PBS News: October 27 – 28 2019, This Detroit bead museum honors an
African legacy while modeling revitalization, Why does almost half of America’s
food go to waste?
Monday on the NewsHour, Islamic
State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi dies during a U.S. special forces raid in
northwestern Syria. Plus: Vice President Mike Pence on President Trump and
impeachment, what al-Baghdadi’s death means for the threat of ISIS, California
endures new wildfires and power outages, and our Politics Monday team, Tamara
Keith and Amy Walter, analyzes the latest political news. Stream your PBS
favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
PBS NewsHour Weekend full episode October 27, 2019
On this edition for Sunday, October
27, analysis on the death of the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and
a look at what that may mean for the region, and a return to Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania one year after 11 people were killed at the Tree of Life synagogue
in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history. Hari Sreenivasan anchors
from New York. Stream your PBS favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
This Detroit bead museum honors an African legacy
while modeling revitalization
Detroit is home to an unusual museum
that draws on African history and customs, filling an entire city block with
installations and sculptures. The MBAD African Bead Museum also allows visitors
hands-on experiences — and acts as a stabilizing force in a distressed area of
the city. Special correspondent Mary Ellen Geist reports. Stream your PBS
favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
Watch more from Making Sen$e: https://bit.ly/2D8w9kc Read more economic news: https://to.pbs.org/2PNUx19 Roughly 40 percent of food produced in America never makes
it to the table. Whether it rots in the field, is trashed at the supermarket,
or thrown out at home, NPR’s Allison Aubrey looks at why good food is being
discarded, and what can be done to prevent it.
How can we stop the spread of
misleading, sometimes dangerous content while maintaining an internet with
freedom of expression at its core? Misinformation expert Claire Wardle explores
the new challenges of our polluted online environment and maps out a plan to
transform the internet into a place of trust — with the help everyday users.
“Together, let’s rebuild our information commons,” she says.
This talk was presented at an
official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
Can technology make people safer
from threats like violent extremism, censorship and persecution? In this
illuminating talk, technologist Yasmin Green details programs pioneered at
Jigsaw (a unit within Alphabet Inc., the collection of companies that also
includes Google) to counter radicalization and online harassment — including a
project that could give commenters real-time feedback about how their words
might land, which has already increased spaces for dialogue. “If we ever
thought that we could build an internet insulated from the dark side of
humanity, we were wrong,” Green says. “We have to throw our entire
selves into building solutions that are as human as the problems they aim to
solve.”
This talk was presented at an
official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
Homelessness in society needs urgent
action. This video documents the homeless people of mid-town New York to find
out more about their world and what struggles and hardships they face. More and
more people are facing homelessness and housing problems so we are putting out
a call to action to stand for some of our most vulnerable members of society.
Winter is approaching and without your help, many people who are homeless will
die over the winter months in New York City. It is important that we unit to provide
whats needed for people who are homeless to have the necessities, such as
clothing, blankets, warm food, shelter and the support every human being
deserves. Summary Project Unity, a non-profit organisation is committed to
unifying communities for good causes. Finding out from grassroots what are the
most effective ways to assist people in need, we empower communities with
direct action to have a positive effect on the issues facing us. Unity
overcomes everything, so transform your environment with the strength of unity.
Presents some of the animal
kingdom’s strangest survival strategies. The most startling behaviour patterns
aren’t found among the classic big animals such as lions or polar bears, but
among nature’s smaller creatures: Poison dart frogs, chameleons, praying
mantises and scorpions, to name only a few. These “Little Monsters”
are masters of survival. Until recently, only a handful of scientists enjoyed
the technical means to study them up close. But now, thanks to 3D
visualization, large audiences can experience a chameleon thrusting out its
tongue at close range, rattlesnakes striking at their targets to within
fractions of an inch, praying mantises hunting and hummingbirds feeding, filmed
from inside the flower! Rather than simply delivering a flat representation of
these amazing stunts, modern 3D provides for an emotional experience. And with
its ingenious combination of slow-motion-3D and timelapse-3D, “Little
Monsters” even improves upon state of the art 3D for greater impact,
yielding unbelievable scenes the world has never seen and “felt”
before.
Photographer Rob Woodcox (previously) travels the world to bring athletes
and dancers together in visually captivating locations and poses. The
29-year-old artist first picked up a camera about ten years ago and hasn’t
looked back. Woodcox works with a diverse array of models both in studio
environments and in deserts and metropolises. A combination of on-site
practical effects and post-production editing create the fantastical final
images.
Woodcox grew up in Michigan, and
shares with Colossal that the lack of a robust local creative industry spurred
his imaginative, DIY approach. Woodcox found creative community online, where
he connected with likeminded photographers. The scale of his projects grew as
his network expanded, and now Woodcox frequently works on client commissions in
addition to his personal practice. As his professional identity has evolved
over the past eight years, Squarespace has stayed Woodcox’s website platform of choice. Its
seamless user experience allows his work to take center stage. “When you’re
doing creative work, the website just needs to be simple, clean, and easy to
use. And that’s Squarespace. If it’s inhibiting the user’s experience, then that’s a
problem,” Woodcox shares with Colossal.
“Pursuing projects with real people
and being a part of things that matter” keeps Woodcox inspired. Teaching
workshops has been a huge part of the photographer’s career: to date, he has
taught over eighty workshops on five continents. Squarespace’s ecommerce integrations allow students to register for workshops
(the next one is in Portland, Oregon) and collectors to purchase fine art
prints. An embedded newsletter signup form lets Woodcox’s audience keep up with
his latest projects.
“It’s fun to think about what people
haven’t even seen yet. I have visions that are so much bigger even than
anything I’ve done so far,” Woodcox tells Colossal. “That’s an exciting thing
as an artist. I don’t think I’m ever going to run out of fuel. There’s so much
that I want to do.”
Ready to show the world your
creative potential? Head over to Squarespace.com for a free weeklong trial, and if you like what you see,
use code COLOSSAL at checkout to save 10% on your purchase of a website or
domain name.
On this edition for Saturday,
October 26, rising winds and forced power outages stoke new fears as California
wildfires continue to burn, a look at how Miami is tackling an affordable
housing crisis, and the band Spoon is staying afloat in a transforming music
industry. Hari Sreenivasan anchors from New York. Stream your PBS favorites
with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG
Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
Thursday on the NewsHour,
Republicans step up criticism of the House impeachment inquiry after stunning
testimony about President Trump’s handling of military aid to Ukraine. Plus:
Rep. Jackie Speier on impeachment criticism, Andrew Brunson’s Turkish
imprisonment ordeal, children held in Cambodian orphanages, how big data
changes creativity and a brief but spectacular take on preventing blindness.
Stream your PBS favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
On this edition for Sunday, October
20, President Trump pulls back on a plan to hold a meeting next year with G-7
leaders at his Florida golf resort, a preview of the high-stakes election for
Canada’s prime minister, and in the second of our two-part series a look at ICE
detentions in Louisiana and their economic impact on rural communities. Alison
Stewart anchors from New York. Stream your PBS favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
On this edition for Saturday,
October 19, another setback for a Brexit deal after the British Parliament
postpones a vote, the first of a two-part series on ICE detention in rural
Louisiana, and writer John Hodgman’s take on losing status. Alison Stewart anchors
from New York. Stream your PBS favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
Exactly when and where did life on
Earth begin? Scientists have long thought that it emerged three billion years
ago in the ocean — until astrobiologist Tara Djokic and her team made an
unexpected discovery in the western Australian desert. Learn how an ancient
rock found near a hot volcanic pool is shifting our understanding of the
origin-of-life puzzle.
This talk was presented at an
official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
Did humans evolve from monkeys or
from fish? In this enlightening talk, ichthyologist and TED Fellow Prosanta
Chakrabarty dispels some hardwired myths about evolution, encouraging us to
remember that we’re a small part of a complex, four-billion-year process — and
not the end of the line. “We’re not the goal of evolution,”
Chakrabarty says. “Think of us all as young leaves on this ancient and
gigantic tree of life — connected by invisible branches not just to each
other, but to our extinct relatives and our evolutionary ancestors.”
This talk was presented at an
official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
Just a few meters below the waves,
marine biologist and explorer-photographer David Gruber discovered something
amazing — a surprising new range of sea creatures that glow in many colors in
the ocean’s dim blue light. Join his journey in search of biofluorescent
sharks, seahorses, sea turtles and more, and learn how these light-up creatures
could illuminate a new understanding of our own brains.
This talk was presented at an
official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
Aerogels are the world’s lightest
(least dense) solids. They are also excellent thermal insulators and have been
used in numerous Mars missions and the Stardust comet particle-return mission.
The focus of this video is silica aerogels, though graphene aerogels are now
technically the lightest. At one point Dr. Steven Jones literally held the
Guinness World Record for making the lightest aerogel and therefore lightest
solid. If you’re interested in learning more about aerogels, let me know in the
comments as there is a potential trilogy in the works… Huge thanks to Dr.
Stephen Steiner and the crew at Aerogel Technologies. To find out more or buy
your own aerogel sample, check out: https://www.aerogeltechnologies.com/
Thanks to Dr. Steven Jones and Dr. Mihail Petkov at NASA’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory And thanks to FLIR for loaning us the awesome high definition
thermal camera. The footage is amazing! https://www.flir.com
Special thanks to Patreon supporters: Donal Botkin, Michael Krugman, Ron Neal,
Stan Presolski, Terrance Shepherd, Penward Rhyme and everyone who provided
feedback on an early draft of this video. Filming by Raquel Nuno Animations by
Maria Raykova Drawings by Mariel Solsberg Music From https://epidemicsound.com
“Seaweed” “Swagger Stagger”
Most of the tombs at Asasif, which
is close to the Valley of the Kings, are from the Late Period (664-332BC) of
ancient Egypt.
However, there are also tombs from
the earlier 18th Dynasty (1550-1292BC), which was the first of the New Kingdom
and included the famous pharaohs Ahmose, Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Amenhotep
III, Akhenaton and Tutankhamun.
Last week, the antiquities ministry
announced that archaeologists had discovered an ancient “industrial
area” in Luxor’s West Valley.
The area included “houses for
storage and the cleaning of funerary furniture, with many potteries dated to
the 18th Dynasty”, it said.
Media caption’Recipe’ for creating
mummies in ancient Egypt revealed
For more information Please Visit
the following link:
In the 1500’s
self-taught artist and nun Plautilla Nelli created a life-size mural of
Jesus and the twelve apostles at the Last Supper. Spanning 21 feet feet, the
vibrantly colored painting includes carefully rendered details including wine
chalices, salt cellars, wood panelling, and a rhythmically creased tablecloth.
In addition to the inanimate objects depicted, Nelli demonstrated impressive
facility with human anatomy in her renderings of the religious figures—at the
time, women were barred from studying the field of anatomy.
Nelli’s masterpiece stayed for two
centuries at her convent, Santa Caterina, and then changed locations a few
times before being unstretched, rolled, and put in storage about a hundred
years ago. After an initial restoration and then additional damage due to
flooding in the 1960’s, The Last Supper has been undergoing restoration for the
past four years. Brought back to life by an all-female team of curators,
restorers, and scientists at Advancing Women Artists, it
is now on permanent display at the Santa Maria Novella Museum in Florence, Italy.
(via artnet, Smithsonian Magazine)
Ing and John’s Street Art, Downtown
Newark, New Jersey, USA- Part 3
Photographs by Ing-On
Vibulbhan-Watts
On Monday, August 28, 2019 John
added his work to the display. John’s artwork is on the far left,
“Impossible Dreamer”. “Gandhi Man of Peace”, in the middle is my artwork,
which I produced in 2010. The far right is John’s artwork “Beneath the
Lake”.
9
I am very happy to have an
opportunity to display our artworks in public. There were people asking
some questions about our artwork. Some people took pictures of our
artwork. It seems to be a positive reaction from the people who view
them. People comment about the beautiful plants and unique artwork.
Ing-On Vibulbhan-Watts and John
Watts, Tuesday, October 22, 2019
Since October 2014, the streets of
Upper Manhattan have become an unexpected destination for rare sightings of
some 314 endangered birds. The Audubon Mural Project is a collaboration between the National Audubon Society
and Gitler &_____ Gallery to commission murals of climate-threatened birds
surrounding the old neighborhood of John James Audubon.
