Mr. Sarmast was injured by a Taliban suicide bomber who infiltrated a school play. The Taliban tried to attack the school again in the years that followed, but their attempts were thwarted, Mr. Sarmast said.

Now, female students say they are concerned about a return to a repressive past, when the Taliban eliminated schooling for girls and barred women from leaving home without male guardians.

Several female students — who were granted anonymity because they feared retaliation — said that it felt like their dreams to become professional musicians could disintegrate. They worried they might not be able to play music again in their lives, even as a hobby.

In recent weeks, as the Taliban swept through the country, the school’s network of overseas supporters tried to help by raising money to improve security on campus, including by installing an armed gate and walls.

But it’s now unclear if the school will even be permitted to operate under the Taliban. It is also increasingly difficult for citizens of Afghanistan to leave the country. Airport entrances have been chaotic and often impassable scenes for days, even for people with travel documentation. The Taliban control the streets, and though they say they are breaking up crowds at the airport to keep order, there are widespread reports that they are turning people away by force if they try to leave the country.

The State Department said in a statement that it was working to get American citizens, as well as locally employed staff and vulnerable Afghans, out of the country, though crowding at the airport had made it more difficult. The department said it was prioritizing Afghan women and girls, human rights defenders and journalists, among others.

“This effort is of utmost importance to the U.S. government,” the statement said.

In the 1990s, the Taliban permitted religious singing but banned other forms of music because they were seen as distractions to Islamic studies and could encourage impure behavior. Taliban officials destroyed instruments and smashed cassette tapes.

Understand the Taliban Takeover in Afghanistan

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Who are the Taliban? The Taliban arose in 1994 amid the turmoil that came after the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989. They used brutal public punishments, including floggings, amputations and mass executions, to enforce their rules. Here’s more on their origin story and their record as rulers.

Who are the Taliban leaders? These are the top leaders of the Taliban, men who have spent years on the run, in hiding, in jail and dodging American drones. Little is known about them or how they plan to govern, including whether they will be as tolerant as they claim to be.

What happens to the women of Afghanistan? The last time the Taliban were in power, they barred women and girls from taking most jobs or going to school. Afghan women have made many gains since the Taliban were toppled, but now they fear that ground may be lost. Taliban officials are trying to reassure women that things will be different, but there are signs that, at least in some areas, they have begun to reimpose the old order.

William Maley, an emeritus professor at Australian National University who has studied Afghanistan, said he was troubled by reports that the Taliban had recently sought to limit the spread of popular music in some parts of the country.

“The Taliban in the 1990s were extremely hostile to any form of music other than religious chants, and people had to hide their instruments and play music secretively,” Professor Maley said. “I would not be optimistic.”

Amid the chaos in Kabul, students, teachers and alumni of the school have exchanged frantic messages on chat groups. They have lamented the fact that they might need to hide their instruments or leave them in the care of others if they try to flee.

William Harvey, who taught violin and conducted the orchestra at the school from 2010 to 2014, said he felt despair thinking his former students might be in peril for pursuing their passion. Still, he said the school is an inspiration for artists and audiences around the world.

“It is to those students, then, that we owe a tremendous responsibility,” said Mr. Harvey, now the concertmaster of the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional in Mexico. “They must live to lift their voices again another day.”

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Politics

Choose orders Biden administration to cease approving new DACA purposes

Judge orders Biden administration to stop approving new DACA applications

A federal judge in southern Texas on Friday ordered the Biden administration to stop granting new applications to the Obama-era immigration program that shielded hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation.

The order declared that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, was “created in violation of the law and whose existence violates the law.”

But current recipients of DACA won’t immediately have their status pulled as a result of the order, the judge noted.

The ruling, which puts in jeopardy the program that President Joe Biden had sought to preserve, came as news outlets reported arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border hitting their highest levels in more than a decade.

Former President Donald Trump had sought to end DACA, but his effort was blocked in 2020 by the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 that his order to wind the program down was unlawfully “arbitrary and capricious.”

In a five-page order Friday afternoon, U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen declared, “From this date forward, the United States of America, its departments, agencies, officers, agents, and employees are hereby enjoined from administering the DACA program.”

Those entities are also barred from reimplementing the program without compliance with another law that governs federal regulatory procedure, Hanen’s order said.

The White House and the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

The judge’s order said that the DACA program, created in 2012 through a policy memorandum from then-President Barack Obama’s Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano, was “illegally implemented.”

