Field hospital civil war

Congo’s Civil War Has Practically Wiped Out the World’s Largest Gorilla

April 4, 2016 by gizmodo.com Leave a Comment

The largest great apes on Earth have suffered a “catastrophic” population collapse over the past twenty years, according to a report published today by the Wildlife Conservation Society. Grauer’s gorilla, a subspecies found only in the lawless eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, is a victim of the same brutal civil war that claimed up to six million human lives from 1996 to 2003.

Watch

Twitter Is Shifting Right | Future Tech

Subtitles

Off
English

view video

Twitter Is Shifting Right | Future Tech

Bert Kreischer’s Secret Twitter Handle Was Ridiculous | Gizmodo Quiz

Wednesday 10:20AM

Sean Gunn’s Favorite Songs From the Guardians Series

Wednesday 9:35AM

Weighing up to 400 pounds, Grauer’s gorillas are the heavyweight cousins of the more famous mountain gorillas, of which less than a thousand remain in the wild. It’s estimated that Grauer’s gorillas numbered up to 17,000 in the early 1990s, but experts have long feared that the ensuing civil unrest took a toll on the population. Those fears are now being confirmed. An extensive field campaign led by wildlife biologists at the WCS and Fauna & Flora International has concluded that fewer than 4,000 individuals remain—a 77 percent population decline over the course of a generation.

“Until the last three to four years, it’s been impossible to get into many of the areas where these gorillas live,” lead study author Andy Plumptre told Gizmodo over the phone. “This is the most comprehensive report to date, and it’s a lot worse than we expected.”

The trouble for Grauer’s gorillas traces back to the Rwandan genocide of 1994, which forced hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee into the DRC. This, in turn, precipitated a devastating civil war; the worst in modern African history. Nine other nations and scores of armed militia were drawn into conflict over the DRC’s vast mineral resources. Over the course of seven years, millions were killed through fighting, disease and starvation.

In addition to the human toll, the war fueled illegal hunting, logging, and the extract of precious coltan and gold ores throughout the eastern DRC’s rainforests. The emergence of a conflict mineral market—which to this day, feeds into consumer electronics through a shadowy global supply chain—spelled disaster for the country’s charismatic wildlife.

“We believe small scale mining is the main cause [of the gorilla decline],” Plumptre said. “A lot of these militia groups are going deep into the forest, partly to avoid being chased out by the military. In order to keep themselves going, they mine. And because there’s no food, they’re hunting bushmeat.”

For hunters, apes are easy targets. Unlike chimpanzees, which travel through the trees, Grauer’s gorillas move around in groups on the ground, leaving large, trackable footprints. With hordes of hungry, gun-toting humans traipsing about their forest, it’s no wonder these animals are now on the brink of disappearing.

Documenting that disappearance took hard work and nerves of steel. All in all, dozens of wildlife biologists, rangers, and community volunteers covered about 12,000 square kilometers of forest over the course of four years, searching for ground nests and other signs of the elusive apes. “We’ve had teams kidnapped by rebels, chased around the forest, shot at,” Plumptre said. “It is not an easy place to work.” Several park rangers have been killed in the effort, including most recently, one on March 31st.

If there’s a silver lining to this extremely depressing story, it’s that there’s still time to turn things around for the remaining Grauer’s gorillas. The new WCS report calls for several immediate measures, including securing the borders around existing national parks, and establishing legal boundaries around the Itombwe and Punia Gorilla Reserves, two critically important but outlying population strongholds.

Illegal mining also needs to be brought under control. That’ll require the DRC military intervention, but also, stricter international oversight to prevent conflict minerals from entering the global technology supply chain. “There’s been a process of trying to source minerals from conflict-free mining sites,” Plumptre said. “We’d like to add bushmeat-free to the criteria.”

Protecting the DRC’s remaining gorillas is not going to be easy, but the stakes have never been higher. “Unless greater investment and effort is made, we face the very real threat that this incredible primate will disappear from many parts of its range in the next five years,” study co-author Stuart Nixon said in a statement . “It’s vital that we act fast.”