So far 20 artworks
have been painted on storefronts, building facades, window panels, and
retractable security grates. The number of species depicted isn’t arbitrary, it
reflects a report from last year highlighting 314 birds most threatened by climate change. The growing list of involved artists includes Gaia,
Iena Cruz,
Hitnes, Lunar New Year, and many
others. You can learn more about the artworks and the birds depicted in them,
including a map of where to find them, on the Audubon Mural Project Website.
Photo: Mike Fernandez/Audubon
The Swallow-tailed Kite mural
contains 12 other climate-threatened species. The church tower to the right of
the mural is the location of John James Audubon’s final resting place.
Black-chinned Hummingbird, by Ashli
Sisk. Photo: Mike Fernandez/National Audubon Society
Brazilian artist L7M (previously)
depicts owls, ducks, sparrows, and other birds materializing from a chaotic
swirl of dripped paint and flourishes of spray. The graffiti birds not only
contrast urban and natural elements, but also depict a distinct clash of both
abstract and figurative techniques. According to Street Art News the artist was recently in Rome where he completed several
of the pieces you see here. Check out more of his latest mural work on Facebook.
For more information please visit
the following link:
How do you fix broken public
systems? You spark people’s competitive spirit. In a talk about getting people
motivated to make change, public sector strategist Abhishek Gopalka discusses
how he helped improve the health system of Rajasthan, a state in India home to
more than 80 million people, using the powers of transparency and public
accountability. “Motivation doesn’t just appear,” Gopalka says.
“Something needs to change to make you care.”
This talk was presented at a TED
Institute event given in partnership with BCG. TED editors featured it among
our selections on the home page. Read more about the TED Institute.
Every year, TED works with a group
of select companies and foundations to identify internal ideators, inventors,
connectors, and creators. Drawing on the same rigorous regimen that has
prepared speakers for the TED main stage, TED Institute works closely with each
partner, overseeing curation and providing intensive one-on-one talk
development to sharpen and fine tune ideas. The culmination is an event
produced, recorded, and hosted by TED, generating a growing library of valuable
TED Talks that can spur innovation and transform organizations.
Watching a flower bloom is peaceful
and calming. Relax while watching a stunning 4K time lapse of blooming flowers,
while listening to soft, gentle piano music. Blooming flowers are mesmerizing
to watch, especially in 4K. Piano music is wonderful for stress relief,
meditation, relaxation, and sleep.
Butterflies and Flowers – 1 Hour Nature Meditation
with Soothing Music
Ho creato questo video con l’Editor
video di YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/editor)///////… GORGEOUS
BUTTERFLIES AND FLOWERS FOR MORE THAN 1 HOUR NATURE RELAX, JOY AND HAPPINESS
////////////////////////////////////// SOOTHING MUSICS FOR RELAX, YOGA,
MEDITATION, TAI CHI, HEALING, REIKI, DEEP RELAX =
If you’ve been
looking for an opportunity to download free high resolution images of 435 bird illustrations,
you’re finally in the right place. The National Audubon Society has recently made John
James Audubon’s seminal Birds of America available to the public in a
downloadable digital library (signing up for their email list is a
prerequisite).
Birds of America was printed between 1827 and 1838, and was filled prints
created from hand-engraved plates based on Audubon’s original watercolor
paintings. In addition to the prints, each bird’s page also includes a
recording of the animal’s call, plus extensive written texts from the period of
the book’s printing.
Audubon is widely lauded as the
individual who brought an awareness and appreciation of birds’ beauty and
fragility; the National Audubon Society has been active since 1905. Explore
more of the Society’s current conservation efforts, as well as ways to get
involved, on their website. (via Open Culture)
A biochemist by
training, photographer Linden Gledhill is fascinated by the beauty of
infinitesimally small aspects of nature and science, from capturing the flight of insects to exploring the beauty of magnetic ferrofluid. Among his most jaw-dropping images are macro photographs of butterfly wings that reveal complex patterns that look
like perfectly organized flower petals. These tiny protrusions are actually
scales, similar to what you would find on reptile, though extremely small and
fragile. Gledhill’s photography recently inspired an episode of Smarter Every Day where Destin Sandlin learns how to
shoot similar photos. (via awkwardsituationist.tumblr.com)
PBS News:October
14-18.2019,How ‘Sesame Street’ is still supporting families, 50 years
after its debut, What Turkey’s assault on northern Syria means for civilians,
regional stability, How ‘Deep State’ book disputes accusations of Trump bias at
FBI, DOJ
WATCH: ‘History will haunt us’ if U.S. fails to act in
Syria, Sen. Blumenthal says
BBC: Turkey’s Erdogan vows to ‘crush heads’ of Kurdish
fighters
CNN: SE Cupp: Don’t be surprised if this is what
undoes Trump
The Kurds: The Most Famous Unknown People in the World
| Stephen Mansfield | TEDxNashville
Turkey, Kurds, Language: Nicholas Glastonbury at
TEDxGallatin
Kurdistan: Homeland of Diversity | Levi Clancy | TEDxDuhok
Bombs, mountains and an unlikely female voice | Dashni
Morad | TEDxErbil
Advocate for the Kurdish community: Tara Fatehi at
TEDxAdelaideChange
Communication in a mass communication society | Joakim
Medin | TEDxUppsalaUniversity
Friday on the NewsHour, the
battleground in northeastern Syria appears to be quieting, as a Turkish
operation there pauses to allow Kurdish fighters to leave. Also: Violence in
the Mexican state of Sinaloa, more questions about Boeing’s handling of the 737
MAX, former Gov. John Kasich on overcoming political divisions, Shields and
Brooks, the art of Native American women and a historic spacewalk. Stream your
PBS favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
Thursday on the NewsHour, U.S. and
Turkish officials agree that Turkey’s military offensive in northern Syria will
pause. Plus: Another U.S. diplomat testifies on Capitol Hill as President
Trump’s acting chief of staff disputes wrongdoing around U.S. aid to Ukraine,
remembering Rep. Elijah Cummings, a possible Brexit deal, resolution of the
General Motors strike and using big data creatively. WATCH TODAY’S SEGMENTS:
Turkish official denies Erdogan agreed to a ‘cease-fire’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOENn…
How impeachment inquiry and Senate trial could unfold https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpY3k… News
Wrap: New England lashed by powerful nor’easter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEtD-…
Remembering lawmaker, civil rights advocate Elijah Cummings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSKwv…
The EU approved Johnson’s Brexit plan. Will Parliament? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63Ay9…
What tentative GM deal says about American organized labor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtU4f…
How customers’ big data is transforming creative commerce https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cs7Cg…
A bipartisan group of senators
announced a bill to impose additional sanctions on Turkey in the wake of the
country’s invasion in Syria. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Chris Van Hollen, who
introduced the bill, were joined by Sens. Marsha Blackburn, Richard Blumenthal
and Jeanne Shaheen. The lawmakers expressed concern about President Donald
Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. “History will haunt
us,” Blumenthal said. “We are going to be complicit in the ethnic
cleansing that occurs as a result of this absolutely abhorrent action.”
Later in the day, Vice President Mike Pence announced a 120-hour cease-fire
between Turkey and the Kurds. Stream your PBS favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG
Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
November marks the 50th anniversary
of public television’s “Sesame Street,” a cultural landmark widely praised
for its approach to children’s programming. But beyond the songs and fun, “Sesame
Street” does some serious work for those in need, providing special
support and guidance for military families and addressing topics like autism
and addiction. Hari Sreenivasan reports. Stream your PBS favorites with the PBS
app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
Turkey continued its military
assault into northern Syria on Thursday. Aid agencies warn that nearly half a
million people near the border are at risk from the violence, which is drawing
criticism from many U.S. officials. Amna Nawaz reports and talks to Sinam
Mohamad, U.S. representative for the Syrian Democratic Council, and Soner
Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Stream your PBS
favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
In a new book, Pulitzer winner James
B. Stewart explores two controversial recent investigations by the FBI and the
Justice Department: Probes into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server
when she was secretary of state and Russian interference in the 2016
presidential election. Stewart talks to William Brangham about how his research
contradicts President Trump’s “deep state” narrative. Stream your PBS
favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
Image copyright Reuters Image
caption Up to 300,000 people are said to have fled the violence in northern
Syria
Turkish President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan says that Turkey will “crush the heads” of Kurdish fighters
if they do not withdraw from a planned safe zone area in northern Syria.
Turkey agreed on Thursday to suspend
an offensive for five days to allow the Kurds to retreat from the area.
But on Saturday both sides accused
the other of violating the ceasefire.
Ankara views the Kurdish forces as
terrorists and wants to create a “safe zone” buffer inside Syria.
Despite the temporary ceasefire,
some sporadic violence has continued – particularly around the border town of
Ras Al-Ain.
What
did Erdogan say?
Speaking at a televised event in the
central Turkish province of Kayseri on Saturday, President Erdogan said that if
Kurdish fighters did not withdraw by Tuesday evening – as agreed in the
ceasefire – “we will start where we left off and continue to crush the
terrorists’ heads”.
The Turkish leader is due to hold
talks next week with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. On Saturday he said
that if those talks did not produce a solution, Turkey would “implement
its own plans”.
Turkey’s defence ministry earlier
accused Kurdish forces of carrying out 14 “provocative” attacks in
the last 36 hours, mostly in Ras Al-Ain, but insisted Turkish forces were fully
abiding by the agreement.
However, the Kurdish-led Syrian
Democratic Forces (SDF) accused Turkey of violating the ceasefire.
Image copyright Getty Images Image
caption Turkish-backed Syrian rebels are still active along the border
They also accuse Turkish troops of
failing to create a safe corridor for the evacuation of civilians and wounded
people from the besieged town.
On Saturday the SDF urged US
Vice-President Mike Pence, who helped to broker the temporary ceasefire, to
pressure Turkey to allow the passage of civilians.
“Despite the constant
communication with the American side and the promise made by them to solve this
problem, there has not been any tangible progress in this regard,” the SDF
said in a statement.
Turkish presidency spokesman Ibrahim
Kalin said they wanted the US to put pressure on Kurdish forces to withdraw.
“We have told our American
colleagues to use their leverage, their connections, to make sure that they
leave without any incidents,” he told AFP news agency.
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for
Human Rights (SOHR) said deliveries of humanitarian aid had been prevented from
entering Ras Al-Ain.
The monitor group said on Friday
that the civilian death toll from the Turkish operation had now risen to 86.
Between 160,000 and 300,000 people
have reportedly fled their homes since the offensive started 10 days ago.
What
prompted the offensive?
Turkish forces first launched their
assault on 9 October, following an announcement US troops would withdraw from
the Syria-Turkey border region.
Media captionThe BBC’s Martin
Patience explains what’s behind the conflict
The Turkish plan is to clear Kurdish
fighters from a buffer zone extending more than 30km (20 miles) into Syria. It
would run for about 440km along the border, President Erdogan said on Friday,
and be monitored from observation posts.
Turkey also plans to resettle up to
two million Syrian refugees, currently on its territory, in the buffer zone but
critics warned the move could trigger the ethnic cleansing of the local Kurdish
population.
The goal was to push back a Kurdish
militia group – the People’s Protection Units (YPG) – that Turkey views as a
terrorist organisation.
Since the offensive was launched,
President Donald Trump has been accused by some, including senior Republicans,
of abandoning a US ally. The SDF – a group dominated by the YPG – fought
alongside the US against the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria.
There has been growing international
concern about possible war crimes committed by Turkey and its allied militias
during the offensive.
Media captionMike Pence announces
Turkish ceasefire in Syria
Amnesty International says it has
gathered “damning evidence” of war crimes and other violations by
their side and the United Nations has called on Turkey to investigate the
allegations.
Unconfirmed reports have also
emerged that Turkish-allied forces have used white phosphorus, a chemical
weapon which causes bad burns, in Syria.
The Organisation for the Prohibition
of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said it was aware of the claims and was gathering
evidence.
What
is the latest with the ceasefire?
The pause in hostilities followed
talks in the Turkish capital Ankara between Mr Erdogan and Mr Pence on
Thursday.
President Trump celebrated news of
the ceasefire and claimed the pause in hostilities would lead to “millions
of lives” being saved. He remained optimistic in comments made on Friday,
despite reports the ceasefire was failing to hold.