But since hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients now rely on DACA, Hanen’s order reasoned that “it is not equitable for a government program that has engendered such significant reliance to terminate suddenly.”

“Nothing in this injunction should be read as ordering DHS or any other governmental entity to cancel or otherwise terminate DACA status for any individual who currently is, as of this date, a DACA recipient in good standing,” Hanen wrote.

“Further, nothing in this injunction requires DHS or the Department of Justice to take any immigration, deportation, or criminal action against any DACA recipient, applicant, or any other individual that either would not otherwise take,” he wrote.

Omar Jadwat, head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement that Hanen’s ruling “is wrong and is subject to appeal.”

Jadwat called on the Democrat-majority Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for the “Dreamers” and other undocumented people in the U.S.

“Dreamers’ futures shouldn’t be in the hands of the courts,” he said.

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Health

C.D.C. Says Vaccinated Camps Can Cease Masking and Distancing

C.D.C. Says Vaccinated Camps Can Stop Masking and Distancing

Federal health officials are encouraging young people aged 12 and over who are heading to camp this summer to get vaccinated against the coronavirus as soon as possible, saying on Friday that camps where all staff and campers are vaccinated can drop many Covid restrictions, including masks, and return to full capacity. Unvaccinated children can also go without masks most of the time when they are outside because the risk of transmission outdoors is low.

“For camps where everyone is fully vaccinated prior to the start of camp, it is safe to return to full capacity, without masking and without physical distancing,” the new guidance says.

In camps where not everyone is fully vaccinated, mask recommendations for all have been relaxed for most outdoor activities, unless the setting is crowded and involves sustained close contact. But other prevention strategies should be maintained, including physical distancing, grouping youngsters in cohorts or pods that don’t mix with one another; encouraging frequent hand washing; avoiding crowded settings and poorly ventilated indoor areas.

The guidance, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says that if campers prefer to wear masks despite being fully vaccinated, camps should be supportive of their choice. Staff members and campers with compromised immune systems are urged to talk to their providers, and continue practicing precautions, like wearing masks.

Individuals are considered fully vaccinated by the C.D.C. two weeks after receiving the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine or the second dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.

“We’re going to start to see more and more adolescents fully vaccinated by mid summer, so it is possible that camps could provide a camp experience for children who are fully vaccinated, and you could get back to the camp experience that was pre-pandemic: no masking, no distancing, and all the activities you would normally do,” said Erin Sauber-Schatz, who leads the C.D.C. task force for community interventions and critical populations.

She noted that 2.5 million children aged 12 to 15 have received the first dose of a Pfizer vaccine in the last 18 days alone.

Individual camps will have the flexibility to determine both how they go about verifying the vaccination status of campers and how they run programs where not everyone is fully vaccinated, she said. They could mix vaccinated and unvaccinated campers or group them in separate cohorts with different rules, she said, or decide that in order “to keep non-vaccinated campers as safe as possible, they may have standard rules across the camp regardless of vaccination status.”

The guidance to campers comes after the agency’s recent recommendation that fully vaccinated people can choose to go maskless in most situations.

Though there is still no vaccine for children under the age of 12, the Food and Drug Administration authorized the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children aged 12 to 15 earlier this month. Younger children will probably be eligible for vaccination in the fall.

Tom Rosenberg, president and chief executive of the American Camp Association, a nonprofit that accredits camps, said the new guidance was issued just in time, as many camps in the southern United States start as early as next week.

But, he said, “The reality is that the majority of camps are for kids six years old to 17, so a good portion of the kids attending camp, by virtue of their age alone, will not be vaccinated. So camps are preparing to manage another Covid summer with a layered mitigation strategy, like last year.”

Federal health officials urged camps where campers are vaccinated to continue with other precautions, including making sure there is good ventilation in indoor spaces by keeping windows open, using fans and air filters; practicing good hand hygiene and respiratory etiquette; and cleaning and disinfecting high-touch areas frequently.

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World News

WhatsApp Sues India’s Authorities to Cease New Web Guidelines

WhatsApp Sues India’s Government to Stop New Internet Rules

SAN FRANCISCO — WhatsApp sued the Indian government on Wednesday to stop what it said were oppressive new internet rules that would require it to make people’s messages “traceable” to outside parties for the first time.