In Cold War Berlin, an Affair Born of Chaos and Control

May 29, 2023 by www.nytimes.com Leave a Comment

KAIROS , by Jenny Erpenbeck. Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann.

The first thing to know about Jenny Erpenbeck’s new novel, “Kairos,” is that it’s a wallow. I was in the mood for one. It’s a cathartic leak of a novel, a beautiful bummer, and the floodgates open early.

Iris Murdoch described the shedding of tears as “usually an action with a purpose, a contribution even to a conversation.” Samuel Beckett took a dimmer view. He wondered if tears were “liquefied brain.”

In “Kairos,” which is about a torrid, yearslong relationship between a young woman and a much older married man, the tears are of every sort: smart and stupid, ugly and otherwise, precipitated by pleasure, pain, laughter, confusion.

This is East Berlin in the late 1980s, just before the fall of the wall. The young woman, Katharina, is a theater design student. Her eyes are described as “fishy”; at the start, she is 19.

Hans, a 50-something novelist and high-minded writer for radio, is handsome and rangy, and he looks fine with a cigarette. Katharina doesn’t like to weep in front of him, so when she anguishes one evening over a coming internship that will keep her in Frankfurt for a year, she waits until he steps out to run some errands:

She takes advantage of his absence and cries now. Cries as she vacuums, cries as she cleans the kitchen, cries in the bathroom as she scrubs the shower and sink, only briefly stops crying when she goes to take the empty bottles downstairs and starts to cry the minute she’s back in the apartment, cries as she takes down the pictures which she and Hans hung up together.

To witness someone else’s tears is not necessarily to be moved yourself. But to absorb “Kairos” is — like reading “Wuthering Heights” or “ On Chesil Beach ,” listening to albums like Lou Reed’s “ Berlin ” or Tracey Thorn’s “A Distant Shore,” watching the film “Truly, Madly, Deeply” or ingesting an ideal edible — to set yourself on a gentle downward trajectory.

If “Kairos” were only a tear-jerker, there might not be much more to say about it. But Erpenbeck, a German writer born in 1967 whose work has come sharply to the attention of English-language readers over the past decade, is among the most sophisticated and powerful novelists we have.

Clinging to the undercarriage of her sentences, like fugitives, are intimations of Germany’s politics, history and cultural memory. It’s no surprise that she is already bruited as a future Nobelist. Her work has attracted star translators, first Susan Bernofsky and now the poet and critic Michael Hofmann.

“Kairos” is Erpenbeck’s sixth book of fiction to be issued in English. Her previous novel, “ Go, Went, Gone ,” was published in the United States in 2017. It’s about a retired classics professor who becomes embroiled in the fate of African refugees in Germany. I found it powerful but often tendentious.

“Kairos” — the title refers to the Greek god of opportunity — is her earthiest novel to date. It’s not just the sex; this is a novel in which pansies are said to resemble Karl Marx and looking inside a stranger’s refrigerator is said to be as good as going to the cinema. She is also writing more closely to her own unconscious.

Yet the sex is devastating, and not because it’s especially explicit. Early on, Hans and Katherina’s lovemaking (“his hands discover that her bottom fits neatly into them, a peach to each”) is scored to Mozart’s “Requiem,” a black disk on his turntable, and the music expands in each of their minds without the moment verging, even for a moment, on the ridiculous.

“Do all the assembled horns, bassoons, clarinets, timpani, trombones, violins, violas, cellos, and organ serve her will?” Erpenbeck asks. They do. This writer is preoccupied with how culture starves humans and how it fills them up, and even more so with what we take from it and what we leave behind.

Hans is old enough to have been, as a boy, in the Hitler Jugend. Katherina, whose life overlaps with Erpenbeck’s to a certain degree (both worked in publishing before moving into theater work) is “one of those children who have been through every phase that the Socialist state prepared for them — from the blue neckerchief to training in production and Russian classes, to harvest help in Werder — to make them citizens of the future.”

The future that arrives is not the one either expected. When the novel begins, Katharina has never been to the West. Hans suggests to her that freedom tastes a bit like a salade niçoise after all the frankfurters and potatoes back home.

Their sex grows more intense, and more violent. We have been here many times before with the young woman and the older man who wishes to part her from her family, friends and underpants. But Erpenbeck plays it, for the most part, straight.

Their affair is conducted on a psychological plane. It swamps them both. They share a hypnotic, Milan Kundera-like absorption in its permutations. He beats her; she mostly enjoys her submission. She feels her life has met its moment.

Through these scenes the novel’s themes play out: chaos and control, freedom and its opposites. He is a serial philanderer. When she cheats on him once, in a minor way, he exacts such sustained revenge that it’s like watching a horror movie: The reader mentally pleads for her to flee. It’s as if he is sending her to the bottom of the sea.

His surveillance, his total control, take on political ramifications that I won’t spoil here. I don’t generally read the books I review twice, but this one I did. “Kairos” left me with an itch I needed to scratch, after the absolved and the condemned begin to flow west though the Brandenburg Gate, after all certainties are shattered. About German history, we read, “Whose job is it to go down into the underworld and tell the dead that they died for nothing?”

The book has an intricate frame — thematic planks that didn’t fully emerge, for this reader, the first time through. Erpenbeck writes: “A strange trick of paper to become a document. Strange trick of paper to produce deceptions.”

This profound and moving book has a subterranean force, and it made me recall lines from the Polish poet Adam Zagajewski’s posthumous collection, “ True Life ,” published earlier this year:

Civilization has five syllables.

At Least 21 Shot Friday into Saturday Night in Mayor Johnson’s Chicago

May 28, 2023 by www.breitbart.com Leave a Comment

At least 21 people were shot, four of them fatally, Friday into Saturday night across Mayor Brandon Johnson’s (D) Chicago.

Breitbart News reported at least 12 people were shot, three fatally, Friday night into Saturday morning alone in Chicago.

By Saturday night at 8:19 p.m. the total number of shooting victims had reached at least 21, with one additional fatality, according to ABC 7 / Chicago Sun-Times.

The additional shooting fatality occurred at 11:15 a.m. “in the 1100 block of North Ridgeway Avenue,” where a man approximately 25-years-old was shot multiple times. He was transported to a hospital, where he died.

The 21 shooting victims for Friday into Saturday night is already nearly as many shooting victims as Johnson witnessed during May 19-21, 2023, which was his first weekend as Mayor. Breitbart News noted that 23 people were shot that weekend.

Mayor of Chicago Brandon Johnson throws a ceremonial first pitch before the game between the Chicago Cubs and the Cincinnati Reds at Wrigley Field on May 27, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Quinn Harris/Getty)

Illinois has a red flag law, a 72-hour-waiting period on gun purchases, a Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card requirement, and an “assault weapons” and “high capacity” magazine ban, among other gun controls.

Cook County, the county seat of which is Chicago, has an “assault weapons” ban as well.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins , a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010. and he holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins . You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange . Reach him directly at [email protected] .

Humanitarian aid delayed due to increased fighting in Sudan

May 29, 2023 by www.thenews.com.pk Leave a Comment

Gunfire and artillery fire echoed across the capital city of Sudan as fears of the six-week battle getting increased with summons to arms Monday, the final day of a ceasefire that has been repeatedly breached.

Residents said that they could hear street battles in northern Khartoum as well as artillery fire in the south of the capital of over five million people, which has been turned into a deadly war zone, AFP reported.

Fearful locals have taken to the streets since the truce started a week ago in an attempt to find food or water, the price of which has doubled since the war began.

However, countless families are still sheltering in place, rationing water and electricity while urgently attempting to avoid errant gunfire.

According to Toby Harward of the United Nations refugee agency, in Darfur, on the western border with Chad, continued fighting “blatantly disregards ceasefire commitments.”

“Intermittent fighting between Sudanese armed forces and Rapid Support Forces in El Fasher, North Darfur, over the last few days has seen civilians killed, homes looted, and tens of thousands newly displaced in the already war-ravaged region,” Harward said.

According to the UN, about half of the population now depends on this “critical humanitarian relief,” but delivery has been delayed because of the ongoing violence.

Representatives of the army’s top brass, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who is in charge of the paramilitary RSF, promised to halt the ongoing airstrikes, artillery fire, and street fighting to allow for the entry of “much-needed aid” and the evacuation of civilians a week ago.

However, by the seventh day of the cease-fire, which was set to end on Monday at 9:45 pm (1945 GMT), no humanitarian corridors had been established, and supplies had just slowly begun to arrive to restock the few hospitals that were still open in the city, the report said.

Aid agencies have informed of the killing of at least 1,800 people, including more than 30 infants, and have also warned that with the rainy season approaching in June, parts of the country will become inaccessible while the risk of cholera, malaria, and water-borne diseases will rise.

The US and Saudi mediators requested that the ceasefire be extended, and both the army and the RSF have stated that they are open to the idea.

Saudi Arabia and the United States, however, issued a warning that “both parties are posturing for future escalation.”

Furthermore, on Sunday, the governor of Darfur, a former rebel commander who is now a military ally, urged civilians to pick up arms.

The army has previously urged reserve personnel and pensioners to arm themselves, while tribes in the country’s east have already called for the provision of guns.

One of Sudan’s most important civil society organisations, the Umma Party, issued a warning “against calls to arm citizens under the pretext of protecting themselves,” which it described as “attempts to drag the country into civil war.”

Even if the ceasefire is extended, the UN issued a warning because of “increasing reports of unexploded ordinances” in the capital and other heavily populated regions.

What is ‘Memorial Day’ and why is it observed in US?

May 29, 2023 by www.thenews.com.pk Leave a Comment

Activities for Memorial Day are crowded with families taking vacations with their kids and visiting beaches. What is the day actually about, aside from all these entertainment?

The holiday, previously known as “Decoration Day,” is observed on the final Monday of May to remember those soldiers and other military personnel who gave their lives for the United States.

Memorial Day became a national holiday in 1971 thanks to a law that the US Congress passed that had its roots in the American Civil War. Here are some key observations for the day:

Brief history of American Civil War

The nationwide holiday has its roots in the US Civil War, which nearly wiped out 2% of the population. According to one account, three women in October 1864 went to a local cemetery and placed flowers on the graves of the dead men who had sacrificed their lives while serving the union.

After the end of the war, a large procession was conducted in May 1865 in the destroyed city of Charleston, South Carolina, where thousands of black US citizens, liberated just months earlier from slavery, remembered those buried in mass graves at a former racecourse.

3,000 school children led the service with roses, singing the Union song “John Brown’s Body”. Historical accounts note that hundreds of women followed with baskets of flowers, wreaths, and crosses.

Cities in the North and South began honouring the dead. Waterloo, NY, was decorated in May 1866 with flags at half-staff, “draped with evergreens and mourning black”.

Why is it Memorial Day?

According to historians, the first commemoration was held in 1868 after Gen John A Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic — an organisation of Union veterans — called for a national holiday to remember the dead people of the Civil War.

He said: “Their bodies lay in almost every city, village, and churchyard.”

Gen Logan, on May 30, wrote an order that it should be “designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defence of their country”.

The remembrance day was regarded for many years as “Decoration Day”, but as it represented all those who had died serving their country, US citizens started to call it Memorial Day.

In one of the first references to commemoration, an article published in the New York Times back in May 1870 described processions in New York City and Brooklyn (then separate cities), among other places.

The story noted that, aside from Independence Day, there was “no day that calls out the patriotic feelings of our people more than Memorial Day,” which was a national holiday not by any enactment by the legislature but by “the general consent of the people”.

Congress officially changed the commemoration’s name in 1967, and a few years later, the government mandated that Memorial Day take place on the last Monday of the month rather than on May 30.

The change went into effect in 1971. The same law also declared Memorial Day a federal holiday.

How Memorial Day differs from Veterans Day

After its evolution, Memorial Day is celebrated to honour the war dead, but Veterans Day is only celebrated to remember those who served in the military.

Veterans Day is annually observed on November 11, which was originally called Armistice Day. It was due to the armistice at the end of World War I in 1918.

It was later broadened in the 1950s to include all war veterans.

Both commemorations have become similar. But, after World War I, veterans “wanted a commemoration of their own, which North and South could celebrate together,” Henry W. Brands, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, told the New York Times .