Media captionPresident Trump on
Turkish and Kurdish forces: “Sometimes you have to let them fight a little
bit”
SDF spokesman Mustafa Bali tweeted
on Friday morning to allege that Turkey was breaking the ceasefire near Ras
al-Ain.
“Despite the agreement to halt
the fighting, air and artillery attacks continue to target the positions of
fighters, civilian settlements and the hospital,” he wrote.
President Erdogan dismissed reports
of continuing clashes on Friday as “misinformation” but international
news media recorded explosions in Ras al-Ain during the morning.
The SOHR said Saturday that the SDF
had not yet started to pull back from the border region.
Local Kurdish media are reporting
that five civilians and 13 Kurdish fighters in Ras-al-Ain have been killed
since the ceasefire began, but the BBC has not been able to independently
confirm that.
For more information please visit
the following link:
SE Cupp says President Donald
Trump’s Syria policy is one of the only issues that has prompted swift
criticism from the Republican party, and argues it may be the one issue that
could put his presidency in danger.
The Kurds are an ancient and noble
people who are now the primary “boots on the ground” against ISIS in the Middle
East. They are 35 million strong worldwide, the largest people group on earth
without their own homeland. In this stirring talk, Stephen Mansfield tells the
story of the Kurds and does so, surprisingly, through the lives of three women.
Stephen Mansfield is a New York Times bestselling author who first rose to
global attention with his groundbreaking book, The Faith of George W. Bush, a
bestseller that Time magazine credited with helping to shape the 2004 U.S.
presidential election. He has written celebrated biographies of Barak Obama,
Booker T. Washington, George Whitefield, Winston Churchill, Pope Benedict XVI,
and Abraham Lincoln, among others. Mansfield’s latest book, The Miracle of the
Kurds, is a timely introduction to the Kurdish people that reached bookstores
just as Kurdish troops began standing heroically against the evils of ISIS in
the Middle East. The book has been named “Book of the Year” by Rudaw, the
leading Kurdish news service. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED
conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more
at https://ted.com/tedx
Nicholas Glastonbury is a graduate
of the NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. His studies focused on the
intersections of human rights law, nationalism, anthropology, political
science, theories of representation, feminist theory and queer theory. About
New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study Creativity,
flexibility and rigor characterize the academic program of the Gallatin School
of Individualized Study. At Gallatin, students have the opportunity to combine
the best of a small college experience with the best of a large research
university. A Gallatin education is unique. The individualized structure of the
program and its relationship to the rest of NYU are part of what makes the
school so special. For more information visit gallatin.nyu.edu/ About TEDx, x =
independently organized event In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a
program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a
TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine
to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local,
self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED
event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but
individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and
regulations) video produced by Charles Q. Drexler vfx animation by Michael J.
Green opening music by Gabriel S. Beam Hyphenate Media www.hyphenatemedia.com
Levi Clancy shares his experience in
Kurdistan, the homeland of multi-cultures and many religions, showing the
co-existence and peace it has. Levi was born and grew up in 1990 in Los Angeles
in the United States. When he was still a kid, he started taking college
courses and when he was only 13 years old he transferred to the University of
California! At 15, he was abandoned by his family and had to leave university,
and started working in medical research as well as web development and graphic
arts in order to support himself and make it month to month. At 18, he received
a scholarship to return to university, and reconnected with his family. After
finishing his baccalaureate in Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics
(MIMG) with a minor in Mesopotamian history, he moved to Erbil. Levi has worked
for University of California as a researcher in electron microscopy, oncology
and flow cytometry. He has also worked in marketing for clients including the
LA Lakers, NCAA, Verizon and AT&T. Currently, he works as a software
developer and as a freelance journalist. Levi has been featured on CBS News and
LA Times. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format
but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
Imagine Iraq. Then imagine pop
music. Dashni Morad is now in her tenth year as the leading successful singer
of modern pop in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. From the little girl whom fled
Saddam Hussein’s tyranny to the strong woman whom challenged the status quo,
Dashni tells us her heartbreaking coming of age tale. Born in the city of
Sulaimanya, raised in Netherlands, lost between two cultures and struggling
between accomplishing dreams. Dashni Morad, a Kurdish/Dutch Pop singer and a TV
personality who was known for her show on Kurdistan TV “Bi Control”, flee
Kurdistan at the age of eleven to become a refugee in Netherlands due to the
unstable political situation in Iraq and Kurdistan. Since moving to the
Netherlands, Dashni, worked hard to accomplish being a musician and a TV
presenter to entertain the Kurdish audience since it was much needed at the
time in Kurdistan. Today, she is recognized as a national and international
artist who broke through the impossible to give the gift of modern music to
Kurdistan and presenting it outside of the Middle East region. Her songs
presented messages such as women empowerment, peace, and the love for
Kurdistan. She, however, didn’t stop at making music and TV presenting, she
also founded a small non-profit under the name “Green Kids” supporting
education to the kids of Kurdistan, as well as, raising funds for refugees and
IDPs in Kurdistan, and also many group and student participation to clean the
mountains of Kurdistan. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED
conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more
at https://ted.com/tedx
Tara comes from one of the oldest
living civilizations and indigenous people in the world, which today is under
constant oppression and war, her ultimate goal is to make sure the Kurdish
people don’t forget themselves so the world never forgets the Kurdish people.
In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local,
self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.
At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep
discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events
are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED
Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx
events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
Joakim Medim is a freelance
journalist who, among other things, documented the military coup in Honduras,
covered the political development in Central America, Hungary and Turkey and
specialized in the refugee crisis and the socio-political response in Lebanon.
Medin tells the stories that have been untold and fight for media where it has
been oppressed. In 2014, when he was covering the humanitarian crisis in Syria,
Medin was arrested by the Syrian government and was kept in isolation in a
3-by-6-foot cell. After heavy interrogation he was moved to Damascus for
further questioning. It was only after the intervention of Syrian Kurdish
officials that Medin and his translator were finally released. This talk was
given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently
organized by a local community. Learn more at https://ted.com/tedx
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in
Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, informally known as The Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is an award for outstanding contributions
mainly to the … Wikipedia
Oct.14 — Abhijit Banerjee and
Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michael Kremer of
Harvard University were awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics “for their
experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.” Randall Kroszner, Chicago
Booth School of Business deputy dean and former Federal Reserve governor,
reacts to the announcement on “Bloomberg Surveillance.”
Esther Duflo reflects on the
relative lack of women working in the field of economics and how to adapt the
profession to attract a wider sphere of people. In this conversation with Adam
Smith, recorded just after the public announcement of the 2019 Prize in
Economic Sciences to her, her husband Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kramer, she
also discusses the way that local experiments can often uncover general principles
that can be applied to problems of poverty worldwide.
French economist Esther Duflo gives
a press conference at the Reconquista Hotel in Oviedo on October 22, 2015, in
the eve of the Princess of Asturias awards ceremony. Duflo is part of the trio
that has been awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics. AFP/Getty
Images
The 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics
was awarded to economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer for
their pioneering work alleviating global poverty. The winners were announced on
Monday morning.
The Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences said the winners “considerably improved our ability to fight global
poverty. In just two decades, their new experiment-based approach has
transformed development economics, which is now a flourishing field of
research”.
Duflo is the second woman and the
youngest person to ever receive the prestigious award in the field of
economics. The trio will evenly split the 9 million Swedish Krona prize
($916,474 USD).
“As a direct result of one of their
studies, more than five million Indian children have benefitted from effective
programs of remedial tutoring in schools. Another example is the heavy
subsidies for preventive healthcare that have been introduced in many
countries,” said the Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Poor people are supposed to be
either completely desperate or lazy or entrepreneurial but people don’t – we
don’t try to … understand the deep root and interconnected root of poverty.
Esther Duflo
Their work, which tackles one of
humanities most pressing issues, is based on the idea that to battle poverty,
the issues should be broken down into smaller pieces and studied via small
field experiments to answer precise questions within the communities who are
most affected.
PROMOTED
“The essence of our research is
to make sure that the fight against poverty is based on scientific
evidence,” Duflo said. “Often the poor are reduced to caricatures,
and often even people that try to help them often do not actually understand
what are the deep root of the problems that are addressing the poor,” she
added.
“Poor people are supposed to be
either completely desperate or lazy or entrepreneurial but people don’t we
don’t try to … understand the deep root and interconnected root of poverty,”
said Duflo.
Even with all of the work focusing
on reducing global poverty, it is still the most pressing issue for humanity.
According to the Swedish Academy, five million children under the age of five
still die annually from diseases or ailments that could be treated with
inexpensive medical treatments. In total, more than 1.3 billion people live in
extreme poverty. That is, they subsist on less than $1.25 per day. In total, 1 billion children worldwide are living in
poverty. Here in the U.S., income inequality is
growing.
While many of their field studies
have taken place in developing parts of the world, their work is helping
Americans as well. According to the Center for Poverty Research at the
University of California, Davis, “the official poverty rate is 12.3 percent,
based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2017 estimates. That year, an estimated 39.7
million Americans lived in poverty according to the official measure.”
Asked by the Nobel Prize committee
how it feels to be the second woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, Duflo
responded, “We are at a time when we are starting to realize in the profession
that the way we conduct each other privately and publicly, is not conducive all
the time to a very good environment for women. Showing that it is possible for
a women to succeed, and to be recognized for success, I hope will inspire many
many other women to continue working, and many many other men to give them the
respect they deserve, like every single human being.”
Banerjee, born in Mumbai, India
earned a Ph.D. in 1988 from Harvard University and is the Ford Foundation
International Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Duflo, born in Paris, France earned a Ph.D. in 1999 from Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and is the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty
Alleviation and Development Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Kremer, born in the U.S.A., earned a Ph.D. in 1992 from Harvard University, and
is the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University.
For more information please visit the following link:
The
Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economic Sciences, officially known as The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in
Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (Swedish: Sveriges riksbanks
pris i ekonomisk vetenskap till Alfred Nobels minne), is an award funded by
Sveriges Riksbank and is annually awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
to researchers in the field of economic sciences.[1]
The first prize was awarded in 1969 to Ragnar Frisch
and Jan Tinbergen.[2]
Each recipient receives a medal, a diploma and a monetary award that has varied
throughout the years.[3]
In 1969, Frisch and Tinbergen were given a combined 375,000 SEK,
which is equivalent to 2,871,041 SEK in December 2007. The award is presented
in Stockholm
at an annual ceremony on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.[4]
As of the awarding of the 2019
prize, 51 Nobel Memorial Prizes in Economic Sciences have been given to 84
individuals.[5]
Up to 2007, nine awards had been given for contributions to the field of macroeconomics,
more than any other category.[6]
As of October 2018, the institution with the most affiliated laureates in
economic sciences is the University of Chicago, which has 32 affiliated laureates.[7]
List of Nobel Memorial Prize laureates in Economics 1969 – 2019
Year Laureate Country Rationale Ph.D. alma mater Institution(most significant tenure/at time of receipt)
On this edition for Sunday, October
13, U.S. troops withdraw in Syria as the Turkish offensive escalates against
the Kurds, the latest on the Trump administration and a preview of Tuesday’s
Democratic presidential debate. Also, a newly named North Macedonia sets its
sights on membership in NATO and the European Union. Megan Thompson anchors
from New York. Stream your PBS favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG
Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
PBS NewsHour Weekend full episode October 12, 2019
On this edition for Saturday,
October 12, the latest acting director of the Department of Homeland Security
steps down, a longtime head of security at The Met discusses a new book about
his extraordinary career, and in our “Future of Food” series, a look
at what farmers in Iowa are doing to help grow more sustainable practices for
the future. Megan Thompson anchors from New York. Stream your PBS favorites
with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
Friday on the NewsHour,
congressional testimony from the former Ukrainian ambassador further roils the
impeachment inquiry. Plus: Why Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the
Nobel Peace Prize, former United Nations ambassador Susan Rice talks U.S.
foreign policy, Mark Shields and David Brooks analyze the latest political
news, and an unconventional outdoor art center in Montana. Stream your PBS
favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
Thursday on the NewsHour, two
associates of Rudy Giuliani’s are arrested on charges of violating campaign
finance law. Plus: California residents face frustration over planned power
outage amid wildfire risk, consequences of Turkey’s military assault in Syria,
a new book about high profile FBI and Justice Department investigations, and
how “Sesame Street” is serious about supporting families. Stream your PBS
favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
Wednesday on the NewsHour, As Turkey
sends troops into Syria, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo discusses international
flashpoints such as China and Ukraine. Also: Returning to the Bahamas after the
storm, the crisis caused by the White House refusing to cooperate with
Congress, how Democrats are courting a key voting bloc, new details on the
Black Sox scandal and more. Stream your PBS favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
Monday on the NewsHour, President
Trump comes under fire from both Republicans and Democrats for abruptly
announcing the removal of U.S. troops from Syria. Also: The impeachment inquiry
grows as a second whistleblower emerges, Amy Walter and Tamara Keith on
Politics Monday, a firestorm for the NBA about China, free speech and human
rights, and Gary Clark Jr. on the tenor of the times.