The lawsuit, filed by WhatsApp in the Delhi High Court, seeks to block the enforceability of the rules that were handed down by the government this year. WhatsApp, a service owned by Facebook that sends encrypted messages, claimed in its suit that the rules, which were set to go into effect on Wednesday, were unconstitutional.

Suing India’s government is a highly unusual step by WhatsApp, which has rarely engaged with national governments in court. But the service said that making its messages traceable “would severely undermine the privacy of billions of people who communicate digitally” and effectively impair its security.

“Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that a requirement to ‘trace’ private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse,” a WhatsApp spokesman said. “WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people’s personal messages and we will continue to do all we can within the laws of India to do so.”

The lawsuit is part of a broadening battle between the biggest tech companies and governments around the world over which of them has the upper hand. Australia and the European Union have drafted or passed laws to limit the power of Google, Facebook and other companies over online speech, while other countries are trying to rein in the companies’ services to stifle dissent and squash protests. China has recently warned some of its biggest internet companies against engaging in anticompetitive practices.

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party have worked for several years to corral the power of the tech companies and more strictly police what is said online. In 2019, the government proposed giving itself vast new powers to suppress internet content, igniting a heated battle with the companies.

The rules that WhatsApp is objecting to were proposed in February by Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s law and information technology minister. Under the rules, the government could require tech companies to take down social media posts it deemed unlawful. WhatsApp, Signal and other messaging companies would also be required to create “traceable” databases of all messages sent using the service, while attaching identifiable “fingerprints” to private messages sent between users.

WhatsApp has long maintained that it does not have insight into user data and has said it does not store messages sent between users. That is because the service is end-to-end encrypted, which allows for two or more users to communicate securely and privately without allowing others to access the messages.

More than a billion people rely on WhatsApp to communicate with friends, family and businesses around the world. Many users are in India.

Critics said the new rules were being used to silence government detractors. Last month, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter were ordered to take down dozens of social media posts that were critical of Mr. Modi’s government and its response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has ravaged the country. Government officials said the posts should be removed because they could incite panic and could hinder its response to the pandemic.

The social media companies complied with many of the requests by making the posts invisible inside India, though they were still visible to people outside the country. In the past, Twitter and Facebook have reposted some content after determining that it didn’t break the law.

Tensions between tech companies and the Indian government escalated this week when the police descended on the New Delhi offices of Twitter to contest labels affixed to certain tweets from senior members of the government. While Twitter’s offices were empty, the visit symbolized the mounting pressure on social media companies to rein in speech seen as critical of the ruling party.

Facebook and WhatsApp have long maintained working relationships with the authorities in dozens of countries, including India. Typically, WhatsApp has said it will respond to lawful requests for information and has a team that assists law enforcement officials with emergencies involving imminent harm.

Understand the Covid Crisis in India

Only rarely has WhatsApp pushed back. The service has been shut down many times in Brazil after the company resisted requests for user data from the government. And it has skirmished with U.S. officials who have sought to install “back doors” in encrypted messaging services to monitor for criminal activity.

But WhatsApp argued that even if it tried enacting India’s new “traceability” rules, the technology would not work. Such a practice is “ineffective and highly susceptible to abuse,” the company said.

Other technology firms and digital rights groups like Mozilla and the Electronic Frontier Foundation said this week that they supported WhatsApp’s fight against “traceability.”

“The threat that anything someone writes can be traced back to them takes away people’s privacy and would have a chilling effect on what people say even in private settings, violating universally recognized principles of free expression and human rights,” WhatsApp said.

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Health

Cease Kissing and Snuggling Chickens, C.D.C. Says After Salmonella Outbreak

Stop Kissing and Snuggling Chickens, C.D.C. Says After Salmonella Outbreak

A salmonella outbreak related to backyard poultry has led U.S. health officials to issue a stern warning: do not kiss or cuddle your ducks and chickens.

163 illnesses and 34 hospital admissions have been reported in 43 states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said last week. North Carolina had the highest number of reported cases at 13, followed by Iowa at 11. About a third of the cases involved children under the age of 5, the agency said.

The true number of those sick is most likely higher as many recover without medical help and not tested for salmonella, according to the CDC.

The likely source of the outbreak is exposure to backyard poultry, the agency said.

“Do not kiss or cuddle the birds as it can spread germs in your mouth and make you sick,” the agency said.

This was among the guidelines the CDC offered to people who keep poultry at home, whether they are seasoned owners or building their first backyard pen. You should always wash their hands for 20 seconds after contact with birds or related materials, the agency said, and don’t allow children under the age of 5 to touch the birds.