Meet
the man on a mission to take down Cambodia’s timber tycoons and expose a
rampant illegal cross-border trade.
Under a rickety wooden stilt house
near Cambodia’s Phnom Prich Wildlife Sanctuary, one of the country’s leading environmental
campaigners is preparing dinner.
Ouch Leng stuffs raw meat into an
empty beer can and throws it into the fire. It’s a poor man’s feast for his
team of investigators to fuel them through a night’s surveillance.
Chewing pork and buffalo, their infrared
optics and cameras ready to record, they wait patiently for trucks to emerge
from the darkness.
Their cargo? Timber logged illegally
inside a wildlife sanctuary that is meant to be protected under Cambodian law.
“We went and saw eight trucks
inside one sawmill and another timber truck was loaded with square logs,”
he says, as he chops vegetables for dinner.
“It’s ready to export out
tonight.”
Before long, two semi-trailers, a
procession of tractors and four minivans, all loaded with logs, rumble out of
the wildlife sanctuary, which is marked by a sign brandishing the logos of the
European Union, USAID and Cambodia’s Ministry of Environment.
It is a significant haul but pales
in comparison to the convoy Leng says he witnessed the night before.
“I saw 23 timber trucks transport [logs] from the Phnom
Prich area,” says Leng.
Such stakeouts are part of Leng’s
relentless pursuit of timber tycoons who pillage his country’s forests for
profit, leading to some of the fastest rates of deforestation in the world.
In the 2000s, the Cambodian
government began leasing millions of hectares of land – called concessions – to
private companies, some of them inside protected forests.
It led to a nation-wide logging gold
rush – one that Leng is determined to stop.
Land concessions by country (LICADHO, 2018)
In one of his more daring exploits,
Leng disguised himself as a chef working at logging camps to infiltrate the
network of notorious logging baron, Try Pheap, an adviser to Cambodian Prime
Minister Hun Sen.
He lifted the lid on Pheap’s vast
illegal logging operations in a 2013 report but the tycoon continued to expand
his timber business across the country. This year, Leng filmed two major
logging operations inside the protected area of Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary
in the western Cardamon Mountains – both in concessions leased by Try Pheap.
What he discovered next is a scandal
on an international scale.
Video footage from Try Pheap’s
timber depot on the outskirts of Phnom Penh shows huge quantities of luxury wood
being loaded into shipping containers.
Al Jazeera tracked these containers
and confirmed they travelled from Cambodia’s Sihanoukville Port to northern
Vietnam.
Try Pheap and his representatives
have not responded to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.
Leng, the activist, says timber
smugglers use illegal crossings dotted across the border as part of a rampant
industry, with Vietnam effectively laundering then exporting illegally logged
wood from Cambodian forests.
Almost half a million cubic metres
of timber were smuggled from Cambodia to Vietnam between 2016 and 2018,
according to a series of reports by international non-government organisation,
the Environmental Investigation Agency.
In official correspondence seen by
Al Jazeera, the Cambodian government accuses Vietnam of issuing permits for
illegally logged timber, despite repeated warnings.
“There is still timber going
across the border because there is a black market in that area,” spokesman
Neth Pheaktra tells Al Jazeera.
“These activities are illegal.
That’s why the Ministry of Environment, as well as other relevant ministries,
and border officials are cracking down on forest crimes.”
Vietnam’s government says it
“strictly prohibits illegal timber harvesting, transportation, processing
and trade” and is taking measures to stop it.
From 2001 to 2018, Cambodia lost
2.17 million hectares of tree cover, equivalent to a 25% decrease, according to
data analysis by Global Forest Watch.
The timber feeds an insatiable
demand for rare wood in China, where prices for luxury timber furniture have
soared. One bed made from Siamese Rosewood – which has been almost eradicated
in Cambodia – reportedly was on sale for $1 million.
“Sometimes I cry. I feel disappointed
because I’m not able to protect the forest,” says Leng. “I see that
the destruction is so big, but no one helps to protect it.
With huge profits to be made, Leng’s
investigations are undertaken at great risk.
Another Cambodian forest activist,
Chut Wutty, was murdered in 2012 while investigating a logging company. Several
more forest patrollers have been killed since, including three who were shot at
the Vietnamese border last year.
Leng himself has received numerous
death threats and had his equipment smashed.
“I know that this is dangerous
work… No one dares to challenge the companies,” says Leng. “Why do I
challenge [them]? Because the companies have caused mass destruction to the
forest.”
In some cases, protected areas have
been completely destroyed – such as Snuol Wildlife Sanctuary in eastern
Cambodia.
Snuol Wildlife Sanctuary Data: NASA Landsat / USGS
The sanctuary was so severely
damaged, the government removed its protected status in 2018 – conceding there
was nothing left to protect.
Travelling in a four-wheel drive
vehicle so old the rear brakes often erupt into plumes of smoke, Leng stops at
the barren remains of the former sanctuary.
“Maybe 10 years ago there was
jungle and a lot of forest and a lot of wildlife like elephants, tigers,
rabbits…” he laments.
“The private companies came to destroy,
to terminate the forest here.”
Other sanctuaries, like Boeung Per
in the north, are rapidly heading towards the same fate.
Boeung Per Sanctuary Data: NASA Landsat / USGS
But despite the forces stacked
against him, Leng continues to race off deep into the jungle every time he gets
a new tip-off of potential illegal activity.
“This has happened for 10 to 20
years – not just this year, and no one has been able to prevent it,” he
says.
But as long as there are precious
forests to save in Cambodia, Leng will be on the frontline defending them.
Image copyright EPA Image caption
Activists say tens of thousands of people have fled towns along the
Syria-Turkey border
“It’s like hell. I am afraid
for all my family and everyone I know.”
Sevinaz is from a town near Syria’s
border with Turkey that immediately came under heavy bombardment when the
Turkish military and allied Syrian rebels launched an assault on Kurdish-led
forces there on Wednesday.
The 27-year-old Kurdish filmmaker
and activist said repeated air and artillery strikes on the town – called Sere
Kaniye by Kurds, and Ras al-Ain by Arabs – had forced her to flee with several
members of her family.
“I am outside the town with my
sick mother. My brother is inside. I have been informed that my cousin might
have been martyred. There is no safe place for anybody,” she told the BBC
on Thursday morning, hours before rebels said the town was surrounded.
“I’m concerned about it being
the last time that I see my city,” she said.
‘Erdogan
is a liar’
Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan, has said the aim of the military operation is to create a 32km
(20-mile) deep “safe zone” along the Syrian side of the border and to
resettle up to two million Syrian refugees there.
Media captionSome residents began to
flee as smoke rose over the border town of Ras al-Ain
He has said he wants to push back from
the Turkish border members of a Syrian Kurdish militia called the People’s
Protection Units (YPG). He insists the YPG is an extension of a rebel group
that has fought for Kurdish autonomy in Turkey and is designated a terrorist
organisation by Turkey, the US and EU.
The YPG, which denies the claim, is
the dominant force in an alliance of Kurdish and Arab militias called the
Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). It has been the critical partner on the ground
in Syria for the US-led multinational coalition against the jihadist group
Islamic State (IS).
Sevinaz dismissed Mr Erdogan’s
assertion that he wants “to prevent the creation of a terror corridor
across our southern border, and to bring peace to the area”.
“He’s a liar and he wants the
Kurds to be finished. And not just Kurds, because in Sere Kaniye and all the
other cities it’s not just Kurds who are living here,” she said.
Sevinaz said she believed the SDF
and YPG’s fighters would do all they could to repel the Turkish assault, and
that ultimately they would be victorious.
“They are the children of this
land. They are our brothers and sisters,” she explained. “Even with
all the things that are happening and the silence from the world, I still
believe that the right people will win.”
Azad Cudi, a British-Iranian Kurd
who is a sniper for the YPG, told the BBC on Wednesday that US President Donald
Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from the border area in anticipation of
a Turkish offensive felt “like a stab in the back”.
The US military had previously
attempted to avert a Turkish offensive on its Kurdish allies by setting up with
the Turkish military a “security mechanism” in the border area. The
YPG co-operated by dismantling fortifications.
“In August, we came to this
‘security mechanism’ agreement,” Mr Cudi said. “Based on that, we
withdrew. We destroyed the fighting positions which were built to fight the
Turkish in case of an invasion and we handed them over to the Americans.”
‘We
have no friends but the mountains’
Mr Cudi said SDF forces were not
equipped with the heavy machine-guns and anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons
that they would need to repel a Turkish assault.
“But if there is no choice,
there is no choice. We will fight back at all costs.”
“There’s been many, many
letting down and abandoning Kurds in the past. This is what we say: ‘We have no
friends but the mountains,'” he added. “The United States, like any
other state or any other government, will do whatever serves their own best
interests. We know that.”
He said Mr Trump and other US
politicians had been “lied to” about the war with IS, and he
expressed concern about the risk of thousands of suspected IS militants being
detained in SDF prisons escaping if their guards came under attack by Turkey.
Image copyright AFP Image caption US
troops pulled back from the border on Monday in anticipation of the Turkish
assault
“[The war] is not finished, it
is not over. We wouldn’t do such a thing as losing prisoners, but imagine when
things get tough and there is a war and you are fighting on many fronts. It
will be practically difficult to control and manage these prisoners.”
He added: “The Kurds are the
only people who have fought [IS]. The Iraqi government and the Syrian
government couldn’t stand their attacks. We were the only ones who could resist
them. With us being threatened, their hope for a new caliphate may grow
again.”
Sevinaz said she believed Turkey was
also in contact with IS sleeper cells inside north-eastern Syria and would ask
them to target the Kurds. On Wednesday, several IS militants reportedly
attacked SDF posts in the region.
“I’m worried and I think soon
that there will be lots more movement from them. They already did one [attack]
next to Sere Kaniye, and… in Raqqa, and I think there will be more
soon.”
She also held out little hope of Mr
Trump carrying out his threat to “totally destroy and obliterate”
Turkey’s economy if it does anything he considers to be “off limits”.
Image copyright EPA Image caption
The Syrian Democratic Forces has said it will defend its territory “at all
costs”
“What does ‘off limits’ mean?
They’re already attacking everywhere,” she said. “They don’t care
about civilians. They don’t care about the middle of the cities.
“Donald Trump is going to do nothing. He cares about money. He doesn’t care about the 11,000 people who died while fighting and resisting against IS.”
Sevinaz insisted that she would not
flee to another part of Syria. “I will not move from Rojava. I will never
move,” she said, using the Kurdish name for the north-east of the country.
Instead, she called for people
across the world to make clear to their governments their anger at the
situation.
“The states do not care about
us. The states didn’t care about bringing their [foreign] IS prisoners back to
their countries. The states didn’t care about us being under threat for a long,
long time,” she added. “It is the time for the voices of the people,
who believe in freedom, who believe in human rights.”
It made landfall on Saturday shortly
before 19:00 local time (10:00 GMT), in Izu Peninsula, south-west of Tokyo and
moved up the east coast. Almost half a million homes were left without power.
In the town of Hakone near Mount
Fuji more than 1m (3ft) of rain fell on Friday and Saturday, the highest total
ever recorded in Japan over 48 hours.
Media captionMore than seven million
people were urged to leave their homes
Further north in Nagano prefecture,
levees along the Chikuma river gave way sending water rushing through
residential areas, inundating houses. Flood defences around Tokyo have held and
river levels are now falling, reports the BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in
Japan.
Officials said some of those killed
were swept away by landslides while others were trapped in their cars as
floodwaters rose. Another 15 people are listed as missing and dozens are
reported injured.
What
preparations were made?
More than seven million people were
urged to leave their homes as the huge storm approached, but it is thought only
50,000 stayed in shelters.
Many residents stocked up on
provisions before the typhoon’s arrival, leaving supermarkets with empty
shelves.
Image copyright Reuters Image
caption Torrential rain has caused rivers to flood huge areas
Image copyright EPA Image caption A
huge clean-up operation was under way in Kawasaki near Tokyo
“Unprecedented heavy rain has
been seen in cities, towns and villages for which the emergency warning was
issued,” Japan’s Meteorological Agency (JMA) forecaster Yasushi Kajiwara
told a press briefing.
Many bullet train services were
halted, and several lines on the Tokyo metro were suspended for most of
Saturday.
All flights to and from Tokyo’s
Haneda airport and Narita airport in Chiba have been cancelled – more than
1,000 in total.
Image copyright Reuters Image
caption Bullet trains were half submerged in Nagano, central Japan
Two Rugby World Cup games scheduled
for Saturday were cancelled on safety grounds and declared as draws –
England-France and New Zealand-Italy. The cancellations were the first in the
tournament’s 32-year history.
Sunday’s Namibia-Canada match due to
take place in Kamaishi was also cancelled and declared a draw.
The US-Tonga fixture in Osaka and
Wales-Uruguay in Kumamoto will go ahead as scheduled on Sunday, organisers
said.
Meanwhile, a crunch game between
Scotland and tournament hosts Japan on Sunday will now go ahead. The decision
followed a safety inspection.
Local resident James Babb spoke to
the BBC from an evacuation centre in Hachioji, western Tokyo. He said the river
near his house was on the brink of overflowing.
“I am with my sister-in-law,
who is disabled,” he said. “Our house may flood. They have given us a
blanket and a biscuit.”
Image copyright Reuters Image
caption Tornado-like winds whipped up by the typhoon struck east of Tokyo
Andrew Higgins, an English teacher
who lives in Tochigi, north of Tokyo, told the BBC he had “lived through a
few typhoons” during seven years in Japan.
“I feel like this time Japan,
generally, has taken this typhoon a lot more seriously,” he said.
“People were out preparing last night. A lot of people were stocking
up.”
Only last month Typhoon Faxai
wreaked havoc on parts of Japan, damaging 30,000 homes, most of which have not
yet been repaired.
“I evacuated because my roof
was ripped off by the other typhoon and rain came in. I’m so worried about my
house,” a 93-year-old man told NHK, from a shelter in Tateyama, Chiba.
Japan suffers about 20 typhoons a
year, but Tokyo is rarely hit on this scale.
Image copyright Getty Images Image
caption Shopkeepers tried to protect their stores from the powerful winds and
rain
Image copyright AFP Image caption Many
supermarket were left empty as people stocked up
In this powerful, personal talk,
author and academic Juan Enriquez shares stories from inside the immigration
crisis at the US-Mexico border, bringing this often-abstract debate back down
to earth — and showing what you can do every day to create a sense of
belonging for immigrants. “This isn’t about kids and borders,” he
says. “It’s about us. This is about who we are, who we the people are, as
a nation and as individuals.”
This talk was presented at an
official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
For the past 20 years, photographer
and TED Fellow Jon Lowenstein has documented the migrant journey from Latin
America to the United States, one of the largest transnational migrations in
world history. Sharing photos from his decade-long project “Shadow Lives
USA,” Lowenstein takes us into the inner worlds of the families escaping
poverty and violence in Central America — and pieces together the complex
reasons people leave their homes in search of a better life.
This talk was presented at an
official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
Refugee and immigrants rights
attorney Melanie Nezer shares an urgently needed historical perspective on the
crisis at the southern US border, showing how citizens can hold their
governments accountable for protecting the vulnerable. “A country shows
strength through compassion and pragmatism, not through force and through
fear,” she says.
This talk was presented to a local
audience at TEDxMidAtlantic, an independent event. TED’s editors chose to
feature it for you.
TEDx was created in the spirit of
TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading.” It supports independent organizers who
want to create a TED-like event in their own community.
About 60 million people around the globe
have been forced to leave their homes to escape war, violence and persecution. The
majority have become Internally Displaced Persons, meaning they fled their
homes but are still in their own countries. Others, referred to as refugees,
sought shelter outside their own country. But what does that term really mean?
Benedetta Berti and Evelien Borgman explain. [Directed by Biljana Labovic,
narrated by Susan Zimmerman, music by David Obuchowski and Peter Linder].
Chris
Perani uses macro photography to capture the microscopic details
found on butterflies’ wings, such as multi-colored hairs and iridescent
scales. To photograph with such precision, the photographer uses a 10x
microscope objective attached to a 200mm lens, which presents an almost
non-existent depth of field. “The lens must be moved no more than 3 microns per
photo to achieve focus across the thickness of the subject which can be up to 8
millimeters,” Perani explains to Colossal. “This yields 350 exposures, each
with a sliver in focus, that must be composited together.” In total this
accounts for 2,100 separate exposures combined into a single image. For more
detailed observations of butterfly wings, visit Perani’s
website. (via Colossal Submissions)
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has
decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2019 to Ethiopian Prime Minister
Abiy Ahmed Ali for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation,
and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict
with neighbouring Eritrea. The prize is also meant to recognise all the
stakeholders working for peace and reconciliation in Ethiopia and in the East
and Northeast African regions.
When Abiy Ahmed became Prime
Minister in April 2018, he made it clear that he wished to resume peace talks
with Eritrea. In close cooperation with Isaias Afwerki, the President of
Eritrea, Abiy Ahmed quickly worked out the principles of a peace agreement to
end the long “no peace, no war” stalemate between the two countries. These
principles are set out in the declarations that Prime Minister Abiy and
President Afwerki signed in Asmara and Jeddah last July and September. An
important premise for the breakthrough was Abiy Ahmed’s unconditional
willingness to accept the arbitration ruling of an international boundary
commission in 2002.
Peace does not arise from the
actions of one party alone. When Prime Minister Abiy reached out his hand,
President Afwerki grasped it, and helped to formalise the peace process between
the two countries. The Norwegian Nobel Committee hopes the peace agreement will
help to bring about positive change for the entire populations of Ethiopia and
Eritrea.
In Ethiopia, even if much work
remains, Abiy Ahmed has initiated important reforms that give many citizens
hope for a better life and a brighter future. He spent his first 100 days as
Prime Minister lifting the country’s state of emergency, granting amnesty to
thousands of political prisoners, discontinuing media censorship, legalising
outlawed opposition groups, dismissing military and civilian leaders who were
suspected of corruption, and significantly increasing the influence of women in
Ethiopian political and community life. He has also pledged to strengthen
democracy by holding free and fair elections.
In the wake of the peace process
with Eritrea, Prime Minister Abiy has engaged in other peace and reconciliation
processes in East and Northeast Africa. In September 2018 he and his government
contributed actively to the normalisation of diplomatic relations between
Eritrea and Djibouti after many years of political hostility. Additionally,
Abiy Ahmed has sought to mediate between Kenya and Somalia in their protracted
conflict over rights to a disputed marine area. There is now hope for a
resolution to this conflict. In Sudan, the military regime and the opposition
have returned to the negotiating table. On the 17th of August, they
released a joint draft of a new constitution intended to secure a peaceful
transition to civil rule in the country. Prime Minister Abiy played a key role
in the process that led to the agreement.
Ethiopia is a country of many
different languages and peoples. Lately, old ethnic rivalries have flared up.
According to international observers, up to three million Ethiopians may be
internally displaced. That is in addition to the million or so refugees and
asylum seekers from neighbouring countries. As Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed has sought
to promote reconciliation, solidarity and social justice. However, many
challenges remain unresolved. Ethnic strife continues to escalate, and we have
seen troubling examples of this in recent weeks and months. No doubt some
people will think this year’s prize is being awarded too early. The Norwegian
Nobel Committee believes it is now that Abiy Ahmed’s efforts deserve
recognition and need encouragement.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee hopes
that the Nobel Peace Prize will strengthen Prime Minister Abiy in his important
work for peace and reconciliation. Ethiopia is Africa’s second most populous
country and has East Africa’s largest economy. A peaceful, stable and
successful Ethiopia will have many positive side-effects, and will help to
strengthen fraternity among nations and peoples in the region. With the
provisions of Alfred Nobel’s will firmly in mind, the Norwegian Nobel Committee
sees Abiy Ahmed as the person who in the preceding year has done the most to
deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for 2019.
Listen to the call between Ethiopian
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali and Olav Njølstad, Secretary of the Norwegian
Nobel Committee, recorded shortly after the public announcement of the 2019
Nobel Peace Prize.
Immediately after hearing news of
the award of Nobel Peace Prize, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali
answered two quick questions from Adam Smith. He describes the encouragement
and energy that the prize will provide, both to his and others’ ongoing efforts
towards achieving peace in their region, and to those who are trying to work
for peace worldwide. Copyright Nobel Media
The Nobel Peace Prize 2019 was
awarded to Abiy Ahmed Ali “for his efforts to achieve peace and
international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to
resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea.” The Nobel Peace
Prize 2019 was announced at The Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway. #nobelprize
This article is
about a person whose name ends in a patronymic rather than a family name. The article
properly refers to the person by his given name, Abiy, and not as Ahmed.
A former army intelligence
officer, since becoming prime minister Abiy has launched a wide programme of
political and economic reforms,[5] not all of which have met with favour
by supporters of the federalism-based
constitution/system of Ethiopia
and in Tigray (in which
Abiy’s shake-up of the Ethiopian state that has targeted Tigrayans is seen as selective).[6][7]
Abiy is the 13th child of his
polygamous father and the sixth and youngest child of his mother.[9][16] His childhood name was Abiyot
(English: “Revolution”). The name was sometimes given to children in
the aftermath of the Derg revolution of 1974.[9] The then Abiyot went to the local
primary school and later continued his studies at secondary schools in Agaro
town. Abiy, according to several personal reports, was always very interested
in his own education and later in his life also encouraged others to learn and
to improve.[9]
Abiy, who had started his Doctor of Philosophy
(Ph.D.) work several years ago as a regular student,[20] completed his Ph.D. in 2017 at the Institute
for Peace and Security Studies, Addis Ababa University.