Emily Shoop, poultry educator at Penn State Extension, said Monday poultry farming is “the fastest growing animal-related hobby in the US.”

The CDC has routinely issued similar guidelines over the years, she said, adding that this is the time of year when hatcheries and feeders sell chicks to people who start herding at home.

“You bring these chickens home, you cuddle them close to your face or you kiss them, and then we see some bugs and a salmonella outbreak,” said Ms. Shoop. “The best way to prevent this from happening is to wash your hands after touching chickens, their dung, eggs, or meat.”

Animals can ingest salmonella from contaminated food or the bacteria can live naturally in their intestines. According to the CDC website, some may even pick up the bacteria from their mothers before they are born.

Raising backyard poultry has become more common in recent years, and some have described the process of rearing chickens as an exercise of inter-species respect.

Chick sales often go up during times of anxiety or economic stress, such as being at home. B. Stock market slumps and presidential election years. At the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, a combination of unemployment, anxious leisure time for those not struggling with illness, and financial instability led people to panic buying chickens, much like toilet paper. Many were first-time buyers.

Although their intentions may have been good, there were health consequences. By mid-December 2020, there had been more than 1,700 salmonella infections in all 50 states, the CDC said, noting that exposure to backyard poultry was the likely cause of the outbreaks. More than 300 people have been hospitalized and one death has been reported. The number of diseases reported was higher than any previous backyard-related outbreak.

Ms. Shoop said that there is a risk with all types of livestock. “These are not pets, and a lot of people get them confused,” she said. Poultry, she said, is usually kept outside and outside of the food preparation areas.

“If you cuddle them close to your face or mouth, you should probably wash your face and brush your teeth as well to prevent cross-contamination from these birds,” she said. “Chickens are by no means dirty animals, but of course they have a lot of bacteria around their bodies.”

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Business

It’s the Media’s ‘Imply-Too’ Second. Cease Yelling and Go to Human Sources.

It’s the Media’s ‘Mean-Too’ Moment. Stop Yelling and Go to Human Resources.

Perhaps even worse, Ms. Cooper remarked early on that she’d never heard of Brian Lehrer, the beloved WNYC morning host whose gently probing, public-spirited interviews embody the station’s appeal, and that she didn’t “get” why he was popular. She has since come to the view that “Brian is the soul of the station and, in many ways, the city itself,” a WNYC spokeswoman, Jennifer Houlihan Roussel, said in an email.

In fact, Ms. Cooper’s mission was to jump-start the station’s lagging digital transformation, something she had done with unusual success in San Francisco and that requires a willingness to make enemies. She has ambitious plans to hire 15 to 20 more reporters — but first she had the near-impossible assignment of bringing together a group of traditional radio journalists, used to working for days and occasionally weeks on colorful local features, with the reporters at Gothamist, the scrappy local blog that WNYC bailed out in 2018. Ms. Cooper sought to professionalize Gothamist away from its bloggy and irreverent roots, telling reporters to be less openly hostile to the New York Police Department in their reporting, two reporters said. Ms. Roussel suggested that Ms. Cooper was trying to rein in Gothamist’s habit of adding “an element of editorializing to its coverage that can be interpreted as bias.”

And Ms. Cooper started pushing the radio journalists to pick up their pace and to file stories for the web. That seemed like a reasonable request, but it led to another stumble in early February, when an 18-year veteran of the radio side, Fred Mogul, filed a story with one paragraph printed in a different font. The editor realized it was Associated Press copy; Ms. Cooper promptly fired Mr. Mogul (who declined through his union to be interviewed) for plagiarism without a review of whether he’d ever done it before.

Ms. Cooper declined to speak to me about Mr. Mogul’s termination. But one thing I learned this week about public radio is that no matter what is happening, someone is always recording it. And that was true when Ms. Cooper called a virtual meeting Feb. 5 over Zoom to inform the full newsroom of her decision to fire Mr. Mogul. According to a copy of the recording provided to me by an attendee, Ms. Cooper told the staffers, “It’s totally OK to be sad.” But then several stunned radio reporters questioned the move, explaining that they regularly incorporated A.P. copy into stories on air and had imported the practice to WNYC’s little-read website, crediting The A.P. at the bottom of the story.