He did his Ph.D. work on the Agaro constituency with the PhD
thesis entitled “Social Capital and its Role in Traditional Conflict
Resolution in Ethiopia: The Case of Inter-Religious Conflict In Jimma Zone
State”. As a follow-up to his Ph.D. thesis, he published a research
article on de-escalation
strategies in the Horn of Africa in a special journal issue dedicated to countering
violent extremism.[21]
Personal
life
He met and married his wife, Zinash
Tayachew, an Amhara woman from Gondar,[22][9][16] while both were serving in the
Ethiopian Defense Forces.[23] They are the parents of three
daughters and one recently adopted son.[23] Abiy is multilingual and speaks Afaan Oromo, Amharic, Tigrinya, and English.[24] He is a fitness aficionado and
professes that physical health goes hand in hand with mental health and, as
such, he frequents physical and gym activities in Addis Ababa.[23] Abiy is a devout EvangelicalPentecostal
Christian of the Full
Gospel Believers’ Church.[25]
Military
career
As a teenager and in early 1991,[26] he joined the armed struggle against
the Marxist–Leninistregime
of Mengistu Haile Mariam
after the death of his oldest brother. He did so as a member of ODP (Oromo Democratic
Party), which at that time was a tiny organization of only around
200 fighters in the large coalition army of about 100,000 fighters that resulted
in the regime’s fall later that year.[24][9][23] As there were only so few ODP fighters
in an army with its core of about 90,000 Tigrayans, Abiy quickly had to learn the Tigrinya language. As a speaker of Tigrinya in a
security apparatus dominated by Tigrayans, he could move forward with his military
career.[24]
After the fall of the Derg, he took
formal military training from Assefa Brigade in West Wollega and was stationed there. His
military post was in intelligence and communications. Later on he became a
soldier in the now Ethiopian National Defense Force in 1993 and worked mostly
in the intelligence and communications departments. In 1995, after the Rwandan genocide, he was deployed as a member of
the United
Nations Peace Keeping Force (UNAMIR), Kigali, Rwanda.[27] In the Ethio-Eritrea War
between 1998 and 2000, he led an intelligence team to discover positions of the
Eritrean Defence
Forces.[28]
Later on, Abiy was posted back to
his home town of Beshasha, where he – as an officer of the Defense Forces – had
to address a critical situation of inter-religious clashes between Muslims and
Christians with a number of deaths.[24][29] He brought calm and peace in a
situation of communal tensions accompanying the clashes.[24] In later years, following his election
as an MP, he continued these efforts to bring about reconciliation between the
religions through the creation of the Religious Forum for Peace.[28]
In 2008, Abiy was one of the
co-founders of the Ethiopian Information Network Security Agency (INSA), where
he worked in different positions.[9] For two years, he was acting director
of INSA due to a leave of absence
of the director assigned to the post.[9] In this capacity, he was board member
of several government agencies working on information and communications, like Ethio Telecom and Ethiopian
Television. In 2010, Abiy eventually decided to leave the military
and his post as deputy director of INSA to become a politician. The highest
rank he had achieved during his military career was that of a Lieutenant Colonel.[21][24]
In the 2010 national election, Abiy
represented the woreda of Agaro
and became an elected member of the House of
Peoples’ Representatives, the lower chamber of the Ethiopian Federal
Parliamentary Assembly. Before and during his time of parliamentary
service, there were several religious clashes among Muslims and Christians in Jimma zone. Some of these confrontations turned
violent and resulted in the loss of life and property. Abiy, as an elected
member of parliament took a proactive role in working with several religious
institutions and elders to bring about reconciliation in the zone. He was then
setting up a forum entitled “Religious Forum for Peace”, an
outcome of the need to devise a sustainable resolution mechanism to restore
peaceful Muslim-Christian community interaction in the region.[21]
In 2014, during his time in
parliament, Abiy became the Director General of a new and in 2011 founded
Government Research Institute called Science and Technology Information Center (STIC).[9][31] The year after, in 2015, Abiy became
an executive member of ODP. The same year he was elected to the House of
Peoples’ Representatives for a second term, this time for his home woreda of Gomma.[32]
Rise
to power
Starting from 2015, Abiy became one
of the central figures in the violent fight against illegal land grabbing activities in Oromia Region and
especially around Addis Ababa. Although the
Addis Ababa Master Plan at the heart of the land-grabbing plans was stopped in
2016, the disputes continued for some time resulting in injuries and deaths.[33] It was this fight against
land-grabbing, that finally boosted Abiy’s political career, brought him into
the spotlight and allowed him to climb the political ladder.[24]
Oromia Urban Development and
Planning Office
In October 2015, Abiy became the
Ethiopian Minister
of Science and Technology (MoST), a post which he left after only 12
months. From October 2016 on, Abiy served as Deputy President of Oromia Region as part of the team of Oromia
Region’s president Lemma Megersa while
staying a member of the Ethiopian Federal House of Peoples’ Representatives.[34][35] Abiy also became the head of the
Oromia Urban Development and Planning Office. In this role, Abiy was expected
to be the major driving force behind Oromia Economic Revolution, Oromia Land
and Investment reform, youth employment as well as resistance to widespread
land grabbing in Oromia region.[36] As one of his duties in office, he
took care of the displaced one million Oromo people from Somali region during the 2017 unrest.[37]
As head of ODP Secretariat
from October 2017, Abiy crossed over religious and ethnic divides to facilitate
the formation of a new alliance between Oromo and the Amhara groups, both making up two thirds of the
100 million Ethiopian population.[38]
In early 2018, a lot of political
observers considered Abiy and Lemma as the most popular politicians within the
majority of the Oromo community and other Ethiopian communities.[39][40] This came after several years of
unrest in Ethiopia. But despite this favourable rating for Abiy and Lemma,
young people from Oromia Region called for immediate action without delays to
bring fundamental change and freedom to Oromia Region and Ethiopia – otherwise
more unrest was to be expected.[33] According to Abiy himself, people are
asking for a different rhetoric, with an open and respectful discussion in the
political space to allow political progress and to win people for democracy
instead of pushing them.[33]
Until early 2018, Abiy continued to
serve as head of the ODP secretariat and of the Oromia Housing and Urban
Development Office and as Deputy President of Oromia Region. Then he left all
these posts after his election as Leader of EPRDF.[41][34]
EPRDF
leadership election
Following three years of protest and
unrest, on 15 February 2018 the Ethiopian Prime Minister, Hailemariam Desalegn,
announced his resignation – meaning that he also resigned from the post of
EPRDF Chairman. Historically, the incoming EPRDF Chairman is the next Prime
Minister. The EPRDF Chairman on the other hand is one of the heads of the four
parties that make up the ruling coalition: ODP, ADP, SEPDM and TPLF.[42]
Hailemariam’s resignation triggered
the first ever contested leadership election among EPRDF coalition members to
replace him. A lot of political observers made Lemma Megersa (the ODP Chairman) and Abiy the
front-runners to become the Leader of the ruling coalition and eventually Prime Minister of
Ethiopia. Despite being the clear favourite for the general public,
Lemma Megersa was not a member of the national parliament, a pre-condition to
become Prime Minister as required by the Ethiopian constitution. Therefore,
Lemma was excluded from the leadership race.[43] On 22 February 2018, Lemma’s party,
ODP, called for an emergency executive committee meeting and replaced Lemma as
Chairman of ODP with Abiy. Abiy had the advantage of being a Member of
Parliament in contrast to Lemma, and some observers saw that as a strategic
move by the ODP to retain its leadership role within the coalition and to
promote Abiy to become Prime Minister.[32]
On 1 March 2018, the 180 EPRDF executive
committee members started their meeting to elect the leader of the party. Each
of the four parties sent in 45 members. The contest for the leadership was
among Abiy of ODP, Demeke Mekonnen,
the Deputy Prime Minister and ADP leader, Shiferaw Shigute as Chairman of SEPDM and Debretsion
Gebremichael as the Leader of TPLF. Despite being the overwhelming
favorite by the majority of Ethiopians, Abiy faced major opposition from TPLF
and SEPDM members during the leadership discussions.[44]
On 27 March 2018, a few hours before
the beginning of the leadership elections, Demeke Mekonnen, who had been seen
as the major opponent to Abiy, dropped out of the race. Many observers saw this
as an endorsement of Abiy. Demeke was then approved as Deputy Prime Minister and
got another term in that post. Following Demeke’s exit, Abiy received a
presumably unanimous vote from both the ADP and ODP executive members, with 18
additional votes in a secret ballot coming from elsewhere. By midnight, Abiy
was declared Chairman of the ruling coalition in Ethiopia, the EPRDF, and was
considered as the Prime Minister Designate of Ethiopia by receiving 108 votes
while Shiferaw Shigute received 58 and Debretsion Gebremichael received 2
votes.[3] On 2 April 2018, Abiy was elected as
Prime Minister of Ethiopia by the House of Representatives and sworn in.[2]
Prime
Minister of Ethiopia
On 2 April 2018, Abiy was confirmed
and sworn in by the Ethiopian parliament as Prime Minister of
Ethiopia. During his acceptance speech, he promised political
reform; to promote the unity of Ethiopia and unity among the peoples of
Ethiopia; to reach out to the Eritrean government to resolve the ongoing
Eritrean–Ethiopian border conflict after the Eritrean–Ethiopian War
and to also reach out to the political opposition inside and outside of
Ethiopia. His acceptance speech sparked optimism and received an overwhelmingly
positive reaction from the Ethiopian public including the opposition groups
inside and outside Ethiopia. Following his speech, his popularity and support
across the country reached an historical high and some political observers
argued that Abiy was overwhelmingly more popular than the ruling party
coalition, the EPRDF.[3]
Domestic
policy
Since taking office in April 2018,
Abiy’s government has presided over the release of thousands of political
prisoners from Ethiopian jails and the rapid opening of the country’s political
landscape.[45][46][47] In May 2018 alone the Oromo region
pardoned over 7,600 prisoners.[48] On 29 May Ginbot 7 leader Andargachew Tsege, facing the death penalty on
terrorism charges, was released after being pardoned by President Mulatu Teshome, along with 575 other detainees.[49]
That same day, charges were dropped
against Andargachew’s colleague Berhanu Nega and the Oromo dissident and public
intellectual Jawar Mohammed, as
well as their respectively affiliated US-based ESAT
and OMN
satellite television networks.[50] Shortly thereafter, Abiy took the
“unprecedented and previously unimaginable” step of meeting
Andargachew, who twenty-four hours previously had been on death row, at his
office; a move even critics of the ruling party termed “bold and remarkable”.[51] Abiy had previously met former Oromo Liberation Front
leaders including founder Lencho Letta, who had
committed to peaceful participation in the political process, upon their
arrival at Bole International
Airport.[52]
On 30 May 2018, it was announced the
ruling party would amend the country’s “draconian” anti-terrorism law,
widely perceived as a tool of political repression. On 1 June 2018, Abiy
announced the government would seek to end the state of emergency two months in
advance of the expiration its six-month tenure, citing an improved domestic
situation. On 4 June 2018, Parliament approved the necessary legislation,
ending the state of emergency.[47] In his first briefing to the House of
Peoples’ Representatives in June 2018, Abiy countered criticism of
his government’s release of convicted “terrorists” which according to
the opposition is just a name the EPRDF gives you if you are a
part or even meet the “opposition”. He argued that policies that
sanctioned arbitrary detention and torture themselves constituted
extra-constitutional acts of terror aimed at suppressing opposition.[53] This followed the additional pardon of
304 prisoners (289 of which had been sentenced on terrorism-related charges) on
15 June.[54]
The pace of reforms has revealed
fissures within the ruling coalition, with hardliners in the military and the
hitherto dominant TPLF said to be “seething” at the end
of the state of emergency and the release of political prisoners.[55] These hardliners, centered around TPLF
chief Debretsion
Gebremichael, had grown to deeply resent the leadership of Abiy’s
predecessor Hailemariam (at times supposedly bringing him to the brink of
tears), and had hoped to place a more assertive figure in the prime minister’s
office willing to “act with an iron fist”, rather than a reformist.[56]
An editorial on the previously
pro-government website Tigrai Online arguing for the maintenance of the state
of emergency gave voice to this sentiment, saying that Abiy was “doing too
much too fast”.[57] Another article critical of the
release of political prisoners suggested that Ethiopia’s criminal justice
system had become a revolving door and that Abiy’s administration had quite
inexplicably been rushing to pardon and release thousands of prisoners, among
them many deadly criminals and dangerous arsonists.[58] On 13 June 2018, the TPLF executive
committee denounced the decisions to hand over Badme and privatize SOEs as
“fundamentally flawed”, saying that the ruling coalition suffered
from a fundamental leadership deficit.[59]
Constitutional
reform
In his briefing to parliament of 18
June 2018, Abiy announced that he would set up a commission aimed at reviewing
the divisive system of ethnic federalism,
which he said was failing to adequately deal with the proliferation of
localized disputes over which particular ethnicity was entitled to control
certain towns and districts, potentially paving the way for sweeping
constitutional reform.[60]
In June 2018, the ruling coalition
announced its intention to pursue the large-scale privatisation of state-owned
enterprises and the liberalization of several key economic sectors
long considered off-limits, marking a landmark shift in the country’s
state-oriented development model.[61]
State monopolies in the
telecommunications, aviation, electricity, and logistics sectors are to be ended
and those industries opened up to private sector competition.[62] Shares in the state-owned firms in
those sectors, including Ethiopian Airlines,
Africa’s largest and most profitable, are to be offered for purchase
to both domestic and foreign investors, although the government will continue to
hold a majority share in these firms, thereby retaining control of the commanding
heights of the economy.[63] State-owned enterprises in sectors
deemed less critical, including railway operators, sugar, industrial parks,
hotels and various manufacturing firms, may be fully privatised.[64]
Aside from representing an ideological
shift with respect to views on the degree of government control over the economy,
the move was seen as a pragmatic measure aimed at improving the country’s
dwindling foreign-exchange
reserves, which by the end of the 2017 fiscal year were equal in
value to less than two months worth of imports, as well as easing its growing sovereign debt load.[63][61]
In June 2018, Abiy announced the government’s
intention to establish an Ethiopian stock exchange in tandem with the privatization
of state-owned enterprises.[60] As of 2015 Ethiopia was the largest
country in the world, in terms of both population and gross domestic product,
without a stock exchange.[65]
Foreign
policy
In May 2018, Abiy visited Saudi
Arabia, receiving guarantees for the release of Ethiopian prisoners including
billionaire entrepreneur Mohammed Hussein Al
Amoudi, who was detained following the 2017 Saudi Arabian
purge.[45]
In June 2018, he met with Egyptian
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
in Cairo and, separately, brokered a meeting in Addis Ababa between the South
Sudanese president Salva Kiir and rebel leader Rieck Machar in an attempt to
encourage peace talks.[66]
Djibouti
and port agreements
Abiy with President Guelleh of Djibouti
Since taking power Abiy has pursued
a policy of expanding landlocked Ethiopia’s access to ports in the Horn of
Africa region. Shortly before his assumption of office it was announced that
the Ethiopian government would take a 19% stake in Berbera Port in the unrecognized Republic of Somaliland
as part of a joint venture with DP World.[67] In May 2018, Ethiopia signed an
agreement with the government of Djibouti to take an equity stake in the Port of Djibouti, enabling Ethiopia to have a say
in the port’s development and the setting of port handling fees.[68]
Two days later a similar agreement
was signed with the Sudanese government granting Ethiopia an ownership stake in
the Port of Port Sudan. The Ethio-Djibouti agreement
grants the Djiboutian government the option of taking stakes in state-owned
Ethiopian firms in return, such as the Ethiopian Airlines
and Ethio Telecom.[69] This in turn was followed shortly
thereafter by an announcement that Abiy and Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta had reached an agreement for the
construction of an Ethiopian logistics facility at Lamu
Port as part of the Lamu Port and Lamu-Southern Sudan-Ethiopia Transport
Corridor (LAPSSET) project.[70]
The potential normalization of Ethiopia-Eritrea
relations likewise opens the possibility for Ethiopia to resume
using the Ports of Massawa and Asseb,
which, prior to the Ethio-Eritrean conflict, were its main ports, which would
be of particular benefit to the northern region of Tigray.[61] All these developments would reduce
Ethiopian reliance on Djibouti’s port which, since 1998, has handled almost all
of Ethiopia’s maritime traffic.[71][69]
Upon taking office, Abiy stated his
willingness to negotiate an end to the Ethio-Eritrean conflict. In June 2018,
it was announced that the government had agreed to hand over the disputed
border town of Badme to Eritrea, thereby complying with the
terms of the 2000 Algiers Agreement
to bring an end to the state of tension between Eritrea and Ethiopia that had
persisted despite the end of hostilities during the Ethiopia-Eritrea War.[61] Ethiopia had until then rejected the
international boundary commission’s ruling awarding Badme to Eritrea, resulting
in a frozen conflict
(popularly termed a policy of “no war, but no peace”) between the two
states.[72]
Abiy and President Isaias Afwerki of
Eritrea
During the national celebration on
20 June 2018, the president of Eritrea, Isaias Afwerki, accepted the peace initiative put
forward by Abiy and suggested that he would send a delegation to Addis Ababa.
On 26 June 2018, Eritrean Foreign Minister Osman Saleh Mohammed
visited Addis Ababa in the first Eritrean high-level delegation to Ethiopia in
over two decades.[73]
In Asmara, on 8 July 2018, Abiy became the first
Ethiopian leader to meet with an Eritrean counterpart in over two decades, in
the 2018 Eritrea–Ethiopia
summit.[74] The very next day, the two signed a
“Joint Declaration of Peace and Friendship” declaring an end to
tensions and agreeing, amongst other matters, to re-establish diplomatic
relations; reopen direct telecommunication, road, and aviation links; and
facilitate Ethiopian use of the ports of Massawa and Asseb.[75][76][77] Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for his efforts in
ending the war.[8]
Religious
harmony
Abiy with one of the Patriarchs of
the Orthodox Tewahedo Church
Ethiopia is a country of various
religious groups, primarily Christian and Muslim communities. Both
inter-religious and intra-religious divisions and conflicts were a major
concern, where both the Ethiopian
Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Ethiopian Islamic Council
experienced religious and administrative divisions and conflicts.[78][79] In 2018, he was given a special
“peace and reconciliation” award by the Ethiopian Church for his work
in reconciliating rival factions within the church.[80]
Abiy with the Ethiopian Muslim Grand
Mufti
Security
sector reform
In June 2018, Abiy, speaking to
senior commanders of the Ethiopian
National Defense Force (ENDF) declared his intention to carry out
reforms of the military to strengthen its effectiveness and professionalism, with
the view of limiting its role in politics. This followed renewed calls both
within Ethiopia and from international human rights groups, namely Amnesty International,
to dissolve highly controversial regional militias such as the Liyyu
force.[81] This move is considered likely to face
resistance from TPLF hardliners, who occupy much of the military
high command.[82]
Notably, he has also called for the
eventual reconstitution of the Ethiopian Navy, dissolved in 1996 in the
aftermath of Eritrea’s secession after an extraterritorial sojourn in Djibouti, saying that “we should build our
naval force capacity in the future.”[83] It was reported that this move would
appeal to nationalists still smarting from the country’s loss of its coastline
25 years prior. Ethiopia already has a maritime training institute on Lake Tana as well as a national
shipping line.
A large peaceful demonstration was
organized in Addis Ababa at Meskel Square on 23 June 2018 to show support for
the new prime minister. Just after Abiy had finished addressing the crowd a
grenade was thrown and landed just 17 metres away from where he and other top
officials were sitting. Two people were killed and over 165 were injured.
Following the attack, 9 police officials were detained, including the deputy
police commissioner, Girma Kassa, who was fired immediately. Questions were
asked as to how a police car carrying attackers got so close to the prime
minister and soon after the car was set alight destroying evidence. After the
attack the prime minister addressed the nation on national TV unhurt by the
blast and describing it as an “unsuccessful attempt by forces who do not
want to see Ethiopia united”. On the same day the prime minister made an
unannounced visit to the Black Lion general hospital to meet victims of the
attack.[87][88][89][90]
Cabinet
reshuffle
In the parliamentary session held on
16 October 2018, Abiy proposed to reduce the number of ministries from 28 to 20
with half of the cabinet positions for female ministers, a first in the history
of the country.[91] The new cabinet restructure included the
first female president, Sahle-Work Zewde;
the first female minister of the Ministry of
Defense, Aisha Mohammed Musa;[92] the first female minister of the new
Ministry of Peace, Muferiat Kamil
responsible for the Ethiopian Federal Police and the intelligence agencies; the
first female press secretary for the Office of the Prime Minister, Billene Seyoum
Woldeyes.[93]
Increasing
ethnic unrest
The internal political power shift
has created fears for Tigrayans, and already “simmering anti-Tigrayan
sentiments have led to violence” people told IRIN,
“from barricading roads and forcibly stopping traffic to looting and
attacks on Tigrayan homes and businesses in the Amhara and Oromia
regions”. Tens of thousands Ethiopian Tigrayans have been displaced from
their homes (or killed), due to ethnic based violence, since Abiy assumed
office.[94][95][96][97]
Since the 2018 election of Abiy,
around 1.5 million Ethiopians were forced from their homes by ethnic violence –
the highest number of internally
displaced persons (IDPs) of any country in 2018.[98][99][100][101][102]
Some of the worst calamities were in
the south, where more than 800,000 Ethiopian Gedeos[103] have fled from the district of West Guji amid persecution by the Oromo Liberation Front.
Abiy’s government has been accused by humanitarian groups of ignoring the
ethnic violence and withholding of aid from Gedeon refugees.[104][105]
In the north of Ethiopia, and
especially in Tigray which was the cradle of the successful revolt against the Derg
that in 1991 put in place the current governing coalition, there are reports of
increasing anger and ethnic tension as Abiy’s shake-up of the Ethiopian state,
which has targeted Tigrayans in top positions, is widely seen as biased and
vindictive.[6][106]
Government spokesmen have countered
that there are many ex-officials accused of amassing billions in the past
decades that are wanted by law enforcement on corruption charges and that many
of these defendants come from the ruling Tigrayan elite of the past decades. These
legal proceedings are sometimes conflated with ethnic persecution, especially
by those ex-officials that fear persecution.[107]
Debretsion
Gebremichael, the acting President of Tigray Region and currently chairman of the Tigray
People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and part of the EPRDF ruling coalition, has been reported as having
accused prime minister Abiy of “conducting ethnic profiling in the name of
fighting corruption” and described “recent arrests of senior military
officials as being politically motivated and implemented along ethnic
lines”,[108] and his criticisms are echoed by
other prominent TPLF
members and people of Tigray.[109][110][111][7] A local University law professor that IRIN
talked to, added and said “there is a lot of [lies] and propaganda, and the
TPLF has been made the scapegoat for all vice”.[94] Abiy has also sacked around 160
Tigrayan army Generals and much
more lower ranking army officers, in his reforms.[106]
In a March 2019 interview with the Financial Times of London, Debretsion
Gebremichael said “concentrating on one ethnic group is dangerous”, when talking
about Abiy’s crack-down on Tigrayan government workers and politicians, and the
fact that Abiy is calling them “daytime hyenas” (a phrase being
interpreted as an ethnic slur).[112]
Nominee for Tipperary
International Peace Award alongside Mary Robinson (the eventual winner); Aya Chebbi; humanitarian worker in South Sudan Orla Treacy; the President of Eritrea, Isaias
Afwerki; Swedish student and climate change activist Greta Thunberg and Nigerian humanitarian
activist Zannah
Bukar Mustapha[117]
This week on Africa Weekly, pride in
Ethiopia, as Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize.
We take a look at his first year and a half in office. We also head to
Madagascar, where access to electricity is increasingly proving a luxury for
the few who can afford it. Subscribe to AFP and activate your notifications to
get the latest news ? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC86db…
EXPLAINED: Why Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed Ali has been
awarded Nobel Peace Prize 2019, and not Greta Thunberg
Ethiopian
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali has been awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace
Prize for 2019, defeating Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. The
Norwegian Nobel Committee chose Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali as the
Nobel Peace Prize winner 2019 for his efforts to achieve peace and
international cooperation. The Nobel Peace Prize 2019 award has gone to the
Ethiopian Prime Minister particularly for his decisive initiative to resolve
the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed
Ali has been awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize for 2019, defeating
Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. The Norwegian Nobel Committee chose
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali as the Nobel Peace Prize winner 2019
for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation. The Nobel Peace
Prize 2019 award has gone to the Ethiopian Prime Minister particularly for his
decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea.
The Nobel Peace Prize 2019 also recognises all the stakeholders working for
peace and reconciliation in Ethiopia and in the East and Northeast Agrican
regions.
Story of Ethiopian PM Abiy Ahmed Ali’s peacemaking
efforts:
Abiy Ahmed Ali assumed office as the
Ethopian Prime Minister in April 2018, he was clear on resuming peace talks
with Eritrea. In a bid to end the long “no peace, no war” stalemate
between the two countries, Abiy Ahmed worked out certain principles of a peace
agreement in close cooperation with President of Eritrea Isaias
Afwerki. These principles are set out in the declarations that Ethiopian
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali and President Afwerki signed in Asmara and Jeddah
last July and September. What came as a breakthrough was Abiy Ahmed’s
unconditional willingness to accept the arbitration ruling of an international
boundary commission in 2002.
Both Prime Minister Abiy and
President Afwerki helped formalise the peace process between the two counties.
Prime Minister Abiy has initiated important reforms in Ethiopia that give many
citizens hope for a better life and a brighter future. In his first 100 days as
Prime Minister, Abiy lifted the country’s state of emergency, granting amnesty
to thousands of political prisoners, discontinuing media censorship, legalising
outlawed opposition groups, dismissing military and civilian leaders who were
suspected corruption, and significantly increasing the influence of women in
Ethiopian political and community life. Prime Minister Abiy also engaged
with other peace and reconciliation processes in East and Northeast
Africa. The Norwegian Nobel Committee sees Abiy Ahmed as the person who in
the preceding year has done the most to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for 2019.
On a day when the Nobel Peace Prize
2019 is announced, we remember 16-year-old environmental activist Greta
Thunberg too for her histrionics at the United Nations last month. The young
Swedish activist furiously attacked world leaders at the United Nations with a
fiery speech, and asked: “How dare you?”. Not just that. Greta’s
stare at US President Donald Trump when he arrived to attend a meeting on
religious freedom was also caught on camera. She was hailed by some, and
criticised by some. A lot many had predicted Greta Thunberg as the Nobel Peace
Prize winner, but that clearly didn’t happen.