“Go through every single one of our articles and fire all of us, because that is exactly what we have all done,” one host, Rebeca Ibarra, told her.

On Feb. 10, more than 60 employees — including Mr. Lehrer — signed a letter asking Ms. Cooper to reconsider and calling the firing a “troubling precedent.”

Categories
World News

Village Caught in Czech-Russia Spy Case Simply Needs Issues to Cease Blowing Up

Village Caught in Czech-Russia Spy Case Just Wants Things to Stop Blowing Up

VLACHOVICE-VRBETICE, Czech Republic – For almost a century, residents have been amazed at the strange comings and goings in a closed-off camp surrounded by barbed wire and dotted with signs on the edge of their village.

The armies of Czechoslovakia, National Socialist Germany, the Soviet Union and the Czech Republic used the 840 hectare property over the decades and deterred intruders with watch dogs and armed patrols.

When the professional soldiers withdrew in 2006, the secret activities became even more shady. Dozens of arms depots hidden among the trees have been taken over by arms dealers, a rocket fuel company, and other private companies.

Then, in October 2014, came the biggest mystery of all.

A huge explosion ripped through Depot No. 16, knocking farmers in nearby fields to the ground and raining dangerous debris on the area.

The explosion set the stage for an international espionage thriller that further upsets Russia’s relations with the West: Who was behind the explosion that killed two Czech workers, and what was the motive?

This astonishing claim sparked a diplomatic turmoil which in recent weeks has resulted in the displacement of nearly 100 Russian and Czech diplomats from Prague and Moscow and brought relations between the two countries to the lowest level since the end of the Cold War.

The villagers, who are more focused on local property values ​​than geopolitics, just want things to stop blowing up.

Vojtech Simonik, holding a piece of splinter that landed in his garden in 2014, said he felt “no relief, just shock and astonishment” when he saw the Czech Prime Minister talk about Russia’s role on television.

The announcement “caused a stir here,” said Simonik, who worked in the camp for a while and dismantled artillery shells. “After seven years of silence, all arguments start again.”

The fenced-in property where the explosions took place winds around the edge of two small neighboring villages with around 1,500 inhabitants – Vlachovice (pronounced VLAKH-o-vee-tseh), the larger settlement, and Vrbetice (pronounced VR-byet-tee) – tseh), just a few houses and a side street that leads to the main entrance of the former military camp.

Vlachovice Mayor Zdenek Hovezak said he had long wanted to know what was going on in the camp but got stuck because everyone there, including the villagers hired for cleaning and other tasks, had to sign agreements in which they were bound to secrecy.

“Little did I know there were so many explosives near our village,” said Hovezak, who had just been elected and was about to take office when the explosion occurred in October.

The Military Technical Institute, a government agency that has managed the site since the Czech Army withdrew, is currently examining what to do with the property, but insists that it will not be re-used to store explosives for military or private purposes becomes company.

Rostislav Kassa, a local contractor, said he didn’t care if Russia was responsible for the demolition of the site – although he firmly believes it – but he was angry that the Czech authorities were making efforts to raise the alarm years before beat, ignored explosions.

Troubled by reports that a rocket fuel company had rented space in the warehouse, he launched a petition in 2009 warning of a possible environmental disaster. Most residents signed, he said, but his complaints to the Department of Defense went unheeded.

“It doesn’t really matter who blew it up,” he said. “The main problem is that our government is allowing this.” His own theory is that Russia wanted to cut off the supply of rocket fuel to NATO forces and not, as is commonly believed, wanted to blow up weapons for Ukraine.

Ales Lysacek, head of the village’s volunteer fire department, recalled being called to the camp that day in October 2014 after a fire broke out there. He was ordered to come back by the police guarding the entrance and a few minutes later, after a series of small explosions, a gigantic explosion sent a shock wave that knocked him and his men off their feet.

“We had no idea what was in all the depots,” said Mr Lysacek. No one had ever thought of telling the local firefighters about the potential danger. Officials later assured villagers that the explosions were an accident, but Mr. Lysacek said, “Nobody here really believed them.”

After the 2014 explosions, it took pyrotechnic experts six years to search the warehouse and surrounding village land for unexploded ammunition and other hazardous waste.

The arduous clean-up operation, during which roads were often blocked and villagers repeatedly evacuated from their homes for safety reasons, only ended last October.

Mr Hovezak, the mayor, was amazed, like most of the villagers, when he told Prime Minister Andrei Babis at a press conference last month that the big 2014 explosion on their doorstep was the work of the Russian Military Intelligence, known as the GRU

“I was completely shocked,” said the mayor. “Nobody here ever imagined that Russian agents could be involved.”

That it was them, at least after years of investigation by the Czech police and the Czech security service, only raised questions about what was really going on in the camp and the suspicion among locals that they were only being told half the truth.

Mr Simonik, who found the splinter in his garden, said he wasn’t entirely convinced that Russia was to blame, but he never believed the explosion was just an accident. “I definitely think it didn’t explode on its own,” he said. “It was triggered by someone.”

Who that could be is a question that in the past and present of Russia, whose troops invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 to overthrow their reformist communist leadership, has reopened old cracks across the country, but still for defeat by some Czechs is held responsible against Nazi Germany.

“The older generation remembers how the Russians freed us from Hitler, while others remember the year 1968 when they invaded us,” said Ladislav Obadal, the deputy mayor of Vlachovice. “But hardly anyone has a good word for the Russians now.”

Except for President Milos Zeman, a frequent visitor to Moscow who was recently on TV to contradict the government’s report on the explosions. The explosions may have been an accident – sabotage by Russian spies was just one of two plausible theories.

Mr. Zeman’s testimony sparked protests among Czechs in Prague who for a long time considered him far too friendly to Russia. It was also received with anger by the residents of Vlachovice-Vrbetice, who believe Moscow should compensate the villages for any physical and psychological damage, a demand the mayor backed if Russia’s role is proven.

Jaroslav Kassa, 70, the father of the local contractor, who said his disaster warnings were ignored, is undoubtedly to blame for the Kremlin.

“Of course the Russians did,” said Kassa, noting that the Russian military would have detailed plans for the sprawling facility from the time the Soviet Army used it after the 1968 invasion.

His views have led to disputes with his neighbor Jozef Svehlak, 74. Recalling how he knew and liked a former Soviet commander at the camp, Mr Svehlak said he had never heard of Russian spies in the region in the 1970s, only western ones during the Cold War.

Half a century later, the fact that spies are supposed to be running around again is a measure of how suspicions of the Cold War are rising in this remote eastern corner of the Czech Republic.

“It’s fun to see James Bond in films,” said another of Mr Kassa’s son Jaroslav. “But we don’t want him to hide behind our hill.”

Categories
Business

Assist, We Can’t Cease Writing About Andrew Yang

Help, We Can’t Stop Writing About Andrew Yang

“The media leans towards celebrity, novelty and energy,” said Bronx US Representative Ritchie Torres, who endorsed Mr. Yang.

The candidate’s Trumpian provocation version is a series of Twitter controversies about slightly misguided enthusiasm for bodegas and subways. The Daily Show launched a spoof Twitter account last week with a big-eyed Mr. Yang excitedly explaining gems like, “Real New Yorkers Want To Go Back To Times Square.”

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Mr. Yang was less amused than usual by the exertion. “It seems like a strange time to take advantage of the Asian tourist tropics,” he said sourly. “I wish it was funnier.”

The joke is likely on its critics too. Like Mr. Trump, he simply benefited from the attention. When his campaign asked the fairly narrow group of Democratic primary voters who get their messages from Twitter how they would characterize what they see about the candidate, 79 percent said it was positive.

While Mr. Yang is not new to the city, he is new to its civil life. He has never voted in a mayoral election. The provocative heart of his presidential campaign, a pledge to alleviate the dystopian, robot-driven social collapse by giving $ 1,000 a month to an evicted citizenry, makes no sense in the city budget, so he replaced it with a cash bonus program rather traditionally the poor aligned. It’s unclear how many people still think he’s the free money candidate.

The best in his campaign are working for a consulting firm led by Bradley Tusk, a former advisor to Mayor Bloomberg and disgraced former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Mr. Tusk, who also advised Uber, has guided Mr. Yang to a comprehensive, pro-business center and kept him out of competition from other candidates for the left wing of the primary electorate.

Mr. Tusk told me in an unguarded moment in March that Mr. Yang’s great advantage was that he came into local politics as an “empty ship”, free of firm views on city politics or alliances. When I asked the candidate what he thought of the remark, Mr. Yang took no offense. “A lot of New Yorkers love someone who walks in and is just trying to figure out how best to approach a particular problem, how free from a number of obligations to existing special interests,” he said.

Categories
Health

CDC chief says vaccinating alone will not cease Michigan Covid surge

CDC chief says vaccinating alone won't stop Michigan Covid surge

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer receives a dose of Pfizer Covid vaccine at Ford Field during an event to encourage Michigan residents to receive the vaccine on April 6, 2021 in Detroit, Michigan.

Matthew Hatcher | Getty Images

A senior health official in the Biden government said Monday Michigan should “shut things down” as it grapples with a staggering increase in coronavirus cases.

Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said an increase in Covid-19 vaccinations alone is not the answer – even as Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer urges the federal government to send her more vaccines.

“I think if we try to vaccinate our way out of what’s going on in Michigan, we’d be disappointed that it took so long for the vaccine to work and actually have the effects,” Walensky said during a White House briefing the pandemic. It took several weeks for the vaccinations to kick in and the number of cases decreased, she noted.

The state’s best bet, Walensky said, “is to really close things up.”

Walensky urged Michigan to “go back to where we were last spring, last summer, and turn things off, smooth the curve, reduce contact with each other” and step up testing and contact tracking efforts. The number of cases in Michigan has risen dramatically in the past few weeks. For the past week, an average of 7,359 new cases per day have been recorded and, according to Johns Hopkins University, the pandemic cases were nearing Thanksgiving. Deaths are also increasing.

“What we really have to do in situations like this is turn things off,” said Walensky.

Whitmer, a Democrat in a politically violet state where shutdowns were particularly controversial, was reluctant to order new restrictions in response to the recent surge in cases.

Last week, she asked residents of her state to voluntarily restrict their activities and urged schools to temporarily stop personal learning. However, she stressed that “these are, to be very clear, not orders, mandates or requirements”.

No state has more daily infections per capita than Michigan, according to a CNBC analysis of the Johns Hopkins University data.

Much of the current surge comes from a highly infectious variant of Covid, B.1.1.7, the most common strain of virus in the United States today

Whitmer on Friday called on President Joe Biden’s administration to flood their state with vaccines and called on the government to “develop a vaccination program to help states like Michigan”. The government is reportedly ready to transfer some resources to the state, but not vaccines.

Without contacting Whitmer directly, Walensky pushed back calls for additional vaccines to be shipped to states with severe outbreaks.

“There are different tools that we can use for different periods of time,” Walensky said at the meeting on Monday.

“We know that if vaccines are in our arms today, we won’t see any effect from those vaccines for two to six weeks, depending on the vaccine,” she said. “So when you have an acute situation, an extraordinary number of cases like Michigan, the answer isn’t necessarily to give a vaccine. In fact, we know the vaccine will have a delayed response.”

“We also need this vaccine in other places,” said Walensky. “If we vaccinate today, we’ll have an impact in six weeks and we don’t know where the next place will be to increase.”

– CNBC’s Berkeley Lovelace Jr. contributed to this report.

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“They had a sense of resilience and ‘grit’, even prepandemic which I think served them well,” she said. “I see an ability to pan.”

In Dr. Luther’s research actually regressed reports of loneliness for seventh and eighth grade students between spring 2020 and spring 2021 – a reflection of how she suspects how alienating and lonely middle school is for many of them in “normal” times. (“The loners, the introverts, the kids who weren’t popular – they’re fine, thank you,” she said.)

Other new data suggests that the youngest teens may have got through the pandemic year with slightly less wear and tear than older teens. In the fall of 2020, a research team led by psychologist Angela L. Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania surveyed more than 6,500 high school students in a large, demographically diverse school district where families could choose whether their children would attend remotely or in school Person.

They found that students who attended school from a distance, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, exhibited significantly lower social, emotional, and academic wellbeing – with the exception of ninth graders, whose level remained roughly the same. (And who for most of the 20th century were considered to be in the same developmental category as seventh and eighth grade students, teaching in middle schools.)

Overall, according to Dr. Steinberg, the youth who fared best during the pandemic were more likely to be the ones who were able to keep in touch with their friends. And for many middle school students, that means having parents willing to relax their usual rules on social media and screen time.

“Social media mitigates some of the effects of isolation,” he said.

This message, often echoed by experts and educators, should provide some relief to the many parents who feel guilty about the screen time they have given their children over the past year.

Rabiah Harris, a Washington public middle school science teacher, holds a PhD in education that, as the mother of a nearly 12-year-old, allows her to take a philosophical viewpoint.