Ing and John’s Street
Art, Downtown Newark, New Jersey, USA Part 1
I love street art for many reasons.
First of all, the artwork is there for the public. It is for everyone who
passes to their destination. Without spending time visiting art galleries
or museums, they can see art while they are going to work or getting lunch.
Some may pay attention to the artwork and some may not. Some may ask
questions about the artwork. I hope, at least the artwork will activate
the thought process of those passing by.
I love plants and flowers. It
makes me happy when I see the freshness of green leaves and beautiful flowers
blooming. Our shop is closed temporally, and the window gate is
down. I thought that if I display our artwork and some of the plants from our
backyard garden in front of the shop gate, it would make it more pleasant for
the people who pass by. I am happy to do it, and I hope the artwork and
the plants will help the downtown office workers or others feel fresh and
lively.
My first day of Street art was on
Friday, July 26, 2019. I took some plants from our backyard garden to
display in front of our shop. I started my first display of artwork with
“Elephants at the Water Lily Pond” I produced in 1999. There are always
people walking by our place, but more during lunch time. Most of them are
the office workers. Also, in the evening, people walk by going home from
work. Some people are interested in the artwork, and ask questions, while
others are oblivious to the artwork that I display.
One week later I changed my artwork
to, “By the Water Lily Pond”, which produced in 1998. I added more plants
to my display, when the pink blossom flowers of Rose Queen were in full bloom.
This artwork of mine titled, “I Have
A Dream – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr”, I displayed from, Wednesday, August 14,
2019, to August 21, 2019. I produced this work in 2010. I also
added more plants to fill the front of shop space.
My Thai classical artwork was displayed on Thursday, August
22, 2019. I produced this artwork in1994.
On Monday, August 28, 2019 John
added his work to the display. John’s artwork is on the far left,
“Impossible Dreamer”. “Gandhi Man of Peace”, in the middle is my artwork,
which I produced in 2000. The far right is John’s artwork “Beneath the
Lake”. Thanks to John Watts, my husband, for helping to display the
artwork in a better presentation.
Ing-On Vibulbhan-Watts and John
Watts, Thursday, October 10, 2019
Based on an update to
his website this morning it appears Banksy visited
the Jungle Refugee Camp in Calais, France, one of the largest refugee camps in
western Europe. The artist left behind four new artworks, most notably a piece
featuring Steve Jobs carrying an early Macintosh computer and a sack over his
shoulder noting his background as a “son of a migrant from Syria,” (Jobs was
adopted, but his biological father was from Syria). In another piece he
references Géricault’s famous Raft of Medusa painting, depicting an imperiled group
of people on a sinking raft as they hail a modern cruise ship just on the horizon.
The artist previously brought attention to the refuge crisis in a piece at Dismaland earlier this year.
In addition to the artworks, part of
Banksy’s team installed 12 permanent structures and a makeshift playground
inside the squalid Jungle camp using materials left behind from Dismaland, a
project he refers to as Dismal Aid.
One of the best ways you can help
Syrian refugees is through donations to the UN Refugee Agency.
French artist Julien
Malland, aka Seth Globepainter (previously),
has spent the summer exhibiting a large body of work inside and outside of the Institut Culturel Bernard Magrez. Located in Bordeaux, France, the historic chateau was
built in the 18th century and now doubles as a cultural center.
Malland’s takeover includes dozens
of paintings, installations, and sculptures that have transformed the castle
into a colorful record of his travels and a look into his mind.
Titled 1,2,3, Soleil, the exhibition features over 50 of the artist’s faceless
characters. Each room in the chateau has a theme that represents one of
Malland’s previous projects in countries around the world. Vibrant colors and
geometrical shapes are complicated by themes of conflict and loneliness.
The exhibition includes site-specific installations as well as collaborative
pieces made with artists Mono Gonzalez and Pascal Vilcollet.
The walk through Malland’s world
will remain on view in France through October 7, 2019. In addition to his solo
show, Malland also recently completed two murals in Denmark as part of Kirk Gallery‘s annual
Out in the Open mural initiative. To keep up with the artist’s latest projects,
follow him on Instagram.
Seth | ‘Jack
in the Box’ | Østerbro 41 | Aalborg | Denmark
For more artwork and information
please visit the following link:
PBS News: 9.30-10.5.2019, The Crown
Prince of Saudi Arabia (full film) FRONTLINE,
TED
Talks: Tim Flannery Can seaweed help curb
global warming?, Safeena Husain A bold plan
to empower 1 6 million out of school girls in india?, Ashweetha Shetty H ow Education helped me rewrite my life, How trees talk to each other-
Suzanne Simard
On this edition for Saturday,
October 5, the latest on the impeachment inquiry and the months-long battle
between Beijing and protestors over the future of Hong Kong. Also, tourists
flock to King’s Landing as “Game of Thrones” lives on in Croatia. Hari
Sreenivasan anchors from New York. Stream your PBS favorites with the PBS app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG
Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
Thursday on the NewsHour, President
Donald Trump reiterates his desire for foreign involvement in investigating the
Biden family, saying he might ask China about the idea. Plus: The implications
of Trump’s recent actions, problematic water in Flint five years after the lead
crisis, what’s at stake in the General Motors strike, a book on U.S. border
policy and China’s booming art market. Stream your PBS favorites with the PBS
app: https://to.pbs.org/2Jb8twG Find more from PBS NewsHour at https://www.pbs.org/newshour Subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://bit.ly/2HfsCD6
Note from FRONTLINE: This version of
“The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia” has sporadic technical glitches with the audio.
We have corrected the problem and posted a new version here: https://youtu.be/SVa2xqeIbkg
One year after the murder of columnist Jamal Khashoggi, FRONTLINE investigates
the rise and rule of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) of Saudi Arabia. In
a never before seen or heard conversation featured in the documentary, the
Saudi Crown Prince addresses his role in Khashoggi’s murder exclusively to
FRONTLINE correspondent Martin Smith. Smith, who has covered the Middle East
for FRONTLINE for 20 years, examines MBS’s vision for the future, his handling
of dissent, and his relationship with the United States. This journalism is
made possible by viewers like you. Support your local PBS station here: https://www.pbs.org/donate Love FRONTLINE? Find us on the PBS Video App where there
are more than 250 FRONTLINE films available for you to watch any time: https://to.pbs.org/FLVideoApp Subscribe on YouTube: https://bit.ly/1BycsJW#MBS#SaudiArabia#Khashoggi
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frontlinepbs Twitter: https://twitter.com/frontlinepbs Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/frontline FRONTLINE is streaming more than 200 documentaries online,
for free, here: https://to.pbs.org/hxRvQP Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of
PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Major funding for FRONTLINE
is provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Ford
Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation, the Park
Foundation, The John and Helen Glessner Family Trust, and the FRONTLINE
Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the
Jon L. Hagler Foundation.
It’s time for planetary-scale
interventions to combat climate change — and environmentalist Tim Flannery
thinks seaweed can help. In a bold talk, he shares the epic carbon-capturing
potential of seaweed, explaining how oceangoing seaweed farms created on a
massive scale could trap all the carbon we emit into the atmosphere. Learn more
about this potentially planet-saving solution — and the work that’s still needed
to get there.
This talk was presented at an
official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
“Girls’ education is the
closest thing we have to a silver bullet to help solve some of the world’s most
difficult problems,” says social entrepreneur Safeena Husain. In a
visionary talk, she shares her plan to enroll a staggering 1.6 million girls in
school over the next five years — combining advanced analytics with
door-to-door community engagement to create new educational pathways for girls
in India. (This ambitious plan is part of the Audacious Project, TED’s initiative
to inspire and fund global change.)
This talk was presented at an
official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
There’s no greater freedom than
finding your purpose, says education advocate Ashweetha Shetty. Born to a poor
family in rural India, Shetty didn’t let the social norms of her community
stifle her dreams and silence her voice. In this personal talk, she shares how
she found self-worth through education — and how she’s working to empower
other rural youth to explore their potential. “All of us are born into a
reality that we blindly accept — until something awakens us and a new world
opens up,” Shetty says.
This talk was presented at an
official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
Seventy thousand Americans are dying
each year from drug overdoses. Two-thirds are the result of opioid addiction.
Technology companies have been accused of helping facilitate the illicit sale
of drugs online, but are they really to blame? Warning: This programme contains
people affected by drug abuse. Subscribe HERE https://bit.ly/1uNQEWR Find us online at www.bbc.com/click Twitter: @bbcclick
Facebook: www.facebook.com/BBCClick
Asia’s most beautiful railway line?
The “Main Line” cuts through tea plantations and jungle, then passes Buddhist
temples and relicts of the British Empire. In the 19th century the British
built a railway in what was then their colony of Ceylon. Their idea was to
transport goods such as tea from the highlands to the port of Colombo. Today
it’s mainly only locals and tourists who use the so-called “Main
Line.” The route is considered one of the most picturesque in the whole of
Asia. Our trip takes us from the capital, Colombo, to Ella in the highlands.
Our first stop is one of the country’s largest elephant orphanages. And then on
to Kandy, the former capital of the Singhalese kingdom. The city is home to the
famous Temple of the Tooth, which is said to house the Buddha’s top left
canine. The train then winds its way further up into the highlands. We watch
tea pickers at work and go to a tea factory to discover where the aroma comes
from. Nuwara Eliya is Sri Lanka’s highest town at an altitude of almost 1900
meters, where a racecourse still brings the colonial era back to life. The stations
have also retained their own colonial charm: in 1901, a signaling system was
set up to make the long journey safer. And those suffering from the altitude
can catch their breath at the final stop, the spa in Ella. _______ Exciting,
powerful and informative – DW Documentary is always close to current affairs
and international events. Our eclectic mix of award-winning films and reports
take you straight to the heart of the story. Dive into different cultures,
journey across distant lands, and discover the inner workings of modern-day
life. Subscribe and explore the world around you – every day, one DW
Documentary at a time. Subscribe to DW Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCW39… For more
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Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dw.stories
DW netiquette policy: https://www.dw.com/en/dws-netiquette-p…
“A forest is much more than
what you see,” says ecologist Suzanne Simard. Her 30 years of research in
Canadian forests have led to an astounding discovery — trees talk, often and
over vast distances. Learn more about the harmonious yet complicated social
lives of trees and prepare to see the natural world with new eyes. TEDTalks is
a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED
Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their
lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and
Design — plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more. Find
closed captions and translated subtitles in many languages at https://www.ted.com/translate
Follow TED news on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/tednews
Like TED on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TED
Subscribe to our channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TEDtalksD…
Discover the life of the monarch.
Adult female monarchs lay their eggs on the underside of milkweed leaves. Each
female can lay 400 eggs. These eggs hatch, depending on temperature, in three
to five days. Monarchs spend the caterpillar stage of their lives eating and
growing. The young caterpillar measures about 2 mm and reaches a length of 50
mm. After about two weeks, the caterpillar will be fully-grown and find a place
to attach itself so that it can start the process of metamorphosis. Witness the
monarch’s transformation. It is the only one North American butterfly who
migrate, each year, in large number. Probably no other insect on the Earth make
such a migration. The Monarch can fly more than 100 km in a single day.
Subscribe : https://www.youtube.com/user/Explorat…
It is almost
impossible these days to click around the web without running into the work of
filmmaker and architectural photographer Rob Whitworth who spends months at a time filming immersive time-lapse
videos in some of Asia’s largest cities. Whitworth is currently based in
Shanghai where he recently completed his latest film, This is Shangai in conjunction with JT Singh. While often extremely fast-paced it’s amazing to see the
filmmaker’s camera move so effortlessly through space, a trick he achieves with
the use of extremely high-powered telephoto lenses and other filming
techniques. I’ve included two additional videos above which you many have seen
elsewhere but are certainly worth another view.
Update: You can read a great
interview with Rob over at Asia Blog.
Ing’s Photographs:
I captured these Monarch Butterflies with my camcorder at my backyard garden
downtown Newark, New Jersey on Saturday, September 28, 2019. I saw four Monarch Butterflies this day.
If you have more time please visit
the following link:
