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In 2015, Minnesota native Andrew Funk was living with his Spanish girlfriend in Barcelona, Spain, expecting a baby and launching a start-up. The way he saw it, life was good, he said.

But then, things unraveled. His start-up tanked. Funk and his girlfriend broke up. Funk had to move out of his flat but he had nowhere to go and no money.

At first, Funk, then 34, was couch surfing. After months of that, he wound up sleeping outside near Barcelona’s port. By that point, he was gripped by despair.

“It's hard to explain that to people,” Funk, now 41, said. “But really, your entire soul, your brain, your heart — everything — just weighs [you] down and brings you on the floor.”

Andrew Funk found himself homeless in Spain in 2015 (left). But with some help, he was able to start anew (right). Now, he runs Homeless Entrepreneur, a nongovernmental organization that connects homeless people with jobs.

Credit:

Courtesy of Andrew Funk

Eventually, Funk was fortunate enough to meet someone who took him in. He found the support he needed, including friendship and a roof over his head.

That enabled him to start over. His first impulse was to start helping others. He had an idea: to leverage his already global network of contacts to help people who find themselves in the same predicament that he did.

Later that same year, Funk founded Homeless Entrepreneur, a nongovernmental organization that connects homeless people with jobs. Since then, it has grown from a one-man operation into a well-funded venture. And although most of his efforts have been focused in Spain, the NGO is branching out more globally.

Funk’s group has helped construction workers find gigs and IT people get into training programs. And for people with good business ideas, he looks for investors.

So far, Funk said, his group has helped 39 people get work and find stability and helped hundreds of others improve their lives personally and professionally.

Like Chilean David Sanchez. The 47-year-old has lived all over the world and was once even a famous DJ. He was living the good life — then, he moved to Barcelona from Berlin a few years ago and put everything he owned in storage.

Chilean David Sanchez, who lives in Spain, was down to nothing when he met Andrew Funk, the founder of Homeless Entrepreneur. Now, he's running his business, Sandboard Spain, which has secured funding from various sources, including IBM.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

“I got robbed, and I lost everything,” he said. “I was fully stranded with only what I was wearing and my dogs.”

Now, Sanchez and his two dogs, Stella and Alfie, live in a tiny, wooden shack that he built into a cliff perched high over Barcelona’s cruise-ship harbor. One misstep on the scramble down could mean freefalling.

“Since I got stranded and having this housing problem … it’s mainly because nobody would rent me a place with my two dogs, that's all,” he said. “They would never leave me behind, so I won't leave them.”

Without a safety net, Sanchez has been stuck. He couldn’t rent or grow his business.

But then, he crossed paths with Funk. Sanchez was a good fit for Homeless Entrepreneur, because he’s motivated and stable, Funk said: “It's good. Because most people, when they're starting out, they're kind of lost. So, I appreciate that.”

Funk prompted Sanchez to create a short video about his business that helped attract financial support including from IBM. Through Homeless Entrepreneur, Sanchez was also able to take professional development classes.

David Sanchez, who is originally from Chile, found himself homeless in Spain. But Andrew Funk, through his nongovernmental organization, Homeless Entrepreneur, has been able to make a new start.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

Today, Sanchez runs a company called Sandboard Spain, crafting sandboards.

“Sandboarding, if you don’t know it, is a fairly new sport” — basically, it’s a blend between surfing, skateboarding and snowboarding on sand dunes.

Sanchez’s workshop is a particle-board cubicle, about 10 feet by 8 feet inside a large industrial warehouse. He’s got his tools and a couple of dozen boards lined against one wall.

“I buy secondhand boards on different platforms and I change the base of it and I got a different base so they can work in the sand,” he said.

Sanchez and Funk plan to attend a march against homelessness this coming January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — in the hopes of landing even more support.

Funk, who ended up marrying the very person who’d helped him get off the streets all those years ago, said that he knows he’s reaching just a small segment of people through Homeless Entrepreneur. But for those he can reach, the exposure and resources is life-changing.

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General Augusto Pinochet is known worldwide as a sinister dictator. Between 1973 and 1990, his regime tortured, killed and disappeared thousands of people in Chile, in the name of fighting communism.

But as Pinochet's US-backed military coup marks 50 years, many in the South American country have complicated views about its legacy, and there's still no consensus about whether the coup was a good or bad thing.

For Pablo Abufom, a civil rights activist in the capital Santiago, the legacy of Pinochet is clear. "I think he should be remembered as one of the worst things that has happened to Chile," he said. "His dictatorship was a dark moment in our history where democracy and human rights were not respected."

Abufom said it's important to remember this painful chapter of history so that it doesn't happen again.

A man pedals his bicycle past a mural marking the 50th anniversary of the country's military coup, with a reminder of those disappeared during the Augusto Pinochet regime and an image depicting the deposed President Salvador Allende, in Santiago, Chile, Friday, Sept. 8, 2023.

Credit:

Esteban Felix/AP

But not everyone agrees.

A 30-year-old member of Chile's military recently spoke with The World and asked not to give his name because he's forbidden to share political opinions publicly.

"The military coup was necessary for Chile because the country was on the verge of economic collapse," he said. "After the coup, life improved for many Chileans, so yes, there were mistakes, but we can't say that everything was bad about Pinochet's regime."

The soldier said he grew up in a family that supported the political left, but after he joined the military, he started questioning those views.

"Three decades after our democracy was established, there's still a lot of people in Chile that repudiate the military because of its involvement with the coup," he said. "People have called me a murderer just because I'm wearing a uniform."

The situation becomes more tense in the run-up to the anniversary of the coup every September 11th.

On Sunday, during an annual march that demands justice for the disappeared under Pinochet's rule, one group of people wearing black masks threw objects at the presidential palace and clashed with security forces.

Protesters are hit by a police water cannon during clashes at a march marking the 50th anniversary of a military coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, in Santiago, Chile, Sunday, Sept. 10, 2023.

Credit:

Luis Hidalgo/AP

The member of Chile's army said that he doesn't support any of the events commemorating the 1973 coup.

"Chile needs to put that past behind and move on," he said, "because these anniversaries only feed polarization."

That opinion is shared by millions of people in Chile.

An annual poll revealed that almost half of Chileans (47%) now agree that the Pinochet regime was partly bad and partly good, compared to 27% who said the same 10 years ago.

Market Opinion Research International (MORI), the nonprofit that conducts this poll every year, also found that 42% of the respondents believe the coup destroyed democracy, the lowest number since 1995.

People light candles with the names of the detainees who were disappeared and executed during the military dictatorship led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, at the National Stadium, which served as a detention center in the early years of the regime, during the event marking the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup that toppled the government of late President Salvador Allende, in Santiago, Chile, Monday, Sept. 11, 2023.

Credit:

Esteban Felix/AP

"This is a cultural, social and political failure," said Marta Lagos, the founder of MORI. "Chileans are confused about what democracy is because there's no agreement about how to interpret the violent past."

Claudia Heiss, a political scientist at the University of Chile, said the changes in public opinion of Pinochet and his regime are a response to Chile's present issues. "We interpret what happened before depending on what's happening today," she said.

Chile is currently facing a security crisis, with a rise in violent crime and transnational gang activity, "and this has led to an increase in the tolerance to authoritarianism and the perception that it's better to have a strong hand, a strong government, to protect you from crime or corruption."

According to Heiss, more people in Chile are now willing to give up freedoms and political accountability, "and that is very worrisome for the sustainability of democracy," she added.

In July, a poll by the Chile-based Center for Public Studies found that 66% of respondents agreed with the statement that, rather than worry about the rights of individuals, the country needs a firm government.

The political right has a majority in Chile's national assembly right now, and members of several right-wing parties boycotted commemorations of the 1973 coup on Monday. On the other hand, President Gabriel Boric has been a proponent of these events and even led one of the marches himself.

Chile's President Gabriel Boric, center, takes part in a demonstration marking the 50th anniversary of a military coup led Gen. Augusto Pinochet outside La Moneda presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, Sunday, Sept. 10, 2023.

Credit:

Esteban Felix/AP

"What Boric is doing is the right thing to do," Heiss said. "This commemoration is significant because it's half a century, and we are in the last opportunities of achieving some justice because the victims and the perpetrators are getting very old," she said.

For those who are critics of the Pinochet regime, justice is the only way to finally come to terms with the past.

"There's no way to reconcile with people who think that Pinochet was right in doing what he did because they're defending state terrorism," said Pablo Abufom, "so, for me, only when we have truth and justice, will we have reconciliation."

Last week, for the first time, the Chilean government announced a new effort to track down the remaining disappeared.

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On July 29, 1982, a paramilitary group known as the civil defense patrol, which took orders from Guatemala’s army, attacked the village of Rancho Bejuco — because the people there had refused to join the patrol and fight left-wing rebel groups. The patrol killed 25 people.

Pedrina Alvarado lost her mother and son in the massacre that occurred during one of the bloodiest periods of the nation’s civil war.

Last month, Alvarado traveled for four hours to hear the judge’s ruling in one of Guatemala's most-infamous war crimes cases in Guatemala City.

A group of Maya Achi Women attend a court hearing in Guatemala City, Guatemala, where a judge ruled on the massacre of Rancho Bejuco, which took place on July 29, 1982.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

On Aug. 24, Judge Walter Mazariegos condemned the former colonel in charge of military operations around Rancho Bejuco to 20 years in prison for ordering attacks on Indigenous villages, which constituted crimes against humanity. But he let free eight members of the paramilitary group who carried out the massacre, arguing that they had no choice but to obey the military’s orders.

For Alvarado, who wore a traditional Mayan blouse known as the huipil and sat next to four other Indigenous women during the hearing, the verdict was not a true victory.

“I am leaving with a lot of sadness and frustration,” Alvarado said in tears after leaving the courtroom. “We worked so hard to have this case heard, we made so many sacrifices for this?”

More than 200,000 people were killed during Guatemala’s civil war that lasted from 1960 to 1996. According to the nation’s truth commission, at least 440 Indigenous villages were destroyed by the military as it tried to defeat rebel groups in rural areas.

Guatemalan officials have tried to investigate these war crimes since the country went back to civilian rule. And those efforts got a boost in 2007 when the UN set up an international commission against impunity in Guatemala (CICIG). But human rights groups say that lately, it’s been hard for victims to obtain justice, with courts stacked with judges who favor the interests of the nation’s elites, which includes some former military members.

Also, judges who have been tough on war criminals have received death threats, and some have been chased out of the country by prosecutors who act under the orders of an attorney general that has been sanctioned by the US for blocking corruption investigations.

Maya Achi men and women held a spiritual ceremony outside the judicial palace in Guatemala City, Guatemala, before a judge issued a ruling on the 1982 massacre of Rancho Bejuco.

Credit:

Manuel Rueda/The World

“The military sectors and their allies never really went away,” said Jo-Marie Burt, a Guatemala expert at the Washington Office on Latin America. “Their power was just tempered a bit when this international sponsored body was in Guatemala.”

Burt is referring to CICIG, which was expelled from Guatemala a handful of years ago after it uncovered a corruption scheme that involved the nation’s president. Since then, Burt said, the Guatemalan justice system has become more partial to the interests of the nation’s elites.

“It’s not just trying to keep a few war criminals out of jail,” she said. “It’s a much broader project that is meant to restore the power control and impunity that this group of corrupt actors has over the entire political system.”

Some Guatemalans are hoping that this changes with the nation’s recently elected President Bernando Arévalo. He comes from the Semilla Movement, a small party, from outside of Guatemala’s power structure and has promised to fire officials who have been named in corruption investigations. He is also creating a special agency that will devise tougher anti-corruption laws.

Judge Walter Mazariegos issued his verdict on the Rancho Bejuco massacre, at a courthouse in Guatemala City, Guatemala, Aug. 24, 2023.

Credit:

Manuel Rueda/The World

Arévalo won the presidential election by a landslide in August as voters expressed their discontent with the nation’s establishment. But his rivals are now challenging the results in Guatemala’s courts, arguing that Arévalo’s movement was registered with fake signatures.

Analysts say that it will be tough for the new president to make changes to the nation’s judicial system if he makes it to his inauguration in January.

Arévalo will have to work with congress — where his party is a minority — to name new judges to Guatemala’s top courts. The constitution bars him from firing the nation’s controversial attorney general, so he will have to try to force her to resign.

“There is little the president can do to interfere in war crimes cases,” said Paulo Estrada, a human rights activist in Guatemala City who is also a plaintiff in another war crimes case.

He explained however, that the new president can change the leadership of the President’s Commission for Peace and Human Rights, which is the agency in charge of complying with international human rights rulings.

Juan Ovalle, a former colonel in Guatemala’s army, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in the massacre of Rancho Bejuco. The men under his command were absolved.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

In the past, the agency has been notorious for ignoring orders from international courts that say the government should provide reparations to victims and help them to find their disappeared relatives.

One ruling that has been ignored, for example, orders the Guatemalan government to build a memorial for 183 activists and political leaders who were abducted and disappeared by Guatemala’s military in the early 1980s and are now part of what’s known as the Military Diary cases.

“We would hope that this new government complies with those international court orders,” said Estrada, whose father and uncle are among the disappeared.

In the meantime, war crimes cases continue to advance slowly in Guatemala’s local courts.

Guatemalan's newly elected President Bernardo Arévalo has promised to tackle the corruption that has also infiltrated Guatemala’s judicial system.

Credit:

Manuel Rueda/The World

The families involved in the Rancho Bejuco trial have already said they will appeal the judge’s decision to let most of those who perpetrated the massacre go free. They believe that the ruling violates international law.

“You can’t absolve people because they were obeying orders,” said Lucia Xiloj, the victims’ lawyer. “Perhaps, you can give them a smaller sentence, but obeying orders should not be an excuse for impunity.”

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In a massive shift for higher education in the US, historic, reduced-credit, three-year bachelor’s degrees have won approval from accreditors.

This newly sanctioned pilot program doesn’t cram four years of school into a shorter time period. Several schools have done that. This is different.

Instead of 120 credits, students will only need about 90 to graduate. Those pushing for the change say it will make college more accessible and affordable.

“A lot of people in this country have started an education and stopped,” said Boyd Baggett, the director of accreditation at Brigham Young University-Idaho (BYUI). “It's just too far of a reach, too expensive.”

Baggett’s campus won approval for a shortened online bachelor’s degree along with Ensign College, another school in the BYUI system.

“We’ve been following, trying to cut down on the time a student is in college … for a long time,” Baggett said.

BYUI pursued this initiative because of the needs of its student population. Baggett said their average online student is in their 30s, working full time and caring for a family.

“When they get done with … all of the required general education requirements, then there's 20 or 30 credits left, and we say, ‘Take any class you want,’” Baggett said. “How do you say that to a working father or mother [who’s] trying to put food on the table?”

More than half of the students enrolling in this new, shorter program are also international students. In fact, Baggett’s team looked abroad for inspiration as they designed their program. In places like the UK and Germany, many students focus on their area of study in high school so they get a jump-start.

“Once they decide on something, a discipline, then, there's a path through it,” Baggett said. “Not 40 paths through it.”

Sonny Ramaswamy is the president of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, the accreditation board that approved the pilot.

“This is an innovation that I think – its time has come,” he said.

Ramaswamy is well aware of how historic this decision was.

“This conversation has been going on for some time,” he said. “Do we really need students to sit on their — pardon me, butts — in the classroom … for four years? Or should it be based on learning outcomes?”

The accreditation committee went through about a year and a half of vetting, talking with federal and state regulators to ensure they were missing no statutory requirements.

“They do not say, ‘Thou shalt have a four-year degree,’” Ramaswamy said.

However, administrators have not worked out all the kinks. One of the biggest concerns is whether other universities will accept a three-year degree. Because they are not seen as equivalent, many US graduate programs require applicants from countries like Germany and France to take additional courses in order to qualify.

Robert Zemsky, professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, believes problems such as these aren’t insurmountable. He said what’s important is that future education models address what keeps students from going to college in the first place.

“Accreditors actually know better than most people that higher ed is in trouble today,” Zemsky said. “And that they need this kind of revitalization, or it isn't going to work in the long run.”

As students see the soaring cost of tuition and debt they have to carry for decades, Zemsky said they are rethinking the necessity of a college degree. A shorter option could mean a new life for higher ed.

“My bet is if we get this to work, by 10 years, almost every college degree in America will be a three-year degree,” he said.

There’s a fight ahead for many schools to win approval, but Zemsky thinks that higher education is ready.

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The costs of the war in Ukraine can be measured first and foremost in human lives lost, in destroyed communities and infrastructure.

But environmental damages are also widespread and will continue to impact Ukrainians for decades to come.

In early June 2022, the Kakhovka Dam on the Dnipro River burst, unleashing much of the water from a reservoir roughly the size of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Large swaths of the reservoir dried up, while towns and villages south of the dam were flooded. Floodwaters contaminated with sewage, oil and land mines swept away houses and forced evacuations.

This incident sparked global attention on the environmental impact of the war for the first time.

But damage to the environment has been ongoing since February 2022, when the full-scale invasion started. 

In the video above, The World’s Carolyn Beeler explains how the war has impacted the environment in Ukraine.

Related: A coalition of Ukrainians is documenting environmental crimes 

Old-school trench warfare along the front lines has torn up forests and triggered fires.

Industrial sites and oil depots have been bombed and destroyed, sending contamination into the soil and groundwater.

Damaged wastewater and sewage facilities have contaminated drinking water, while mines and unexploded ordinance have rendered agricultural land unusable.

Beeler also speaks about the effort by the Ukrainian government and local nongovernmental organizations to document the damage.

Related: Farmland off-limits in Ukraine due to mines

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On Feb. 24, 2022, at the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian composer Oleh Shpudieiko left his hometown of Kyiv.

He found shelter with some relatives in the western city of Lviv, where other musicians from across the country had also fled. Like him, they were faced with a dilemma: What should artists do in times of war?

“We had a very severe case of artistic identity problem, because we didn’t really understand what we are anymore,” Shpudieiko said.

Oleh Shpudieiko (Heinali) at a performance at the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, Spain, on June 1, 2023.

Credit:

Alan Ruiz Terol/The World 

Some artists joined the Ukrainian armed forces. Others changed jobs. Some tried to use art to defend their country. Shpudieiko was one of the latter.

With a career spanning 15 years, Shpudieiko, also known as Heinali, has recorded a dozen albums. His core practice consists of reimagining early music from medieval times with his synthesizer, resulting in electronic sounds that combine tradition and experimentation.

But amid war, his work took a different direction: To heal his trauma, he made  “Kyiv Eternal,” an album fusing electronic music with recordings of his past life. 

For Shpudieiko, the turning point was a month into the war — he was set to play a livestream show at a music school in Lviv to raise funds for the Musicians Defend Ukraine foundation. 

But air-raid alarms went off before they could start. 

“We had to either postpone or cancel several of our livestreams,” Shpudieiko recalled. “We decided to just move the whole thing to the nearest bomb shelter.”

In the video of the performance, Shpudieiko appears alone in the middle of a neglected room, wearing a black winter jacket. His modular synthesizer looks futuristic, with colorful cables emerging as if in the console of a spaceship. The machine emits eerie sounds as Shpudieiko carefully turns its knobs.

“When I was rehearsing, it didn’t really feel like making music — it felt like political activism,” Shpudieiko said. “But during my performance, something clicked, something changed, and I felt as if I’m a musician again.”

Oleh Shpudieiko (Heinali) at a performance at the Primavera Sound festival in Barcelona, Spain, on June 1, 2023.

Credit:

Alan Ruiz Terol/The World 

The feeling didn’t last. Later that day, back at the apartment of the relatives he was staying with, news came of the massacre of civilians at the hands of Russian troops in the town of Bucha, next to Kyiv.

“I never felt anything like this before,” Shpudieiko said. “Every person that was killed there, when I saw the photos … It felt as if I am these people.”

‘The city was like a living organism’

In April 2022, after Russian forces retreated from Ukraine’s capital, Sphudieiko finally returned to his home. He experienced Kyiv in a completely new way.

“The city was like a living organism, a living being,” Shpudieiko said.

 It made him want to embrace it, hug it, protect it from harm.

Oleh Shpudieiko (Heinali) at a performance at the Ephemera Festival in Warsaw, Poland, on June 18, 2023. 

Credit:

Michał Murawski/Ephemera Festival

The experience was painful, but also interesting artistically, so he decided to turn it into music. In July, he left his home again for an art residency in Cologne, Germany. He began working on what would become “Kyiv Eternal.”

“It's a very traumatic album,” he said. “It’s an album that I had to record — I didn't really want to record it, I just had to record it.”

“Kyiv Eternal,” released this past February, coinciding with the first anniversary of the Russian invasion, is a time capsule of the city’s soundscape prior to the war.

Across 49 minutes, the eerie tones of Heinali’s synthesizer interwave with real-life recordings of Kyiv, such as the bustle at the Maidan square subway station, or the sound of bus drivers calling out destinations.

To Shpudieiko, these are the city’s “earmarks”: the sonic equivalent of visual landmarks. He began capturing them in 2011 after he purchased an inexpensive audio recorder.

“The interesting thing about Kyiv is that it doesn’t really have any prominent earmarks. But it has a lot of small earmarks,” he said.

Shpudieiko lets the listener inhabit the music, and wander around in the Kyiv of yesterday. The resulting atmosphere is spacious, airy and irresolute.

In one of the 11 tracks, named “Silpo,” after one of Ukraine’s most-popular supermarket chains, the distinct, high-pitch noise of cash registers is revamped into an ethereal chime.

In “Botanichnyi Sad,” birds tweeting at the botanical garden combine with erratic synthesizer notes, creating a dialogue between the artificial and the organic.

All these recordings, however mundane, were connected with Shpudieiko’s personal story in Kyv. 

Oleh Shpudieiko (Heinali) at a performance at the Ephemera Festival in Warsaw, Poland, on June 18, 2023. 

Credit:

Michał Murawski/Ephemera Festival

“We don’t really have this past anymore,” he said. “And we are also devoid of the future this past had.”

By transforming these recordings into something new, not only does he hope to remember, but also to imagine a different future.

‘Every music is political’

Shpudieiko was born in 1985, a few years before Ukraine declared independence from the former USSR. He came of age with the Orange Revolution in 2004, and a decade later, took part in the Maidan protests that deposed President Viktor F. Yanukovych after he attempted to drag the country closer to Moscow. 

The revolution was both political and cultural. The following years, Kyiv saw the emergence of a bustling electronic music scene, of which Shpudieiko was part. 

“After the second Maidan, everything changed,” he said.

Now, some of the artists who were part of this cultural revival are proving that electronic music can be a powerful tool for resistance in the face of Russia’s aggression — whether by livestreaming a concert from a bomb shelter, or by releasing an ambient music album featuring old recordings.

“Some people think that electronic music is apolitical, but it is not,” he explained. “Every music is political, whether you want it or not: you can just ignore the political context, or you can work with it.”

Somehow, Shpudieiko has overcome his hesitancy about artists’ role in times of war. He said Russia is trying to destroy Ukrainian culture and also uses its own culture as a weapon. Therefore, preserving and promoting Ukrainian culture has become Shpudieiko’s mission.

For the last year, Shpudieiko has been performing throughout Europe, including in Germany, Austria, Slovakia and Spain. But he refrained from playing his latest album.

“I really hope to perform ‘Kyiv Eternal’ after the war is over in Kyiv, because it makes all the sense to perform it there,” he said.

However, he decided to make an exception this past June after he was invited to play in Warsaw, Poland, one of the cities that welcomed many Ukrainian refugees.

“When I am in Poland, I feel almost like I'm in a distant part of Ukraine. So, it feels almost like home there,” he said.

His performance was held at a sports hall as part of the Ephemera festival. Shpudieiko sat with his computer in front of the bleachers filled with people. Behind him, a giant screen displayed photos and videos that fellow Ukrainians had sent him. Like “Kyiv Eternal,” they were memory capsules of a peaceful life before the war.

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American colleges and universities have long attracted some of the best talent in the world, but the US is no longer as appealing as it once was. International students’ enrollment numbers have been falling, even before the pandemic, and that’s worrying for the US schools that depend upon the full tuition they pay.

One of the hurdles to studying here is wait times for student visas, which, for some students, can be as long as a year.

Ibrahima Sow is a Belgian engineering student who got accepted into a master’s program in space robotics at Carnegie Mellon University last year. The program attracts top engineers from around the world, and Sow had all the qualifications, but one piece was missing: his student visa.

“My parents moved to Belgium when I was one,” Sow said. “So technically, in all of my immigration documents, passport, [it is] written that I was born in Guinea, a country in West Africa.”

Even though he’s a Belgian citizen, Sow suspects that being Muslim and Guinean-born posed even more delays. He said he was taken aback by some of the standard questions on the forms, such as “Are you a member or representative of a terrorist organization?”

“I am Muslim. I have a name like Ibrahima,” Sow said. “So, I was already expecting something weird.”

He also had to provide a travel history, listing every place he had been in the previous five years. And then he waited.  

“I was always calling them, sending them emails,” Sow said. “When I send an email, I received always the same automated answer. … I tried everything.”

With no visa, Sow was tuning in remotely when his semester at Carnegie Mellon started. But, his professor told him he had to be there in person a week after classes began, or he’d be unenrolled. And that’s exactly what happened. 

“I just graduated from my undergrad,” Sow recalled. “I was like, Okay, what do I do?”

These delays are well known among his friends back home. He said the delays have deterred some of his friends from applying to study in the US.

Juan Pablo Perez is a student from Bogota, Colombia. He had a similar experience — and it cost him. Last year, he was accepted into a master’s program at UC Berkeley. Perez and his wife booked and paid for plane tickets and paid thousands of dollars to secure an apartment in the Bay Area, which then sat empty for months as they waited. 

“We were already paying rent here, in the most expensive place on Earth,” Perez said.

After shelling out thousands of dollars to move to the US for his studies, Juan Pablo Perez and his family were uncertain if it would even happen.

Credit:

Max Harrison-Caldwell/The World

As the semester approached, Perez was so desperate to know his fate that he went to a fortune teller in Bogota. He asked her if he’d receive his visa in time to stay enrolled for the fall semester.

Jeremy Neufeld is a senior immigration fellow at the Institute For Progress (IFP), which describes itself as a non-partisan Washington DC economic think tank. 

“Visa wait times are just completely broken,” Neufeld said.

He has been tracking visa processing times in consulates across the globe, and he says the system is simply not working. As a result, the US is falling behind in the race for talent.

“Wait times for visas across the board have exploded, partially because of COVID,” Neufeld said. “But they were also increasing before COVID-19.” 

A few years ago, 80% of visa applicants could get appointments within three weeks, according to Neufeld. 

“Today, wait times often exceed hundreds of days, and in some places, it can take years before you can even get an interview appointment,” he said.

To make matters worse, Neufeld said, the US is lagging in its adoption of technology.

“Our processing system is based on paper records, it's based on in-person interviews,” he explained. “Our peer countries — Canada, the UK, Australia — have started to increase their experimentation with digital technology.”

Julie Stufft is the deputy assistant secretary for visa services at the State Department. She said the delays are due primarily to the closure of embassies and consulates during the early pandemic — an issue that has created a lasting “pandemic-related backlog.”

Stufft rejects the suggestion that the US is lagging in its technology and says that most of the visa application process is online. 

“But US law does require that we do some activities in-person [and] explicitly states that we need to conduct an in-person interview and collect biometrics, in this case, fingerprints, which is, of course, also done in-person,” Stufft said.

She said it’s in the national interest of the US to have these international students come to the United States, both for diplomatic reasons and because the money they spend here is an important part of the US economy.

“But it is one of the requirements of a visa application — in any category, including students — to convince the consular officer that they will depart the United States after a temporary stay,” Stufft added.

Getting all the information to make those decisions is labor-intensive and takes time, and again, said Stufft, it’s the law. 

Immigration advocates and universities are arguing that these delays of months, and even a year, are hurting the US in terms of competitiveness and that they are losing top talent to other countries, which numerous reports have found is happening.

“It's costing the US billions of dollars a year in trade, research and business,” Neufeld said. “And it's imposing costs on our credibility as an international partner.”

And Juan Pablo Perez? Well, the fortune teller told Perez he would get his visa just in time for him to start classes at Berkeley. And three days before the semester began, her prediction came true.

But that method is probably not endorsed by the State Department.

Max Harrison-Caldwell is a second-year student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He spent the summer covering Bay Area news and culture at KALW in San Francisco.

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In Russia, where the Kremlin promotes traditional values, many citizens believe it is a woman’s patriotic duty to give birth and become a mother. 

The experience was surprising for Amie Ferris-Rotman, who is originally from the UK and has lived in Russia for years as a foreign correspondent. 

Amie Ferris-Rotman in Moscow during her 2019 pregnancy.

Credit:

Joel van Houdt

In 2019, she became pregnant with her first child. 

Ferris-Rotman, a global news editor for New Lines Magazine, said that while the experience was "overwhelmingly positive," she did notice many cultural differences. She wrote about it in a personal essay called, "What my pregnancy in Moscow taught me of Russia's Putin."

In the essay, she details some of the reasons why motherhood and motherland are linked throughout history. She said that throughout her pregnancy in Russia, notions of motherhood and motherland were inextricably intertwined. 

“Everything about it is about women and what women can then do for the state,” she said.

She talked about it with The World's host Marco Werman. 

 To hear the full interview, click on the audio player above.

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Kaneez Fatima Alvi and Lissith Diaz from Colombia are among the millions of people who have made the journey to Iraq this year to take part in the annual Arbaeen walk.

It’s one of the world’s largest-annual religious gatherings. This year, officials predict around 28 million people are expected to participate.

“I hope, first I can do it because this is really different,” Alvi said. “The heat, the culture.”

The heat is a major factor when Arbaeen falls in the summer. Temperatures can reach up to 116 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, so many people choose to do the walk at night.

People mark Arbaeen in Karbala, Iraq, Sept. 6, 2023.

 

Credit:

Anmar Khalil/AP

“You feel something really different in your heart, in your mind, like all your body, like experience and different energy,” said Alvi, who became Muslim about a decade ago, and has been to Iraq once before.

This, however, is her first time doing the walk.

Diaz, who converted last year, added, “I feel that being here I can understand better. I can get close to God.”

Both women are wearing black, like everyone else on the walk — the color of mourning — to mark the somber event. Arbaeen, which means 40 in Arabic, marks the 40th day of mourning after Ashura, the day that Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Husayn, was killed in the year 680 by an army of the ruling Umayyad caliphate.

People on the Arbaeen walk on the road between the Iraqi cities of Najaf and Karbala, September 2023.

Credit:

Sara Hassan/The World

Today, the walk can start from anywhere. But most people begin in the city of Najaf until they get to Karbala — nearly 50 miles away — where Husayn is buried.

Numbered markers along the road between Najaf and Karbala along the Arbaeen walk in Iraq.

Credit:

Sara Hassan/The World

Along the Najaf-Karbala road, you can see just over a thousand markers, each about 160 feet apart, leading the way.

Story of justice and sacrifice

“The Arbaeen walk is not an obligation on Muslims, like the pilgrimage to Mecca [for the annual Hajj pilgrimage] is,” Sayed Mohammed Baqer Qazwini explained.

He’s living in Najaf right now, but is an assistant imam in Dearborn Heights, Michigan.

“However, the prophet's family highly recommended Muslims to visit Imam Husayn in Karbala after his martyrdom. They wanted to preserve his legacy because Imam Husayn represents justice, freedom. He rose to say no to the dictator of his time. He rose to say no to injustice.”

It’s this story of justice and sacrifice that inspires many people during Arbaeen. The walk was even banned during the time of Saddam Hussein, because people would use the occasion to assemble and challenge his government.

Imam Husayn’s sacrifice also inspires the many acts of charity and service throughout the walk.

In 2019, UNESCO declared the hospitality offered during Arbaeen an intangible cultural heritage of humanity.

One group, Imamia Medics International, has been traveling to Iraq for 15 years to give free medical and dental services.

Qasim Jaffry is a consultant urologist and one of the group’s directors. He’s been based in Ireland for more than two decades. He said that their 24-hour camps are available for those on the walk, as well as for local Iraqis.

“Some of them would be sick from before, and they may have forgotten their medication or this Arbaeen visit may have exacerbated their diseases, and some of them get sick while they're here,” he said.

Jaffry said that since their first year, they’ve treated about 750,000 patients. Their services include cardiology, internal medicine, dermatology, gynecology, urology, pain management and dental services.

Local hospitality

Some local Iraqis even open up their homes to the visitors.

Shaykh Hassan al-Mas’udi is a local Iraqi tribe leader.

“Every year, I provide all of the services to welcome the pilgrims visiting Imam Husayn and provide hospitality in the form of food and drink, and also showers and bathrooms, and I also put out mattresses here for them to sleep on,” he said.

Local Iraqi tribe leader Shaykh Hassan al-Mas’udi opens his home to people on the Arbaeen walk to rest, shower and have home-cooked meals, September 2023.

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Sara Hassan/The World

There are more than a thousand stations, or mawkibs, where people can rest.

Along the walk itself, everything is free. People set up and sponsor stalls along the walk that hand out water, meals and tea and provide various services.

People make food to serve for free to those on the Arbaeen walk in Iraq, September 2023.

Credit:

Sara Hassan/The World

One woman was even repairing people’s bags that had worn out during the walk.

There are also people offering free foot massages for those on the walk.

Zain Fatema Bhurani comes every year from India.

“Some people don't wear any shoes, and they are in so much pain,” she said. “So, we feel like they are getting some of the comfort and relief from our hands.”

They even have a physiotherapist on hand for more serious problems. Bhurani travels with other women. And they pay for their own flights to give free massages to people on the walk.

“Money never comes to our minds,” she added. “And the prayers which we get from the visitors is priceless.”

Women volunteers give free foot massages to those participating in the Arbaeen walk, September 2023.

Credit:

Sara Hassan/The World

This year, the Iraqi government offered free visas for four new countries: Pakistan, Lebanon, Yemen and Afghanistan. It also includes Iran, but it’s not the first time for them.

The overwhelming majority of people who participate in the Arbaeen walk are Shia Muslims. But it is not limited to Shias or even Muslims. Some Sunnis participate and even Christians and Hindus have taken part.

Salil Abbas, who is part of a group that came from the UK, said he spoke with a group of Christians who walked last year. He asked them what they thought.

“And they said, ‘We've never seen people give things away the way that the lovers of this imam and this leader of yours are giving away. We have never seen selflessness of this kind anywhere. And it is an inspiration to see this.’”

That inspiration is what the people on the walk take back home with them afterward to continue serving others.

Related: Iraqi author Ghaith Abdul-Ahad on the 'unbuilding' of Baghdad

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After the war in Ukraine started in February 2022, the global supply of Ukrainian and Russian wheat dried up, raising fears of a possible global food crisis. 

At the time, the warring countries accounted for more than one quarter of global wheat exports.

Most of the wheat used in Senegal was imported from Russia. 

Wheat, the second-most consumed cereal after rice, is an important staple in Senegal.

A good portion of that wheat went into making the hugely popular French baguette — Senegalese consume close to 10 million baguettes per day, according to Senegal’s National Association of Grain Importers.

Related: Is it time for Senegal to end its romance with the French baguette?

But Western sanctions against Moscow have meant that wheat importers in the West African country have had to look to other sources for the grain, such as Poland, Lithuania and Argentina — and pay higher prices for it.

In light of the war and rising prices, the national government subsidized the price of wheat to keep the consumer price of baguettes stable. 

Russian agricultural products are subject to sanctions exemptions. But in practice, sanctions have created additional levels of complexity for shipping and insurance companies to get the supply of grains out to the global market. 

Sanctions have also made it more difficult to convert payments from dollars to rubles.

The Black Sea Grain Initiative, brokered in July 2022 by Turkey and the United Nations, allowed Ukrainian grain shipments to leave ports in the Black Sea and through the Bosphorus Strait in Turkey for countries around the world.

Recently, though, Russia scrapped the breakthrough deal. And Ukrainian sea and river ports and other key infrastructure have been targeted with drones and missile strikes.

Moving forward, there is a lot of uncertainty about whether the Black Sea Grain Initiative can be restored.

While Senegal has been able to resume most of the wheat imports coming from Russia, and prices are slowly returning to normal, the crisis has raised awareness about the risk of being 100% dependent on other countries for wheat. 

In the video above, The World’s Tibisay Zea explains how the war in Ukraine is shaking up a big part of Senegal's food culture.

Related: Europe looks to Senegal for new energy supply. But what’s in it for the Senegalese?

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This summer, “Planet Hip Hop” took listeners around the world for a series of stories and conversations about hip-hop. 

From India to Korea, Ecuador to Senegal, we heard from rappers, artists, activists and scholars about how a sound born out of the South Bronx in New York 50 years ago traveled far and wide and influenced new generations of hip-hop voices.  

To wrap up “Planet Hip Hop,” H. Samy Alim returns to talk with host Marco Werman about current questions in hip-hop and also — its future. 

Alim is an anthropology professor and the director of the Hip Hop Initiative at UCLA. He is also co-editor of the book, "Freedom Moves: Hip Hop Knowledges, Pedagogies, and Futures.”

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and length.

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Srey Touch Kroch stood over a large wok, frying pieces of chicken in hot, bubbling oil as she cooked a Cambodian dish called cha kreung satch moan for 40 people. 

The second-year student at the Royal University of Phnom Penh is studying international business management, and it was her turn to make dinner for the women she shares a dorm with. 

Srey Touch Kroch.

Credit:

Anton L. Delgado/The World

The students’ housing and food are paid for by Harpswell, a US nonprofit that raises money from donors and also has staff in Cambodia. The program opened its first dorm there in 2006. Kroch and the other women say they are grateful to live in a residence hall and pursue a university degree. 

Alongside Srey Touch Kroch, Leakhena Long prepares a chicken and basil leaves dinner as part of her weekly duties at the Harpswell Foundation’s dormitory. The 20-year-old is in her third year at the University of Health Sciences majoring in pharmaceutical science.

Credit:

Anton L. Delgado/The World

Only about 20% of Cambodians complete the 12th grade, according to a 2021 report from Cambodia’s Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport. Overall, only around 10% of college-aged youths are enrolled in university.

Dorms are not common, and students generally live with families or rent an apartment. Without free housing, many of these students from poor rural areas would not be able to attend university in the capital. 

“It would be another burden for my family because they would have to pay for my school tuition, my place to live and also for other financial support that I would need to ask for coming to Phnom Penh,” Kroch said. 

Education in Cambodia was decimated during the Khmer Rouge’s rule in the 1970s, in which educated people were targeted. Following the genocide under the regime, public universities reopened and private institutions formed beginning in the 1990s. While Cambodia has built up its higher education offerings since then, the government puts less toward university funding than most other countries in Southeast Asia. 

The Harpswell Foundation built its first dormitory for university women in Phnom Penh in 2006.

Credit:

Anton L. Delgado/The World

Students from rural areas have a particularly hard time managing the costs. Farming incomes have become less sustainable for supporting families, and while public universities charge about $500 in tuition a year, that’s out of reach for most rural Cambodians. 

There is little support from the government, and the portion of education funding going to universities fell by half after 1990. The government does offer scholarships for about 15% of enrolled students at public universities. 

But the living stipends provided are not adequate, said Bunhorn Doeur, a PhD candidate studying education at the University of Southern Queensland in Australia. He knows firsthand how hard it is to live in Phnom Penh on a student’s budget.

“It's impossible for them to live in the capital city with that allowance. It's only about $10 to $20 a month,” he said. “There is no way that they can live depending on those funds at all.”

Student loans are not really an option in Cambodia. The country does not have a public student loan program, although the Education Ministry has said it plans to set one up by 2030. Interest rates charged by private banks are as high as 18%.

Srey Touch Kroch on the balcony of the Harpswell Foundation’s dormitory. With assistance from the foundation, the 20-year-old student is studying international business management at the Royal University of Phnom Penh.

Credit:

Anton L. Delgado/The World

Plus, many families are already deeply in debt. The World Bank called Cambodia’s ratio of household debt to gross domestic product “exceptionally high,” more than three times the rate of countries such as Sri Lanka and Indonesia. The average microloan in 2020 was around $4,200, more than the annual income of 95% of Cambodians, according to a report from the human rights groups Licadho and Equitable Cambodia. 

A lot of students from rural backgrounds have to find creative ways to get through university. For Sroem Khen, a child of farmers from Kampong Cham province, that meant becoming a monk at the age of 15, which is not particularly uncommon.

“One day, I decided that if I don't become a monk, maybe I cannot continue my education at that time, because our financial situation was not very good,” he said.  

A student studies biochemistry in the Hall of Great Women in the Harpswell Foundation’s dormitory in Phnom Penh.

Credit:

Anton L. Delgado/The World

Buddhism and education are deeply intertwined in Cambodia, and many pagodas in Phnom Penh house male university students from the provinces.

“We got a free place to stay. The pagoda I stayed at was very good because we were provided one room each and then two meals per day,” he said, adding that the pagoda gave him a lot of support.  

Khen eventually graduated from university, left the monastery and now has a job with a corporate training company. But in his spare time, he runs a program working with students attending a Buddhist high school, preparing the next generation for college.

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From Parisian pigeons to New York City rats, every city has its pesky wildlife creatures.

In London, it’s the city’s 10,000 urban foxes that have become both a malevolent menace and misunderstood mammal — it just depends on who you ask. 

“One thing you can certainly say about the fox is it's an animal that's been persecuted its whole existence,” said professional wildlife photographer Matt Maran, co-author of the book "Fox: Neighbor. Villain. Icon." 

A fox stands outside Southwark Crown Court in London, Wednesday, July 26, 2023. 

Credit:

Alberto Pezzali/AP

Maran said his fascination with London’s foxes stems at least in part because of the creature’s ability to adapt to its surroundings, even as other animals were phased out of the city.

“We used to have bears, wolves and lynx roaming these lands,” Maran said.  “But somehow the fox has managed to survive all of that persecution.”

Wildlife photographer Matt Maran.

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Rebecca Rosman/The World

For many Londoners, there’s less of a fascination and more of an irritation, especially as urban foxes become bolder, increasingly making their way into gardens and raiding trash bins. 

“I think most people consider them perhaps a nuisance,” London resident Sara Johnson said. She regularly sees foxes rummaging around the garden of her home located just next to Hyde Park. 

“[London] is not a natural habitat for foxes,” according to Eivand Johnson, her husband. “There’s so much food in the city that’s thrown out that foxes can live off of these provisions that are left from restaurants and even private homes.”

To which Maran said — can we blame them? 

“Why would you blame an animal for going to get easy pickings?” he said, “They're really great survivors.”

These are what you call human problems, Maran said, not fox problems. 

Wildlife photographer Matt Maran looks out for foxes.

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Rebecca Rosman/The World

Maran points to other places where humans have found solutions to living with disruptive wildlife. For example, specially designed bear resistant trash cans used inside national parks in the US. Why doesn’t London have fox-proof bins, he said.

Wildlife photographer Matt Maran prepares to photograph a fox in his neighborhood community garden.

Credit:

Rebecca Rosman/The World

After all, foxes have been a staple of the city’s landscape for decades. 

“The whole thing with foxes is they've been prevalent in London since the 1930s,” said Trevor Williams, founder of the Fox Project, a charity that operates a wildlife ambulance service that treats more than a thousand foxes a year. 

But when Williams launched the organization in 1991, it was because he felt there were too many misconceptions going around about foxes.

“I've always felt there was a need for an organization, an information bureau really on foxes, and that's what I wanted to establish,” he said.

There are some points Williams wants to make straight: Foxes are generally not a threat to humans or domestic animals such as cats or dogs. They haven’t carried rabies in the UK since 1902. The fox population in London isn’t growing — it’s actually gone down since its peak in the mid-'90s. 

And those wailing screeching sounds that they sometimes make at night? They can be annoying, but they’re generally just mating calls or a simple fox conversation. 

“It's those kind of misconceptions which blow up and they get worse by urban myth,” Williams said.

“Everybody gets more and more frightened because we love being frightened in England.” 

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Hannah Hirschsprung Lange, who is finishing her fourth and final semester studying bioengineering at Aarhus University in Jutland, Denmark, receives about $800 each month in financial support from the Danish government.

“It means I don’t have to work too much besides school,” Hirschsprung Lange said. “It helps with paying the rent and food, and then, you don’t have to think too much about it.”

And like most Danes, she will graduate owing nothing. That’s because in Denmark — as in at least a dozen European countries — tuition at public universities and most colleges is free, and students are paid to go to school as if it’s a job.

The Danish grant system, known as the Statens Uddannelsesstøtte, or SU for short, is available for students for up to six years. The amount of money a student receives depends on how much they earn working on the side. In the case of illness or pregnancy, students can apply for extra financial help.

Hannah Hirschsrpung Lange poses for a photo outside the Royal Danish Library at Aarhus University in Jutland, Denmark, on June 20, 2023. Hirschsprung Lange, who studies bioengineering, receives about $800 each month in financial support from the Danish government.

Credit:

Joshua Coe/The World

With student debt repayments back on the horizon for college graduates in the US, Hirschsrpung Lange said that the American higher education system seems broken because of “the fact that you have to go into so much student debt.”

Still, many Danish students like Hirschsprung Lange work part time to earn extra spending money for things like vacations and clothes. And some students do take out government loans, but they aren’t always used for school.

For Astrid Skifter Madsen, a first-year chemical engineering master’s student at Aarhus University, a loan enabled her to go to Asia recently.

“I needed a long summer holiday to Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia,” she explained. “So, I needed some money to cover that.”

Madsen said that she’s not worried about being able to finish her studies and paying back the loan.

The Danish government subsidizes student loans with a low interest rate, and she’ll have up to 15 years to pay it off.

The entrance of the Royal Danish Library on the campus of Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, on June 20, 2023.
 

Credit:

Joshua Coe/The World

Many Danes say that the generous subsidies and the free tuition is money well-spent.

“I mean, in the end, in a sense, you pay it back later,” said physics student Tobias Washeim, 22, who’s finished his third year of his bachelor’s degree at Aarhus University. “And I think it takes the stress off being a student.”

Danes do end up paying for the free education and the SU system through the country’s steep taxes that can carve out over 50% of one’s income. (It’s a progressive tax system, so the more you earn, the more you pay.) But polling in the country has shown satisfaction with the high taxes, which not only contribute to free education, but also free health care and pensions.

“You might pay less taxes and you get a higher income in the US, but I don’t really mind paying [those] high taxes,” Washeim added.

Astrid Skifter Madsen, 24, poses for a photo in the University Park, a public park in the center of the Aarhus University campus, on June 20, 2023. Madsen studies chemical engineering at the university.
 

Credit:

Joshua Coe/The World

The SU system came about 50 years ago at a time when the country of just 6 million decided to prioritize a well-educated population, explained Philipp Schröder, who teaches economics and business at Aarhus University.

“It's a small open economy [that] has virtually no raw materials here apart from brains,” Schröder said. “And so, that is a political agenda that has always been baked-in for changing governments [in Denmark]. So, education is for free.”

The idea was, in part, to make higher education an option for anyone in Denmark, regardless of their socioeconomic status, explained Fane Groes, an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School.

Before that, the SU system saw many students stuck with heavy loan burdens and high interest rates. But despite the goal of leveling the playing field for all Danes, Groes said, it hasn’t exactly worked out that way: “We know that it is the more-educated children and the richer children who actually go to college or university.”

Pedestrians walk along one of the two lakes in the middle of the University Park, a public park in the center of the Aarhus University campus, in Aarhus, Denmark, on June 20, 2023.

Credit:

Joshua Coe/The World

A 2021 study showed that for Danes born in 1987, the social heritage of education attainment is at the same level as in the US. And while the SU costs Denmark a little more than 1% of the gross national product, there are grumblings inside and outside of the government about the system. For one, because Denmark is part of the European Union, it has to offer SU grants to students from other EU countries.

Politicians have argued that this mandate has seen little returns, with a minority of internationals staying in Denmark after graduating. And, they say that too many students take too long to get through school and don’t go into fields that the country needs.

“If you allocate resources and talent mass sensibly in an economy, you don't want that to happen — that people train for something that no one in the job market wants,” said Schröder, who sat on a government commission tasked with suggesting higher education reforms. “Then, they have to settle for lower-skilled jobs where they can't use the investments they have taken.”

Earlier this summer, the government made some of the biggest reforms to higher education, controversially shortening or restructuring the length of a third of the country's 500 master’s programs from two-year degrees to one year and three months.

Hannah Hirschsrpung Lange poses for a photo outside the Royal Danish Library at Aarhus University in Jutland, Denmark, on June 20, 2023. Hirschsprung Lange, who studies bioengineering, receives about $800 each month in financial support from the Danish government.

Credit:

Joshua Coe/The World

The government said it will reallocate the funds to training for nursing, teaching and social work — fields that have recently experienced staff shortages in Denmark. But there was no government proposal to get rid of free tuition for undergraduates. Nor did they touch payments that go to students.

The move is expected to mainly impact master’s degrees in the humanities and social sciences.

Sigrid Strunge Vetter, who recently completed a psychology degree at Aarhus, said she couldn't imagine jamming two years of study into one year and three months.

“I have a two-year master’s degree, and I still feel like I’m having massive gaps and there’s lots of knowledge I haven’t gathered,” she said. “So, how they want to be able to cut that down to half, I simply can’t fathom.”

Overall, Strunge Vetter said that she is not against reforms, though. She said it’s good for the state to regulate higher education to correspond with market needs to keep unemployment rates down.

But she doesn’t want the government to chip away at the right of every Dane to get a higher education.

“It ensures that everybody, independently of their financial and socio-economic background can attend whatever studies they want to attend,” which she hopes will be the case for generations of Danes to come.

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A violent gang in Haiti opened fire on Saturday on protesters organized by a church leader close to Port-au-Prince, the country’s capital. At least seven people were killed, and others were wounded and kidnapped.

Marcorel Zidor, known as Pastor Marco, had been urging hundreds of his followers to confront a street gang that controls a swath of a suburb called Canaan, which he said had attacked many of his parishioners.

The gang, known as 5 Seconds, has got a reputation for random killings, kidnappings and extortion. Just last week, gang leaders said they wanted to shut down the only road connecting the capital to the country’s north.

On Saturday, he organized a protest against the gang, and hundreds of religious faithful attended his call. The group, wearing matching yellow shirts, marched from the Caradeux neighborhood, where their church is located, toward Canaan. Some carried wooden sticks or machetes.

Graphic videos shared on social media show protesters being shot at, bodies in the streets and people who appear to be taken hostage.

“The gangs fired on them with their M-16s and M4 and M14. It was a real massacre,” said Henry-Louis Mars, executive director of Lakou Lapè, a peace institute based in Port-au-Prince.

Mars said it’s unclear why the pastor led his followers into such a dangerous situation.

“I think it's to attract attention, to show off that he can mobilize people. So, he might have political ambitions, he wants national attention.”

Mars said other Protestant pastors have called for demonstrations recently, but they have not done what Pastor Marco did, by confronting gang members in the street.

Speaking to the news media, protester Francois Vicner said he saw Pastor Marco leading the demonstration.

“The pastor assured his followers that they were bulletproof,” he said.

In an interview on local radio on Monday, Pastor Marco confirmed this. He said that 95% of his parishioners survived because they had faith, and those who were killed did not have faith.

Rosy Ducenat, program manager of the National Human Rights Defense Network in Haiti, said the national police were aware of this protest and they didn’t stop it.

“The pastor publicly announced that he was going to take the members of his church to Canaan to fight the gangs. This is actually incitement to violence, and the police should have prevented the victims from going to Canaan.”

In a press conference on Monday, Police Chief Frantz Elbe said that they did what they could to prevent the protest, but that the people were determined to go.

Haiti has been grappling with violent gangs since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.

Mars said to build peace in Haiti, the smuggling of guns from the US into Haiti must stop.

“If there's no longer any guns coming in, and ammunition coming in, then you would have these guys more willing to negotiate.”

The government of Kenya proposed to lead a multinational effort to bring order to Haiti, including 1,000 security forces. The Bahamas have offered to send 150 police officers, too.

But Haitians have mixed feelings about that.

Ducenat said it’s a bad idea: “Reinforcing the police and the impunity and the bad governance would be much more helpful. But of course, most of the population seems to believe that the international military will help them because of a lack of confidence they have in the police institution today.”

Earlier this month, the United States said that it would present a resolution to the UN Security Council, authorizing the intervention of security forces from Kenya.

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Toni Merino’s downtown deli in Barcelona, Spain, has been around for over a century, offering expensive cheese, Iberian ham and wine.

Sales were way off this year, he said. He has noticed an uptick in visitors lately, but he said that many come in just to check out its ornate interior — and take selfies. With hardwood shelves and marble countertops, the place is something of a bygone era.

This deli is over 100 years old and draws tourists for its ornate interior reminiscent of the bygone days.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

Spain’s on the rebound with tourism after huge losses during the pandemic. Those who work in the tourism business are relieved. But visitors are back with a vengeance and they’re not always well-behaved — irking locals who miss the quieter days of confinement.

One day, Merino said he came out of the storeroom and saw a few men setting up a tripod in the middle of the store. They were speaking English, he said, and filming. Then, they just left.

“It was becoming a zoo,” he said. “They weren't even saying hello.”

Merino, fed up, a few months back, went into his office and wrote up a little sign. It's still there, taped to the glass door: "Just looking," it reads, "€5 per person."

A sign in the window of an iconic gourmet deli in downtown Barcelona has been dissuading tourists from coming in just to snap selfies.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

“We've never had to charge anyone,” Merino said, but tourists got the message.

“No one's taking selfies anymore,” he said. “Our clients are really grateful they don't have to wait for the tourists to leave just to come in.”

Like nearly everyone in Barcelona, Merino's not against tourists. He said he is just against too many of them and their sometimes less-than-civil behavior.

This summer, a crowd of tens of thousands of revelers cheered on a drunken tourist in his underwear. It was shown on Spanish TV, with the guy standing in a public fountain swinging a street sign over his head.

This graffiti is on a lot of walls in Gracia and other parts of Barcelona. Most residents aren’t this radical, but it does reflect a growing frustration with the unbridled partying as tourist numbers rise.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

For better or worse, tourism in Spain is back. The country is on track to receive more than 83 million tourists this year. That was the record set just before the pandemic. It's nearly twice Spain's population.

It's bringing moments of mayhem, but it's also putting a lot of money in people's pockets, from apartment renters to cab drivers to owners of tourist drinking holes.

One place where visitors drop lots of dough is along Barcelona's famous downtown esplanade, Las Ramblas.

This summer, it has three times the officially allowed number of outdoor restaurant seats. Owners are willing to risk the fines, and it's clear why. At a tourist spot where everyone’s drinking sangria, a large glass is a whopping $22.

The Las Ramblas is tourist-central, but aided by online “top 10” listicles, festive foreigners are making their way into neighborhoods way off the beaten path.

On a Barcelona hilltop known as the Bunkers, police come in daily to kick out the mostly young partiers.

Tourists flock to the Bunkers for the views but their presence has overwhelmed local residents.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

During the Spanish Civil War, there was an anti-aircraft battery up here. Now, it's a city park and the place to go for sunset selfies, attracting people from all over the world.

The park never used to close at all. Today, police lock the high iron gate the city has installed around it.

The Bunkers park sits atop a hill behind the city and offers amazing views. The city has had to build an iron fence around the park so that young partiers don’t come up here at night, bothering residents. It hasn’t worked.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

"I wish I knew that they're closing early,” Canadian tourist Rala Liu said. “They should update their hours on Google Maps or something, so at least people know to come early.”

Yet, local residents said the measure has not made much of a difference.

"As soon as the police leave, they'll be back," said neighbor Nati Mesa, who was out walking her dog, Simba.

"They party up there all night,” she said, adding that the neighborhood bus is full of tourists.

“We actually live up here." she said. “Sometimes, I can't even get home."

Fencing off popular spots is just one way the city is trying to rein in the party. It's also banned organized pub crawls in the old city. Police dole out fines for indecent behavior.

No city can control its number of visitors, but there is an attempt to spread the tourists around to take the pressure off overrun areas.

On a recent day at the new Gabriel Garcia Marquez library in the San Marti neighborhood, it’s crowded — but mainly with locals.

Librarian Maemi Pons said she's thrilled.

"Even if, at times, it gets a little noisy … we need to call for quiet,” she said, “but mostly, people here behave well.”

The city chose the site for the library some 20 minutes from downtown in a working-class neighborhood far from the tourism circuit — for now, at least.

Barcelona's new neighborhood library, named after Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, has seen a boost in visitors after winning the World’s Best New Library of the Year 2023 from the International Federation of Libraries.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

The wood-and-glass building just won an award for the best new public library in the world.

If it makes the listicles, the selfie mobs might just make the trek out here.

Like Merino’s overrun downtown deli, it may have to get creative to protect the residents who come here to actually use it.

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When Crimea is mentioned in the news, it’s often in the context of war — Russia has occupied Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula since 2014.

But when Ukrainians hear the word Crimea, they often think of it as a bastion of culture and music.

Susana Alimivna Jamaladinova, known simply as “Jamala,” is one of Ukraine’s most famous singers. She won the Eurovision song contest in 2016.

Jamala, an Indigenous Crimean Tatar, often talks about how her heritage shapes her music.

“My whole family are musicians,” Jamala told The World. “My mom, she is a piano teacher. My father, he is an accordion player and he's a really good folk singer. He sings Crimean Tatar songs.”

One song that Jamala said exudes strong emotions is “Bizim Taraf,” or “My Side” in English, a Crimean folk classic passed down by her paternal grandmother.

Growing up, Jamala said she was encouraged to listen to all musical genres, from jazz to opera and folk to rock.

And then she started to write her own music.

Jamala recently released an album called “Qirim,” or “Crimea.” It includes more than 80 musicians, a double symphony orchestra and folk musicians who created a total of 14 ancient Crimean Tatar songs.

“It's like a diary,” she said, of various Crimean characters in folk history.

In one song, "Alim," listeners learn about a famous Crimean akin to a 17th-century Robinhood who fought for the rights of poor people.

“The belief in his strength was huge,” Jamala said.

Jamala drew inspiration from film composers such as Hans Zimmerman and Ramin Djawadi to create a “soundtrack” for Crimea that was cinematic in scope.

“Because, you know, the ‘Game of Thrones,’ they built seven kingdoms with different melodies, and we feel it in the music. Oh, my God. It was a real inspiration for me,” she said.

Another song on the album, “Yosmam,” tells a heartbreaking story passed down by her great-grandmother about a village girl waiting by a window for her boyfriend — who never arrives.

“Nowadays, it sounds [like,] ‘OK, whatever. I'll find another one.’ But at that time, it was a huge tragedy. ‘You [crushed] my heart,’ and we feel it at the end of the song,” Jamala explained.

The album was nearly completed, Jamala said, when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine started in February of 2022. They had to stop working on it while Kyiv was under attack.

During this time, Jamala said she had a dream to include new sounds at the end of the album that acknowledged the atrocities that occurred in Bucha and Mariupol.

“Russians can steal our territory nowadays, but they can’t steal our identity, our songs,” Jamala said.

“I want to say to the whole world that we exist. And for me, it's important to give a voice to my homeland, Crimea.”

Jamala's songs in the order they appear in the segment:

1. "Bizim Taraf" (not on the latest album)
2. "Alim"
3. "Yosmam"
4. "Outro"
5. "Dağlarniñ Yollari"

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Alena Popova is a Russian opposition politician who has organized scores of political campaigns. She has also run for office multiple times.

But the political process in Russia is at a low point today, she said.

“Everything changed because of the war, everything is worse.”

These days, Popova is a politician in exile in the United States with the Wilson Center in Washington. Popova said that political repression in Russia has accelerated since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We have dictatorship in Russia, it’s not a democracy, it’s dictatorship, and in dictatorship, you don’t have any elections. But you have this will of the people, to change something, and you need not to let the people think that they are just slaves, or the official authorities can take any power over them.”

Popova understands that elections today in Russia are often staged. But she still encourages her former constituents to go to the ballot box.

“Despite all the things that are happening in my own country, even if you don’t like any candidate, you need to vote, even against everyone.”

This kind of “protest vote” strategy is also being deployed by the organization led by Alexei Navalny, an opposition politician who is currently a political prisoner.

Despite his imprisonment, he and his team are still communicating with their supporters.

Earlier this week, Navalny’s team posted a video encouraging his supporters to vote for anyone aside from Vladimir Putin’s United Russia.

András Tóth-Czifra, a fellow with the Eurasia program of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said that strategy has worked in the past, but Russia these days is much more repressive.

Most independent candidates are barred from running, and certain election processes have changed.

“Online voting, I would say, is a kind of silver bullet which can be used to change electoral outcomes.”

In previous years, election monitoring organizations have alleged that e-votes were, in fact, falsified and used to swing elections in favor of United Russia.

But now, even speaking about these kinds of irregularities could be risky.

“You know, any civil or political activist right now in Russia understands that he’s under risk,” said Stanislav Andreichuk, the co-chair of Golos, an independent Russian election monitoring group.

Just last week, Russian authorities arrested one of Andreichuk’s colleagues, Grigory Melkonyants.

Grigory Melkonyants, co-chair of Russia's leading election organization, is escorted from a courtroom after a session in Moscow, Russia, Aug. 18, 2023. A Moscow judge has formally arrested and detained Melkonyants, one of the leaders of a prominent independent election monitoring group on charges of being involved with an "undesirable" organization. Melkonyants faces up to six years in prison and will appear in a Moscow court.

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Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

Andreichuk said this is the type of political intimidation that’s become common in Russia.

“When you have such kind of censorship, it is very uncomfortable to talk, even with your friends and your neighbors and so on, because you are not sure that they will have the same position.”

Russian political scientist, Alexander Kynev, said that despite the war making all the headlines on state TV, it’s been downplayed in the election cycle.

“People are trying to live like they did in the past, and not pay attention to the war,” he said.

From the Kremlin’s perspective though, Kynev said that these regional elections are all about Putin’s presidential reelection bid next year.

The presidential election campaign has already begun, and that’s the vote that really matters, he added. The Kremlin will use next year’s elections as a sign of the population’s support for the war in Ukraine.

Opposition politician Popova said even though it’s obvious who Russia’s next president will be, “all the dictatorships, anytime will end the same way. All the dictatorships will be ruined by themselves.”

And that’s why voting, and building strong democratic instincts is so important, she added. Once this regime implodes, Russian citizens need to be ready.

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Diana Luz Vasquez became an activist for mothers’ rights in Mexico after trying, for years, to get child support for her 6-year-old daughter, Sabina.

Vasquez’s former partner left her when she was two months pregnant and didn’t recognize their daughter, Sabina. He owes Vasquez more than $20,000 in child support payments, she said.

“I’ve heard the same stories from my mother, grandmother, and some of my aunts, because in Mexico, it’s easy to impregnate someone and abandon them without any major financial or moral consequences,” Vasquez said.

Vasquez has been through a complicated and expensive process to hold Sabina’s father accountable. She even had to pay for a DNA test that cost her the equivalent of two months of her salary.

“It’s a very exhausting process, and many women just quit because they don’t have resources, or simply because they get tired of fighting without achieving results,” Vasquez said.

Last year, she came up with a different idea: She organized a protest where single mothers hung the picture of the debtors in a clothes line at a public plaza in the city of Oaxaca, in the southwest of the country. They called it “Tendedero de Deudores,” or “Debtors Clothes Line.” Dozens of women showed up and it got a lot of media attention.

Diana Luz Vasquez, activist for mother’s rights in Mexico and main proponent of the bill, "Ley Sabina."

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Frente Nacional de Mujeres Contra Deudores Alimentarios Facebook page

“In a corrupt country where machismo is so strong, people are more afraid of shame than justice,” Vasquez said.

The protest was so popular that it was replicated across Mexico, and soon turned into a social movement demanding better policies to hold child-support debtors accountable.

They have been pushing for a bill called “Ley Sabina,” named after Vasquez’s daughter, which prevents child support debtors in Mexico from running for public offices, driving, or leaving the country. The bill was finally approved in March, and the government is now committed to creating a public registry of debtors.

Vasquez said that this is a good first step, but a lot more needs to be done to help mothers navigate the process and make sure they receive payments on time.

Children in Latin American countries are far more likely to live in lone-mother families than in any other region, according to the United Nations.

In Colombia, about a quarter of single mothers get child support. In Guatemala, it’s only 14%.

Women at a protest to help single mothers in Mexico get child support.

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Frente Nacional de Mujeres Contra Deudores Alimentarios Facebook page

“In these countries, there is less accountability, and there is a lot of work that needs to be done for single mothers to be able to receive any child support,” said Laura Cuesta, a researcher with Rutgers University who’s been studying child support policies in Latin America.

It’s usually the mothers who must find out about the system, fill out applications, attend appointments and collect evidence, including about their ex-partners who many times would prefer not to participate or collaborate, Cuesta said, “and that is a burden. And that means that people have to spend resources that many times they don’t have.”

Cuesta’s research found that child support plays a significant role in preventing single-parent families in Latin America from being economically insecure.

Women rally for a bill in Mexico to help single mothers get child support.

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Frente Nacional de Mujeres Contra Deudores Alimentarios Facebook page

In the US, there is a similar approach, but according to Cuesta, the process tends to be quicker and less expensive, and there is more policy enforcement.

In many European countries, it’s the government that pays mothers directly and then charges debtors.

“These European countries see children as a public good, and then, the question is not whether the father is paying child support or not. The question is what this child needs to not live in poverty,” Cuesta said.

Several Latin American countries are interested in this policy.

In Chile, the Ministry for Women started a registry of child support debtors last year. Those on this list aren't allowed to issue or renew passports or drivers licenses. In Argentina, where there’s a similar registry, debtors also can’t get tickets for soccer games.

There are 100,000 people on the registry of debtors in Chile, and 97% of them are men, according to Chilean Minister for Women Advancement Antonia Orellana.

“It's a gender issue and it has to do a lot with patriarchal values across the region,” she said.

Chilean Minister for Women Antonia Orellana

Credit:

Wikimedia page

Orellana mentioned a popular song called “Papito Corazon,” by Chilean folk group Los Picantes. Papito Corazón is described as a handsome guy who has multiple girlfriends and kids and doesn’t pay for child support.

“Many Chileans see this song as funny, but it’s definitely not,” Orellana said.

Her office is trying to change that mentality. They are launching new campaigns to educate women, especially poor mothers, on how to register the debtors on the list and why it is important to do so.

The creation of these registries is a first step, but the problem of forcing the debtors to pay still persists, Vasquez said.

The activists behind Ley Sabina are planning protests in the United States, for fathers who migrate north and don’t send money to their children in Latin America.

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A day after a private jet dropped out of the sky north of Moscow, reportedly killing all onboard, including apparently Wagner mercenary group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, many questions remain.

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday offered condolences to the families of the dead. He praised Prigozhin as a talented businessman. He went on to say that the mercenary chief made serious mistakes in his life, but he "got results for himself and for the common cause when I asked him."

A telegram channel linked to Prigozhin's Wagner Group said that his death is "the result of actions committed by traitors to Russia."

To discuss the incident and what it means, The World's host Marco Werman spoke with Kimberly Marten, who has studied the Wagner Group and testified about it on Capitol Hill. She is a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University.

Marco Werman: Kimberly, what do yesterday’s events tell you about Putin’s grip on power?Kimberly Marten: He is strengthening his grip on power. He took his revenge slowly, most likely, but he used that time productively to ensure that the mutineers were located on Belarusian territory far away from Russia's borders but close enough to monitor and control, and also probably to renegotiate the contracts in Syria and in several African countries where Wagner's groups are on the ground playing a very important role for Russian foreign policy and security interests in those countries. So, he always takes his revenge a little bit after the events actually happened. And I would guess he used these two months very productively.So, who were the other people onboard that plane yesterday?One of them is listed as being Dmitry Utkin, who was the original military founder of the Wagner Group back in 2014. But other people had indicated that there were rumors that he was actually killed a long time ago. And then probably the most important other person who was on the list as being killed is a man named [Valeriy] Chekalov. He was listed as being head of security, but he was also the person listed as being the manager of Prigozhin's private business firm located in Syria. It is likely that the troops in Syria that had been working for the Wagner Group have now been moved either over to work for the Russian defense ministry directly or else for a different group similar to Wagner called Redut that is affiliated with a different Russian oligarch named Gennady Timchenko, who is actually much closer to Putin than Prigozhin ever was.Let me ask you, Kimberly, was this crash essentially a decapitation of the Wagner group as we know it?Sure. It looks like the kind of revenge that Putin would take. And, you know, it's not clear exactly what's going to happen next. But these forces could probably continue their activities in Africa under local commanders or the local commanders, if they did not wish to cooperate with the Russian state any more, could be pretty easily replaced by other people.What can we say then about rivalries in the groups of officials who surround Putin?So, I think the rivalries that we're going to see are probably coming from other groups that are somewhat like Wagner. And the one that everybody has been talking about is called Redut, which means redoubt. It has mostly been on the ground in Syria providing security to oil and gas facilities. It also had a role in 2022. It one of the first groups that went into Ukraine alongside the regular Russian military forces. It did not do very well there. It doesn't really have a lot of combat experience. So, it probably would have a difficult time taking over Wagner's combat roles. There are a variety of other companies. One is called Patriot. There are some others that could potentially play a role, but we're not sure what's going to happen there. The big question in Moscow is how the Russian military thinks about Prigozhin and Prigozhin's death. We do know that the former head of the Russian air force and space forces was removed from duty. He has not been seen since the mutiny back in late June.That would be General Sergey Surovikin and also nicknamed "General Armageddon."Yes, Prigozhin had identified him as the person who was his go-between with the defense ministry. And we don't know how deeply inside the Russian military support for Prigozhin went. And so the one thing to keep an eye on is whether there is any kind of instability within the Russian military over this. But what we have seen is that particular groups inside the Duma, the Russian legislature, have apparently been celebrating the death of Prigozhin. And so, in terms of the politicians that are close to Putin, there's probably not going to be any instability whatsoever.How many private military groups are there like Wagner in Russia? And is the reported death of Prigozhin going to open, kind of, the floodgates for more of these mercenary groups to emerge?That wouldn't be surprising if that happens. As far as we know, there are somewhere maybe between 10 and 15 of these groups. They haven't exactly been counted. They have a tendency to change their names, and new ones are appearing all the time. So, for example, the Russian state has been apparently calling for private oligarchs in Russia to put forward their own new groups to go fight in Ukraine. We know that Gazprom, the Russian big natural gas monopoly, has created three of these new groups just in the last several months, which are apparently cooperating with Redut in their training for going to deploy in Ukraine. We know that the Russian space agency has created a group. We know that Ramzan Kadyrov, who is the warlord in the Russian region of Chechnya and a very strong Putin supporter, he has created groups to go fight in Ukraine. And so, it would not be the least bit surprising if we now see a plethora of these groups just emerging to try to fill the space that Prigozhin formerly occupied. But I think it would also not be surprising to see that various Wagner formations continue to be Wagner just under new commanders.Yevgeny Prigozhin was famous for publicly calling out Russian military leaders as ineffective, especially in the war in Ukraine. And he questioned the rationale for the war and said the rank-and-file soldiers were being exploited. What happens to that message now?I think that message probably disappears. What Putin has done immediately after the Prigozhin mutiny — the leader of the group of strong Russian militaristic nationalists, Igor Girkin, was imprisoned and that sort of shut off one set of strongly pro-war but anti-how-the-war-was-being-fought group that was loud in addition to Prigozhin and anybody who has expressed any dissent about the war itself has immediately been shut down.So, Kimberly, if this is indeed the end of Yevgeny Prigozhin, what do you think it all means for Russia's war in Ukraine?I'm not sure it has any direct impact on Russia's war in Ukraine. Wagner troops, per se, had not been in Ukraine since early May. So, it certainly has no direct impact on the fighting. The big question is what all of this will mean for Russian military morale. And again, that comes back to the question of how much support Prigozhin actually had within the military, whether the ordinary rank-and-file soldiers saw him as a hero.So, what does this change then about Putin's hold on power?I think it strengthens Putin's hold on power because he has demonstrated that he does not allow people who have betrayed him to get away unscathed. The one thing it does also, though, is to demonstrate that Putin is not trustworthy or reliable because it appeared that he had a deal with Prigozhin and it appears that that deal now ended. And so it would, I think, make people think twice about reaching any kind of an agreement with Putin in the future.Kimberly, what are the other shoes left to drop? What are you going to be paying most attention to now?I think what we should pay most attention to is exactly what happens to the leadership of these groups that were associated with Wagner that are in foreign countries and then what happens in Belarus. We have reports already that there was a Russian military airplane that landed in Belarus last night and that there has been some activity around a Belarus camp in the middle of the country today. And I suspect that there will be some effort by the Russian regime to ensure that those Wagner fighters in Belarus, who were primarily prisoners, who were given freedom in return for fighting in Bakhmut in Ukraine by Prigozhin last year, and who therefore may see Prigozhin as being a hero, that those people are controlled. They do not have heavy weapons, as far as we know. Their heavy weapons were taken away after the mutiny. And so, they don't appear to be posing much of a threat. But I would guess the Russian military is paying very close attention to them.This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Related: Wagner mutiny leads to questions about Russia’s military leadership

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On a recent evening, a small crowd of locals in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, gathered in the offices of Esimde, a research organization that focuses on modern history, to take in a documentary and lecture about a bloody uprising in the country that occurred in August 1916.

That summer, Russian authorities forces in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, which were then part of the Russian Empire, announced a draft to enlist Central Asians to support Russia in World War I. The Russians killed thousands who resisted, and scholars estimate that at least 100,000 more people died trying to flee to nearby China, although some estimates put the total number of dead at more than triple that.

The shores of Issyk-Kul, a sprawling lake surrounded by snow-capped mountains in northern Kyrgyzstan, are an idyllic summer vacation spot. But in summer 1916, when the region was part of the Russian empire, the villages near the lake witnessed a uprising against Russian authorities where thousands died.

Credit:

Levi Bridges/The World

Most of the victims died while crossing over the snowy mountains that separate Kyrgyzstan from China. The tragedy became known by the Kyrgyz word urkun, which is often translated as “exodus,” but one Kyrgyz scholar said it means something closer to panicked animals running away from danger.

More than a century later, historians and locals say it is still complicated to talk about the episode, in part because of pressure from Russia to downplay Russia’s role in the tragedy. But every summer, groups like Esimde strive to commemorate the tragedy.

Even in the summer months, many of Kyrgyzstan's towering mountains remain covered with snow and glaciers. Experts believe that at least 100,000 people died in the mountains trying to escape the Russians during the 1916 uprising.

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Levi Bridges/The World

“Our government can’t openly recognize the Urkun, but ordinary people and independent organizations like ours really want people to know about what happened,” said Gulzat Alagoz Kyzy, a researcher with Esimde who helped organize the documentary screening.

Although the Urkun occurred several generations ago, the memories of what people endured have been passed down through generations surviving as an oral history.

“My family fled up toward the mountains, stopping during the day to hide in bushes,” said Anvar Nanshanlo, an ethnic Dungan man from the regional city of Karakol.

Nanshanlo’s grandmother was just 8 years old during the uprising. After Russians entered her village and started burning down houses, she and her family fled to the nearby mountains that separate Kyrgyzstan from China.

Anvar Nanshanlo of Karakol, Kyrgyzstan, heard the story about the Urkun from other family members. Nanshanlo's grandmother, who was just 8 years old during the 1916 uprising, fled over the nearby mountains to China in order to escape the Russians.

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Levi Bridges/The World

But the journey over the mountains was no easy feat. Even in summer, snow cover and frozen glaciers remain in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan.

“People would cut out steps in the ice with knives and axes, put one foot forward and then start cutting the next step,” Nanshanlo said as he described the slow journey his relatives took through the mountains to China.

Many Kyrgyz didn’t survive the harsh conditions.

Decades later, one man who visited the mountains where it is estimated that hundreds of thousands people fled during the 1916 uprising described finding a river with banks still “covered in human bones.”

Asel Daniyarova, a Kyrgyz historian, and her husband, Vladimir Schwartz, said that they found documents in Russian archives, which they said suggest that Russia intentionally used the uprising to displace the local population through violence to make way for Russian settlers.

Not all historians share this interpretation of the events, but many agree that Russia tried to control the historical narrative about the Urkun starting during the Soviet period.

“In Soviet times, there was almost no information in school textbooks about the Urkun,” Daniyarova said.

But after the Soviet Union fell, Kyrgyzstan became an independent country and Indigenous peoples, not Russians, had a chance to write their version of history.

Myratbek Imankulov, head of social studies and humanities at the Kyrgyz Academy of Education, wrote a history book for high school students published in 2006, which includes a detailed section about the Urkun.

Myratbek Imankulov stands with a history book that he wrote for Kyrgyz highschool students that includes detailed descriptions about the Urkun. Imankulov came under fire from Russians who accused him of falsifying history.

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Levi Bridges/The World

After the book came out, some Russian academics accused Imankulov of falsifying history. He was even threatened with legal action for spreading propaganda.

“They wanted to silence me so other historians would stop their work,” Imankulov said.

Despite the pressures against him, Imankulov’s book is still in print. But other Kyrgyz who have chosen to tackle the subject of the Urkun have faced some form of censorship.

A 2016, Hollywood-style movie about the Urkun (also titled “Ukrun”) produced by Kyrgyz filmmakers faced significant delays before gaining government approval to show the film in Kyrgyzstan.

Later, one of the producers told the local press that the authorities asked them to change some parts of the film before its release, presumably so as to not sour relations with Russia.

The mountains separating Kyrgyzstan from China are treacherous and awe-inspiring.

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Levi Bridges/The World

Imankulov said the scale of carnage carried out by Russia during the Urkun is comparable to the slaughter of civilians last year in the Ukrainian city of Bucha.

“These are crimes against humanity and even though the two events are separated by more than 100 years, they are essentially the same,” Imankulov said.

But acknowledging Russia’s responsibility for crimes committed recently in Ukraine, or last century, is difficult in countries that maintain close ties with Russia. Central Asian countries still greatly depend on Russia economically and their leaders have refrained from outwardly condemning Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Still, some Kyrgyz are determined to make sure that Russia’s influence in their countries as a colonial power is not forgotten.

“Up until now, there is a wound, and we have to bring the truth, otherwise it will never be healed,” Daniyarova said.

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Huge replicas of 50 of Nicaragua’s most-important cathedrals and churches stand tall along the waterfront in Managua, Nicaragua’s capital.

Local officials said the statues, constructed eight years ago, were President Daniel Ortega’s idea. He wanted to honor the country’s most-important religious institutions, and in particular, the Catholic Church.

Church replicas line this walkway along the waterfront in Managua, Nicaragua.

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Michael Fox/The World

But Ortega and the church are no longer on good terms.

Last week, a judge ordered the seizure of the Central American University, one of the country’s most-important Jesuit institutions. It’s the latest in an ongoing government crackdown on the Catholic Church and church-affiliated institutions inside Nicaragua. But why is the Nicaraguan government at war with the church?

In 2018, the school opened its doors to protesters who were demonstrating against Ortega. The judge ruled that the university had acted as a center of terrorism, “creating lies and elevating levels of violence and destruction."

The announcement of the seizure dropped like a bombshell. The university repudiated the claims. Former and current students denounced the move in videos online.

Demonstrators protest outside the Jesuit-run Universidad Centroamericana, UCA, demanding the university's allocation of its share of 6% of the national budget in Managua, Nicaragua, Aug. 2, 2018. The Jesuits announced on Aug. 16, 2023, that Nicaragua's government has confiscated the UCA, one of the region's most highly regarded colleges.

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Arnulfo Franco/AP/File

In neighboring Costa Rica, exiled former students protested in front of the Nicaraguan Embassy.

"The regime continues to fear that the students will develop,” one of them told the US government news outlet Voice of America. “It doesn’t want them to have their own thoughts and to continue their right to study freely and in democracy.”

But students interviewed by Nicaraguan state media said it wasn’t a bad thing.

"It’s an important change for the student population and for the university population in Nicaragua,” student Sugey Lopez said. "They are going to have greater access to their studies and be able to better adapt to their financial situation."

The Nicaraguan government hasn’t closed the doors. The Catholic university has been transformed into a state institution — the Casimiro Sotelo Montenegro National University — named after a student martyr from the 1960s.

"We are announcing that this university will be free for all, in order to guarantee education and the future of the country’s youth,” said Ramona Rodriguez, the president of the country’s national university, during a ceremony opening the new school late last week.

In recent years, the government has also seized more than two dozen private universities and transformed them into public institutions. The government says it is democratizing education. The opposition sees it otherwise.

“They are afraid that the students will organize at the universities,” said former student leader Edgar Blanco in a video posted online. "That’s why they don’t want to leave any private universities untouched.”

Blanco, who now lives in Costa Rica, once led student protests against Ortega in 2018, when widespread street protests rippled across the country.

Demonstrators protest outside the Jesuit run Universidad Centroamericana, UCA, demanding the university's allocation of its share of 6% of the national budget, in Managua, Nicaragua, Aug. 2, 2018.

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Arnulfo Franco/AP

They began as demonstrations against austerity measures and pension reform. State forces cracked down, attacking protesters, which fueled dissent even further. Many were killed, including students. Some protesters were peaceful. Many were not. They threatened and attacked local residents. They called for Ortega to step down.

The clergy said they were standing with the people.

“The murdering president and his wife need to get out,” a priest told a rally outside the Central American University, the school that has now been shut down. "Get out you miserable assassins. Get out. Get out. Get out.”

In this Sept. 5, 2018, file photo, Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega and his wife and Vice President Rosario Murillo, lead a rally in Managua, Nicaragua.

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Alfredo Zuniga/File/AP

Ortega accused the Catholic Church of fueling the violence, backing the protests and pushing for a coup against his government. Many in Nicaragua say church officials did go too far.

"I've done interviews of people who are victims of opposition violence in Juigalpa, in Nueva Guinea and in Rio San Juan, in San Carlos. And in every case, they said that the church was used as a logistics base for the gangs that were operating the roadblocks, preventing people going about their business, extorting money from businesspeople and local farmers trying to move their produce to market through the roadblocks,” said Stephen Sefton, who’s lived in Nicaragua for 30 years and runs the local media collective, Tortilla con Sal.

A video, which surfaced in July 2018, allegedly shows residents of the city of Diriamba protesting against a church, which they discovered had been housing weapons to be used by opposition forces against them.

Since 2018, relations between Ortega and the Vatican have continued to deteriorate.

Ortega has called the Catholic Church "the perfect dictatorship.”

“Who elects the priests? Who elects the bishops? The cardinals? How many votes do they get?” he told state TV.

He broke off diplomatic relations with the Vatican in March. Earlier this year, the pope called Ortega a dictator.

The government has also banned Easter week processions, clergy have been jailed and top church officials have fled the country.

Bishop Cesar Bosco Vivas Robelo, left, Cardinal Leopoldo Brenes, center, and Bishop Rolando Alvarez, pray at the end of the third day of the national dialogue in Managua, Nicaragua, May 21, 2018. President Daniel Ortega initially asked the Catholic Church to play a role as a mediator as political tensions rose, but the first round of dialogue didn’t last long. After priests sheltered demonstrators inside their parishes and expressed concern about excessive use of force, Ortega targeted them as “terrorists” who backed opposition efforts to undermine or overthrow him.

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Alfredo Zuniga/File/AP

But every Sunday, most Nicaraguans still attend church.

Leon Cathedral is one of the most famous in Nicaragua.

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Michael Fox/The World

In a recent poll, 82.6% of Nicaraguans said there is freedom of religion in their country.

Ortega has said that he’s religious, too.

"I am a revolutionary, because of Christ,” he told a crowd earlier this year. “The interior strength that I have had over these years to survive, I owe to Christ."

A woman takes part in a reenactment of the Stations of the Cross during the Lenten season at the Metropolitan Cathedral in Managua, Nicaragua, March 17, 2023. Amid tensions between the Vatican and the Daniel Ortega government, Catholics staged the devotional commemoration of Jesus Christ's last day on Earth in the gardens of the Cathedral due to the police ban on celebrating religious festivities on the streets.

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Inti Ocon/AP

In other words, the conflict is between president Ortega and the Catholic Church itself — not the religion.

This is where issues of education, religion and politics intersect. And in a country as polarized as Nicaragua, there are no easy answers.

But everyone can agree that the closure of the Central American University is only the latest battleground in the fight between Ortega and the Catholic Church.

And the conflict is far from over.

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Paul Moposita wore a bright blue Adidas tracksuit, a white hat and shades as he led Mugre Sur’s rehearsal at El Pan Óptico, an alternative art and music space in Quito, Ecuador.

The group is known for its deeply political songs, but also for its sense of humor; they perform wearing costumes of clowns and bunnies.

Credit:

Gisele Regatão/The World

Moposita, 47, the leader of the group and its only original member, started with “Cleptocratas.” It's a song about corrupt politicians that very much reflects the situation in Ecuador today. Earlier this year, Congress wanted to impeach President Guillermo Lasso over accusations of embezzlement. So he dissolved the National Assembly.

Moposita says that’s nothing new.

“We haven’t had stability since forever. My parents suffered with financial reforms that led to inflation, my grandparents suffered with strikes all the time, I am suffering the same,” he said. “And that's why we have to change, we have to raise our voice, right?”

In the ephemeral world of pop music, Mugre Sur has been going strong for more than 20 years. The group is known for its deeply political songs but also for its sense of humor. They perform wearing costumes of clowns and bunnies. They are tackling Ecuador’s political turmoil in their upcoming album “Sudamericamente.”

Paul Moposita (wearing blue tracksuit), his daughter Sisa and some of the members of Mugre Sur, a band he started more than 20 years ago.

Credit:

Vera Haller/The World

“South American mind or nicely sweating,” Moposita said, explaining the double meaning of the word.

The sweat is a reference to migrants all over the world.

“Our cousins, our aunts, our families have migrated to be a little better off. And now we receive our Venezuelan brothers who also migrate to be better off in another country,” he said. “I believe that migration is part of humanity.”

Moposita was first exposed to hip-hop thanks to his family’s migration to the US. He was about 10 years old when his cousins came to Ecuador on vacation and brought rap albums and baggy clothes. He started wearing those low pants, and he got his artistic nickname.

“My mom asked me one day, what is your costume about?” he said. The nickname “Disfraz,” or costume, stuck.

Moposita’s mom is a housewife and his dad is a cobbler. He dropped out of school at 14. In his 20s, he began writing songs. In the early 2000s, when the hip-hop movement in Ecuador got organized, he started to pay attention to the world around him.

“What is happening in my neighborhood, what are the needs of my place, of my society? So there I began to write more political, more social things,” he said.

Mugre Sur is based in Quito, the capital of Ecuador, a country that has been dealing with political instability and rising violence.

Credit:

Gisele Regatão/The World

Mugre Sur’s political songs make them particularly relevant in the country right now according to Juan José Avilés, or Juanjo, a music critic for the Ecuadorian newspaper El Universo.

“This is their moment. We need people who talk about these problems, these daily problems,” he said.

Avilés explained that the band has credibility because they come from humble beginnings. “They are people who came from the streets, from the Ghetto,” he said. “Mugre Sur is a hip-hop band that you should understand when you know that things are not OK in politics …here in Ecuador.”

Mugre Sur often rehearses at El Pan Óptico, an alternative art and music space in Quito.

Credit:

Gisele Regatão/The World

Mugre Sur doesn’t get a lot of radio play, and they use social media to get their songs out, according to Avilés. Considering that, he said it’s particularly impressive that they performed at the Estéreo Picnic festival in Colombia earlier this year.

“Music here in Ecuador is not, like, a way of living,” he said. “People who really live from music here in Ecuador, tienen que sudarla, it’s hard, you have to sweat it.”

Mugre Sur has been influential for anyone doing hip-hop in Quito, said Gonzalo Arroyo, a rapper and music producer who performs under the name R3tal. “They have been pillars of Ecuadorian hip-hop since forever. Any rapper when they are starting out, in my case it was 2005, 2006, Mugre Sur was there,” he said.

Arroyo produced their latest album, “Mugresuréate.” He said he first showed them his new beats, but then he decided to show Moposita some old ones that he really liked. “I believe more than half of ‘Mugresuréate’ has my old beats. That is really incredible because Moposita gave life to these beats that I didn’t think anyone would ever use,” he said.

Moposita said he's explored new sounds since what he calls his more professional album came out in 2009. “It had sounds more Latin, more Ecuadorian, more ours, and that kind of shook up the hip-hop movement a bit,” he said.

The youngest member of Mugre Sur, Luis Miranda, is 22 and has been with the band since he was 18. He said initially his parents didn’t like the idea, but they came around.

“My dad said it was better to be with the group than on the streets,” he said.

Luis Miranda, 22, is the youngest member of Mugre Sur and he has been with the band for four years.

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Vera Haller/The World

Moposita hopes his four kids or maybe his bandmate’s children will carry his mantle.

"Mugre Sur will be open to all of them. That’s why it will last for a long time. When I'm gone, they can each take a costume, put it on and represent us,” he said.

His daughter Sisa, who is 16, has performed and recorded with the group. But she said she wants to be a marine biologist.

Support for this story was provided in part by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.

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Spain has won the Women’s World Cup for the first time, outplaying a tough England team on Sunday in Sydney, Australia.

The winning goal was a left-footed bull’s eye into the corner of the net by Spanish captain Olga Carmona.

This win is for the whole country, Carmona said to the press after the match.

“To all the fans in the streets, we did it, but it was a very hard struggle,” she said.

That struggle was on and off the field. Last September, 15 of Spain’s top players quit the national team. That’s more than half the squad. They said that their head coach, Jorge Vilda, was too authoritarian and controlling and that his behavior was affecting their mental health.

In a press conference at the time, player Irene Paredes said that for people to return to the team, Spain’s soccer federation needed to address their concerns. But the federation, led by Luis Rubiales, backed Vilda.

Spain's Olga Carmona celebrates after scoring a goal during the Women's World Cup soccer final between Spain and England at Stadium Australia in Sydney, Australia, Aug. 20, 2023.

Credit:

Mark Baker/AP

So, Spain came to this cup with a bench full of young players untested on the world stage. That inexperience nearly cost them the cup. Japan pounded them 4-0 in an early round. But those same young players rallied to keep Spain’s hopes alive.

Nineteen-year-old Barça star Salma Paralluelo scored one of her two World Cup goals, one that would help eliminate Sweden. Paralluelo also took home the cup’s best young player award.

When Sunday's final whistle blew, the players rushed the pitch, piling on top of each other, dancing and crying. Noticeably not included was Vilda, who at first stuck to hugging other male staff members. It was a subtle sign of the lingering tensions on the team.

In the not-so-subtle category: As Spanish soccer chief Luis Rubiales handed out the victory medals, offering each player a traditional kiss on the cheek, he grabbed star forward Jennifer Hermoso. And, to her surprise, and in front of a global audience, he planted one on her lips.

Spain's Salma Paralluelo lies on the ground with her medal at the end of the Women's World Cup soccer final between Spain and England at Stadium Australia in Sydney, Australia, Aug. 20, 2023. Spain won 1-0.

Credit:

Abbie Parr/AP

In locker room celebrations afterward, Hermoso said she did not like that. On social media, fans called for Rubiales’ resignation. Some said it was a sign of Spain’s chauvinist attitude toward women athletes.

Later, Rubiales apologized — even as Hermoso herself excused the kiss as a natural and spontaneous gesture of joy. But in the larger scheme of things, the team’s victory is sure to inspire women in their fight for equality with men. And, just to play the game.

Already, more and more young Spanish girls are suiting up, including Spain’s 15-year-old Princess Sofia.

President of Spain's soccer federation, Luis Rubiales, right, reacts as he greets Rocio Galvez on the podium following Spain's win in the final of Women's World Cup soccer against England at Stadium Australia in Sydney, Australia, Aug. 20, 2023. Pictured from left, is FIFA President Gianni Infantino with Spain's Jennifer Hermoso, Spain's Alexia Putellas is embraced by Queen Letizia of Spain as Princess Infanta Sofia watches.

Credit:

Mark Baker/AP

After the bittersweet win, Carmona, who scored the decisive goal, learned that her father had died. He’d been suffering from a long-term illness, and Carmona’s family chose to let her play without the grief. After, she wrote on X, formerly Twitter, “I had no idea my ‘guiding star’ had been by my side during the game, giving me strength. Rest in peace, Dad.”

On Monday night, Spain’s national team brings its World Cup trophy home. Awaiting them will be throngs of fans celebrating on the streets of Madrid.

Related: A traditional Iranian sport has been closed off to women. One activist wants to change that.

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The Crooked House pub — now just a pile of rubble — has unwittingly become one of Britain’s most famous watering holes.

Because of its tilting structure, customers used to joke about feeling tipsy just walking over the threshold. The building, which dates back to 1765, was located in the small village of Himley in the West Midlands.

A nostalgic photo of a family posing in front of The Crooked House, June 24, 1979.

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Courtesy of "Save The Crooked House" Facebook Group.

On Aug. 5, an unexplained fire tore through the premises. Two days later, its remains were destroyed reportedly without planning permission. Police in Staffordshire in the UK have launched an investigation.

Residents and campaigners say the demise of The Crooked House is symbolic of the destruction of numerous historic pubs across Britain in recent years and are calling on the UK government to introduce laws that would preserve these establishments.

The Crooked House was demolished without official approval from the planning commission.

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Courtesy of "Save The Crooked House" Facebook Group

Paul Turner, 58, lives two miles up the road from Britain’s “wonkiest” pub, as it was known.

He remembers going there even as a kid and watching as the bar owner would roll a bottle upward along a table. It’s an optical illusion but it was a big tourist draw.

An old photo of the magic table where bottles rolled up-hill at The Crooked House pub.

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Courtesy of "Save The Crooked House" Facebook Group

A grandfather clock looks like it's leaning but it's standing perpendicular in The Crooked House pub.

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Courtesy of "Save The Crooked House" Facebook Group

When you walked into the pub, he said, one door would lean to the left, another tilted to the right and the windows sat at an angle. A large grandfather clock looked like it leaned to one side but was, in fact, perpendicular.

“Whenever you went in there, you sort of felt drunk before even ordering a drink,” he said.

The pub is located on a former coal mining site and years of mining under the foundations caused one end of the building to slip down almost four feet.

In January, Marston’s Brewery owners put the bar up for sale. Last month, word got out that the pub had been sold to a property company ATE Farms, who didn’t intend to keep it as a pub.

Turner said he was gutted. He started an online petition appealing for the bar to be saved. But nine days after the sale, the fire destroyed it.

Since its demolition, hundreds of people have visited the site, some placing placards with slogans like "More Than a Pub" and "Straight Answers for our Crooked House" among the rubble.

Former owners Tom and Laura Catton said they were devastated when they saw the destruction. The couple ran the pub between 2006 and 2008.

“I proposed to my wife here. We had our first kid here. So that was a lot of memories even after 15 years away,” Tom Catton told local media.

Over the following week, stories emerged about the new owners. One national newspaper even reported that the couple had been previously linked to a landfill site that went up in flames without explanation. Police are treating the fire as suspected arson but have made no arrests so far.

Last week, West Midlands Mayor Andy Street said that planning permission had not been granted to demolish the pub.

The Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) group said the destruction of The Crooked House is representative of what has happened to numerous pubs across Britain. In the first half of this year, 96 pubs were either demolished or lost to conversion in the UK, a third of them without planning permission, the group said. Fifteen percent of the country’s pubs closed their doors between 2010 and 2022, according to the Office of National Statistics.

The Crooked House activists are advocating to rebuild the beloved pub as an exact replica.

Credit:

Courtesy of "Save The Crooked House" Facebook Group

Greg Mulholland, campaign director with Campaign for Pubs, said the penalties facing developers who demolish or convert historic pub buildings without permission are not enough of a deterrent.

Developers factor in the council fines when they destroy these establishments because they know it will still be economically more profitable for them to do so, he said.

“Until we have far greater penalties and indeed personal prosecutions, people will simply think, ‘Well, we can get away with it and ride roughshod over communities and local authorities,’” he said.

Large breweries are also part of the problem, according to Mullholland.

In the UK, many local pubs are owned by breweries and tied into contracts that force them to purchase most of their alcohol from that brewery or pub company. Mulholland said this restricts the bar from what it can sell and is often anti-competitive.

The brewery that owned The Crooked House should have also made an effort to keep the premises as a bar, offering it for sale as a pub at an independently valued price, he said.

"Marston's [the brewery] should hang its head in shame for selling the pub to a property developer and selling it before the community had a chance to mount a proper campaign to save it.”

If more pubs were owned by smaller breweries, entrepreneurs or the local community they would have a better chance of survival, he said.

“There’s a lot we need to do in the UK if we are serious about wanting to preserve our world famous pub culture.”

Old signage from the demolished pub.

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Courtesy of "Save The Crooked House" Facebook Group

Mulholland has written to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asking him to change the law around pub sales. His campaign group wants any bar that is over 50 years old and now for sale to be marketed as a pub at an independently valued price for the first 12 months.

Mulholland said the prime minister, like many other British politicians before him, likes to have his photo taken in a pub, pulling a pint. Britain is likely to hold a general election next year, and it would be wise for politicians like Sunak to have pub owners onside, he said.

Local Conservative MP for Dudley North, Marco Longhi told a group of residents this week that he plans to campaign for a new law that would grant better protection for heritage venues. It should be named the Crooked House law, he said.

Paul Turner, 58, is on a mission to save The Crooked House, campaigning to have it built brick-by-brick as it once was.

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Courtesy of Paul Turner

Turner has altered his petition to Save The Crooked House twice, following the fire and subsequent demolition. Before the blaze, his petition had a few hundred signatures. Now it has more than 19,000. He’s calling for the pub to be rebuilt as an exact replica.

Mulholland said this is not without precedent.

In 2015, the old Carlton Tavern was demolished after the new owner, an Israeli-owned development firm, was denied planning permission to convert it into a block of 10 flats. After a six-year campaign by local residents, the council ordered the developers to rebuild the pub “brick by brick" to its original state.

“That pub is now open again and thriving, having been built from a pile of rubble,” Mulholland said, adding that councils need to send out a strong message that destruction of pubs or any heritage buildings will not be tolerated.

The story of the Carlton Tavern gives Turner hope, he said.

It’s not going to be easy building the pub from rubble, recreating its crooked structure with its slanted floors and wonky doors.

But Turner said there’s no point constructing it any other way. “The place that we've lost, that is what we want rebuilt.”

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A new report documents years of human rights abuses committed by Customs and Border Protection agents against migrants at the US southern border.

The Kino Border Initiative and the Washington Office on Latin America have listed hundreds of incidents of human rights violations by immigration officials that include physical violence, verbal abuse and sexual harassment — including some cases that have been fatal.

“We started documenting these cases years ago in our facilities in the Mexican city of Nogales,” said Johanna Williams, a social worker with the Kino Border Initiative, an organization that helps migrants who are deported from the US.

“The people that we receive, many of them, they were held in detention for a couple of days or maybe months before being deported, and we provided a space for them to share their stories and frustrating experiences while they were in detention,” she said.

Williams said members of the staff hear stories of human rights abuses on a daily basis. The most common one is the practice of deporting migrants into dangerous Mexican cities during the early hours of the morning, when most shelters and services are closed.

This is exactly what happened to David Reyes, an immigrant from Venezuela.

“We were put on a bus and dropped off on the Mexican side of the border at 2 in the morning,” he said in a recent interview.

Immigration officials confiscated all his documents and valuables, so he couldn’t pay for, or even find, transportation, he said. As he walked in the middle of the night, Reyes said, he and two others were kidnapped and their families had to pay $2,000 for their release.

Advocates question why deportees are left in the middle of the night to face these kinds of risks.

Other documented stories of abuse include unprovoked violence, verbal abuse, denial of food or medical services, family separation, racial profiling, sexual harassment and aggression against members of the LGBTQ community.

Williams recalled the story of another migrant who arrived at the Kino Border Initiative’s facilities.

“A Border [Protection] agent pushed down this individual in the desert against a rock and it ripped a tendon in his knee — falling on the ground hard onto the rock — and then the Border [Protection] agents forced him to walk 25 meters to the track to then be detained with his injury and the whole time making fun of him. And then, once he got into custody, they didn't give him medical attention for his injury.”

Back in 2015, Williams said the Kino Border Initiative started making formal complaints to find out the accountability process from an insider point of view from people experiencing the abuse.

What they found was a complicated, opaque and slow-moving process.

“There are four agencies with overlapping responsibilities that handle complaints and pass cases between each other,” she explained. “All of these agencies suffer from personnel and other capacity shortfalls, and some have insufficient power to make their recommendations stick.”

Adam Isaacson, a security expert with the Washington Office on Latin America who co-authored the report, said the lack of accountability is a systemic problem within the Department of Homeland Security.

According to the report, the investigations can begin in two ways. Some — often, the most serious cases — start at US government investigators’ own initiative, especially if the site of the abuse is a crime scene. But many others require outside actors to take the first step.

“Without their initiative, most such cases would never be investigated at all — and, as this report shows, many still don’t get investigated,” Isaacson said.

The advocates filed dozes of complaints and found that 95% of the cases resulted in no investigation and no disciplinary action taken.

Customs and Border Protection has said that they have implemented reforms that make the agency more transparent and accountable, and that they take allegations of misconduct very seriously.

Williams said, despite the lack of accountability, her organization will keep filing complaints and pushing for change “with the hope that we can honor the courage of the migrants who are choosing to believe that a better world is possible and to believe that they could be treated with dignity and respect while in custody.”

The authors of the report are also holding meetings with members of Congress and immigration officials to try and address the problem.

Related: San Diego doctor says height of the border wall is leading to more injuries from falls

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While most of London is preparing for bed, Dr. Qian Xu clocks in for her graveyard shift inside a bustling emergency room in southwest London.

Paramedics shuffle in patients on gurneys. One man dislocated his shoulder, and another just lost a pint of blood after accidentally puncturing a vein. Meanwhile, there's a waiting room full of dozens of people.

When she started her medical career over a decade ago, Xu said the average wait time was just over two hours. These days, "people don't bat an eyelid at four hours," she confessed. "It's more like approaching 12 hours. We need to do something."

Xu said the ER, referred to as A&E in the UK, has become the first point of contact for many patients, who, since the pandemic, have put off routine doctor's visits until it's too late. There, it's a struggle to sort them out, she said.

Her emergency room is hardly an outlier when it comes to being spread too thin. Britain's National Health Service, known as the NHS, celebrated its milestone 75th birthday last month.

The NHS is treasured for its motto, which promises Britons health care "free at the point of delivery." But a series of recent crises have concerned many health care providers about the public institution's ability to continue delivering on that promise. Plagued by staffing shortages, crumbling equipment and infrastructure, and an aging, sick population, the NHS is facing perhaps its deepest crisis since its inception in 1948.

More than 7 million people are currently on waiting lists for medical procedures — nearly double the amount since the start of 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thousands of NHS staff members have also been striking over calls for pay increases.

Last month, the conservative government said it would give junior doctors a 6% pay increase, well short of the 35% workers insisted is needed just to bring them back to the same pay rate they received in 2008 once inflation is considered.

Many seek work abroad in places like Canada and Australia, where wages are higher.

Harry Eccles, a nurse and union activist working in southeast England, in large blamed the ruling conservative government for the current crisis. He accused the party of intentionally neglecting the NHS as the party leans into the private sector.

"There's a lot of money that can be made in health care, and we really want to protect our NHS from that," Eccles said. "It feels a little bit like the vultures are circling, and they want [the NHS] to fall so that they can pick up the pieces and sell it off for quite a lot of money."

Public health care spending has risen by an average of less than 2% in the last 10 years, less than half the amount in the decade before. Meanwhile, the Conservative government has openly toyed with the idea of charging patients about $25 to visit a doctor as a means to keep waits.

In January, Britain's former Health Minister Sajid Javid said he felt the NHS couldn't keep running as is.

"I don't think the model of the NHS as it was set up some 70 years ago is sustainable for the future," Javid told Sky News. "The world has changed, and the NHS has not moved on."

In a proposal, Javid cited Ireland and Norway as examples of countries that charge patient fees as a means to control costs and keep wait times down.

But for most people in Britain, charging for health care would be a grave mistake.

An Ipsos poll released last month found that nearly three-quarters of all Britons think the NHS is crucial to British society, and everything should be done to maintain it in its current form.

"We must never forget what it was set up for in the first place," said 75-year-old Aneira Thomas.

Thomas, born just after midnight on July 5, 1948, was the first NHS baby. She was named after the NHS founder Aneurin Baeven, a Welsh Labour Party politician and Britain's former health minister.

"He was a giant of a man," Thomas said. "I often use the phrase said by Martin Luther King, the American activist, 'I have a dream.' So did Nye Bevan. And he had a vision of creating a health service for the people of Great Britain."

Despite its recent struggles, Thomas said she's hopeful about the future of the NHS: "It was there for my first breath, and please, God, it will be there when I take my last breath."

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The sounds of the divine rang out from everywhere this week at McCormick Place in Chicago as hundreds of thousands of religious and spiritual leaders convened for the 2023 Parliament of the World's Religions.

It’s the largest and oldest interfaith gathering in the world. With rising religious extremism and nationalism around the world, from Brazil to India to the US, the focus of this year’s conference was authoritarianism.

Mohammad A. Siddiqi, an imam and educator with the World Council of Muslims for Interfaith Relations, was on hand in a room for people to learn more about Islam and to pray.

Prayer mats are arranged in one corner of the room, with a table set up for coffee and sweets to encourage conversation.

Siddiqi said it’s important to engage in conversations about authoritarianism because politicians often misuse religion to gain power.

Mohammad A. Siddiqi is an imam and educator with the World Council of Muslims For Interfaith Relations, Aug. 16, 2023.

Credit:

Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

“The people may appear to be religious, like the right-wing or this or that, but they essentially don't know what their religion is, whether they are among the Christians, or Muslims or Buddhists or any faith,” he said. “Because essentially, if you look at religious teachings, no religion teaches that a dictator can control an entire nation and oppress the people.”

Vijaylakshmi Nadar is a journalist with the Indian Times. Nadar, who participated in an afternoon panel on religious extremism, said that she has been tracking the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and in the United States.

She said that Hinduism inherently promotes inclusivity.

Swami Vivekananda delivered a groundbreaking speech at the very first Parliament of World Religions back in 1893 with this very message, she said, but India’s current government promotes Hindu-centric policies that marginalize Muslims and other religious groups.

Vijaylakshmi Nadar (left) and Mark Lukens (center) speak on a panel about religious extremism at the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago, Aug. 16, 2023.

Credit:

Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

“The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the leader of BJP was right in saying the spirit of Swami Vivekananda speech has the potential to create a more just prosperous and inclusive planet,” she said. “And yet, he is at the very crux of becoming an extreme right-wing dictator powering Hindu fanaticism, threatening not just India, but the rest of the world as well.”

In fact, conference organizers reportedly removed Hindu leader Nivedita Bhide from the schedule this week after activists raised concerns over her links to Hindu nationalism, according to the Middle East Eye.

Rev. Mark Lukens, a retired pastor with the United Church of Christ Emmanuel, said that Christian nationalism poses similar threats in the US.

“In its aims and in its ideology, Christian nationalism is every bit as violent and dangerous as any other authoritarian movement.”

He said that Christian nationalism is a threat to Christianity itself, and that religious leaders must call this out “loudly and often.”

Jane Kryzanowski knows firsthand about the fight against authoritarianism — within the church itself. Kyrzanowski holds the title of bishop with the Roman Catholic Women Priests in Canada.

She said that she served for 15 years as a parish minister but couldn’t be ordained because she is a woman.

“The powers of patriarchy in the church and in the world have divested women of that basic identity. They say we are complementary. We are not equal,” she said. “Once you dispossess people of their identity, then you can take away things from them.”

Jane Kryzanowski is a bishop for the Roman Catholic Women Priests, Canada, and a servant leader for Mary of Magdala Inclusive Catholic Community.

Credit:

Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

She was nearly retired when the women's ordination movement gained momentum. At 60, she said that she felt called back to serve God.

"It came back to me in my time of retirement and the reenergizing power that has come to me by the power of the spirit and my grace of ordination has been to continue to to speak out about the injustice against women in the Roman Catholic Church through patriarchy, misogyny, and the denial of human rights, basic human rights, spiritual rights," she said.

She and others at the conference agreed that countering authoritarianism requires coalition-building, continuous dialogue and a focus on service.

Under a large tent outside the conference hall, Sikhs held a daily langar — a free community kitchen that is considered an act of devotional service in the Sikh tradition.

"Life's true business is serving food to humanity," said Sikh volunteer Randeep Lall, who greeted newcomers as they entered the tent.

Participants enjoy langar, a free communal lunch provided by Sikhs, which they consider a devotional service.

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Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

Sukhbir Singh is the main event organizer and representative of the Guru Nanak Nishkam Sewak Jatha, or GNNSJ, in the United Kingdom.

He said that Sikhs are intrinsically interfaith and stand against all forms of religious extremism.

Sukhbir Singh is the event organizer with the Sikh organization Guru Nanak Nishkam Sewak Jatha in Birmingham, United Kingdom. He helped organize the daily communal meal known as langar outside the Parliament of the World's Religions. The meal is free for everyone of all faiths and is seen as a devotional practice, Aug. 16, 2023.

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Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

“Where does extremism begin from? It begins from the mind. Right? Then it takes shape and it becomes a physical act of violence or killing somebody,” he said. “So, what we've got to concentrate is on taming the mind right from the beginning.”

Children brought up with love and care, he said, will become very, very good citizens to the world.

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When Nicolas de Francisco is not at his office, you can often find him on the treacherous sidewalks of Bogotá, Colombia, carrying two buckets of paint.

With a paint roller and some brushes, the 35-year-old engineer and a determined group of volunteers cover loose tiles and broken slabs of concrete in bright pink. Then, they paint black Xs on top, in the hopes that pedestrians will steer clear of these hazardous chunks of the city’s sidewalks.

Nicolas de Francisco says that so far, his group of volunteers has painted over more than 17,000 loose tiles and broken chunks of sidewalk in Bogotá, Colombia. The campaign is trying to shame politicians into fixing the city's deteriorating infrastructure.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

“If you see an X on the floor with a pink background, just try to avoid it,” de Francisco said as he painted over a cracked slab of concrete. “You could fall down, or you could get your foot wet.”

Walking is one of the most common ways to get around Bogotá. According to the city government, it accounts for about a third of all journeys taken each day in the city of 8 million people.

But sidewalks are often cracked, making it easy for those who don’t look down to trip. Other paths made from small bricks and clay tiles are also deteriorating in the rainy city, and as the tiles loosen, they store water underneath, splashing those who step on them with dirty water and grime.

Nicolas de Francisco covers a cracked part of the sidewalk with pink paint.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

De Francisco and a group of volunteers have been trying to shame the city government into fixing these urban traps — by making them as noticeable as possible.

They’re hoping that their silent, but colorful protest, shows the city’s residents that they can defend public spaces and take matters into their own hands.

“We have to have proper sidewalks for people to walk on,” de Francisco said during a recent outing where he marked dozens of loose concrete tiles outside a hospital. “As citizens, we have to enforce control over institutions that are not performing their actual job.”

The campaign known as “Empecemos,” or “Let’s Begin,” started in April after an elderly friend of de Francisco’s tripped on a cracked sidewalk and broke his wrist.

The volunteers say that so far, they have painted over 17,000 loose tiles and broken slabs of pavement in the city where the government has long been tolerant of graffiti and street art — even if it is slow to fix decaying infrastructure.

After he paints the broken chunks of sidewalks in pink, de Francisco files complaints with the Department for Urban Development.

Loose tiles and cracks on Bogotá, Colombia's sidewalks made it easier for people to trip. To prevent that, volunteers are painting the broken parts of the sidewalk in pink.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

“Bogotá deserves better,” said de Francisco, who ran for Congress last year, but was not elected. He’s now running for the City Council; elections take place in October.

The volunteers are out in the streets several times a week, and at this point, their pink sidewalks with black marks have become a noticeable part of the city’s landscape, said German Sarmiento, an urban planning consultant who runs a blog on Bogotá’s public spaces.

But some people are starting to get annoyed with the initiative — even if it has good intentions.

“It’s become way too visible, and it might be considered by many as visual pollution,” Sarmiento said.

The marked sidewalks add to the current disorder of tags, posters and graffitis that is already present on the city’s streets, he said: “The marks suggest that anyone has the right to be painting over the public space.”

Nicolas de Francisco says that initially his team used spray cans to mark broken sidewalks, but they switched to oil paints because they last longer.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

But others argue that they want their broken roads and sidewalks to be marked in pink to put more pressure on city officials.

Maria Paula Caparosso lives in the neighborhood of La Calleja in the north of the city.

After seeing de Francisco’s videos on Instagram, she wrote to him, asking him to paint pink marks around a pothole that's around 5 feet wide.

“This started as a small hole six years ago, but now, it’s like a crater,” she said, after helping de Francisco to sweep dust away from the pothole’s edges so that the paint could stick better. “The city officials have never come here to fix this, and we need to drive on the other side of the road now, to stop our cars from getting damaged.”

A volunteer sweeps dust away from the edge of. a pothole in Bogotá, Colombia's La Calleja neighborhood. Residents asked Nicolas de Francisco's team to visit the neighborhood and paint around potholes and broken sidewalks.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

De Francisco’s protest has also been noticed by city officials, who argue that they have been working hard to fix potholes and broken sidewalks even before citizens started to paint them pink.

Planning Secretary Felipe Jimenez said that two years ago, the city set up a team that is dedicated exclusively to fixing sidewalks. The city also designed a new manual, he said, which spells out requirements for contractors, so that they build longer-lasting sidewalks.

“I think in the past, we’ve had problems because we didn’t give clear rules to contractors,” Jimenez said, adding that some contractors took advantage of the lax regulations to build things on the cheap.

Officials said the City’s Department for Urban Planning fixed 600,000 square meters of public space last year, though it's not clear how much of that included sidewalks.

Jimenez raised his eyebrows and nodded his head when asked about the efforts to paint broken sidewalks in pink.

Sidewalks in poor state accumulate water when it rains, and pose a hazard to pedestrians in Bogotá, Colombia.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

“We are in campaign season,” he said. “And lots of people are trying to become popular by pointing out the city’s flaws.”

But de Francisco said that his pink marks are no publicity stunt.

He argued that the pink paint is already getting results, with city crews fixing some of the stretches of pavement that he’s singled out, like a long stretch of broken pavement outside a shopping mall.

“They actually fixed only the slabs that were marked with the X, even though there were other broken slabs we missed,” de Francisco said. “That shows you the markings bother the public office and they are going to fix it.”

For de Francisco, it means that “Being an active civilian works,” he said. “Wherever you are, you can do some activism that can leave a positive impact on your community.”

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Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Preserve is one of the country's top ecological destinations.

And there's a good reason for that. It has a lush green jungle, and it’s home to more than 2,000 species of plants and trees, 400 different types of birds and 120 amphibian and reptile species that thrive in a unique ecosystem that is nearly permanently in the clouds.

Or, at least, it used to be.

As temperatures in the area warm, the clouds are beginning to lift. On one particular day a couple of weeks ago, it was abnormally windy and mostly dry. Decades ago, there were only 25 days annually when it didn't rain. Now, there are more than a hundred dry days a year.

"For cloud forests, that's a lot of dry weather,” said Monteverde resident scientist Alan Pounds who has been at the reserve since the 1980s. "Plants and animals in the cloud forest are adapted for this constant input of mist and cloud; like all these little orchids that grow on branch tips have evolved to be bathed in this moisture most of the time and so they can be really affected by these kinds of events."

Fungai in Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Preserve. It is home to more than 2,000 species of plants and trees.

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Michael Fox/The World

Already two species of local frogs have gone extinct: the golden toad and a local breed of the harlequin frog. And there are concerns that the extravagantly feathered Quetzal bird, whose native mating habitat is in the cloud forest, may now be in danger.

Alan Pounds is a residen scienists in Monteverde in Costa Rica and has been at the reserve since the 1980s.

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Michael Fox/The World

Pounds wrote one of the first papers on the impact of climate change in tropical forests in the late 1990s and said the future of the cloud forest itself is at risk.

"If we continue on the present trajectory, I think it's safe to say the cloud forest is going to disappear,” he said. "It’s already turning into something else. It’s turning into more of a seasonal rainforest."

Pounds said even if the reserve gets the total rainfall it did before, it’ll come in clumps, rather than dispersed evenly throughout the year. The transformation means a hit to the local ecosystem, with some species being pushed out or killed off, and different ones moving in as temperatures warm.

Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Preserve. Decades ago, there were only 25 days annually when it didn't rain. Now, there are more than a hundred dry days a year.

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Michael Fox/The World

Sensitive species could face extinctionMonteverde is just one of many places in Costa Rica that are seeing an impact.

The privately run Tirimbina Biological Reserve is located about 100 miles east of Monteverde. Tirimbina boasts of having the longest suspension bridge in Costa Rica, nearly 1,000 feet across the rushing Sarapiquí River. And it’s based in a tropical rainforest, not a cloud forest like Monteverde. But climate change is taking a similar toll there.

The privately-run Tirimbina Biological Reserve boasts of having the longest suspension bridge in Costa Rica, nearly 1,000 feet across the rushing Sarapiquí River.

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Michael Fox/The World

“If you came here 25 years ago, you’d find that more than 300 days out of the year it was raining, raining, raining — constant rain,” Tirimbina biologist Sergio Villega said. "But not today. Daily rainfall has decreased dramatically."

Sergio Villega is a biologist at the privately-run Tirimbina Biological Reserve in Costa Rica.

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Michael Fox/The World

Villegas said there are studies that temperatures near the reserve have increased by almost half degree over the last 20 years.

“For a person, that might not seem like much, but for a little frog or a fish or a sensitive species, this could mean the difference between a decline in the population or not,” he explained. “Some species may move to higher regions. But others may have nowhere to go and they may be condemned to extinction or [become] highly endangered."

A poison dart frog in Costa Rica.

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Michael Fox/The World

Stemming the tideCosta Rica, as a country, has been doing its best to stem the tide.

“Costa Rica has been one of the top Latin American countries on the forefront of the battle against global warming,” said Alonso Villalobos, a political scientist at the University of Costa Rica who specializes in climate and sustainability.

"Combating climate change has been state policy going back over four administrations — from the mid-2000s on,” he said.

Hummingbirds at Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Preserve.

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Michael Fox/The World

They've created national plans against global warming, pushed for carbon neutrality and transitioned to renewable energy.

"Previous governments have approved binding international commitments such as the Paris Agreement,” said Pascal Girot Pignot, the director of the geography school also at the University of Costa Rica.

“And public policies such as Carbon Neutrality, the Climate Change National Adaptation Policy and its National Adaptation Plan and the Decarbonization Plan,” he added. “These commitments are based on a long tradition in national and international environmental law in which Costa Rica has been a leader."

Costa Rica’s Monteverde Cloud Forest Biological Preserve is home to species that thrive in a unique ecosystem which is nearly permanently in the clouds.

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Michael Fox/The World

But it can’t be done alone. If other countries don’t also contribute, climate change will still affect Costa Rica.

"Climate change is not something that’s going to happen,” in the future, Tirimbina biologist Sergio Villegas said. "It already is happening and we're witnessing the consequences."

Related: Animal species are evolving to adjust to climate change, but scientists say time is running out

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Until recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin would host an annual televised event that he described as a “direct line” to him. 

The idea was to portray himself as a leader who speaks directly to the Russian people, hears their needs and gets things done.

A decade ago, during one of these televised events, Putin said that there needs to be a set of standardized textbooks on Russian history.

He said that it’s unacceptable that there are dozens of different textbooks that teachers can choose from. Now, Putin is finally getting his wish.

New, rewritten history textbooks recently hit the presses in Russia. Students in 10th and 11th grade will begin using them this coming school year. The books were introduced earlier this month in Moscow by Russia’s education minister, Sergey Kravtsov.

Kravtsov said that “the Ministry of Education developed a uniform program for teaching history.”

He said that, up until now, teachers developed their own lesson plans, which he claimed led to varied interpretations and confusion.

Kravtsov said that the new textbooks will cover what he called the “reunification” of Crimea, in addition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — which he referred to as the “Special Military Operation.”

“Books for other grades will be revised for the 2024-2025 school year,” Kravtsov said.

Ivan Kurilla is a history and political science professor at the European University at St. Petersburg.

Kurilla explained that the textbook attempts to connect the current generation of Russian students back to the perceived grandeur of the Soviet Union.

“Everything which was celebrated by the Russian society after 1991, freedom of speech, freedom of [the] press, freedom of worship, that is something that the current regime does not tolerate anymore, and to a big extent, they already reversed it,” he said.

The textbooks echo Putin’s belief that the fall of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe, and it portrays Putin’s presidency, and the war in Ukraine, as a correction of history.

“How to explain the war in Ukraine, they tried several different explanations and the most convincing was that they are just restoring the old empire, old state, the Soviet Union,” Kurilla said. “And that helps them, the association of themselves with the Soviet Union, helps to explain the decision to conquer Ukraine.”

Kurilla said that, in the past, it was up to each teacher to plan his or her own lessons, but now, the situation is shifting.

“There are new fears that some of the schoolchildren, and parents of schoolchildren, may report if the teachers [do] not say [the] right things,” Kurilla said. “They can complain, they would say that, 'OK, that teacher spent enough time talking about the special military operation or the war in Ukraine.' And I know that many schoolteachers are now afraid.”

And that fear of losing independence in the classroom has made some Russian teachers like Mikhail Kopitsa decide to leave the country.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kopitsa taught history at school in Arkhangelsk in northern Russia.

But given recent events, “I understood that it would be impossible for me to live and work the way I used to,” said Kopitsa, who left Russia in March of 2022.

He added that he would have to “hold himself by the throat” in order to keep working.

Kopitsa, who is now based in Montenegro, and continues teaching there, said that the pages of the new textbooks feel like “they’ve been soaked in poison.”

And he said that there’s one clear theme that stands out to him: “There’s always an enemy. The West, or the US, is always the enemy.”

He said that the textbooks are filled with Kremlin propaganda, and he drew another analogy: He said that “diamonds are formed under great pressure,” and that some people thrive under this kind of pressure. They resist, and their values become stronger.

But he worries that there are very few people that are like that. Most people, he said, get crushed by the system.

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2020 saw history at the Oscars when a Korean film, "Parasite," became the first non-English language film to win best picture.

Today, most Westerners recognize "Parasite" as a hallmark of modern cinema, and the film is beloved by many.

But before "Parasite," a different film occupied the international cinematic landscape — the 2003 film, "Oldboy." Now, the film is returning to theaters this summer for its 20th anniversary.

The trailer for the theatrical rerelease of "Oldboy," the second installment in the thematically connected "Vengeance Trilogy," created by Korean director Park Chan-wook, highlights some of its most-striking imagery. "Oldboy" has also been remastered and restored for modern theaters. 

Grant Leuning teaches a film class at the University of California San Diego that covers many types of foreign films. He's also researched cinema and politics in South Korea. 

"The importance of a film like 'Oldboy' is hard to overstate because it was one of the first huge Korean hits in the West, specifically in the US," Leuning said. "So, it set a template for a lot of the films and a lot of the understanding of films that we would see later on."

Following "Oldboy's" success, he said, extreme depictions of violence became directly attributed to popular Korean media in the West — think Netflix's "Squid Game."

These films, and to a lesser extent "Parasite," are part of an unofficial genre in cinema known as the "Korean revenge film." 

The term has roots with UK distributor Palisades Tartan's Asia Extreme Collection, a label popular in the early 2000s that would be assigned to violent films from Asian communities to market to a wider, more Western audience, according to Hye Seung Chung, a film professor at Colorado State University and a South Korean native. 

"This created all kinds of stereotypes. Korean cinema being ultraviolent," Chung said. "And actually, some of the most popular films in Korea are not necessarily this kind of violent."

Still, Chung said, it has cultural relevance — under Korea's authoritarian regime, there was widespread violence against activists who spoke out against the government.

"So, I think if you understand that Korea's past in the '70s and '80s military dictatorship and what people went through, I think that violence or the desire for revenge makes sense," she said.

Director Park himself has said that violence is exhilarating. During a public event, he said that growing up, he suppressed a lot of his anger and frustration and theorized that could be why he desired to show it so prominently in his films.

That said, there could be possible consequences from violent Korean cinema dominating the Western landscape. For one, these films do not necessarily present a flattering view of Korean society. 

But Leuning said that Western exposure to Korean films versus Korean exposure to Western films will always be totally lopsided. 

"So, absolutely, I find that many Korean filmgoers have a much better understanding of the broad variety of US genres, including art films," Leuning said. "Whereas in the US, we really only get these few megahits."

But with foreign films rereleasing in US theaters, he said, it could lead to more cultural appreciation. 

But Chung said that it doesn't always go that way. 

"There's a reason why something like 'Parasite' was selected because you don't really need cultural background to understand," she said. "You don't need cultural or historical knowledge; you don't need to know Korea to understand the film."

Still, Korea has plenty of other cultural resources to offer, like K-Pop and Korean dramas, which have dominated the Western market in their own right.

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Just outside of Odessa, there is a national natural landmark identifying one of the only known asteroid craters in the country.

Rocks jut out of the ground at the Odessa Meteor Crater, where there are signs warning visitors to watch out for snakes and pumpjacks rocking back and forth in the distance. But about 60,000 years ago, when woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers roamed the Earth, an asteroid slammed into what is now known as West Texas.

It may not look like much to the untrained eye, but peering out over the Odessa Meteor Crater, Ania Losiak sees the power small asteroids can leave in their wake. As a planetary geologist, she studies craters around the world and is interested in finding what these geological features can reveal about asteroid strikes.

“You can see what happens when extraterrestrial material impacts the Earth with hypersonic velocities,” Losiak said during her most recent visit to the crater site. “Sometimes very deadly and terrible things are also very exciting.”

Losiak is a Fulbright scholar currently working with the Lunar Planetary Institute in Houston and the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona. She has wanted to visit Odessa’s crater for years, but until recently she had to postpone her trip to West Texas.

The Odessa Meteor Crater was formed around 60,000 years ago when a small asteroid the size of a car smashed into what is now West Texas.

Credit:

Mitch Borden/Marfa Public Radio

Walking to the center of the crater, Losiak said, “We can see here [it’s] not a very deep hole in the ground.”

The reason the crater is shallow is for thousands of years sediment and soil has washed into the crater. On top of that, the asteroid that made it was small by space standards, which is what piqued Losiak’s curiosity.

Instead of focusing on the giant asteroids like ones shown in Hollywood blockbusters like “Armageddon” or “Don’t Look Up” — she is more interested in minor space rocks, like the one that made Odessa’s crater, which was about as big as a midsize car.

Pointing at stones emerging from the ground like rows of jagged teeth, she explained that smaller asteroids are still powerful.

“Just imagine how much energy [it would take] to lift this block up,” Losiak said. “It’s absolutely crazy.”

The asteroid hit so hard, according to her, that it caused an explosion equivalent to an atomic bomb and if anyone or anything had been in the middle of the crater when it struck, their death “would be very quick — you would not feel a thing.”

Over the years, multiple Meteorites have been found near Odessa's crater. One of these is on display at the small museum dedicated to the national natural landmark.

Credit:

Mitch Borden/Marfa Public Radio

Part of her research is searching for the charred remains of any plants or animals that were unlucky enough to be caught in the blast radius. This is a part of Losiak’s effort to better understand howhard smaller asteroids hit and how they affect the surrounding area — which could actually help save lives.

“Only by studying Odessa and other craters we are able to understand how far do we need to evacuate people if we know within the next day, or so, there will be a collision," she explained.

This isn’t a hypothetical threat. Smaller asteroids are much more likely to strike Earth than larger ones — which the Russian city of Chelyabinsk found out in 2013. Without warning, an asteroid, around the size of a house, suddenly appeared and exploded over the city, shattering windows and injuring over 1,600 people, according to NASA.

“Smaller objects are much fainter,”according to Davide Farnocchia, a navigational engineer with NASA’s Center for Near Earth Objects Studies. “They’re harder to pick them up when they are far, so you can only detect them when they are making their final approach to Earth.”

He calculates the trajectories of asteroids in our solar system to figure out ifthey will strike our planet. Situations like the asteroid that exploded over Russia are a once in a lifetime event. But Farnocchia said it is good to have plans in place if an astronomer suddenly spots an asteroid hurtling toward a city.

“If you had something like Chelyabinsk that you discovered 10 days before impact what would you do? Well, you need to notify the government of the country affected and support evacuation,” he said.

NASA has found 90% of all asteroids that will come near Earth’s orbit and are a kilometer or larger in diameter, but according to Farnocchia, we are far off from being able to reliably detect smaller objects like the asteroid that made the crater near Odessa.

There is a small museum located at the Odessa Meteor Crater dedicated to educating visitors about meteors and asteroids.

Credit:

Mitch Borden/Marfa Public Radio

The destructive power that minor asteroids can unleash amazes Losiak, which makes exploring craters thrilling for her. Even though it could be decades before another asteroid poses any kind of threat, she believes humanity should try to be as prepared as possible.

“Only if we know exactly how those things were happening in the past, we are able to avoid [a] similar fate in the future," Losiak said.

She plans on returning to West Texas next year with a team of researchers to scour the Odessa Meteor Crater to see what it will reveal.

An earlier version of this story originally appeared on Marfa Public Radio. Read the original article.

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Renu Rai Yalgaonkar grew up in Lonavala, a hill station close to Mumbai, India.

Her father moved to Lonavala from a relatively poorer area to work for the Indian railways. Her mother was a homemaker. Yalgaonkar and her five siblings always lived on their father’s single income.

Yalgaonkar holds a university degree, had some early success as a mathematics tutor, and even got a scholarship to enroll in a management program in the United Kingdom. But when she got married, she stopped working.

“Since [my husband’s] family was really well-to-do and there was no financial need,” she said.

Many Indian women like Yalgaonkar are more educated and healthier than in the past, but their participation in the workforce is declining, which has surprised global economists. Across the world, higher economic growth has seen a rise in women’s employment. But India is bucking that trend.

In 2005, 35% of Indian women were working. By 2021, that number had drastically reduced to 19%. For context, India’s economic growth in 2005 was approximately 9%, while in 2021, the country grew at 21%.

Indian leaders predict that the country will become the 3rd largest economy in the world in the next few years, behind the US and China. But economists are saying that’s unlikely — although India is the most populous country in the world, women are not doing enough paid work.

Prosperity keeps women out of workforceYalgaonkar’s experience is common to an entire generation that benefited from the opening up of India’s economy in the early 1990s, when many middle-class families were propelled to wealth.

“Male wages increased and they withdrew women from the workforce [because they could] manage on one salary,” said Vibhuti Patel, a former gender studies scholar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai.

In other countries, education for women often translates to employment, but that’s not the case in India, according to Sairee Chahal, who runs an online employment and entrepreneurship platform called Sheroes. Chahal said educated women in India join the workforce but often drop out when family responsibilities take over.

Nandita Bedi graduated with an economics degree from Lady Shri Ram College at the University of Delhi. She worked at an organization that would influence IT policy in the 1990s, when the internet was just making inroads into India.

Bedi moved cities after she got married.

“I quit my job when I moved from Delhi to Calcutta,” she said.

Bedi decided to quit her job because she felt her children needed her attention. Her husband supported the change. Nuclear families with limited extended support along with insufficient child care options mean women like Bedi often make the choice to prioritize their families.

Bedi’s family moved to nearly a dozen cities in 25 years, due to her husband’s work. She spent most of her time adjusting her family to the new cities and setting up homes in each of them.

'Valorized as homemakers'In 2014, a Hindu nationalist party took over at the federal level. Patel, the gender studies scholar, said although conservative ideas existed before that, gender stereotypes have been consolidated since then.

“Women are valorized as homemakers,” she said.

Many women in India have in fact dropped out of the labor force, but experts say the numbers are misleading because women who work in informal economies often get paid in cash that is not reflected in the gross domestic product.

For example, Anisa Sheikh works as a cleaner in Mumbai, earning about $35 a month that is paid in cash. When her 9-year-old son fell ill, she took cash loans to get him treated at a nearby hospital.

“I don't have a bank account, I care for my three children with whatever cash I get paid as salary,” she said.

According to a 2018 International Labor Organization report, about 82% of the total number of working women like Sheikh do not get counted in the GDP. They are concentrated in the informal sector, working in fields such as domestic work, home-based work, waste picking, construction and street vending.

Many of these women were formerly employed in agriculture and livestock industries and made significant contributions to their family incomes. But “agriculture is highly mechanized, which has left a lot of women unemployed,” economist Nisha Srivastava said.

As the Indian economy grows, machines are replacing more and more jobs, which is yet another reason why fewer women are in the workforce.

Men can migrate, Srivastava pointed out, while migration for women is not always an option since they often play dual roles as caregivers at home.

Sairee Chahal said she sees this often in her work with Sheroes.

“Women continue to be caregivers, which means every woman who has a job has a second job."

Sairee Chahal, Sheroes, an online employment platform, India

“Women continue to be caregivers, which means every woman who has a job has a second job. At some point she comes to a decision to say ‘which one can I keep?’ She obviously can't give up her home. It is a systemic trade off, very deeply embedded,” Chahal said.

Patel, the gender studies scholar, said when the number of available jobs shrink, men are prioritized for them. “Women are the first victims of the changes that are coming up in the production processes,” she said.

Chahal, with Sheroes, added that jobs are not a policy priority in India. But, when women work, the results are transformative. “Children get better education, better health care, better savings, better safety nets,” she said.

Bringing women back into the workforce means focusing on safer commutes and better child care options. But experts also say the nation needs to address the prevalent outlook that considers women’s work less important than men’s work.

Related: 'We have to fight': Venezuelan women lead migration to Brazil

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Six months after record-breaking earthquakes devastated southern Turkey and northern Syria, the historic city of Antakya is a rolling landscape of cracked high-rises, tent cities and piles of debris.

The freezing temperatures of the earthquake’s immediate aftermath have been replaced by dust and 95-degree-Fahrenheit days.

Despite the Turkish government’s promise to rebuild affected areas within a year, nearly everyone in the city continues to live in tents and converted shipping containers — set up in front of gardens, olive orchards and open fields.

Donated tents, designed for the winter cold, soak up the heat of the sun. But skin infections, borne by flies, are common. Organized settlements of container homes are set up on hot concrete, surrounded by barbed wire, and are reliant on regular shipments of drinking water.

Of the more than 50,000 deaths reported in Turkey, half occurred in Hatay, the country’s southernmost province. Grief pervades almost every corner of the province but, slowly, the residents who remain are carving out a life amid the rubble.

Here is a photo essay by The World's Durrie Bouscaren.

Some homes and buildings remain standing in central Antakya, Turkey, awaiting demolition.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

Mustafa Güler, a tinsmith in Antakya’s covered bazaar in Turkey, lost 57 members of his family in the earthquakes.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

A motorcyclist rides past a demolished building in the beach town of Samandağ. A converted shipping container serves as an insurance office.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

From their terrace, a family watches a building next door get torn down. Asbestos wasn’t banned in Turkey until 2010, and environmentalists fear the dust created by earthquake debris is toxic.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

A child walks through a tent camp in an olive orchard in Antakya, Turkey.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

A container camp in Antakya, Turkey.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

An informal tent camp set up in an olive orchard in Antakya. The Turkish government has prioritized its own citizens for container housing, and most residents of informal tent camps are Syrian refugees.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

Syrian children outside their tent in Antakya, Turkey. Many Syrian families who lost their homes in the earthquake are living in tents.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

A tent hospital set up on Samandağ beach, not far from a large dump site for earthquake debris.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

Many shops have reopened for business in converted shipping containers, like this liquor store.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

Semih and Serap Bozaydi reopened their tailoring shop in a market of small, prefabricated buildings set up by the government. The shopkeepers will be charged rent starting in October, and the Bozaydi’s aren’t sure they’ll stay. “It feels like a temporary life,” Semih said.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

Mişel Atik, director of the Samandağ Environmental Protection and Tourism Association, stands outside the ruins of the historic house that he had painstakingly restored. The morning of Feb. 6, Atik had randomly awoken just a few minutes before the earthquake, and escaped through a window just before his home collapsed.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

Environmentalists help hatching sea turtles reach the surface on Samandağ Beach, just a few meters from a large dump site for earthquake debris.

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Durrie Bouscaren/The World

Related: Life returns to Antakya, a city nearly leveled by earthquakes in southern Turkey

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In 1914, as Europe was bracing for war, a young Italian farmer named Salvatore Iocco set sail for Argentina. Like millions of European migrants in the 19th and 20th centuries, he sought a better life on the American continent, and Argentina was the top destination after the US.

Salvatore worked in the countryside, had nine children, and settled down in Lomas de Zamora, a district in the conurbation of Buenos Aires. He died on March 15, 1965. By then, the great migration from Europe to Argentina had all but ended; if anything, it was starting to reverse course.

Matías Basualdo and Marina González after moving to Spain at the apartment of some Argentine friends living in Barcelona, Spain.

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Alan Ruiz Terol/The World

On March 15, 1986, Salvatore’s great-grandson Matías Basualdo was born. Since then, he has grown disillusioned with the country his ancestor made his home. On top of the country’s crumbling economy and rampant inflation, insecurity was also taking its toll — thieves had recently broken into their home; his wife, Marina González’s car was stolen; and Matías’ brother was kidnapped.

“It’s part of our normality, of our day-to-day,” González said. “But I don’t think we should get used to it and accept it.”

The facade of Argentina’s national Museum of Immigration.

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Alan Ruiz Terol/The World

Just like Salvatore, they too wanted to leave their home country and chase a better life abroad. They had an escape plan: retracing Matías’ ancestorship to obtain an Italian passport, which allows free mobility across the EU, and resettle in Spain, where they already had family and friends and knew the language.

It’s a familiar path for their fellow countrymen: 328.333 Argentines live in Spain according to official figures, but the number is estimated to be higher.

Departures from Argentina skyrocketed in the early 2000s following the country’s economic meltdown. The flow slowed and even reversed through the past decade, but it’s on the rise again.

A space inside of Argentina’s national Museum of Immigration.

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Alan Ruiz Terol/The World

Migration is a defining feature of Argentina’s history. From its first census in 1868 to 1947, the population jumped from 1.7 to nearly 16 million. In 1910, when Argentina celebrated the centenary of its independence from Spain’s colonial rule, half the population of Buenos Aires were foreigners.

Most migrants came from Spain and Italy, and were lured in by the promise of Argentina’s economic expansion. But behind the story of migration, there’s also a story of genocide, said Marcelo Huernos, a researcher at Argentina’s national Museum of Inmigration.

“Elites decided to exterminate native people, and replace them with migrants,” he said.

After taking the land from Native tribes, they were in need of workers and had a clear idea of whom they preferred.

“They wanted to create the so-called Argentine race, white and European,” Huernos said.

A replica of a ship at Argentina’s national Museum of Immigration.

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Alan Ruiz Terol/The World

Now that the tables have turned, and aging European nations need young workers, they too are being selective, Huernos said.

“They prefer to welcome Argentines, white and catholic, who in theory will fit in culturally, over, say, muslim Africans,” he said.

European countries offer legal pathways for the descendants of their nationals to reclaim their rights to become citizens — and in Argentina, more and more people are seizing the opportunity.

Demand for European passports has skyrocketed over the past five years, especially after the pandemic, said migration lawyer Gonzalo Outeda, who’s been in the business for about a decade.

“Everybody is doing it,” he said. “First comes a member of a family, then comes the cousin, then the uncle … it’s like a spider web.”

Researcher Marcelo Huernos is shown at Argentina’s national Museum of Immigration.

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Alan Ruiz Terol/The World

The Italian consulate is so overflown with applications that it can take years to get a turn, and some people even travel to Italy to do all the paperwork there, Outeda said. Getting all the paperwork ready is no easy task, and many people hire migration lawyers to help them with the process.

“You need to create the family tree, with certificates of birth, marriage and death,” he said.

Even with all the paperwork in order, problems can still arise, as Matías Basualdo knows firsthand. Two years ago, he submitted all the documents to apply for Italian citizenship, but he said, he was told that the name of his great-great-grandmother didn’t match up.

It was a slight misspelling: her name was hispanicized when her son Salvatore arrived in Argentina, and reported his parents’ names for official records. But the consulate said they were two different people, so he had to file a lawsuit to amend it. The whole migration process took years and cost more than $6,000 including official fees, lawyers and translators.

Despite all the bureaucracy, Basualdo and González eventually got good news: last March, a court finally authorized changing the name of Matías’ great-great-grandmother, so they could complete the application for Italian citizenship.

On May 20, they left Argentina for good.

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Carpenters in the woods in southern Germany are erecting a medieval utopia. The workers are using only tools and methods from that era — 1,300 years ago.

They're building a village and monastery following the only blueprint that survived the early Middle Ages, a medieval manuscript that was first sketched on calfskin. A design for a village that was never built, until now.

The cover of a book by Kristen Ghodsee.

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Courtesy of Kristen Ghodsee

Author Kristen Ghodsee says the building project is sparking important discussions about community and how societies can combat loneliness and isolation. Ghodsee is the author of the new book, "Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life." She spoke with The World's host Marco Werman about the project.

Marco Werman: It's not unheard of for people interested in history to try to re-create a medieval village. But this site Campus Galli near the German-Swiss border is not really the typical historical recreation. Tell us about it. What are you seeing right now?Kristen Ghodsee: It's just one of the most amazing things you can imagine. So, what they're doing here is they're trying to build the plan of Saint Gall, which is a ninth-century plan for a Benedictine cloister, a monastery, using the methods and the materials of the ninth century, which, as I'm sure you can imagine, means that the work is very slow and very painstaking.

Medieval tools being used to build a Benedictine cloister at Campus Galli in Southern Germany.

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Courtesy of Kristen Ghodsee

For you, as someone who has thought a lot about attempts to create utopias in places where people live together, happily, why are the bells particularly meaningful?That's the way that the workers on-site communicate with each other. They meet together for meals. They meet together to have discussions, to plan. They meet together to discuss this thing called the Rule of Saint Benedict, which is a 530 A.D. text, which gives the blueprint for how a bunch of non-blood-related people could live together in harmony, in community with each other and with nature.

A sketch of a Benedictine cloister being replicated at Campus Galli.

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Wikimedia Commons

You've met some of the archeologists and craftspeople building this medieval community today. What did they tell you about what motivates them? What are their priorities?Quite a few of them are history buffs. Some of them are just really interested in experimental archaeology and this process of learning what it was like to build and create community in the ninth century. But a lot of others, especially, I would say, the master craftsman — the carpenters and the stonemasons and the people who could actually be making a pretty decent living elsewhere in Germany or in Switzerland — are giving all their time to this project because, you know, there was one young man that I spoke to today who was a cabinetmaker, and he said, "I would build a chair or I would build a table and then I would sell it and it would just go off into the world and I would never see those people again. I would never see this thing that I created, this beautiful thing that I created in the world. And here every single day that I work, that I labor towards this project, I'm laboring for something that is important to this community that I'm a part of."

The blueprint of a Benedictine cloister being replicated by carpenters in Southern Germany.

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Wikimedia Commons

Yeah, I mean, that's fascinating that they fully realize this project won't be completed in their lifetimes, but they're committed to it.Yeah. So, as I was walking around Campus Galli, I ran into one of the master craftsman, Julian, who has been working in Campus Galli for the last seven years, and I asked him what his motivations were for being here:"I was used to a very tight and a very quick rhythm of working. And here, I got to know another way of working and also working with each other. I think it's something that a lot of people are looking for also in our society, because it's an aspect that fascinates a lot of people. How is it possible that you work that slowly? Yeah, it's possible because maybe it's a perspective [for the] long term." So, you know, we live in a pretty isolated, hyperpolarized and atomized society in the West. And you can get really kind of caught up in your own personal dramas day to day. And I think that what the people here are doing, which is really inspiring, is they're just saying, "Hey, community is really important, too."What we see and Campus Galli is also this concept of slowing things down, which connects to climate change and returning the global to the local. Do experiments like Campus Galli address that, do you think?Absolutely. I'm in southern Germany right now and it's well into the mid-90s. It's very hot for this time of year in Germany. You know, the climate crisis means that lots of things about the way we live on the Earth are going to have to change. And that means that maybe learning some of these older building techniques, learning how to build with dowels instead of nails and how to build more sustainably are going to be really important skills in the future. And people here say it's the slowness, it's the care, it's the community, it's the connection that this kind of, you might call it slow construction, requires, right? There are certain things that if you don't have a crane and you're going to be lifting up a 2-ton block of stone to make a grinding wheel of some kind, you're going to need a lot of community and teamwork. If you're raising a barn roof, if you're building a church out of stone, there's a lot of community and connection that is required. And I think that, for a lot of people, that slowness that is based on reconnecting with others and finding the joy in that slowness is really important.One can imagine that this utopian community of Campus Galli, when completed, will be multigenerational. So, I'm wondering what lessons does this community offer us about how elders were incorporated into society than just avoiding isolation and loneliness?I think everybody in a community like this, everybody has a role to play. Now, not everybody is going to be a master carpenter or a master stonemason, but there are other things that can be done. There are potters. There are people who read. There's a scriptorium where people are writing out manuscripts. So, there are built-in roles for people. There's a medicinal herb garden, right? There's also an orchard. So, there are all sorts of ways in which people, of all generations, children, as well as the elderly, can be incorporated into this collective project of building the community together. And I really think that we've lost, in many ways, this sort of intergenerational solidarity that projects like this really show is pretty normal and natural for human beings who are living together in community.

A cup representing the Benedictine cloister being built at Campus Galli in Southern Germany.

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Courtesy of Kristen Ghodsee

So, it may be challenging to answer this question briefly, since it's really the thrust of your book, but why do you think it's important to revisit these sort of utopian visions of the past? What do you say to people who have reactions like, "Why would we want to return to this medieval world?"Exactly, right. And I think, you know, I'll admit, first of all, I understand that not everybody wants to live using the methods and the amenities of the ninth century. People are pretty happy in the 21st century. But here's the thing. I think that we get stuck thinking that the way we organize our private lives in our single-family homes, surrounded by our blood-related kin, you know, our family members and with our own privately owned stuff in our private cars going in and out of the office or whatever, or even telecommuting with our privately owned laptops, however it works, we tend to think that that's normal. We've got it stuck in our head that this sort of isolated life that we're living, raising children with just two biological parents in this single-family home, this model is creating a real crisis of care in our society. It's also creating a crisis of care for the elderly. It's also creating a crisis of care for people who are kinless. And so, I think, by going back and revisiting these utopian experiments of the past, we can understand a little bit better that there were other ways of living. There are other ways. And it doesn't mean that we have to go back to the ninth century, but we could learn from these experiments. There are things that we can take from these experiments and apply to our own lives in the present day to make us feel more contented and connected and ultimately in harmony with each other and with nature.This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Related: In Germany’s Black Forest and beyond, a quiet loss of biodiversity

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As the "Planet Hip Hop" series continues, we talk about female rappers who help nurture the sound and give the expression a different voice — showing their male counterparts that they're just as important, talented and influential.

The World's Marco Werman caught up with Msia Kibona Clark, director of graduate studies in African studies at Howard University in Washington, to talk about how women have helped shape hip-hop around the globe. She also hosts the "Hip Hop African" podcast.

Marco Werman: The big hits in the early days were almost exclusively from men. When you started digging into hip hop and appreciating it, I'm curious: who was the first truly global female rapper, a pioneer in the genre, and what message was she sending to young women in parts of Africa, Asia or South America?Msia Kibona Clark: Godessa from South Africa. They were the first recorded group out of South Africa. They're based in Cape Town, where South African hip-hop emerged. They actually came out around 2000 or 2001, which is fairly late. The first song I heard of theirs was "Social Ills," they talk about being yourself and putting out unrealistic images and not trying to keep up with fashion trends and just learning to be yourself. Those were the early messages that came out.Our hip-hop series has shown us that everyone has a voice and a story, and sometimes their stories are heard, suppressed and even censored. Is there a country with a thriving hip-hop scene but a country where female rappers have struggled to get heard?Yes. Senegal. Senegal has a very strong hip-hop scene, very rich in social commentary. The minimum movement there was very influential and political change. But when it came to releasing music, you didn't see women rappers engaging in that way. So even though they may have been on the ground, they weren't doing so through their music.What about Jamaica? We’ve heard from up-and-coming young toasters there who are women with things to say, but they also perform in a very macho place. How is that working in Jamaica?I think the universal experience of women emcees is confronting misogyny and patriarchy. Hip hop itself is a very misogynistic space. You know, it's a very sexist space. So, you have to navigate hip-hop's culture. Then you have to navigate, kind of, local cultures. So whether you're talking about South Africa, Jamaica or Nigeria, you're also navigating misogynistic patriarchal structures and institutions, making it very difficult. When a woman decides to get into hip-hop on her own terms, she's already challenging those structures. One of the things the women are doing now is rejecting the fancy label and just wanting to be recognized as emcees, period.You just hit on this, in some subgenres of hip-hop — it’s misogynistic, even violent toward women. There's also the flipside that hip-hop has been empowering for many female rappers. I know you're a fan of Sampa the Great from Zambia. Tell us about her.Sampa is, yeah, Zambian. She did her undergrad in the US and then moved to Australia. She won a couple of ARIA Awards in Australia and is living in Botswana, I believe now, but has written many songs, not only celebrating being a woman but also being African. I think one of the narratives that isn't talked about as much is the experience of the African in the diaspora. I was born in Tanzania and came to America and experienced kind of anti-African sentiments; And so, what it's like to be an African in America, this sense of loneliness that's there, and kind of finding community artists like Sampa the Great represent that for African women immigrants. I connect to her a lot because of these multilayered intersecting identities in Tanzania, and I'm African American. I'm all of these things.Sampa the Great is on the title track to the Netflix series Supa Team 4. This series is a superhero story about girls’ strength and African ingenuity. It does really fit into the theme we're talking about here. I'm wondering, is that double hit of feminist culture coincidental, or is there kind of an intentional crossfertilization between media like film and music among these women creators?I think it's very intentional. Women nowadays are very intentional about their messaging and understanding the importance of crossplatforms and having a lot of content coming out that addresses or has many of these messages in it. It’s a great thing that's happening. I think that some artists also produce, sure, because I think Samba the Great has a short documentary or something that goes along with some of their music. So there's this whole visual art piece that goes along with her music.What country right now are you looking at? A place that's really bubbling up with the female rap artists of the future.If I had to pick one that wasn’t South Africa, it would probably be Ghana or Kenya. I probably would have said Nigeria, but Afrobeats really has kind of taken over Nigeria. For hip-hop, Ghana or Kenya would probably be the other two places.As you look around the world, has global hip-hop been its best self for women as opposed to its American iterations? And have women successfully flipped the script, do you think?Yes, I think globally hip-hop has done a lot more for women than what it has done for women in the US. That it has been a much more positive influence, that women are able to really use hip hop as a form of empowerment, much more outside of the US and much more globally, which I know is, you know, for some, controversial. I know that American hip hop is very American-centered, and most Americans are not familiar with hip hop outside of America. I think the most innovation happening right now in hip hop is happening outside of America. And that's, you know, it's just the truth.This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

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Cassidy Beach was part of a research project looking at the invasive lionfish species off South Caicos Island when she decided to go on a hike one day. She’s an incoming senior, studying environmental science and oceanography at the University of Michigan.

Cassidy Beach holds up the bottle she found on South Caicos island that Pennel Ames had thrown into the water in 2004 from Nantucket, Massachusetts, April 25, 2023.

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Courtesy of Cassidy Beach

On her way to check out the abandoned Highland House, she stumbled upon a green glass bottle lying among the rocks and marine debris. When she looked closer, she saw there was a note inside that was dated Sept. 30, 2004 — nearly two decades ago.

She took it back to their research center to try and crack it open. The note was from a fisherman who had thrown the bottle into the ocean about 30 miles off the coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts, asking anyone who found it to write back to him.

It turned out that the bottle that Beach found was one of hundreds that Pennel Ames threw into the Great South Channel, mostly between 2000 and 2006, when he was an offshore commercial fisherman. Those bottles are still being found to this day around the world, and so far, he’s heard back from around 80 people.

The bottles don’t, however, travel below the equator. That’s because they’re moved by ocean currents that follow a clockwise, circular path around the North Atlantic Ocean.

“It's almost like they catch rides. They catch rides on currents,” said Sharon Ames, Pennel Ames’s wife.

It’s also why they don’t travel in a straight line, like taking a direct flight on a plane.

“People think that our bottles start on the East Coast of the United States and just shoot across to Europe,” she said. “They don't. They have to follow [the] currents, and they go up with that Gulf Stream.”

A photo of a book showing ocean current patterns, taken July 30, 2023.

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Sara Hassan/The World

The Ameses got help from their two daughters, and for the first response they got back, the bottle had only made it as far as New Jersey.

Pennel Ames holds one of the bottles which he threw into the Atlantic Ocean about two decades ago that was returned to him, Nantucket, Massachusetts, July 30, 2023.

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Sara Hassan/The World

They found that water had seeped in and made the note moldy. So, Pennel Ames started cleaning out the bottles and, instead of using corks, he ordered synthetic ones, assembling them with a handheld corker. “Almost all the replies I've gotten [since then], the note has been in very good shape, you know, 17 or 18 years later,” Pennel Ames said.

The darker bottles also preserved the ink on the notes better if the print was outward facing.

Traveling around the worldOnce the bottles were clean and airtight, they stayed afloat and traveled farther.

The first sign that the bottles were actually going somewhere was when the Ameses got a response from Canada. They then started showing up in Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Spain, Portugal — even the Canary Islands, the Azores and the Caribbean.

Yuleisy Durán Díaz found a bottle in Cuba while fishing out at sea with her then-husband.

“I didn't understand the language, so a friend of mine helped me” to translate it, she said.

Sharon Ames looks through scrapbooks of responses from people who found bottles with notes tossed into the ocean by her husband, Pennel Ames, in their home in Nantucket, Massachusetts, July 30, 2023.

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Sara Hassan/The World

Sharon Ames said that after they received a few responses in Spanish, like the one Durán Díaz sent them, they started printing some of the letters in both English and Spanish, and even some in Portuguese.

She added that it’s always exciting getting letters back from people.

“All of a sudden you get an envelope and you go, ‘Oh, wow, I don't know that person. That's a bottle letter.’”

Sharon Ames, wife of fisherman Pennel Ames

“You get your mail and you kind of know your bills and the familiar people who send stuff to you,” she explained. “But then, all of a sudden, you get an envelope and you go, ‘Oh, wow, I don't know that person. That's a bottle letter.’”

A drawing of Pennel Ames’s boat moored next to a restaurant in Nantucket, Massachusetts.

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Sara Hassan/The World

She’s collected all the responses into scrapbooks that have come from all kinds of people. A 9-year-old girl from Florida wrote back. An 87-year-old man from Canada found one while vacationing with his wife in the Bahamas.

“One man in France found it,” Sharon Ames said. “His son then found one of our bottles years later.”

All of the Ameses’ scrapbooks are filled with photos of people with the bottles they found, postcards from their vacations, printed-out emails and handwritten letters.

A handheld bottle corker rests on top of scrapbooks of letters, postcards, emails and press clippings of people who found bottles thrown by Pennel Ames into the ocean.

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Courtesy of Sharon Ames

Meeting in-person

Cassidy Beach holds up the letter she found inside a bottle on South Caicos island that Pennel Ames had thrown into the water in 2004 from Nantucket, 2023.

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Courtesy of Cassidy Beach

When Beach, the incoming senior at the University of Michigan, found her bottle, she told the Ameses of a new project she was working on for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) using acoustic data to look at the present trends and habitat use of harbor porpoises and dolphins at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary.

It was going to take her to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, not far from where they live.

So, they all arranged for her to meet them at their home in Nantucket.“As soon as I walked in the cottage, they had a whole dining room table full of letters and books,” Beach said. “They had one book dedicated to France alone. And it was just really cool.”

She’s now back home in Michigan. And the letter from Pennel Ames is framed on her bedroom wall.

Related: Galapagos discovery offers clues to climate impact on deep-sea corals

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Gino Yevdjevich — who goes by “Gino” — is intense.

Founder and lead singer of Kultur Shock, Gino Yevdjevich.

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Courtesy of Kultur Shock

The founder and lead singer of the Seattle-based punk band Kultur Shock sports a bald head and a salt-and-pepper ZZ Top-style beard that he sometimes ties in a knot beneath his chin. Onstage, he pumps his fist in the air and sings in a deep growl.

But Gino wasn’t always a punk — he was a pop singer in Sarajevo, in the former Yugoslavia, who rose to fame in the years before the war in Bosnia.

Gino said he remembers a particular day when the war became real for him: April 2, 1992.

“I was living in my place in my condo. My mom's living across the bridge, so every single day, you know, you wake up, I don't have food at home. I go and, and like, you know, kind of linger on her food ... And then, one day when I came to my mom's, the bridge closed,” he said.

That moment changed everything for him. His own home was on the front line. He ended up staying at his mother’s place for three years. He said he still thinks about what might have happened if he’d been stuck on the other side of that bridge.

“I would not know you. You would not know me. I would not come to the United States. I would not make this band,” he said.

Sarajevo was under siege for almost four years. During that time, Gino and the other artists he knew were trapped, so they did what artists do — make art.

The way he describes it, most artists get less and less radical as they get older. His story is the opposite.

Gino Yevdjevich sings with Kultur Shock, a Seattle-based punk band.

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Courtesy of Kultur Shock

“It's logical, you know, to be old and wise, you must first be young and stupid,” he said. “I mean, I was a pop musician for the first 10 years of my [artistic] life. Yes, I sold the records, but I was miserable.”

Gino said he turned to theater and later punk rock when he realized that the music he had become famous for had become too commercial.

“Life is way too short to waste it on stuff that you don't believe in. I was at the end of the world and I realized when it's up to disappearing, art will prevail,” he said.

A friend’s father suggested they produce a musical in the local chamber theater.

“You know, before the war, you could not push people in the theaters. ... We were packed for three years because there was no electricity, there was no running water, there was no nothing. There was just art.”

One day, in the middle of a performance, a woman jumped onstage, and she started singing with them. Gino said it surprised them at first.

“Like, why is this woman jumping on stage and singing at us? But the woman looks familiar. Who's the woman? Joan Baez!”

At one point, the director and writer of the film “Field of Dreams,” Phil Alden Robinson, showed up at the theater and he went out for a drink with Gino and the other performers.

“This is the best show I've ever seen in my life,” he told Gino. “I would love to have you guys in the United States.”

But there was no clear way to leave at the time.

“Being trapped, being used as a pawn in the negotiations, I remember what I discovered, that, you know, terror is a war of the poor men toward the rich man. And war is a terror of the rich man toward the poor man.”

But Robinson continued to encourage Gino to find a way to the US.

“I just went underground and I ran ... I got to Croatia and then after that, the United States,” Gino said, adding, “At that moment, I felt really homesick.”

He went on to create Kultur Shock, a band that brings together punk, metal and Balkan folk.

Kultur Shock is a Seattle-based punk band started by Gino Yevdjevich.

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Courtesy of Kultur Shock

“You know, I'm a pop-rock musician. I don't do folk music much, ethnic music much. I know how to do it because of my Roma background, and I started singing that just for myself. And we did it acoustically.”

Fans loved it but Gino said something was missing for him: “There was still a lot of rage inside me.”

“I don't want that rage to go out in my private life ... so we plugged in.”

He realized that “you need to sing every single song like it's your last song or it doesn't count,” adding, “So that's ‘culture shock,’ doing everything you have, like it's your last thing. Like you have five minutes, five minutes to sing, sing.”

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For centuries, shark fin has been considered a delicacy in Chinese cooking — a symbol of hospitality, status and good fortune. The fin itself doesn’t have much taste, but it provides a gelatinous texture to a popular soup served at fancy banquets and luxury restaurants in China, where people pay up to $200 for a single bowl.

But there is a huge problem with this soup: Tens of millions of sharks are killed every year to make it. Many come from South America, where the shark fin trade has expanded and flourished.

Peru is the world's largest exporter of shark fins, according to Oceana, an international organization devoted to ocean conservation. Around 95% of their shipments go to Hong Kong, where buying and eating shark fins is legal.

But most of these fins don’t come from Peruvian waters, explained Alicia Kuroíwa, a biologist and researcher with Oceana. “Around 75% of the sharks come from neighboring Ecuador, where there are far larger populations of sharks and fewer regulations,” she said.

César Ipenza, an environmental lawyer based in Peru, said there are criminal organizations that smuggle fins to Peru or hide them among frozen fish.

“Once there, there’s a system that allows for officials to issue illicit permits to ship them abroad,” Ipensa said.

Both Peru and Ecuador are grappling with corrupt officials, a lack of capacity and the large profits at play.

In Hong Kong, a pound of shark fins can cost up to $700, compared to $7 in Peru.

Selling shark fins in Hong Kong is legal, but people need a special permit to sell endangered species. People can face up to 10 years in prison for illegal trading, but prosecutions are rare.

Around the world, it’s not uncommon that shark hunters cut the fin off and throw the animal back into the sea. Unable to swim, they sink and die of blood loss or are eaten by other predators. This practice is known as finning, and it’s banned in many countries.

Finning doesn’t happen so much in Ecuador or Peru, Alicia Kuroíwa said, where sharks are caught and retained whole to satisfy a modest demand for shark meat.

But foreign ships may engage in finning and get away with it, according to Evan Ellis, a Latin American research professor with the US Army War College.

“You’ve seen Chinese-flagged vessels operating farther and farther off their coasts after they pretty much depleted fish stocks closer to [their] own shores,” Ellis said. "Their fishing fleets have had to go farther and farther away to find fishing stocks that have not been exhausted."

Recent investigations show that hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels are operating almost 24/7 off the coast of South America.

Last year, China accounted for about 80% of the fishing in the international waters off Ecuador, Peru and Argentina.

According to Ellis, it’s challenging for authorities there to catch illegal foreign ships. “Oftentimes, vessels also will change names and registries that make it difficult for them to do so. And you have other practices such as turning off the transponder systems.”

Without advanced techniques, proving that a specific vessel has been engaged in illegal fishing is difficult.

The lucrative trade of fins is threatening species of sharks in South American waters, according to María Cristina Cely, a marine veterinarian and an environmental activist in Ecuador.

“Industrial fishing is depleting the overall fish population in Ecuador, which forces many local fishermen to look for exotic and more lucrative species like sharks or to go fishing in protected areas like the Galapagos islands.”

Maria Cristina Cely, marine veterinarian and environmental activist in Ecuador

“Industrial fishing is depleting the overall fish population in Ecuador, which forces many local fishermen to look for exotic and more lucrative species like sharks or to go fishing in protected areas like the Galapagos islands,” Cely said.

The business is thriving across South America despite legislative efforts to stop it.

Last month, authorities in Panama seized its largest amount of illegal shark fins. And just a month earlier, Brazilian officials caught 29 tons — the world's largest-ever shipment of illegal shark fins. Authorities estimate that close to 10,000 sharks were killed for this single shipment.

Panama’s Congress is currently discussing a bill that plans to restore and protect shark populations off its waters, but the country has still not banned shark fishing and the export of shark fins.

In Ecuador, people have been able to catch sharks by categorizing it as “incidental catch,” or an unintentional catch while fishing other species, which remains legal in the country.

However, in February 2022, Peru convicted two shark traffickers to four and a half years in prison for carrying 1.8 tons of fins from six species of shark, which they were going to sell to a seafood company. It took four years for the case to be completed, and there have been no convictions since.

Ipenza called it a “major success for Peru,” as this was the first time this country had ever sentenced anyone for illegal shark fin trading.

Related: An important fishing village in Senegal is on the verge of disappearing as sea levels rise

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Freddy Torres and his family arrived at Boston Logan International Airport on a frigid December day last year, not knowing what would happen next.

Torres, his wife, Adriana, and their two young children had fled Colombia seeking political asylum, crossing into the United States from Mexico. Now in Boston, they had a place to stay for one night through a friend and $1,200 in their pockets.

“It was hard, and I was so nervous,” Torres told GBH News recently in Spanish. He said he asked himself, “Why did I come? What did I do? What is happening? What about the children?”

The Torres family is part of a steady stream of migrants coming to Massachusetts — a number that has spiked as people from South America and the Caribbean flee violence and political turmoil.

Calling it a humanitarian crisis, Governor Maura Healey has activated the National Guard to support migrants at Joint Base Cape Cod and launched two welcome centers in Boston and Quincy. But the influx of desperate people is so great that families are flooding nonprofits and local hospitals.

Now seven months in, the Torres family has housing through the state shelter system in Dorchester. Freddy and Adriana, the parents, areworking multiple jobs to make ends meet as they wait for an immigration hearing in November.

They feel blessed that they are safe, and grateful for the city workers and advocates who have helped them find housing and education for their children. But the initial emotions they experienced upon arriving are something other migrants feel,too: confusion, fear and trauma.

The Torres family found an apartment with the help of the Boston-based nonprofit FamilyAid. Larry Seamans, the group's president, said he wants to help all new migrants arriving in Boston. But he compares the growing need to a “natural disaster” that has inundated the state.

“The needs of families coming now seem to be greater because the volume is higher,” he said. “Part of it is figuring out how to manage the crisis.”

'We've got a family here'Torres, 42,said he fled Colombia with his family because he feared persecution from the new administration of Gustavo Petro. The president is a former member of the M-19 guerrilla group, similar to those Torres once investigated as part of his job in the Colombian military. The family also sought help for their two children: their 14-year-old daughter, Zhayreth, has diabetes and their 8-year-old son, Freydar, has Down Syndrome and autism.

They left Colombia in December and flew to Cancun, Mexico, by plane. Once there, Torres hired a human smuggler known as a coyote to lead them to Ciudad Juarez, which borders Texas.

Torres remembers how nervous he was when the coyote unexpectedly arrived with two other men to guide them. “In Mexico before crossing, you don’t sleep. You worry about your kids, that something will happen to your wife, that they will be killed, that they will be kidnapped,” he said.

Despite his concerns, he said, they crossed the border without incident and presented themselves to border patrol officials for asylum. The family spent two days in the custody of US Customs & Border Patrol in Texasbefore being released with humanitarian parole — an immigration status that lets migrants stay temporarily in the United States.

Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration has long anticipated the arrival of more migrants like the Torres family. Yusufi Vali, deputy chief of staff at Wu’s office, told GBH News in June that the city had intervened to get people into temporary shelters and hotels while migrants work on their applications for the state shelter system through the Department of Transitional Assistance.

The state of Massachusetts' Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, or EOHLC, manages an emergency shelter system for families, working in tandem with the state's Department of Transitional Assitance to carry out that work. But soaring numbers have exposed a need for more services, prompting the city to become more involved.

“That’s the role that we've seen ourselves playing here and just trying to, again, fill in gaps as the state comes up with a more sustainable regional strategy,” Vali said.

Typically, Vali said, the process begins when families arrive at local hospitals and police departments. Other times, a resident may call 311 and simply say, “We’ve got a family here," he said.

That’s when one of two neighborhood liaisons with Haitian Creole and Spanish language skills gets involved.

Helping out familiesThe Torres family was connected to liaison Gladys Oliveros after they ended up at the East Boston branch of the Boston Police Department, directed by locals from the Maverick MBTA station.

Oliveros, 58, spends her days working with Latino communities around Boston, especially with migrants who have just arrived and need to be connected to services. She said she asks about medical needs, whether they’ve had a meal and calls the city to arrange for short-term hotel housing.Then, she takes them there.

“When I meet people, they’re scared, not knowing what to do, but when I speak Spanish, they suddenly feel comfortable and have the energy to open up and talk,” she said.

Gladys Oliveros is the Latinx Community Liaison for the City of Boston, and one of two main individuals who work one on one with new migrants to help them find emergency shelter at hotels, food, and even formula for infants.

Credit:

Sarah Betancourt/GBH News

Oliveros said she understands their plight because she entered the United States without official documentation 32 years ago.

“I see myself in them. I’m so happy to be there and [to be] helping them,’’ she said, starting to cry while explaining why her work means so much to her. “I was once in that position.”

Oliveros helped the Torres family stay at a hotel for a few nights. Then she asked them to meet her at a Department of Transitional Assistance office in Nubian Square. The couple said they filled out a “mountain” of paperwork and were told to meet outside of a supermarket that evening where a Lyft took them to an apartment in Dorchester.

That's where they met social worker Paola Batista of FamilyAid.

“It was a blessing,” Freddy Torres said. “Paola told us not to worry and talked to us about the children and our immigration situation. There was no fear we would be evicted overnight.”

The family can stay in the three-bedroom Dorchester apartment while they obtain work authorization and earn enough to no longer qualify for state-funded emergency shelter, according to FamilyAid.

The City of Boston is hiring two more community liaisons to help migrants navigate the emergency housing and shelter systems. In addition to housing, many need help with employment, schools and health insurance.

Batista helped the Torres family enroll for health insurance at Boston Medical Center and secure doctor appointments. While there, their daughter’s blood sugar spiked because she’d been without insulin for days, making her very sick. She stayed in the hospital over the weekend.

“We spent New Year's at the hospital,” Torres said.

Over the winter they were connected to the East Boston Community Soup Kitchen for groceries. That's an oasis for free and healthy foods based out of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Maverick Square. They found out Adriana was pregnant, and she started going to prenatal appointments. Through a friend, they were able to find short-term work shoveling snow.

Commonwealth struggles to meet demandBatista said families in similar situations tend tostay at least a year. The Torres family shares the apartment with a nephew, ayoung adult who gets his own room. The kitchen and living room are one large room, with few decorations other than the essentials — a table and chairs for eating and a couch. Adriana and Freddy share a room with Freydar, and Zhayreth has her own.

“These are things of God. For us to end up in this apartment,’’ Torres said. “I knew no one.”

But the Torres family has been luckier than most.The state shelter system has been strained. FamilyAid, which has a contract with the state to provide housing and help with social services, added 12 units of housing in the past four months to compensate for the new families.

"Two years ago, the population of new arrivals in our shelters was about 10%. That number is now increased to over 33% in just the last 12 months alone,” Seamans said. He said there is not enough low-income housing for every family.

In June, Governor Healey called the influx “unprecedented” and said her office is working with local and federal authorities on “long-term solutions to this crisis.”

“We’ve seen a steady rise in shelter demand due to the rising cost of housing, more families arriving in our nation and our state from other countries and delayed federal work authorizations,” Healey said.

To address the crush, Healey hired a group of well-known immigration advocates to top posts at the state Office of Refugees and Immigrants. They quickly launched the state’s first Welcome Center in Allston to process migrants and set uptemporary housing at Joint Base Cape Cod.

A second intake center opened on Monday in Quincy at Eastern Nazarene College, this time with on-site shelter for up to 58 families.

“We want to be providing a smoother, more efficient sort of access and entry point into the state shelter and care system,” said Ronnie Millar, director of Strategic Initiatives at the state Office of Refugees and Immigrants.

Another organization struggling to keep up with demand is the East Boston Community Soup Kitchen, where Freddy and Adriana pick up groceries. Executive Director Sandra Lorena Aleman-Nijjar, an immigrant from El Salvador, launched the project in 2016 after seeing the need in her community.

Aleman-Niijar said the soup kitchen gives 450 bags of groceries on Mondays to locals and new arrivals — anyone who needs food, like eggs, vegetables and bread.

“Usually they don’t have income because they don’t have an immigration status,” she said. “There's always new families that come to us to say, ‘I'm new here. I just got here a week ago, two months ago.’”

Aleman-Niijar said the needs in her community are exploding, both because of new migrants and others facing hard times. She’s been seeking funds from the city, politicians and large foundations to provide a new space and more food. “I’ve been begging everyone I know,” she said.

'More peace, more calm'At 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, Freydar Torres was just dropped off at home after his day at the public George Conley Elementary School in Roslindale. The 8-year-old with Down Syndrome cheerily followed his father around the apartment, later flinging himself onto the couch while echoing the sounds of a video game in his hands.

Torres hugged his son. “Freydar is happy,” he said. “He can’t express it, but I know he’s content, joyful.”

Freydar Torres, 7, plays soccer on an iPad, while his father Freddy washes dishes.

Credit:

Sarah Betancourt/GBH News

Then Freddy Torres prepared for work. He’s working at a company an hour away where he cleans and packs fish onto ice during the night hours. He arrives home at about 6:30 a.m. to see the kids off to school. Adriana has piecemeal employment cleaning at a Lexington hotel, and her commute is often about two hours each way. She's out the door when Freddy returns.

“We see each other so rarely,” FreddyTorres said, who works six days a week. “But you need clothes, food, soap, toilet paper — so we got jobs. We were lucky to find work.”

Each morning, Torres said he waits until Zhayreth messages him that she’s arrived at her eighth-grade class safely before heading to bed in the morning.

On that Tuesday, Zhayreth came home from a school trip to Lake Canobie looking happier and healthier than the girl they knew before they fled their native country. Torres believes that anxiety from their past life contributed to Zhayreth’s poor health.“She knew a lot about what was going on [in Colombia],” Torres said. “I think here she feels more at peace, more calm.”

Zhayreth, tall with expressive eyes and long, dark brown hair, said she loves school. She told a GBH reporter in an interview in English and Spanish that she’s enthralled by the fact that there’s a computer lab, something she says is a “rarity” in Colombia. She was surprised by how diverse the other students are, originally from Vietnam and the Dominican Republic. “But it’s good, you’re friends,” she said.

She listens to ’90s band Nirvana and is wearing a T-shirt with the band’s logo under a zip-up hoodie. “Sometimes I use the music to try to understand English,” she said in English, grinning.

In her sparse room, she shares a sketchpad and a book she’s reading for school.

Zhayreth Torres shows GBH reporters her room and a book she is reading for eighth grade English.

Credit:

Sarah Betancourt/GBH News

“Coraline,” said Zhayreth. “It’s about a girl who moves from one home to another, but during that time, she finds a door to a different world.”

Now Freddy and Adriana Torres are collecting paperwork to support their asylum claim, which they plan on filing in November. They are on a waitlist to obtain a pro bono attorney with Greater Boston Legal Services.

Freddy Torres said he understands that the increasing needs in the community are contributing to the scarcity of legal services. He’s hopeful for a positive outcome to their long journey north. So far, he said, everything has worked out.

“Sometimes I wonder if God puts people in our paths,” he said.

This story first appeared on GBH News on August 2, 2023.

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The United Nations World Food Program said on Tuesday that it will slowly resume food aid to Ethiopia.

UN officials had cut off the aid nearly five months ago after discovering some of the donations were being resold at local markets.

The risk of hunger is increasing around the world. Combating it is high on the UN's agenda, especially since Russia pulled out of the Black Sea Grain Initiative a few weeks ago.

The US ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, has made combating hunger a priority since the US took over the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council for the month of August.

Thomas-Greenfield spoke with The World’s Carolyn Beeler from New York about where the situation stands.

Carolyn Beeler: I want to first off remind people of the mechanics of the UN Security Council. Any of the five permanent members can unilaterally veto resolutions. Russia is one of those five permanent members, which means it can just stop you in your tracks. The UN Security Council seems kind of paralyzed when it comes to the war in Ukraine. What role can the security council play?US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield: Well, Carolyn, I actually have to disagree with that. I do know and everyone understands that Russia does have the veto power, but they have not been successful in blocking the security council from taking action. And as president of the council, of course, I get to shape the council's agenda for the month. And the UK was president last month. We have been able to isolate Russia in the security council. Basically, it's been 14 to 1. So, they are on their back foot, they're on their heels, they are in a defensive mode. And while they have been able to wield their veto power, they have not been able to wield their own power in terms of influencing the rest of the council. But, of course, the UN Security Council has not been able to stop this conflict since Russia pulled out of the Black Sea Green Initiative a few weeks ago. It's been attacking Ukraine's ports. It's destroyed 220,000 metric tons of grain in the past few weeks alone. That means that grain prices have spiked. That's going to be devastating, especially for food-insecure countries. What is the way out here? The secretary-general, the government of Turkey, are continuing their efforts to bring Russia back into the grain deal. Their attacks on Ukraine, however, show the lack of concern that they have for people around the world. And if you just look at the millions of tons of grain that we were able to get through, I think Secretary [Antony] Blinken said the other day that the equivalent of that 30 million tons of grain that was going through the grain deal was equivalent to about 18 billion loaves of bread. That is millions upon millions of people who are being impacted by their actions. At this point, do you think that the Black Sea Grain Initiative somehow can be revived? We're hopeful. The secretary-general has not given up. The government of Turkey is working along with him to urge the Russians to come back into the deal, and we support those efforts. This certainly was an advantage to the Russians. They were getting their grain out. In fact, they've got now more of their grain since this war started than they did the previous year. So, they have a reason to go back into the grain deal. And hopefully, through the efforts of the secretary-general, they will eventually come to the right decision.Russia is now approaching several impacted countries with these bilateral offers of grain shipments at discounted prices. Is the US prepared to respond to this in any way? Are they making similar offers to vulnerable countries?As far as what we are doing, the US has been in the forefront. We provided about $14 billion in additional funding for food security worldwide. Secretary Blinken was in New York last week. He announced an additional $350 million in aid to 11 African countries and Haiti. And we are continuing to push for more support for the World Food Program. We provide about 50% of the budget for the World Food Program, and Russia contributes less than 1% — in fact, they contribute less than the country of Somalia. I want to leave Russia and Ukraine for a moment and turn to Niger now. The UN Security Council hasn't been able to muster much of a response to the ousting of the president, Mohamed Bazoum. What can the global community do here? Well, first, the security council came out very, very early on this. The three African countries who are members of the council actually called for an emergency meeting on Niger, and we issued a statement condemning the attempted coup. So, the UN Security Council can issue statements, but there's nothing on the ground. Do you think at this point that the coup can really be reversed? Well, look, in our estimation, President Bazoum is still the democratically elected president of Niger, and we are supporting diplomatic efforts to turn this around. As you know, acting deputy secretary and undersecretary for political affairs, Victoria Nuland, was in Niger yesterday as she spoke on the phone to President Bazoum. We're going to continue to support their efforts to turn this around. Are US officials avoiding calling what happened in Niger a coup?We're not avoiding calling it a coup. It is not yet a successful effort. President Bazoum still remains the elected president of this country. We have temporarily suspended our direct assistance to the government until President Bazoum is reinstalled. But we are continuing to provide humanitarian assistance directly.What about the more than 1,000 US soldiers present in Niger right now? Will they be withdrawn?I can't comment on that right now. We're watching that situation very closely. And I know that DOD [Department of Defense] is looking at what steps they might need to take. One final topic for you: Haiti. The US has said it's willing to introduce a resolution at the UN Security Council to authorize a multinational force led by Kenya to help Haitian police fight armed gangs. How involved is the US prepared to get in this effort? Well, we're actively engaged in this effort. We are the so-called pen holders for the Haiti resolution. So, we're working very, very closely with all of the members of the council to ensure that we put in the resolution what will be necessary for the Kenyan contingent on the ground to be successful. This was a request that came directly to the council from the government of Haiti. And we're working very, very closely with that government as well to ensure that what we eventually agree to will work to address the very dire situation on the ground. The gangs are controlling huge swaths of the country. They're blocking civilians from moving from neighborhood to neighborhood. And the situation has gotten to the point of really, it requires a response to really get the country back on track. UN peacekeepers from Kenya have had a mixed record in the past, though, with some being accused of abusing civilians and supporting smuggling rings. Does that concern you or give you pause? We're working closely with the Kenyan government. We have called out any misbehavior by peacekeeping troops wherever those happen; we’ve called for accountability. And this is something that we will work closely with the Kenyans on as they begin to put together this contingent to go to Haiti. Related: 'Assad can't clean up his act with a natural disaster,' US Amb. to UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield says

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and length. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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It’s rare to come across a musical act that remains consistent over time, much less one that stays true to its roots and doesn’t change its lineup for 50 years.

But that’s the case with the band Los Lobos.

It wasn't the plan when its members were much younger, back in high school during the late '60s.

Los Lobos at a music studio in East Los Angeles.

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Marco Werman/The World

“We were all rock ’n’ roll musicians before this whole thing started,” said Conrad Lozano, the band’s bassist.

Los Lobos bassist Conrad Lozano.

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Marco Werman/The World

He said it was amazing that the band lasted so long.

Los Lobos band members (left to right) Louie Perez, Conrad Lozano, David Hidalgo, Cesar Rosas and Steve Berlin.

Credit:

Courtesy of Piero F. Giunti

[Just] the fact that we were young Mexican Americans in the neighborhood, learning this music that we never expected to learn and enjoying playing, Lozano said, and being able to share it with the neighborhood and other people.

International fame for the band came with the movie "La Bamba" in 1987.

The title song that made Richie Valens famous in 1958 was his rock cover of an old Mexican folk tune.

Thirty years later, when Los Lobos performed it for the film, they got it up to number one on the US charts, partly because they already had a rock background, but they also knew how to give Mexican songs the party treatment.

“We took it a real distance. We learned a lot [about] the different areas of Mexico, the territories; the music is different, the instrumentation is different, the Veracruzano, the Huasteco and all that stuff,” Lozano said.

But the band always loved rock ’n’ roll music.

For 10 years, the band studied Mexican folk music, and then the band started to get back to its original rock ’n’ roll sound.

Los Lobos band member Louie Perez.

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Robert Corsini/Native Sons Films

“We kind of brought the things that we learned over the years,” he said, and the group paired it to rock ’n’ roll as they started to write music.

“And the fact that we are all sons of immigrants …,” said Louie Pérez, the band’s lyricist. “… it didn’t take too much thought to realize that there were certain subjects that we needed to address.

Songs like “Is This All There Is?” pierced the bubble of the American dream by reflecting on the world and stories Los Lobos are intimate with.

Many of those compositions are rooted in the immigrant experience, but as a co-writer of many of those songs, Pérez said that, after 50 years, the main message of the band spreads much wider.

“There are more similarities than differences. In all of us. And we discovered that by traveling around the US,” he said. “And that’s the greatest thing about this country … that we are, but we seem to have lost sight of that.”

Related: Young people in Spain use punk rock to vent their frustrations

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Tetyana Samoylenko tried to save all the vegetables in her root cellar before the water started filling it last winter, but she couldn’t get them all.

Now, shriveled black potatoes float in about 3 feet of water that flowed to the village of Demydiv in the early days of the full-scale Russian invasion.

Samoylenko lives not far from a dam separating the Irpin River from the Kyiv Reservoir, which Ukrainian forces blew a hole through in February of 2022.

A view of the flooded area in Kozarovychi village in the Kyiv region of Ukraine on June 10, 2023.

Credit:

Anastasia Vlasova/The World

Thousands of acres of land about 25 miles north of central Kyiv were flooded. That water has been credited with preventing Russian troops from advancing toward Kyiv in their early push for the capital. The new wetland has become a largely welcome addition to the natural landscape, though the water remains an inconvenience for Samoylenko and others in her village whose homes were flooded.

The water reached Samoylenko’s floorboards at its highest. Her water pump was destroyed and her well was contaminated, so she can’t drink the water anymore.

“It’s too dirty,” she said. “All of the sewage system got flooded, too, and all the toilets. Everything was floating here.”

A view of a flooded household in Demydiv village in the Kyiv region of Ukraine on June 10, 2023.

Credit:

Anastasia Vlasova/The World

Now, her sister and brother-in-law, who live in a part of the village that still has clean drinking water, drop off several, 5-liter bottles of drinking water each day.

It’s been like this for well over a year, but Samoylenko is still glad the dam was damaged.

“I’m not mad,” she said. “Had this not happened, Russians would have reached Kyiv.”

That’s largely the public sentiment here, where some people have started calling the Irpin a “Hero River.” The dam hasn’t been repaired; the 7,000 acres remain flooded.

On a warm June afternoon, people sat relaxing on the dam, biking across its span, or hiking along the water line. Swans floated by on the water.

Volodymyr Nechyporenko, who lives in a nearby town, fished in the shallow water.

“It was the right decision to [burst the dam],” he said through an interpreter, “because if they hadn’t blown it, the Russians would be in Kyiv.”

He fishes here about once a week, sometimes frying up the bigger catch to eat, and he wants the wetlands to stay as they are.

Roman Lysenko, a biologist with the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group, said conservationists in Ukraine mostly say the same thing.

The biologist, Roman Lysenko, photographed by the flooded area in Kozarovychi village in the Kyiv region of Ukraine on June 10, 2023.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

“It's quite like what it used to look like in the spring, maybe a hundred years ago,” he said.

Lysenko said the dam was built in the 1960s, and that dried out a natural floodplain. Now, the Irpin River is running closer to its natural course again.

“Now, almost everything that remains under the water is natural floodplains,” he said.

On a visit to the new wetland in June, Lysenko surveyed the pioneer species establishing themselves in the new ecosystem, noting plant species growing near the waterline and a gray heron that flew low over the water.

Credit:

Anastasia Vlasova/The World

“It’s a good sign. I think we will see that biodiversity will bloom here,” he said.

The flooded wetland is a nursery for fish and a good habitat for plants that need fluctuating amounts of water, he said, but for birds, “it’s like heaven.”

This is not how conservationists would have restored this ecosystem had they planned it. Fertilizer and sewage was likely swept into the water when the dam was damaged, Lyzenko said, and homes were flooded.

But now, the area is closer to its natural state than it has been in decades, Lysenko said: “Maybe it’s optimal. It’s optimal for nature, and it’s still optimal for the defense of our country.”

The Ukrainian military has told residents this new wetland will stay here until at least the end of the war.

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The drug was thalidomide.

During the 1950s, doctors prescribed the German-made sedative to pregnant women to reduce nausea.

But tens of thousands of so-called “thalidomide babies” were born with congenital disabilities — from stunted, flipper-like limbs to damaged internal organs.

While chatting in her living room, Josefina Montpeo accidentally dropped her glasses on the floor. Montpeo is confined to a wheelchair, legless. So, picking things up is complicated. That’s where Mushu comes in.

Josefina Montpeo and her service animal, Mushu.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

Mushu is Montpeo’s basque sheepdog. He is trained to retrieve fallen objects, turn on the lights.

“He opens doors for me,” Montpeo told The World. “He can open drawers and bring me my medicine, she said. He can even throw stuff in the trash.”

This is hugely helpful because Montpeo, 64 years old and a widow, lives alone. Thalidomide deprived her of her legs, left one arm deformed and her spine fractured and crooked.

In the 1950s, a German laboratory called Grünenthal hailed its new thalidomide as a wonder drug. But it was never adequately tested.

The result: congenital disabilities in tens of thousands of people across the continent.

There are victims in North America, too, following short-lived clinical trials. By 1962, thalidomide was off the market. The scandal led to stricter drug testing around the world.

As for the victims, governments and Grünenthal compensated most of them. But the hundreds in Spain went ignored.

“Spain’s different,” said 56-year-old retiree Silvia San Salvador. “You could say that Spain is from another galaxy.”

San Salvador is with Spain’s Association of Thalidomide Victims. There are around 150 members. She was born with two stunted arms bent the wrong way, missing fingers and a partially developed nose. By the time she was 12, she’d had seven surgeries.

None of the surgeries were through Spain’s public healthcare system. Because in Spain, San Salvador explained, thalidomide never existed. Officially.

Silvia San Salvador

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Gerry Hadden/The World

“All of this happened under the dictator Francisco Franco,” she said. “And the dictatorship would not admit it had allowed in medicine that caused congenital disabilities. So, the subject was never even broached.”

Nor were women warned — even as the evidence of thalidomide’s dangers mounted. San Salvador knew the cause of her condition: She still has her mother’s thalidomide prescription, with the stamp from a local pharmacy. But many Spanish victims remained in the dark.

That was until 2011, when Franco was long dead, Spain had become a democracy and two thalidomide victims went on a national TV talk show called Cerezas. Suddenly, everyone was talking about it.

Victims found each other. They organized, sued in Germany and then in Spain. But the statute of limitations had expired. So, they lobbied politicians, San Salvador said, and dumped medical proof at their feet.

“We said, just look at us."

Silvia San Salvador

“We said, just look at us,” she said.

Finally, in 2018, Spain passed a law to help them. And this summer, the government apologized.

Spain’s Minister for Social Rights, Ione Belarra, posted this unofficial mea culpa on Instagram. She said that, at long last, victims would receive financial aid — to be paid out in 2024.

Spanish media have run with it. Europe’s last thalidomide victims finally compensated, read headlines. But the story doesn’t end there.

“It’s not enough money,” said victim Josefina Montpeo. “Also, they’re calling it aid.”

If it were damages, it’d be tax-free, but aid is counted as income, she said, so we’ll have to pay about half back to the government come tax season.

“Add to that lawyers’ fees,” Montpeo said. “Victims will end up with just a third of their payouts.”

Spain’s thalidomide victims say they’ll continue to lobby the government for tax-free compensation and an official apology for being ignored for decades, not just a video post on Instagram.

“What’s a life worth,” Montpeo asked, shaking her head. “Because the hardest chapter is fast approaching for us: old age. I’m going to be alone.

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The Milwaukee Recreation Department runs hundreds of free or low-cost classes for children and adults.

If you want to learn how to make a new dish, you’ll find that many of the Rec’s cooking classes are in Korean. Why do they offer so many Korean culinary classes?

It turns out, it’s because of one woman. Seon Joo Oh is a teacher and grandmother in her 60s.

On a recent evening at Hamilton High School, she was getting ready to teach a dozen students how to make beef bulgogi, also known as Korean barbecue. It’s made of marinated thin slices of beef cooked on a stovetop.

"Many Korean dishes [are] very slow[-cooked] food, but [are] very [nutritious]," Seon Joo said.

"[There is] some protein, carbohydrates, some vitamins and all kinds of nutrition. I want to introduce [people to] the Korean dishes, and bulgogi is very popular for everybody."

Students filed in. There were a few couples, a group of friends and a mother-daughter pair named Gail Dompke and Lilli Dompke.

"I’d very much like to be able to make [beef bulgogi] at home. I’d like to learn it from somebody who knows how to prepare it properly."

Gail Dompke, cooking student

"Bulgogi, I’ve had it in restaurants before and it’s delicious," Gail Dompke said. "I’d very much like to be able to make that at home. I’d like to learn it from somebody who knows how to prepare it properly."

Seon Joo Oh lines up the ingredients her class will use to make beef bulgogi.

Credit:

Emily Files/WUWM

Seon Joo told the students that they’d make the sauce used to marinate the meat. The students got to work chopping onions and scallions and crushing fruit to add to the sauce.

Seon Joo never expected to be a cooking teacher. At age 44, she moved from Seoul, South Korea, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to study early childhood education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). That’s when she started to learn English.

"So, it [was] a little bit hard time, but I [took] the course every day, [met] American friends," Seon Joo said. "It’s good [to learn] for my life."

Seon Joo said her grandmother, who lived to be 105 years old, told her that you’re never too old to learn something new.

"[She said,] your age will be more than 120, you need to study something new," Seon Joo laughed.

Now, Seon Joo is the teacher rather than the student. She teaches paper-folding arts to school children, and in 2017 started teaching Korean cooking and culture classes through Milwaukee Rec.

"I started [cooking classes] one by one, many American people want to take more and more," Seon Joo said. "They give [say], '[start a] noodle class, [start a] pancake class.' So, that’s [a] good idea. I [started] more and more."

Students help chop vegetables to include in the bulgogi marinade.

Credit:

Emily Files/WUWM

The demand for Korean cooking classes is there, said Claire McHugh, a marketing supervisor with Milwaukee Rec.

"Seon Joo has been a staple here at Hamilton for a quite a long time," McHugh said. "I know the staff here love her. ... Her classes are always full, like tonight. So, yeah, she’s been a really wonderful asset to the program."

Seon Joo said the most challenging part of teaching these classes is procuring the right ingredients. Milwaukee grocery stores lack the Korean staples. She said her husband drives to the Chicago area about once a week to shop at places like H Mart and Joong Boo Market.

Once the vegetables were chopped for the bulgogi class, Seon Joo lined up the ingredients for the marinade. It included soy sauce, wine, honey, green onion, garlic, sugar and more.

Seon Joo submerged thinly sliced beef into her finished marinade. While that set, the students made their own sauce, commenting on how good it smelled.

After it was cooked, Seon Joo demonstrated how she eats bulgogi — by putting a bite of the meat, along with white rice and spicy chili paste, onto a lettuce leaf — like a spoon you can eat. She took a bite as the students applauded.

"It’s very good," said one student. "Definitely, you can taste the sesame oil and some of the sweetness from the sugar and the fruits."

About 250 Milwaukeeans have learned Korean cooking from Seon Joo, according to the Rec department.

She is teaching more classes this summer, including bibimbap and fried noodles. They’re currently full, but there's a waiting list.

"Always my grandma said, 'The good food is better than medicine,'" Seon Joo said. "So, we don’t need to take more medicine if you [make] good dishes. So, I want to follow her tradition, her advice."

Related: In Kazakhstan, timeless Korean recipes are loved and maintained

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Nelson Leal is a mayor who can’t work in his own town. Two years ago, he was elected to lead Tibu, a town of about 60,000 people near Colombia’s border with Venezuela.

But he had to flee in March due to death threats from the National Liberation army and other rebel groups that are vying for the control of drug-trafficking routes around Tibu.

So now, Leal carries out his mayoral duties from Cucuta, a larger city that is about four hours away, and where he gets around in a bulletproof vehicle.

“I’m not the only one who is absent,” said Leal, who works in a small office that was lended to him by the local governor. “There is no prosecutor there, or any courts. We have no human rights ombudsman and although we are on the border with Venezuela, there is no border post.”

Nelson Leal is the mayor of Tibu, a town near Colombia's border with Venezuela. He fled in March due to death threats and now works from another city.

Credit:

Edinson Estupinan

Leal said he is hoping that a ceasefire that began this week between the Colombian government and the National Liberation Army — known also as the ELN — will make it possible for him to return home and for more government agencies to work in his town to tackle problems such as poverty and crime.

The ceasefire is expected to last six months and seeks to boost ongoing peace talks between Colombia’s government and the ELN, a rebel group of Marxist orientation that has been around since the 1960s.

The truce is part of President Gustavo Petro’s plans to pacify regions of the country that are still affected by rebel groups and drug cartels. Some of these groups have become more powerful recently because they occupied areas of the country that were abandoned by the FARC, a guerrilla group that made peace with the government in 2016.

For Leal, the ceasefire with the ELN provides some hope that things might change in his region where rebel groups impose curfews in villages; tax local businesses; and threaten those who get in their way.

As part of the ceasefire, both sides have also agreed to stop attacks on civilians.

Support for the ceasefire is not unanimous. Recently thousands of people showed up at a rally in Bogotá to protest President Gustavo Petro's security policies including the ceasefire with the ELN.

Credit:

Manuel Rueda/The World

“Those of us who live in areas affected by conflict want peace,” Leal said. “I hope that they stick to what they have agreed to.”

But not everyone agrees that granting the ELN a six-month break from persecution by the nation’s military is the best approach.

In the past, other rebel groups in Colombia have taken advantage of truces with the military to increase their drug-trafficking profits and buy more weapons. Then, they’ve gone back to war when they weren’t satisfied with what was being offered to them at peace talks.

Last month, thousands of people turned up at a rally in Bogotá to protest against Petro’s security policies — including the ceasefire.

“Everyone wants peace,” said Guillermo Rojas, a retired police officer who attended the rally. “But you can’t give a criminal group so many advantages at the start of talks. The government is throwing away its leverage.”

Thousands of people showed up at a rally in Bogotá to protest President Gustavo Petro's security policies including the ceasefire with the ELN.

Credit:

Manuel Rueda/The World

Petro, who was once a member of a rebel group himself, said that the truce presents an opportunity to build trust with the ELN and provide some relief to areas of the country affected by violence.

Petro, during a recent visit to Arauca, another region affected by fighting, was greeted warmly by locals who swarmed around the president to shake his hand and get his autograph. As he spoke to the crowd, he urged the ELN rebels to lay down their weapons and take the truce seriously.

“Leaving your machine guns behind is the most-revolutionary step you can take,” he said. “You need to give the people the chance to decide their own destiny and create their own history.”

As the peace talks move forward, the ELN has hinted that it wants to see changes in how Colombia exploits its natural resources, and it also wants reforms to the electoral system. The group’s lead negotiator Pablo Beltran also said on Thursday that Colombia should prioritize spending on social programs over paying back debts to the nation’s creditors.

Thousands of people showed up at a rally in Bogotá to protest President Gustavo Petro's security policies including the ceasefire with the ELN.

Credit:

Manuel Rueda/The World

For the moment, both sides have agreed to create committees in which members of civil society groups like farmers associations or trade unions will be able to provide proposals on how to solve problems such as poverty or crime.

The ELN said that it wants to use the recommendations that emerge from those committees to come up with a more specific list of demands for the government.

That makes it hard to know how long the peace talks could take.

Thousands of people showed up at a rally in Bogotá to protest President Gustavo Petro's security policies including the ceasefire with the ELN. Some of the protesters were retired army and police officers.

Credit:

Manuel Rueda/The World

Elizabeth Dickinson, a Colombia expert at the International Crisis Group, said that the only way to increase support for the talks is if the ELN’s attacks against civilians decrease during the truce.

“There is limited patience for negotiations with this organization, particularly, while insecurity continues to increase,” Dickinson said. “If there are incidents that are high-profile, whether it’s recruitment, whether it's kidnapping, whether it’s businessmen denouncing that there is ongoing extortion, that can easily discredit the talks in ways that limit the government's capability to keep sitting at the table.”

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In a muddy field in Flanders, in northern Belgium, there are signs of a recent harvest along its edge — raw potatoes here and there.

But toward the back of the field, members of DOVO, the Belgian military’s bomb disposal unit, inspect something else yielded by the harvest — an artillery shell that is more than a century old.

An unexploded German 15-centimeter high explosive shell from 1914. It was discovered by a farmer in a potato field near Ieper, Belgium, during a potato harvest. This area of Flanders saw some of the longest and heaviest fighting during World War I.

Credit:

Joshua Coe/The World

“By sight alone, we know what it is. It’s a German one,” 1st Sgt. Sanders Poelmans said. A German, 15-centimeter, high-explosive shell produced in 1914, to be precise.

“It’s still possible to explode,” he added.

And they still do.

“We have two to three cases every year where a farmer hits a shell with his farming equipment, and the shell blows up,” Poelmans said. “So, the farmers are sometimes hurt.”

From 1914 to 1918, this farmland surrounding the city of Ieper witnessed some of the heaviest artillery shelling and highest casualties of World War I.

A British cemetery in Hooge, Belgium just west of Ieper. Casualties along the Ieper front line known as the Salient were in the hundreds of thousands. The Third Battle of Ypres in 1917 alone saw 900,000 dead and wounded.

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Joshua Coe/The World

Shells like the German one found in this field, along with hand grenades and bombs dropped by planes, are found across Belgium on a daily basis. Every year, the unit removes over 150 metric tons of unexploded ordnance on average.

“Normally, we can go to 20, 30 places a day, when it's in autumn,” the 28-year-old Poelmans said.

“And when all the farmers start harvesting, we have a lot of places to visit.”

So frequent is this corroded, old ammunition found that the routine of clearing it from farmland has been dubbed the “iron harvest.”

Members of Belgium’s bomb disposal unit Warrant Officer Steven de Meulenaere, left, and First Sergeant Sander Poelmans, right, carry a German 15-centimeter high explosive shell manufactured in 1914 away from the field where a farmer found it. The unexploded shell was brought to the unit’s truck for transport back to their barracks on Aug. 1, 2023. Back at the barracks, it will be inspected once again before being destroyed.

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Joshua Coe/The World

About a third of the explosive ammunition fired during the war didn’t go off, in many cases due to the low quality of the mass-produced fuses, Poelmans said. In other cases, it’s because the shell was never quite fired.

The team recovered a 6-pound British artillery at another farm that day.

“The shell is fired with its safety on, so the fuse cannot be armed,” he said.

He speculated that it might have been an inexperienced soldier who forgot about it under extreme stress on the battlefield.

A British hand grenade recovered by the Belgian bomb disposal unit from a farm near Ieper on Aug. 1, 2023. First Sergeant Sander Poelmans with the unit explained that given their similar size, grenades are often unintentionally harvested along with potatoes during harvest.

Credit:

Joshua Coe/The World

The unit is trained to identify over 600 different types of unexploded ordnance. They’ve cataloged 3,000 unique explosive objects from WWI for further reference.

At the Belgian bomb squads barracks in Poelkapelle, Belgium, Warrant Officer Steven de Meulenaere points out the six sites his unit is tasked with clearing of unexploded ordnance on Aug. 1, 2023. On average, the team will get more than 10 assignments each day.

Credit:

Joshua Coe/The World

And with each new find, Poelmans’ team follows the same procedure: Using a brush and small hammer, they carefully remove decades of rust and dirt caked on to shells, to see whether it was fired and thus primed to explode, or if it might have been armed with a chemical agent, like phosgene or mustard gas.

"Most of the shells are filled with high explosive or with the toxic load,” in other words, it’s a chemical weapon, “and it's not possible to tell on the outside,” Poelmans said.

So whenever they find a shell, they approach it as a chemical weapon still hazardous to their health. Mustard gas can still cause skin blisters and burns, as well as temporary blindness. Chlorine or Phosgene can be lethal, especially if it gets inhaled.

The possibility of finding such chemical weapons in the fields of Flanders is unique to World War I battlefields — a conflict in which both sides tested new, cruel means to break a costly stalemate.

A cow rests by the ruins of a concrete German bunker, from World War I, in the middle of a pasture north of Ieper, along what used to be the front line of the war, now mostly farmland, July 31, 2023. Static trench warfare meant that territory gained or lost by either side was often only measured in feet or yards.

Credit:

Joshua Coe/The World

Jacques Callebaut, a member of the bomb disposal unit with nearly four decades of experience, said that suffocating agents and blister agents were frequently used in World War I.

“In fact, the danger for ourselves is bigger when dealing with First World War ammunition than with Second World War ammunition” because of the risk posed by chemical weapons.

After identifying the type of explosive ordnance, the team places it carefully in a box full of sand so it stays secure on the truck.

Sometimes, they will blow it up on location if it’s unsafe to transport to a base — in that case, they will set off a controlled detonation where they found it.

Others are brought back to barracks where they get inspected again before later being destroyed.

If an X-ray reveals chemical traces, they have two options: a static detonation chamber (basically, a huge oven), or a contained detonation chamber, used only when there are a high amount of explosives.

Members of the Belgian bomb disposal unit look on as a trainee inspects a piece of unexploded ordnance collected by a farmer living near Ieper, Belgium. It’s one of six assignments for the team on Aug. 1, 2023. The daily clearance of unexploded ordnance from fields in Belgium is known locally as the “iron harvest.”

Credit:

Joshua Coe/The World

Callebaut said there’s no clear end date for removing all the unexploded ordnance from the area.

“After the First World War, they thought it would be over by 2025, but we are still dealing with it,” he said.

“Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam they're also still dealing with ammunition which was found, the same with Afghanistan.”

Wherever there is a conflict, there is this threat, he said.

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Ukraine is now considered the most heavily mined country in the world.

Nearly 1,000 civilians have been killed or injured by landmines and unexploded ordnances since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022.

And about a third of the country needs to be cleared of these explosives.

A view of a field which is still mined in Makariv village, Kyiv region, Ukraine on June 8, 2023.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

Most of that land is along the border with Russia, in eastern Ukraine. But it also includes parts of the Kyiv region, where Russian forces battled with Ukrainians early in the war.

Yuriy Zahoryui manages a 15,000-acre farm north of Kyiv, in an area that Russian forces reached in their failed push for the Ukrainian capital early into the war.

Security cameras at the farm caught tanks rolling over the land.

Zahoryui said that about 10% of his farm fields are still mined, including one he showed to The World.

“Last spring, we found around 10 anti-tank mines here, and one local resident got injured when one of the mines blew up,” he said, adding, “Where we’re standing right now was sort of a gray zone, because [the] Ukrainian military was positioned over there behind the forest, 500 feet away from here. And over there, there is a highway leading towards Kyiv.”

Yuriy Zahoryui shows the mines found on his field in Makariv village, Kyiv region, Ukraine on June 8, 2023.

Credit:

Anastasia Vlasova/The World

About 20% of Ukraine’s farmland was off-limits in 2022 due to unexploded ordnances or active fighting, in a country where agriculture is a major driver of the economy.

Zahoryui spoke to The World’s environmental correspondent, Carolyn Beeler, about the impact of the war on the farm.

Click the audio player above to hear the full story.

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You may instantly recognize K-Pop supergroup BTS. These boy and girl bands almost always have a rapper or two in their lineup.

Hip-hop found its footing in South Korea in the 1990s.

Haekyung Um has written extensively about Korean pop culture. She also teaches global popular music and Asian music industries at the University of Liverpool. She joined The World’s host Marco Werman to talk about the evolution of hip-hop in South Korea.

Marco Werman: So, put us in South Korea in 1992. What was going on? What was the scene like when hip-hop kind of landed in Seoul? Haekyung Um: Well, 1990 was a very, very dynamic period. Korea became the 10th-largest economy by the 1990s. And then also in 1990, there was the birth of a culture, of popular culture, a new generation, a youth culture, and these teenagers really embraced consumerism and Western popular culture. But at the same time, they also wanted to rebel against the established social and cultural rules. So in this context, hip-hop gained huge popularity among Korean youth.So, hip-hop kind of grew up as South Korea rebuilt and gained that global economic muscle. There's a rapper named EPIK High, a track called “Lesson 2,” which we can listen to. Tell me about EPIK High.EPIK High, their rap seems to be very fine and very, uh, poetically, very pleasing if you are [a] Korean speaker. So it's a quite, quite good way to learn about Korean hip-hop in many ways. In comes the rhyme and flow and then comes the lyrical content.So, this is “Lesson 2,” from Epik High. What is the lesson here? [The] lesson is: What is the failing political system and the corruption of the politicians and business and everything? So they're really, really critical about everything that capitalism and democracy can offer, because usually those two things, which are meant to be always a good thing, have been abused by those who are in power.With the explosion of K-pop in Western countries, it's really put the Korean music industry under a microscope. And Korea's music business has been active in promoting itself around the globe. Some of the reaction often is about Korean rappers and idols getting charged with appropriating other cultures, aesthetics and sounds. What is the perspective of Korean artists?Oh, this is quite a very, very difficult question. I think there are two sides to it. One is the ongoing problem with the Korean industry, and to some extent, also there's a complacency from the artists themselves. Not all of them, but because there is a tendency of colorblindness, because they really don't see classic Western popular music that they see as American pop, rather than Black music or non-Black music, and that that really exacerbates what [can] already sometimes be quite delicate. And Korea used to pride itself as a homogeneous ethnic group or race. So the idea of a multiethnicity or a multiculturalism is kind of a new idea — new in Korea. In this context, they find that multiculturalism and differences have become kind of something which they don't really ever feel very sensitive to. But this is not justified.So, just to conclude, I guess, with some music, what does an authentic Korean hip-hop song sound like? And do you have an example?I was thinking about Tiger JK and RM, their collaboration. This piece is called "Timeless." So it's a quite intricate rap and Tiger K, who was first-generation, really contributed quite a lot to really establish hip-hop as we know [it]. And then RM, who is known to be a rapper, brings it to different generations. So this really makes the music really interesting, kind of a bond to bring people together. And then hip-hop is the link between these two.This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Related: ‘Planet Hip Hop': Senegalese rappers push for social and political change

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Swedish singer and songwriter Nea remembers inventing her own pop songs when she was just 6 years old.

Nea, who has written some of the most-popular hits performed by Swedish artists in recent years, said that dedicating her life to music didn’t seem like such a big deal growing up in Sweden in the 1990s.

Bands such as Roxette and Ace of Base were international stars, and the legacy of ABBA still loomed large.

“Having these role models was a huge factor in that I dared to approach music as a career,” she said. “I had those musicians in Sweden that I could look up to. And I thought if they can do it, I can do it.”

But Nea’s career wasn’t just influenced by Sweden’s pop icons, it was grounded in something far more fundamental: the education system. In Sweden, cultural schools, known as kulturskolan, offer free music classes where children can learn to play an instrument or sing. The schools, which are dotted throughout the country, are paid for by local municipalities.

Swedish music producer Max Martin, who has written more No. 1 hits in the US than any artist except for Lennon and McCartney, attributed the cultural schools to his start in music.

Last November, the newly elected, right-wing government in Stockholm, which depends on the far-right party Sweden Democrats for support, announced it was cutting the budget for cultural schools in half. Artists like Nea and Martin say the decision could be devastating for the future of Sweden’s music business.

Sweden’s success in the pop music industry is nothing short of exceptional for a country of just over 10 million people. ABBA blazed a trail in the pop music field, and still today, long lines of people queue daily to visit the ABBA The Museum in Stockholm.

Producer Martin carved out a name for himself writing hits for Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran and The Weeknd.

Members of the public can join Abba Avatars and sing with them in the Abba museum in Stockholm, Sweden.

Credit:

Orla Barry/The World

Linn Wexell, who runs record label Milkshake with her partner Petter Eriksson, said that while everyone appreciates ABBA's unprecedented accomplishments, Martin’s success opened the eyes of younger musicians to the possibility of a different type of music career.

Singer Nea attended the music academy Musikmakarna in Örnsköldsvik, which specializes in songwriting and music production. Securing a place at the college is fiercely competitive, she said, but once you’re accepted, there are no fees involved.

“It's not like in America where your parents may have saved money their whole lives so you can go to university.”

In Sweden, you can take a chance at a college course in song-writing and if it doesn’t work out, you’re not left with a lifetime of debt, she said.

Conductor Sofia Winiarksi also credited Sweden’s music schools for her choice of career. Winiarksi attended a choir school, another hugely popular option in Sweden, as a child.

Linn Wexell runs record label Milkshake with her partner Petter Eriksson.

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Orla Barry/The World

An estimated 600,000 Swedes regularly sing in choirs.

Winiarski said when she was younger, children could take time out of school to attend music lessons and, as a result, many Swedes grew up playing an instrument or singing.

But Winiarski said that appreciation for the arts appears to have faded in recent years. Successive governments like to talk up the fact that Sweden is a world leader in pop music but artists are continuously forced to point out that this music wonder didn't grow out of a vacuum, she said.

“There's an ecosystem and an infrastructure that is pretty fragile, and if we start tearing down aspects of it, like the kulturskolan, we don't know if we'll still have this music miracle.”

Sweden’s oldest concert hall, built in 1877, Musikaliska, is facing closure because the government agency that owns the building has hiked rents by more than 60%, Winiarski said. The conductor launched a petition to try and save the institution, gathering almost 30,000 signatures.

But right now, she said it stands silent and any prospect of saving it looks bleak.

“Can you imagine if this was Vienna and the Austrian government was allowing one of its most famous opera houses to shut down?” Winiarski said. “There would be uproar.”

Winiarski and other musicians say that the current government is obsessed with students achieving higher grades in academic subjects like math to the detriment of the arts. The far-right Sweden Democrats party is more interested in promoting traditional Swedish music, Winiarski said.

Caroline Fagerlind, head of exhibitions at the Avicii Experience in Stockholm, agreed.

DJ Avicii, who was born Tim Bergling, is often credited with innovating electronic dance music (EDM). Avicii went from sleeping on friends’ couches in his early 20s to headlining dance music festivals within just a few years. His 2011 hit, “Levels,” propelled him to superstardom and he went on to collaborate with everyone from Madonna to Coldplay to Rita Ora.

Caroline Fagerlind, head of exhibitions at the Avicii Experience in Stockholm, Sweden.

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Orla Barry/The World

Avicii took his own life in 2018 at the age of 28. The Avicii museum documents his journey, from the young teen mixing tracks in his bedroom to headlining festivals, taking home $250,000 for a single night’s work.

Fagerlind and the Tim Bergling Foundation are now calling on schools to include Avicii as part of the music curriculum. Avicii’s death is a cautionary tale about the pressures of unexpected stardom, Fagerlind said, but it's also an important story about the mental health struggles so many artists endure. His work continues to influence music producers around the world, and young Swedes should be encouraged to learn about that, she said.

A replica of DJ Avicii's bedroom at the Avicii Experience in Stockholm, Sweden.

Credit:

Orla Barry/The World

Wexell said Avicii’s work is also a reminder of how Swedes enthusiastically embraced digital technology in the music sphere. After all, Spotify was founded in Stockholm, Wexell pointed out.

Singer-songwriter Nea said that just saying you are Swedish appears to open doors in the music business internationally. Nea has written songs for many of Sweden’s most-popular artists like singer Zara Larsson and DJ Axwell as well as British rapper Tinie Tempah and South Korean pop group Twice.

In the last few years, Nea has found success as a solo artist. Her song “Some Say” has clocked up close to 400 million listens on Spotify. At meetings with music executives abroad, Nea said, she is often asked what’s in the water in Sweden that the country has managed to produce so much talent.

It’s great to know that we have this reputation within the global pop music industry, she said. But it would be nice to think our own government is as invested in supporting this great Swedish success story, she said.

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Over the last month, Armenians living in the mountainous region of Nagorno-Karabakh say they are suffering from a shortage of basic necessities.

The Lachin Corridor is the only road connecting them to Armenia, and that’s where Azerbaijan has set up a military checkpoint, essentially cutting them off and isolating them.

“The life for the past month it is disastrous, the situation is close to starvation,” said Nina Shahverdyan, a schoolteacher in her 20s who lives in Stepanakert, the largest city in Nagorno-Karabakh.

“We don’t have any medicine, we don’t have any fuel, we barely have electricity, when we don’t have electricity we don’t have internet as well. We don’t have any food supplies coming in. People right now are struggling with what to put on the table,” she said.

Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought for decades over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Armenians who live there are now calling on the US and EU to step in to assist with a growing humanitarian crisis.

Last week, thousands of people in Yerevan, Armenia’s capital, came out to protest Azerbaijan’s blockade.

They chanted, “Artsakh,” the Armenian name for Nagorno-Karabakh.

The next day, Armenia tried sending humanitarian aid to the region, but a convoy of dozens of trucks filled with food and other goods were stopped by Azerbaijan at the Lachin Corridor checkpoint. They’ve been held up there for a week, still waiting to enter.

Shahverdyan said that a big portion of her day is spent trying to get some food.

“There are huge lines in the city, like, to buy just one or two loaves of bread, and my brother yesterday, he stood for 1 1/2 hours and it’s only just to get the bare minimum bread,” she said.

Shahverdyan said that people who have gardens have begun growing fruits and vegetables themselves to supplement their diets. During the last six weeks, she said she has lost nearly seven pounds, and her brother has lost nearly nine pounds.

“If measures are not taken in the coming weeks or months, an actual famine could start,” said Tigran Grigoryan, head of the Regional Center for Democracy and Security based in Yerevan.

He said that Russia and Azerbaijan share responsibly here.

In 2020, Russia brokered a ceasefire agreement between Armenia and Azerbaijan, where Russian peacekeepers were supposed to manage the Lachin Corridor.

In the years since, Azerbaijan has taken control.

“This is a direct consequence of the war in Ukraine, because of which, the influence of Russia has significantly decreased in the region, and also the interest of Russia has been shifting. That’s why Azerbaijan has been testing Russia’s red lines on the ground,” he explained.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, attends talks with Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev, second left, and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, left, at the Kremlin in Moscow, on Jan. 11, 2021.

Credit:

Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik/Kremlin Pool/AP/Photo

Azerbaijan considers Nagorno-Karabakh to be part of its sovereign territory, and Azerbaijan has tried to justify its Lachin Corridor checkpoint as a security measure.

Meanwhile, as this crisis continues to unfold, Armenia and Azerbaijan are still holding peace talks.

“In my understanding you cannot just ignore the elephant in the room, the blockade and humanitarian crisis in the Nagorno-Karabakh and move forward with these so-called peace talks,” Grigoryan said.

Zaur Shiriyev, a Baku, Azerbaijan-based analyst with the Crisis Group, said that until now, the United States has played a key role in keeping the peace talks alive.

“The expectation now is that the agreement should be signed by the end of the year, the key date in the process. And many worry that if it doesn’t happen by the end, the US will enter its preelection period, potentially decreasing its focus and intervention,” Shiriyev said.

He added that many issues remain unresolved like the status of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh, future security arrangements, and the freedom of movement through the Lachin Corridor.

But despite that, Shiriyev believes that ongoing dialogue between the two sides can be productive, even if a deal doesn’t resolve all these questions.

“Even if [both] sides succeed in signing an agreement, what will happen the day after peace agreement is reached?”

Back in Stepanakert in Nagorno-Karabakh, Shahverdyan, the schoolteacher, said she doesn’t trust that Azerbaijan would uphold a future peace agreement with Armenia.

“This is not just our local issue here, this is an international issue, this is a humanitarian crisis. And I’m thinking that the way the West pressures Russia to stop the war in Ukraine, the same tactics can be applied to Azerbaijan to stop this. The bare fact that the blockade continues, is proof that they don’t do enough,” she said.

Over the weekend, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke with Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev.

Blinken expressed “deep concern for the deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Nagorno-Karabakh,” and urged all sides to continue dialogue.

Armenians living in Nagorno-Karabakh though are looking for more than just words, and are hoping that the blockade is lifted as soon as possible.

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Weeks after a Russian strike hit a Ukrainian oil depot in the town of Kalynivka last March, Pavlo Ivanov showed up with his team of government environmental inspectors to assess the damage.

He noted that the thick, concrete pad the oil tanks sat on was destroyed, with “huge craters from rocket impacts” and scrap metal all over the place; 6,000 tons of oil leaked from the depot in addition to whatever went up in flames as the site spewed thick, black smoke for five days.

Soil samples showed toxin levels 16 times higher than normal, Ivanov said, and a few months after the explosion, a 15-acre lake downhill from the depot was about half-covered in oil slicks.

Ivanov, walking along the lake on a recent visit, pointed to the far edge of the water to show where the oil started.

Related: The environmental cost of war in Ukraine

“I was pretty shocked because in all my career, this is the first time I’ve seen a disaster of this magnitude,” he said through an interpreter.

The site may have been unique, but the process wasn’t. Ukraine’s state environmental inspectorate sends inspectors out to document the damage after every Russian strike.

Their assessments are used to assign a dollar figure for the environmental damage done by Russian forces. At the Kalynivka oil depot, the damage from the burned and leaked oil was calculated to reach nearly $14 million.

Nationwide, the government puts the cost of the environmental destruction of the war at more than $56 billion.

Adhesive tape as seen on the sidewalk of the forest area of Chernihiv pointing out that the area could be mined.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

“This is needed for future litigation in the international courts and future reparations that Russia will pay for all the damage they have caused,” said Dmytro Zaruba, deputy head of Ukraine’s environmental inspectorate.

This ongoing tally is based on a complex formula that goes beyond simply calculating an estimate for cleanup costs and lost profits, and uses methodology devised by a group of experts in the early months of the war.

“Imagine something happened to Niagara Falls,” Zaruba said. “How do you estimate what that’s worth?”

A handful of environmental nongovernmental organizations, both inside and outside of Ukraine, are compiling their own maps and databases of environmental damage to supplement government efforts.

“There is a great deal more environmental information being gathered on this conflict than previous conflicts,” said Doug Weir, from the UK charity Conflict and Environment Observatory, adding that it provides an unprecedented look at the environmental cost of this war.

At the NGO EcoAction, Alex Opanasenko manages an interactive map of Ukraine that marks different types of potential environmental harm with different colors — green for damage to industrial facilities and pink for impacts on ecosystems — and notes the date and location of each attack.

“We try to put attention to this problem because damaging the environment is not a first problem in our country,” he said. “But we can’t forget about it because it’s so important.”

Opanasenko, too, said a main goal of the work is one day holding Russia accountable for its actions.

EcoAction relies on volunteers to comb through news reports, social media posts and official government websites to find Russian attacks that may cause environmental damage. They do not make note of any damages caused by Ukrainian strikes.

Shizhana Tereshchenko, a college student, spends about half an hour a day in her Kyiv dorm room scrolling the internet, looking for these reports.

“When we do not see something, we do not know about the problem, so the importance of my job is to make everything visible,” she said through an EcoAction interpreter.

Tereschenko said most of what she sees is Russian rocket and artillery hits, often on industrial sites where there’s a risk of chemical contamination in nearby land or water.

Spending so much time reading about attacks in a region near where she grew up is hard, she said.

“The first week was the most difficult,” she said, “but after a while, I got used to it.”

Weir, from the Conflict and Environment Observatory, said there is precedent for making aggressors pay out for environmental impacts during wartime.

The example Ukrainian officials point to most frequently is the UN compensation program established in 1991 after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Over more than 30 years, Iraq paid out a total of $52.4 billion, and a small portion of that went to environmental impacts.

Piles of metal roofing stack upon each other.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

“Money was awarded to states, for example, for the costs of monitoring the health of people from oil well fires, for the cost of cleanup and remediation, from oil spills on beaches and the land,” Weir explained. “And so, the process is there.”

The UN Compensation Commission was set up by the UN Security Council, however, where Russia is a permanent member.

“It’s not a model that could be followed now,” Weir said.

The International Court of Justice, in a 2018 case between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, has also established a precedent for awarding damages for environmental harm.

The UN has already established an official repository for documentation of environmental harm in Ukraine.

But Weir cautioned it might be too early for Ukraine to be coming up with its own damage estimates.

“It will be many years until we’re in a situation — if we are in a situation — where there will be discussions around how things are valued, what reparations actually look like,” he said. “And those conversations will rely on the data which is being collected now.”

In the meantime, cleanup work in Ukraine is largely seen as something that will have to wait until the war ends.

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Thomas Sperle held up an old photo of a bog and looked directly at the exact same spot, 50 years later. The photo shows a marshy area, with water winding through the grass. Today, it’s mostly dry.

“In this part of the bog there were no trees,” Sperle said. “And nowadays, a lot of trees.”

This photo, taken 50 years ago, shows a healthier bog, with water winding through the grass.

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Emily Haavik/The World

The trees represent new growth. But in a bog, a tall tree is not a sign of life.

“The tree is a sign that the water level in the ground of the bogs is sinking,” Sperle said.

Thomas Sperle surveyed 124 bogs over three years, counting plant species by hand.

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Emily Haavik/The World

Germany’s Black Forest is the backdrop for countless fairytales. But there’s a darker story emerging about a loss of biodiversity that’s hard to see with the naked eye. And it’s not the only place where a pretty picture can mask a trend of extinction.

Across the globe, the extinction of species doesn’t necessarily mean a desolate landscape – so it takes specialized, time-intensive research to find out what plants the planet is losing.

In 2017, Sperle started surveying dozens of bogs in Germany’s Black Forest. For three years he counted plants, some just a few centimeters long. He often spent nights in his camper van. He made lists of plants and their quantities and compared them to a survey from 50 years ago.

“I find out that nowadays much less species are growing,” he said.

In the nutrient-poor ecosystem of a bog, plants have to get creative. This tiny red specialist plant is a carnivore, trapping and eating insects.

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Emily Haavik/The World

Two plant species have gone extinct, and several more will likely disappear in the next 15 years.

“If this trend in the future will go on, we have … the extinction of I think 10 species in all the bogs,” Sperle said.

The plants that are dying out are mostly what are called specialists, which do well in a very specific setting. Meanwhile, generalists, which can thrive almost anywhere, are increasing. Sperle and his research partner, Helge Bruelheide, attribute the homogenization to hot, dry summers from climate change.

“It results in a type of globalization,” Buelheide said. “So you lose the difference between different habitats.”

Bruelheide is a professor of geobotany at Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany. In another study in northern Germany, he found that over two decades, the landscape had gotten greener.

“Most people think, ‘Wow, yeah, it’s a good sign,’” he said. “Because if something gets greener, we have less concrete and more nature.”

But in this case, greener meant a loss of other colors.

“Colorful meadows have disappeared,” he said. “Less colorful flowers mean you have less pollinators.”

This bog in the Kohlhütte nature reserve has a low water level, and the dry conditions are contributing to a loss of species.

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Emily Haavik/The World

At the University of Minnesota, Elizabeth Borer is also researching biodiversity – but through a more experimental lens.

“I want to know what will happen if I change the conditions, often trying to simulate something like what future Earth might look like,” she said.

As humans burn fossil fuels, it’s not just carbon that is released. Nitrogen and other nutrients are going into the air and falling back down in the rain. Borer simulates these higher nutrient levels in a controlled setting to see what happens to plant biodiversity.

“What we see there is a continued loss of species from those areas,” she said.

Elizabeth Borer is a researcher and professor at the University of Minnesota.

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Emily Haavik/The World

More nutrients might sound like a good thing.

“If you have a single outcome in mind, which is more plant, you are likely to get more plant,” Borer said.

There’s more vegetation overall in the short term because the generalist plants are thriving. But they’re often crowding out the specialist plants, so biodiversity declines.

“The little seedlings or small-statured plants don't have the light resources they need,” she said.

What does a loss of biodiversity actually mean for the planet? Fewer plants mean fewer pollinators, which are important for food production. Plants also store carbon and keep it out of the atmosphere. Bogs are especially good at this.

“The bogs are holding carbon dioxide in very great size,” Sperle said.

Thomas Sperle loves the bogs of the Black Forest, and he works hard to protect them. “They are rare,” he said.

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Emily Haavik/The World

Back in the Black Forest, Sperle said if nothing is done, these particular bogs could disappear completely by the end of the century. So he’s moving from research to action.

Four years ago, he surveyed a tiny birch tree called a Betula nana and discovered there were only 50 left.

“This is a very small tree,” he said. “It is also a specialist of bogs.”

This variety of birch tree is about the size of a bonsai. It was almost extinct for lack of water. And unlike taller, generalist trees, this tiny one is supposed to live in the bog. So Sperle had an idea.

“We take in water from a little stream opposite the bog,” he said. “The tube brings the water in the bog where this little birch is growing.”

With the extra water, they managed to stabilize the 40 remaining plants.

Betula nana is just one small species, but every loss has untold consequences for the planet.

“We don't know exactly what role every species or every system of species has,” Sperle said. “And we cannot say, ‘Oh, that's going away. It is nothing.’”

Sperle said it will take both research and action to find out what kind of extinctions are hiding behind beautiful trees and vibrant green spaces, and keep any more species from disappearing.

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In the city of Chernihiv, in northeastern Ukraine, the wreckage of a bombed home improvement store has stood twisted and rusting since Russian forces attacked it on just the fifth day of the full-scale invasion in February of 2022.

One morning this past spring, ecologist Kateryna Polianska carefully crunched over broken glass and stepped around piles of metal roofing that appeared to have melted into heaps in the inferno of the attack.

“This is evidence that there were huge temperatures, there were a lot of burning materials inside of this building,” said Polianska, who works with a leading Ukrainian nongovernmental organization called Environment People Law and has crisscrossed Ukraine collecting samples of soil and rubble from sites like this one.

Polianska usually wears gloves as she digs through the rubble of affected sites.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

Nearly a year and a half into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its impact has been felt most acutely in lost lives, flattened cities and destroyed infrastructure. But the environmental damage from combat has also contaminated Ukraine’s soil, water and air at a cost the government estimates to be $56 billion. This impact is likely to be one of the longest-lasting legacies of the war, persisting for decades after the fighting stops.

At the destroyed home improvement superstore in Chernihiv, Polianska said the immediate concern was air pollution as the paint, plastic, insulation and other building materials housed there went up in flames. Nationwide, excess greenhouse gas emissions from the first year of the war are estimated to be similar to the annual emissions of the country of Belgium.

The destroyed home improvement superstore in Chernihiv, Ukraine.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

But as the wreckage has sat largely unattended, Polianska said there are now other concerns.

“We can see there is a lot of ash,” Polianska said as her footsteps through the wrecked store sent dust she warned may contain dioxins and cancer-causing materials into the air. “If there is some windy weather, it can just blow up, and people in the nearest buildings can breathe these things.”

Disposal of war waste in Ukraine – where asbestos is widespread in buildings – is also a concern for Polianska. Ukraine lacks special landfill facilities that would prevent toxins from being blown away or leaching into the soil or groundwater after being disposed of, she said.

Polianska collects samples out of the rubble to send back to labs for testing.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

“When people try to rebuild their houses,” she said, “they just collect and remove this waste to another place. But it doesn’t solve the problem.”

Polianska wore gloves as she dug with a gardening spade into the rubble at the home improvement center, putting samples of burned insulation into plastic baggies for laboratory testing. She’s still waiting for those results, but previous testing has shown high concentrations of heavy metals in the soil underneath burned Russian tanks.

Nationwide, groundwater and soil have been contaminated by munitions and chemicals leaked from bombed industrial sites; forests have been mowed down and set ablaze by artillery strikes and missiles, agricultural fields have been compromised by mines, and drinking water has been cut off after sewage and wastewater treatment facilities have been damaged.

Russian forces targeting oil depots and energy facilities have sent more than 30,000 tons of oil into the water and soil.

In the town of Kalynivka, about 20 miles outside of Kyiv, a Russian airstrike on an oil depot last March sent 6,000 tons of oil into the soil, according to government environmental inspectors.

"The explosion was so big, we were scared even sitting in the basement. It was burning and smoking for five days after they blew up everything."

Yulia Samokhatka, resident of Kalynivka, Ukraine who has been affected by the Russian airstrikes.

"The explosion was so big, we were scared even sitting in the basement,” resident Yulia Samokhatka said. “It was burning and smoking for five days after they blew up everything."

The oil that seeped into the ground eventually made its way into a nearby lake, covering about half of its 15 acres.

Almost a year and a half after the explosion, small oil slicks are still visible on the lake’s surface. Residents complain of a foul smell.

Lyudmyla Odynets, who can see the lake from her house, said people used to come there from neighboring towns to swim and sunbathe.

“Now, we wish we could go to our own backyard without this terrible smell,” she said.

Odynets worries about the health impacts of the spill. Her water comes from a well, but hasn’t noticed a funny smell or taste, so she’s continued drinking it.

Odynets guesses that local officials have higher priorities right now than cleaning up this spilled oil but that sooner or later, the war will be over and “we will still have a disaster here.”

That’s the case in many other parts of the country. Government estimates from early in the war suggest that more than a quarter of the country’s protected areas have been impacted by combat.

When the Kakhovka dam burst in June, waters rushing down the Dnipro River flooded about 250 square miles of forests, wetlands and several national protected areas, and has put animal species in the Delta region at risk of extinction.

On the edge of Kyiv, in the Holosiivski National Park, a Russian ballistic missile was shot down in early June, leaving an impact crater about 20 feet long inside a ring of charcoal-black trees.

When the missile was shot down, the fuel inside of it started a fire in the forest, said Oleksandr Novitskiy, an inspector with the national park agency.

Many forest fires in Ukraine have been triggered by artillery strikes from Russian forces.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

The fuel that didn’t burn up soaked into the soil, leaving an acrid smell still apparent a week after the explosion.

“These pine trees are over 100 years old. They will die,” Novitskiy said. “Even the human efforts to replant something, regrow something, will not rectify all the damage that has been done.”

Old-fashioned trench warfare waged with tanks and heavy artillery has mowed and burned down forests on a much larger scale along the more than 600-mile frontl ine in eastern Ukraine.

“In a nutshell, the forests are being destroyed,” said Yehor Hrynnyk, a biologist at the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group. “Places where intense fighting took place in forests, these forests are no longer forests at all. They look like something on the moon.”

Yehor Hrynnyk, a biologist at the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

Artillery strikes and bombings have also triggered forest fires. According to one analysis, half of the roughly 20,000 wildfires in Ukraine last year occurred within about 40 miles of the front lines.

“And of course, it will take decades for the forest to regrow and in some cases, these ecosystems, there is no possibility to restore them,” Hrynnyk said.

That’s true for all of the ecological destruction caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Some areas will take years to clean up, but ecologists warn others may never fully recover.

Related: A ‘green road’ leads displaced Ukrainians to shelter in ecovillages

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Life was bleak for 24-year-old M. at the end of 2021. M. was living in her pastor-father Michael’s church compound in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, and had no job, no education and few prospects.

The pandemic and global economic turmoil had hit her father’s parishioners hard. He could no longer send his six children to school.

M., whose full name isn’t being used for her safety, spent her days doing odd jobs and dreaming of a different life. When M.’s friend, Princess — who’s only being identified by her first name — came to her with a job offer overseas, she thought her dreams had come true.

“She told me she was traveling to Dubai, and her uncle had a job opportunity there,” M. said, sitting at a table in the church with her parents, whose full names are also not being used. “I was happy to help my family, my brothers, my sisters.”

M., who was recruited as a domestic worker from Liberia to Oman, testified against her traffickers.

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Carielle Doe/The World

Michael was suspicious and demanded to speak with Princess’ uncle, Samuel Chan Chan, who promised him that the job was legitimate. M. would work in a printing press in Dubai making $500 a month. That was a large sum to a Liberian family where the gross domestic product per capita is $630 a year, and schoolteachers make $150 a month. Michael agreed.

Samuel Chan Chan told the family they needed to pay $500 to his wife based in Monrovia, and get a passport for their daughter and ensure she passes a COVID-19 test. The family scraped the money together. Then, one night in December, M. and her parents got into a taxi, drove to the airport and said a teary goodbye.

As M. disappeared into the terminal, she carried the weight of her family’s dreams of a better future.

Inside the airport, Samuel Chan Chan’s brother, Arthur Chan Chan, a national security agent, whisked M. past security checkpoints where agents are trained to spot potential trafficking victims. Arthur Chan Chan demanded $75 for his services.

M. said that alarm bells started sounding for her before she got on the plane. The visa that Arthur Chan Chan gave her was for Oman, not Dubai. When she landed, an Omani woman demanded that she hand over her passport. M., wary, refused at first, but she eventually gave in. Over the next few hours, the reality of her situation became clear.

M. was taken to an office filled with women from different parts of the world: Bangladesh, the Philippines and many African countries. It was an agency supplying domestic servants to Omani households. In a scene that she described as alarmingly reminiscent of African slave trades of old, Omanis came in to inspect the women and haggle over price. Asians — considered harder workers — cost more. Africans the least.

It was here that M. said that she first learned about human trafficking.

Typical modern slavery scams in the Middle East are orchestrated by agents who sell domestic servant contracts to households. In Oman, households pay a $1,500 fee to the agent as well as the cost of return flights. Households typically pay the servants $200 a month for long days with no days off. The contract lasts for two years.

M. and her father, Michael, are grateful that after everything that M. went through as a domestic worker in Oman, she made it back to Liberia.

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Carielle Doe/The World

The challenge for agents is that even the poorest women are not interested in that deal. So, the agents enlist local people like Samuel Chan Chan to deceive the women with promises of decent jobs, opportunities to study and no mention of the contract. When the women want out, they’re told the only way to get their passports back is to repay the fee.

Samuel Chan Chan did not appear to need much encouragement to sell out his fellow Liberians. His online history shows that after winning a fellowship to the Arab Africa Summit in Egypt in 2018, he started offering his services on forums recruiting women to work as housemaids in the Middle East.

Samuel Chan Chan advertises his services in finding Liberian workers.

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Samuel Chan Chan's social media.

“I have more than 20 maids in Liberia i need employer for than (sic),” he said in one post.

By 2021, he had relocated to Dubai and made connections with Omani agents including Al Ayadi Al Amina Housemaid Supply whose business card was obtained by one of the trafficked women. Liberian authorities say that more than 350 Liberian women were lured to Oman by the ring in 2021 and early 2022.

Samuel Chan Chan did not respond to The World’s requests for comment sent through Facebook messenger.

M. found herself working in a household with 15 people in 10 bedrooms and eight bathrooms. Only the mother spoke enough English to communicate with her. M. said that she had to wake at 4 a.m., prepare breakfast, get the children ready for school and then, clean all day and cook. The family ate first, and she got what was left over.

“And when they eat the food and there is not enough, they will not give you food to eat,” she said.

M. often went to bed at midnight. She was not allowed outside the compound and got no days off.

Eight months after M. left home trying to change her family’s fortunes, she landed in Monrovia, Liberia, and was reunited with her daughter, who is now 4.

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Carielle Doe/The World

After a couple of weeks, M. refused to work. The agent moved her to another house and another. At one point, he beat her and broke a finger, she said, showing her crooked left ring finger that is healing on an angle.

Eventually, the agent had M. arrested on a fake charge that she had stolen his phone. She said that she was imprisoned in a dark cell with no light for 10 weeks. Five other African women in the jail were beaten and starved. She claimed that one, from Tanzania, died.

“It was like hell in the prison,” she said, struggling to contain emotion. “Too much hell.”

A typical trafficking scenario like this is possible in the Middle East under the kafala system, run by agents who sell servant contracts to households. The households pay a fee to the agent and the costs of flights. Families typically pay the servants $200 a month – not the $500 M. expected.

M.’s story echoes that of five other returned trafficking victims that The World spoke with in this investigation. One said that she was raped. All were beaten.

M. told her agent she wanted to speak with Samuel Chan Chan. That’s when she learned the truth: “He said he bought me for [US] $3,000 from Samuel Chan Chan,” she recalled. “He said, ‘You can go home but first, you have to pay me the $3,000.’”

In Monrovia, Michael said, the family was getting desperate. Sporadic phone calls from his daughter terrified them. The traffickers were also calling, threatening to kill M. if they didn’t pay her fee.

Michael contacted everyone who might help, including police, government officials, other families and Samuel Chan Chan over and over again.

“To have a child go there to try to help the family, for her to see it, and say, ‘Because of our poor condition, I’m going to go and find something to help,’ and then, to end up in jail. It was very painful,” he said, shaking his head at the memory.

For most of the millions of victims of trafficking, this is where it ends. Desperate poverty brought them there in the first place. Some families will stretch themselves to the breaking point to borrow the money to free victims from the contract. But most are trapped, at the mercy of agents. Even when the contract ends, many agents pressure victims into another.

But the Liberian women in Oman were not willing to give up. Most servants carry cellphones so they can be summoned quickly. Some had snuck in their own Liberian SIM cards. They switched out the chips to connect with other Liberians and formed a WhatsApp group. They took photos and videos of what was happening and sent heart-wrenching messages to family and media outlets in Liberia. And, they made a video that went viral.

“We were sent here by some guys who call themselves ‘agency,’” a woman on the video says, surrounded by M. and five other women. “They lied to us. We never knew it was all about this human-trafficking issue.”

Her speech is intercut with footage of a woman fighting two Arab men trying to hold her. Other shots show women crying as they sweep floors. The video also presents a payment slip that M. found, which indicates that Samuel Chan Chan had received money from the agent, an Omani named Said Mohammed Said Khamis al-Kaabi.

An exchange of text messages between M. and her father in May 2022.

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Carielle Doe/The World

Oman has laws against the mistreatment of domestic workers but they’re rarely enforced. An African woman claiming she was deceived into a contract is never believed, they say — and authorities only act when the woman can prove physical violence, which is rare. Omani authorities did not respond to a request for comment.

Screenshot of video image of payment slip showing Samuel Chan Chan had received cash from an Omani national.

Credit:

Courtesy of New Narratives

The video and the women’s desperate calls from Oman made it to Liberian newspapers, Facebook and radio talks shows. Parents demanded the government take action.

The Liberian government also faced pressure from abroad. President George Weah’s administration faced a cut in badly needed US aid if it didn’t step up efforts to combat trafficking. Congress cuts aid to countries that stay on the State Department's anti-trafficking watch list for more than two years in a row. The US provides more than half of Liberia’s $200 million annual foreign aid, which is equal to 12% of the country’s annual budget.

Diplomatic communiques were sent to the Omani government. Oman agreed to stop granting visas to Liberians, according to officials in Liberia’s anti-trafficking unit.

The women found two key allies: One was an African working undercover in Oman who cannot be identified in order to keep helping trafficking victims. The other was Canadian Ward Reddick, who had taken it upon himself to help African trafficking victims after a Ugandan friend had been caught in a scam and he had been unable to find anyone else to help. The pair worked with a Liberian consular officer in Dubai who was given full authority to help the women.

The group set up safehouses. But the women still had to escape the agents. The first women to escape jumped over the walls of the compounds where they were working. Two told The World that they spent three terrifying weeks hiding in the streets of Muscat, eating out of trash cans before other victims connected them with Reddick. As time went on, the consular official, communicating secretly with M. and the other women through Whatsapp, sent cars to collect them. He issued travel documents. Omani authorities let them go.

Today, life is no easier than it was when M. left Liberia for Oman. But she's glad to be back home.

Credit:

Carielle Doe/The World

Six months after the first women left Liberia, they started to arrive back home in March of 2022.

Officials with Liberia’s Anti-Trafficking Unit said that more than 250 of the estimated 350 have returned. More come home every week. The outcome is unprecedented, according to Drew Engel, anti-trafficking adviser at the US Embassy in Monrovia.

“I've never heard of anything this size, a group sort of mobilizing, organizing, however, they managed to do it. I've never heard of anything quite like this in my, probably, 15 to 20 years of being involved in countering trafficking in persons cases.”

Reddick said that the women’s solidarity through the long fight is a lesson for others.

“One of the worst parts of being a victim of modern slavery is the isolation,” he said in a call from his home in Vancouver. “It's the belief that you're truly, absolutely alone, and that nobody cares. Even your family may not be willing to put up the money to bring you home. That's when they can really go downhill. The women bolstered each other's hope in a really positive way. They never felt alone. They never felt isolated. And in some small way, that is a bit of control over your life.”

Eight months after M. left home trying to change her family’s fortunes, she landed in Monrovia.

M., who sat in the family’s compound, teared up at the memory of seeing her 4-year-old daughter emerge, finally, from the airport.

“Tears of joy,” Michael said, smiling. “I was so happy. I was acting like a man. I did not shed tears but I was deeply, deeply thankful to God. It was a very, very joyful day for us.”

A Liberian court has asked police to issue an international arrest warrant for Samuel Chan Chan who is believed to be in the Middle East. His brother, Arthur Chan Chan, is serving a 25-year prison sentence after his conviction for trafficking earlier this year. It’s the longest sentence ever given for trafficking in Liberia. In 2021, the Liberian Legislature had made the minimum sentence for trafficking 20 years.

M. was one of two women who testified against Arthur Chan Chan. He was ordered to pay her $6,000 in restitution. The money would change her life but she has little hope of seeing it. Though Arthur Chan Chan is estimated to have made more than $26,000 for his part in the scam, authorities have done nothing to seize his assets while he appeals his conviction.

But it’s Samuel Chan Chan, not Arthur Chan Chan, M. said, whom she wants to see in jail.

M. and her daughter, who is now 4.

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Carielle Doe/The World

Engel said that the outcome is an important example for governments across Africa — it shows what can happen when officials are motivated to stop trafficking. But in the end, he said, credit goes to the women.

“The victims’ complaints [in the media] and WhatsApp groups [organizing] became very powerful tools to raise awareness about the situation and make it rather untenable for employers and agencies and others to keep many of these women in Oman against their will,” Engel said.

Experts warn demand is so great that traffickers will likely move on to another vulnerable country. But Reddick agrees that there’s much to be learned from the Liberian women.

Today, life for M. is no easier than it was when she left. But she is grateful to be home. She and other women who made it back are now united in fighting for psychosocial support, job training and justice.

M. has been threatened for testifying. Though the government has not provided her with protection, she said that she’s not stopping. She wants other women to know that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Anthony Stephens and Prue Clarke are with New Narratives.

Funding for this story was provided by the International Women in Media Foundation and the US Embassy in Liberia.

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Bells, gongs and flutes chimed atop massive floats decked out in lavish tapestries and treasures throughout Kyoto, Japan, as the grand 1,000-year-old Gion Matsuri festival resumed in all its glory this July after four years of pandemic shutdowns.

The procession was held on an extremely scorching hot day, so the men dressed in period costumes often held red umbrellas or small straw discs to keep cool.

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Monica Narang/The World

Massive throngs of people from across Japan as well as international visitors came to the festival this year.

This UNESCO World Heritage event originally started as a custom to appease the gods and prevent plagues but has now evolved into a major event. Large floats up to 80 feet tall and weighing up to 12 tons are pulled through the streets by groups of 40 to 50 men. Each float has a legendary story attached to it.

Yoiyama Festival attendees viewed a giant boat float called Fune Hoko, with a legendary story behind it. Attendees also listened to special Gion Bayashi music on all the main floats which was a symphony of gongs, bells, and drums.

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Monica Narang/The World

Two boys take part in creating Gion Bayashi music.

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Monica Narang/The World

Even today, the festival continues the practice of selecting a local young boy to be a celestial divine messenger called a chigo san. The child cannot set foot on the ground from July 13 until after he has been paraded through town on July 17. The chigo san rides on top of the gorgeous main float, Naginata Hoko, and cuts a sacred rope with a sword to signal the start of the procession.

These stunning floats appear as movable art museums featuring a collection of Kyoto’s finest craftsmanship and artistry, yet they are maintained by neighborhood guilds.

Excited viewers on both sides of the street applauded and cheered for the men from various neighborhoods who pulled each float by hand.

On top of each of the major floats sat a group of musicians playing a harmonious symphony of gongs, bells and drums called Gion Bayashi music. The Gion Bayashi music rhythm pattern makes the sound of “konchikichin,” and this comforting rhythm brings the community together throughout the festival.

It was also fascinating to watch how these massive floats get turned. Float handlers laid out many cut and flattened pieces of bamboo slats on the ground. They then pour water on top of the bamboo slats. As the float handlers chant, they work in unison to pull the entire float so that the large wheels slid across the bamboo slats. They repeat the process until the entire float has turned.

Wandering through the main Yoiyama festival prior to the procession, hundreds of thousands of people flowed onto Kyoto’s major streets, which were closed to traffic so that festival-goers could also enjoy delicious snacks from stalls selling yakitori, okonomiyaki, taiyaki and more.

During the Gion Matsuri Yoiyama Festival prior to main procession, various neighborhood associations set up stalls selling souvenirs and lucky charms, known as chimaki.

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Monica Narang/The World

The festival wraps up at the end of July with several events at the main shrine, where special golden palanquins housing deities called Mikoshi reside.

Golden palanquins called Mikoshi, where deties are housed, were placed in downtown Kyoto for people to offer donations and prayers, before it was taken back to the main shrine on July 24.

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Monica Narang/The World

A sacred wreath made of ropes is set up so that people can cross it to gain blessings and good luck.

The golden palanquins, Mikoshi, were paraded through the street to honor the deities and were then returned to the main shrine at midnight on July 24.

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Monica Narang/The World

This year's festival offered up many memorable moments, including the unique float with a wooden praying mantis on top of an oxcart — the only mechanical float in the entire procession.

The praying mantis float on top of an oxcart, also known as Toro Yama, was a fan favorite with both adults and children, especially when the master craftsmen spread its wings and turned its head.

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Monica Narang/The World

When the craftsman opened the praying mantis’ wings and moved its head by using mechanical levers, everyone cheered in sheer delight. This mechanical praying mantis must have stunned the crowds centuries ago.

For more photos of the Gion Matsuri festival by Monica Narang, check out her Instagram account: @mopica.

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Ukraine’s military counteroffensive began last month and Western officials say the country is making a major push against Russian forces in the southeast. 

In a video posted by the Ukrainian president’s office on Thursday night, Ukrainian troops are claiming to have liberated the village of Staromaiors'ke in the Donetsk region, much of which is controlled by Russia.

But each bit of territory comes at a cost. Casualty rates are high on both sides of this war, and getting accurate numbers has been very difficult.

Russian officials usually do not speak about this subject. But in September last year, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said about 5,937 Russian troops were killed in Ukraine. Even at the time, though, this figure seemed very low.

Now, a team of Russian journalists and researchers are doing the grueling work of counting Russian casualties on their own. 

“In our database that had names, we already had more people that the Russian Ministry of Defense claimed were killed in Ukraine,” said Mika Golubovsky, a Lithuania-based journalist with Mediazona, an independent Russian news publication.

The team has so far gathered the names for more than 28,000 Russian troops who have died so far in the war. 

The team tracks down these names by scouring the internet, tracking social media posts and local announcements — and even going to cemeteries.

“There are volunteers who are going to cemeteries, taking photos of graves. On the grave, you see the dates and then you see a photo in a military uniform, and then it’s pretty obvious that this person died in the war,” Golubovsky said.

This is risky work — taking photos at Russian cemeteries could lead to an arrest.

It’s also a painstaking process to get the full picture of Russian war casualties. 

“Our data team, they knew that we’re not seeing all of the casualties, because not all information gets to social media or official statements which are major sources for this project, so the idea was to look at excess mortality,” Golubovsky said. 

Dmitry Kobak, a data scientist at the University of Tubingen, in Germany, said he had been doing “excess mortality” calculations to estimate deaths due to COVID-19, and he, along with other researchers, decided to use similar methods to estimate casualties in Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine.

Using projections for excess deaths, Mediazona’s data team determined that, as of the end of May this year, at least 47,000 Russian men have died in this war.

“We always compare male mortality to female mortality, this is really the key statistical trick that we use, because all military deaths in Russia, like above 99% are male, so we’re computing the ratio of male to female, so if the ratio goes up we compute that as war casualties,” he explained. 

Kobak says 47,000 is a conservative estimate, but it's also more than two times the number of all Soviet soldiers who died through nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan.

But there’s been a lack of public outcry in Russia over these losses.

Elise Giuliano, a professor of political science at Columbia University's Harriman Institute, attributes this to increased state repression in Russia. 

“In general, the level of repression has increased over the past few years leading up to the war, but since the war, it has increased by an enormous amount,” Giuliano said. 

Early on, anti-war protesters in Russia got harsh prison sentences. Independent journalism and research has been suppressed, or outlawed.

But Giuliano said there’s a deeper issue affecting Russian public opinion.

“The situation that we really have to understand about Russia is that Putin and the government has worked hard to demobilize the population to kind of get them to a place where like they just don’t care about politics, they consider it dirty business, they consider it something outside that doesn’t affect their life,” she said.

Giuliano also points out that many of the troops dying in Ukraine come from underprivileged sectors of Russian society.  

“There’s a willingness to look away from what’s going on, to not caring and not understanding the depth of the problem, and the number of people dying," she said. "Feeding into that lack of concern unfortunately on the part of a lot of ordinary Russians would be, well it’s the prisoners dying, it’s the poor, rural people dying and it’s the ethnic minorities dying."

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Carla Ponson is proud about the new travel agency she just opened in the bustling neighborhood of La Carolina, in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito, with a few partners.

The deep blue walls still smell of paint and the desks are spotless.

Still, this is far from her dream job. Ponson is a 36-year-old mechanical engineer from Venezuela who moved there in 2018.

“I thought, with the curriculum that I have in the oil industry, five years in logistics, it’s perfect, I’m going to get there and they are going to welcome me with open arms,” she said. “But no, it has not been easy, even though I applied for many positions.”

Ecuador has a strong oil industry and Ponson believes she hasn’t been able to find a job in part due to discrimination against Venezuelans. She also thought it would be a more welcoming place to live with her wife, since gay marriage is legal in Ecuador, but she thinks she has also been a victim of homophobia.

“That’s when one realizes the challenges that you face as a woman, migrant, lesbian,” she said.

Carla Ponson (left) and her wife Maria Swift moved from Venezuela to Quito in 2018. They both believe they have been victims of xenophobia and homophobia.

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​​​​Gisele Regatão/The World

Ponson’s wife, Maria Swift, said she also experienced homophobia in three previous jobs in Quito. She used to be a lawyer in Venezuela, and now works selling insurance. She said she decided to keep her personal life private. “I haven’t felt the freedom to tell, or to bring Carla to an event, or to say openly, I am gay, Carla is my wife,” she said.

More than half a million Venezuelans have moved to Ecuador in the past five years. The small country is the fourth most popular destination for those fleeing the economic and political chaos of Venezuela, after Colombia, Peru and the US. But as Ecuador now faces its own political turmoil, discrimination against foreigners is on the rise, affecting gay and transgender Venezuelans particularly hard.

“For the LGBT community, the challenges are bigger,” said Danilo Manzano, the co-founder and executive director of Dialogo Diverso, an organization that provides legal, health and social services to LGBTQ people. Of the more than 54,000 people they’ve served in the past five years, 90% are Venezuelan migrants.

Manzano said that most Venezuelans choose to come to Ecuador because gay marriage is legal here, and health care is free. “If you are an LGBTQ person in Venezuela living with HIV, for sure you need to identify a country where they are going to provide you with the medication that you need,” he said.

But that doesn’t mean that gay people are openly accepted here, according to Manzano. The Catholic Church is strong in the country, and it tried to lead an opposition to the approval of same-sex marriage in 2019. Manzano had a tough time coming out as gay himself — initially, his parents didn’t accept it. But things changed when he didn’t have money to rent a space for Dialogo Diverso. “My father said, ‘you don’t need to go anywhere, use this,’” and offered up the first floor of Manzano’s childhood home for his work.

Danilo Manzano is the co-founder and executive director of Dialogo Diverso, an organization that provides legal, health and social services to LGBTQ people and is based in the house where he grew up.

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Gisele Regatão/The World

Violence on the riseEcuador has long been a relatively peaceful haven in South America. But in recent years, violence and narco-trafficking have exploded in this country of 18 million people.

Ecuador is dealing with political instability too. In May, President Guillermo Lasso disbanded the country’s National Assembly as he was facing impeachment proceedings. New elections will be held in August.

As the situation gets worse, Manzano said that gay and transgender people in Ecuador are often the target of attacks. “There is a lot of violence against the LGBTQ community, but if you are LGBTQ and you are [a] migrant, you are going to have double reasons to experience violence,” he said.

Ilda Rebek Torres, a 35-year-old transgender woman who moved here from Venezuela in 2019, said she has experienced a lot of violence in Ecuador. She first lived in Riobamba, about 130 miles south of the capital. “There, they would spit on me, I was kidnapped, assaulted, they almost killed me,” she said. “I had to sleep at gas stations when I first arrived because they wouldn’t allow me to sleep in hotels for being trans.”

Torres now lives in a small room she rents in Quito. The Venezuelan flag hangs behind her bed and around the room, she has sparkling dresses that she handsewed. She now works full-time for a travel agency and on the evenings and weekends gives dancing and modeling classes, and works as an actor. Her goal is to open her own modeling and acting school.

Ilda Rebek Torres, a 35-year-old transgender woman who moved from Venezuela to Ecuador in 2019, hung her country’s flag in the small bedroom she rents in Quito.

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​​​Gisele Regatão/The World

Dialogo Diverso helped her with medication, food, therapy and documentation. Torres just got her Ecuadorian ID and visa. Most Venezuelan migrants here lack documentation and Ecuador is trying to regularize everyone by the end of August. Her visa says she is a woman, but her ID says she is a man — an indication of inconsistencies with how Ecuador handles documentation requests from transgender people.

It’s not only LGBTQ Venezuelans who’ve had a tough time in Ecuador.

“I have the theory that people are not xenophobic, they are poor-phobic. They are afraid of the poor,” said Karla Sánchez, a Venezuelan migrant herself and the executive director of the nonprofit organization GRACE, or Give Refugees A Chance.

GRACE is based in the southern city of Cuenca and operates a clinic offering medical and psychological services to Venezuelan migrants.

Sánchez said that as the political and economic situation deteriorates in Ecuador, things are getting harder for Venezuelan migrants. Particularly because those with more resources came first, while the most recent arrivals are poorer. “It’s a small country, there are no resources,” she said. “And the poorer the country is, it’s worse the xenophobia, because there is less money to share. Of course it’s getting worse and worse every day just because the country is going downhill.”

Xenophobia is often driven by a perception here that Venezuelans often commit crimes, but that is not the case, explained Verónica Escobar, president of Fudela, a nonprofit that provides services to kids and teenagers, including Venezuelan migrants.

“There is a statistic that I just reviewed for a report that says that only 3% of those in jail are people of Venezuelan nationality, so it really is not true,” she said. As the situation deteriorates, she said that people are going out less. “And that, in turn, has an economic effect. Businesses don’t hire people, they fire people, and many of these positions were for Venezuelans as well,” she said.

Facing discrimination and poverty, many LGBTQ Venezuelan migrants have left Ecuador. Venezuelan Yeraldine Cabrera went to Ecuador in 2019, but moved to Miami, Florida, last year. She is gay and said she experienced homophobia and xenophobia in Ecuador. Even renting an apartment was hard.

“Just by hearing the Venezuelan accent, people would remove the ad, or tell us the place had been rented. Or we found signs: Venezuelans are not accepted,” she said.

Finding work in Ecuador was difficult as well. “We sold juices on the street, we sold empanadas,” she said. “The migration was quite strong, so there were about six empanada vendors on our corner and every week a new Venezuelan arrived, selling empanadas.”

Cabrera said things were particularly hard because she arrived months after a Venezuelan migrant stabbed his pregnant Ecuadorian partner to death in the city of Ibarra. “There was a strong revolution against Venezuelans, people would pour gasoline on them, throw fire. We lived in great fear,” she said.

Of the 7.3 million Venezuelans who have fled their country in the past five years, many have moved from one country to another, searching for better opportunities.

Danilo Manzano is the co-founder and executive director of Dialogo Diverso, an organization that provides legal, health and social services to LGBTQ people and is based in the house where he grew up.

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Gisele Regatão/The World

Manzano from Dialogo Diverso is now working to form a network with LGBTQ organizations from 10 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The idea is to offer LGBTQ migrants continued support as they move to other countries.

“They deserve to be treated with dignity, with respect, with love,” he said. “It’s not about charity, it’s about humanity.”

Editor's note: Support for this story was provided in part by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.

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On TikTok, you can find any number of videos showing people using various means to get over the wall at the US southern border.

In one, a couple on the Mexican side is filming a group of men shimmying up between the bollards, the vertical steel beams, then hooking a rope ladder to the top of the wall.

That's the point when accidents happen. For several years now, in southern California, hospitals and doctors have been overwhelmed by patients who have fallen from the wall in the western part of San Diego county.

Neurosurgery resident Dr. Alexander Tenorio with the UC San Diego Medical Center has attended to many of those patients.

Dr. Alexander Tenorio in San Diego has started speaking out about falls from the wall at the US southern border.

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Marco Werman/The World

“A lot of these patients get to the top, and they don't have much of an option either to jump down, or they attempt to scale down these beams,” he said. “And they end up falling and end up hurting their ankles, [or gettting] spinal injuries, brain injuries, whatever it may be, unfortunately.”

Sometimes, the injuries result in death. Over time, the number of injuries from those falls has gone way up, according to Tenorio, who has been tracking the data in the San Diego area since 2016.

He said that as the height of sections of the wall have increased from 18 to 30 feet — starting under former President Donald Trump and continuing now under President Joe Biden — the rate of injuries has followed accordingly.

The trend is taking a toll on the medical center.

People protest the border wall at a rally in San Diego.

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Marco Werman/The World

"There may be a point where it pushes us to the brink and ... we won't have the capacity ... to treat the number of patients coming in."

Dr. Alexander Tenorio, neurosurgery resident, UC San Diego Medical Center

“In 2019, we saw border admissions in the 40s that year. In 2022, it was over 330 patients from border falls that we admitted,” he said. “If it continues at this rate, there may be a point where it pushes us to the brink and, unfortunately, we won't have the capacity — the physical and mental capacity — to treat the number of patients coming in.”

A strain on the hospitalsThe San Diego area’s Scripps Mercy Hospital is also managing a rise in cases.

Dr. Vishal Bansal, chief of trauma at Scripps, said that he’s concerned about what he’s seeing, but he’s not sure it’s because the wall height is going up.

“I just don’t know the cause and effect. I mean, could it be directly related to border fence height?” he asked. “It’s certainly possible, but I can tell you my colleagues in Texas and Arizona, where there isn’t necessarily a border fence height, are seeing the same increase in the number of injuries. So, I think it’s more likely related to the sheer number of patients.”

The border wall as it ends in the Pacific.

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Marco Werman/The World

Regardless of the causes, Bansal said that these cases are putting a strain on the hospital. And although they’ve been able to handle it so far, “there was a point in time last November when we were actually beginning to halt elective surgeries because we had too many of these patients, so it could have a potential downstream effect.”

The situation, he said, is troubling on many fronts: “I’m alarmed by the real significant increase in the number of these patients. I’m alarmed from a humanitarian perspective, I’m alarmed by the difficulty that that puts on our hospital resources.”

Speaking out about the border wall The doctors aren’t the only ones concerned about what’s happening at the border wall.

Children on the beach on the Mexican side of the border wall.

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Marco Werman/The World

Musicians from the ensemble Fandango Fronterizo performed a few months ago at a rally at Monument Mesa, where the US and Mexico meet at the Pacific Ocean.

They were protesting the continued construction that's raising the wall higher at one particular spot: Friendship Park.

Since First Lady Pat Nixon founded Friendship Park in 1971, it’s been a place where families separated by the border can meet, and even touch and shake hands through the gaps in between the bollards.

Rev. John Fanestil, a San Diego author and activist, spoke at the rally.

Fandango Fronterizo performing at Monument Mesa.

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Laura Humphrey/The World

“We're here today because the US federal government is actively building two 30-foot walls across Friendship park. Two 30-foot walls across a place that was first demarcated as a site of reconciliation between the peoples of the United States and Mexico.”

Tenorio said he sees a sad irony at the wall in Friendship Park: “It is supposed to be a place of peace, and instead, unfortunately, I fear it is going to be a place of horrific injuries.”

Tenorio himself has begun to speak out about the border wall and its impact.

Last spring, he traveled to Washington and met with White House officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill, making the case to stop increasing the border wall’s height.

Rev. John Fanestil speaks at the rally against the border wall.

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Laura Humphrey/The World

But Tenorio said that he knows from personal experience that the peril for many migrants begins long before they get to the border wall.

“My parents migrated from Mexico, my father, he left due to violent conditions, they threatened him with his life. Speaking to these patients, they’re running away from the same situations as he was. Conditions — violent conditions and economic conditions — that we would flee from.”

For many who endure the long trek north to the US border, whether the wall is 18 or 30 feet, they’re still going to try to get over it, he added.

Customs and Border Protection declined to speak to The World, but sent a statement, which reads in part: “CBP’s message for anyone who is thinking of entering the United States illegally along the southern border is simple:  Don’t do it. When migrants cross the border illegally, they put their lives in peril.”

Related: As Title 42 ends, more migrants from South America are crossing the Darién jungle en route to US

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Since April, Sudan has been rocked by fighting between two factions of its army. At first, the violence was contained in the capital, Khartoum, but in recent days fighting has flared up in western Darfur — ground zero for a genocide that started back in 2003 and left hundreds of thousands dead.

Arab militiamen known as Janjaweed were able to kill so many people in Darfur in such a short time because the area is so remote — there was no one to witness the atrocities or hold the perpetrators to account, so they continued apace.

That’s what makes this latest conflict so different: Technology is allowing third-party observers to document human rights abuses in near-real time thanks to, among other things, low-orbit satellites.

Researchers like Nathaniel Raymond, the executive director of Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, have been using satellites, not just to document the violence but with the right on-the-ground intelligence, to predict attacks before they happen.

The team recently documented evidence of war crimes in Ukraine with a report that provided both photographic and other proof that Russia was behind the systematic relocation of thousands of children from Ukraine into Russia and Russian-controlled regions of Ukraine.

Now, Raymond and the team are working with the US State Department to document human rights abuses in Sudan. It is a bit of a homecoming for them — they pioneered the use of satellite analysis and open-source intelligence in Darfur more than a decade ago, and now they are back with better tools and a focus on ending a crisis that is decades in the making.

Raymond spoke with the Recorded Future News podcast, "Click Here.”

Click Here: Let's start at the beginning. Can you explain how you got into this work?Nathaniel Raymond: It’s a crazy story. In 2005, I was deployed by Oxfam America to Biloxi, Mississippi, in the aftermath of [Hurricane] Katrina. We were on the peninsula, in a primarily African American community around the Division Street Baptist Church. And I observed that there was almost no federal or state assistance making it onto the peninsula 48 to 72 hours out from landfall. But meanwhile, over on the less affected, primarily white side of town, there was a significant amount of aid. I began to think about this concept of digital invisibility, that the white population was more visible to responders. They had cell phones. They had cars where they could charge those cell phones. I had a friend who worked at Google, and he asked me to write a memo about how Google technology could have helped mitigate that digital visibility factor [during Hurricane] Katrina. I sent the memo to them, and I called it Bat Signal — basically saying that, with a combination of online data and Google Earth, we could have a common operational picture to understand where aid was and was not going.What was the response?That memo sat in a drawer for five years. And in October 2010, George Clooney's people gave me a call and said, “George Clooney and a large part of the cast of Oceans 11 — Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Brad Pitt — want you to build what was in that memo.” They wanted to work in Sudan, and they asked if they funded it, could I build it? And I said, “I can sure as hell try.” So, I went to the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and put a team together to begin to build what was in that memo.Could you explain what that was?It was about being able to break data down across streams to create a mosaic effect, what is now called open source investigations. The theory was that we could not only document attacks against civilians in near-real time, but we could begin to move into a predictive posture where we could see when and where the Sudanese Armed Forces or other actors might attack civilian communities ahead of time and position satellites using open source information and pattern-of-life information to catch an attack that hadn't happened yet.Was AI involved at this point to try and predict this or was it more mathematical models?It was done entirely manually, to the point where we even used string and markers on a laminated map in rulers to plot flight directions of bombers.Like something out of [the film] “A Beautiful Mind”?It looked like something out of a Wes Anderson movie, like a kid had opened up their pencil case and basically had started sketching on a map and then used string to do radial plotting of operational ranges of Antonov and Sukhoi GroundStrike fighter [jets]. And really the critical part of the process was the integration of the non-imagery data taken from news reports and reports from humanitarian agencies. We would aim satellites into the places that humanitarians and peacekeepers couldn't go because if they were being excluded from areas, we began to realize that's likely where forces were massing.And so, the challenge here was: How do you get data from inside a conflict zone — by satellites, human sources, media, social media — to begin to talk to each other? Everyone focuses on the satellites, but at the end of the day, what we do is really at the intersection of technology and anthropology.Tell me a bit more about that intersection between technology and anthropology. What does that look like in practice?[When starting out], we went to the Widener Library at Harvard and we got anthropological texts from the 1950s and the 1930s, and we studied the maps in those texts of the movements of [various ethnic groups]. We used that to begin to plot potential attack routes seasonally based on where they traditionally were with their cows. And there was this one moment early on in Sudan [in 2011], we thought we saw this massive amount of dismounted infantry moving through a mountain pass towards a village, and we got all bent out of shape about it. And a colleague of ours, from a satellite imagery company we bring in to have a second opinion, he's like, “Gentlemen, you just caught yourself or herd of cows.” They were longhorn cattle. Just because you see something, it doesn't mean it is what you think it is. Or if it is what you think it is, it doesn't mean that its intent is what you think it is. Over time, you begin to build the ability to see contextual patterns of life.In the conflict more than a decade ago, were you able to successfully predict attacks?Definitely. The first major Sudanese Armed Forces attack happened in Abyei [a region on the border of Sudan and South Sudan] over a Memorial Day weekend just over 12 years ago. Two to three weeks out, we had been watching [the Sudanese Armed Forces] build roads for tanks. We were looking for HETS (Heavy Equipment Transporter Systems), which they used to bring the tanks in. And they had begun to burn villages. We could see a pattern to these arson attacks, and two to three weeks out, we had seen enough to know that these initial arson attacks were preface moves to a larger strike on Abyei. So, I went and warned everyone in the consortium, including George Clooney, that the [Sudanese Armed Forces] was about to attack. And then. I was at a friend's wedding and it was Friday night on Memorial Day weekend, and the call came in that it had begun.They attacked just as we predicted — in a horseshoe pattern, from two directions in the places where they had built up forces, north of the burned villages. And once we got shots over Abyei, we could see tank treads everywhere. We could see that they had blown the bridge out of Abyei after civilians had run across it. And what was incredible about that moment is that we had gotten ahead of it enough to be able to issue a human security alert, and we said Abyei is about to be attacked. There were people at that time who thought we were crying wolf. But we were correct.Have satellites really changed what you can do there now?Oh absolutely. I mean, there are days in Ukraine where we'll get more imagery than we would get in a week or a month in Sudan [a decade ago]. And that’s because we now have microsatellites. [Commercial satellite] companies like Planet Labs and BlackSky get us multiple shots on goal a day, and that begins to give you a fancy term called MTCD: multi-temporal change detection. The trick here is trying to get as many change-detecting shots as close to each other to build a time series. And in many ways, our biggest challenge now is that the sheer amount of data can overwhelm your ability to conduct an investigation.The firehose problem.Exactly. And this is a place where [we can use] AI and RSS feeds and semantic scrapers. But that's a double-edged sword: You have to have those tools to be able to chew through this much terabytes of data, but if you set your parameters wrong, you can end up degrading the quality of the product. New ways of seeing create new ways of being blind.Can you talk a little bit about what you're doing now with the current Sudan conflict?What we are doing now, which has recently been announced by the US Department of State, is our team at the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab at the School of Public Health has been supporting the Department of State as part of the Jeddah negotiations on the ceasefire between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces [paramilitary group]. Our primary objective is to support situational awareness for humanitarian actors that are seeking to deliver aid. So, what that means is detecting villages that have been attacked. And we're doing that, not only through imagery, but through thermal sensors through NASA satellites. They have names like VIRs (Visual and Infrared Imaging Spectrometer), which is a thermal radar. We're looking for roadblocks, we're looking for attacks on humanitarian facilities, we're looking for indicators of displaced people in humanitarian need.And are you trying to do the predictive stuff as well?Yeah, there are two pieces to the mission here. One is providing situational awareness that will help humanitarians deliver aid to those who need it most. The second part is human security warning and basically determining where people could be in danger. It's poignant for many of us who have worked on Sudan now for 13 years. On one hand, it's tragic that we are still doing this. On the other hand, it’s rewarding to be able to go back to a place where some of us have looked at these locations in such detail [for years].Is there a specific thing that has happened that has made all this come full circle for you?Well, thinking back to Abyei in the spring of 2011, we began to read the language of arson attacks on what's called tukels which are traditional African huts common in East Africa. Some are pyramidal; some are conical. When I was deployed as a consulting advisor to the UN Mission in South Sudan in 2015, I spent all my free time visiting different tukels. We had been seeing them from space, but to be able to look at them from the ground was critical. At that point, we were developing an algorithmic tukel detector, and we took an algorithm from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA used for seeing craters on the moon and Mars and inverted it to see the roofs of tukels to speed up arson detection. So, as we come back to, unfortunately, the same tragic phenomena — burned villages — we have built a lot of tools to be faster at before-and-after counting. We're looking at it with new eyes, new capabilities and the decisive factor, which is experience.And what effect has the work had on the situation on the ground?Well, that's a good question. I think we've been able to support the State Department and other actors with situational awareness products we’ve produced to, basically, bring the parties to the table and show evidence [of alleged war crimes]. Information itself is no substitute for political will. But we've been able to really show the value in this conflict of having rapidly produced, high-quality and scientifically validated open-source products that can be shared with multiple parties to a conflict as a basis for negotiation.Is the current satellite situation in Sudan such that it's genuinely hard for fighters to cover up what they're doing, or is that too optimistic?The thing about Sudan right now is that we can see more than we could back when we first started. But to what degree is there a causal protective effect from our monitoring? I still haven't figured out a methodology to measure that. You know, both sides in this conflict are aware that they're being watched. And so, there's this constant responsibility on our side, which is to figure out how we can communicate to the alleged perpetrators that we are seeing them without giving them an intelligence advantage.​​​​ Back when there were fewer high-resolution or medium-resolution satellites, [fighters] could time their killing and dodge [the satellites]. Now, there's a higher chance that if you are operating both day and night, something is going to pick up a tell that you were there. The world has become significantly less anonymous for war criminals. And the fact is, data is people and data is power. And the story I'm telling here is about how we use that power for the most vulnerable people on the planet. An earlier version of this story appeared on the "Click Here" podcast from The Recorded Future News. Additional reporting by Sean Powers, Will Jarvis, and Sarah Wyman.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Related: A conversation with a former member of Wagner: ‘They were like little kings or czars’

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Pape Aly Guéye — also known as "Paco Pat Ghetto" — remembers when he first heard a hip-hop song on the radio, back in the 1980s.

“Yeah, absolutely. It was ‘Sama Yaye,’ one of the first raps ever recorded in Senegal, by Mbacke Dioum [Backé Chium],” said the 47-year-old rapper.

At that time, hip-hop was starting to boom in poor and working class areas, including Guediawaye, the suburban city where Paco Pat Ghetto grew up.

Rap artist Paco Pal Ghetto.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

“This place was just a neglected area. I witnessed a lot of violence, you know, here when I was a teen, I saw people doing a lot of violence, gangbanging, I saw people who got killed, and then I was like: ‘I want to say something.’”

He said hip-hop captivated him, because he could tell serious stories in a fun way, and everyone around him seemed to like it.

Paco Pat Ghetto and some of his friends started a hip-hop group. They called it Pat Ghetto, and they wrote about the violence and insecurity all around them.

The group later became a pioneer of a hip-hop movement in the capital, Dakar, that demanded social and political change.

“Hip-hop over here is always talking about politics, economy and social change. This is what hip-hop is all about mostly, in Senegal,” Paco said.

But this wasn't always the case with Senegalese hip-hop.

Unlike in the US or Europe, where hip-hop emerged from poor areas, in Senegal, it was the rich who first adopted the musical genre and lifestyle.

Bamba Ndiaye, a Senegalese hip-hop researcher at Cornell University, explained that hip-hop arrived in Dakar through middle- and upper-class citizens who were able to travel abroad to places like New York in the US and France.

“And they used to come back with videocassettes and audio cassettes, and had access to cable television and music channels like MTV," he said.

Cornell University researcher Bamba Ndiaye.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

“At first, in the late '80s, early '90s, you had, for instance, hip-hop music that tends to focus more on love, you know, ego-tripping,” he added.

One example is the group Positive Black Soul (PBS), the first Senegalese hip-hop group to get international attention.

In the early days, Senegalese artists rapped mostly in French. But when they started switching to Wolof — the most common local language in Senegal — more people started listening, and using it to tell their own tales, Ndiaye said.

“The politically engaged hip-hop started when youth from working class neighborhoods made hip-hop also a way of expressing discontent, but also criticizing the regime that was in place, the socialist regime.

That was the ruling party in Senegal since they got their independence from France in the 1960s, until the year 2000. During this period, several hip-hop artists got censored, arrested and even beaten up for speaking out against authorities.

But that didn't prevent Senegalese rappers from engaging in political critique.

Back in 2011, there was an anti-government movement called the Y’en a Marre, or “I’m Fed Up,” that was led by rappers and journalists to encourage young people to vote.

It was during that time when rappers Xuman and Keyti came up with the idea of rapping the news.

For several years, every week, they would take hard news, put it to a beat and mix it with a little bit of humor.

Xuman would rap the news in Wolof, and Keyti would do it in French, to imitate the way news is delivered in TV newscasts in Senegal.

“We wanted to bridge the gap between young people and the news, because, many times, they miss what's really happening in the country,” Xuman said. “And sometimes the government is signing new laws to change people's lives. And people don't even know that, you know, their life is about to change.”

His journal Rappé was so successful that it was copied in other countries abroad.

“For me, that's an achievement, because back in the day, we used to copy American hip-hop, the American concept and, you know, it happened that now people are copying our concept,” he said.

Xuman is not rapping the weekly news anymore, but he’s still engaged in politics. In early June, when protests erupted in Dakar, he launched a new single about police brutality and democracy.

Many rappers in Senegal are still asking questions about justice, equity and Africa’s place in the world.

At G-Hip Hop, a youth development center in Dakar founded by Paco Pat Ghetto, students learn about songwriting, rapping, break dancing, sound engineering and music business.

Young graduates from G-Hip Hop music education program.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

But they also take courses on civic engagement. “We teach about democracy, accountability, freedom of expression and good governance,” Paco Pat Ghetto said.

The walls of G-Hop Hop are emblazoned with paintings of African activists, such as Thomas Sankara, Nelson Mandela and Winnie Mandela.

“These people were fighting for freedom and liberties, and we think we can do it too, on a local scale,” Paco Pat Ghetto said.

Mural at the organization G-Hip Hop, a community center and educational organization co-founded by Paco.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

At his center, he hopes to inspire another generation of young Senegalese, like 21-year-old Rash Ga Guru, who was graduating from the program.

“Hip-hop saved me from the drug dealers,” he said. “I grew up around my big brothers who were dealing drugs, but hip-hop saved me from all that. It gave me the courage to be who I wanted to be."

Editor's note: Bamba Ndiaye contributed to this story.

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In a time when nearly everything seems politicized, it's not easy to start honest conversations.

But Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul, both artists from immigrant backgrounds, are trying to do just that — start conversations through dance music.

The two met in Belgium and last year, they put out one of the most celebrated albums of 2022 called “Topical Dancer.”

The songs are angular, electronic rhythms with a dash of distilled, insightful analysis and an undercurrent of playfulness beneath it all.

The music makes you want to dance the night away, but the lyrics also ask you to stay present and contemplate the complexity of the world.

Their song “Blenda” is a good example of that:

The lyrics include the sentence, “Go back to the country where you belong,” a line the two have heard many times, Pupul said.

“That sentence … if I may talk for our Black community, it’s like the N-word … it carries so much pain and grief,” Adigéry said. “But when you take it back and you use it and you celebrate it and you sing it, it's a coping mechanism. And it's a way of showing that you're strong and that you're bigger than that.”

Performing the song live over the past year has been a powerful experience. Pupul said it got very emotional when they played it in Manchester, England, and the whole room lit up and sang along – specifically the words “don’t look like what I sound like” in a diverse chorus of British accents.

“We were looking at each other and I saw the tears coming up and Charlie's eyes and I felt the same. And the crowd really sang those words so loud,” Popul recalled.

“You could see that people feel seen…” Adigéry said.

The two sing about serious issues but they said humor is the first thing that connected them.

“While we were writing the album, we found that humor was, like, our best ally in addressing certain topics,” Popul said. “Being able to laugh is freedom.”

Belgian artists Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul start honest conversations through songs like "Blenda."

Credit:

Courtesy of Camille Vivier

Adigéry said she was a little nervous playing their songs in the US for the first time – especially songs that explore the limits of political correctness and poke fun at contemporary discourse around hot button issues.

“Will this land? Will people find this funny?” they wondered. The answer: Yes, they did.

Adigéry said the whole “woke” movement is very important, and she is happy about it, but “it's also very important to not take yourself too seriously,” she said. “It's not about you. It's about the conversation.”

“I really believe that humor and the way we address it is one way that can help us have conversations and find common ground where you wouldn't think there's common ground,” she added.

Pupul said the album is actually a record of the ongoing conversation between the two artists in the studio, from a Belgian point of view.

“I can imagine that in China or in the US or in Venezuela that it's going to be interpreted a bit different, but all the reactions we've had so far have been supportive, and that's something that we really didn't expect, maybe because it's also very Belgian to not believe in yourself that much,” he added with a laugh.

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At The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, the Sunday afternoon Spanish-language service is about to start.

Nearly 50 people chat over coffee and snacks as a pastor rehearses some music with the pianist by the altar in an adjacent room.

There are men, women and children, most of whom have recently arrived in New York from border states.

One of them is 24-year-old Anderson Fuentes, who has been in the city for just over a week. Fuentes is from a city 200 miles east of Caracas, Venezuela, called Barcelona.

He is one of thousands of migrants facing challenges while trying to build a new life in the United States.

“I left Venezuela three months and 27 days ago searching for the American dream,” he said. “I had $54 in my pocket.”

Pastor Juan Carlos Ruiz and Rev. Nowl Koestline co-officiate a Sunday Spanish-language service at The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in New York.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

Fuentes traveled through neighboring Colombia, crossed the treacherous Darién Gap to get to Panama and then he moved up through Central America and Mexico.

When he crossed into the United States, he turned himself in to border agents. After spending two weeks at a migrant detention center, he ended up in a shelter in El Paso, Texas, waiting for whatever would come next.

“By chance, I learned that there were free buses for migrants heading to New York and Chicago and I chose to come here,” he explained.

At night, Fuentes sleeps at one of New York’s migrant shelters in the borough of Queens with hundreds of other migrants and asylum-seekers.

Six days a week, The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd provides meals to migrants and others in the community in New York. The operation is run by volunteers partly in this small kitchen area.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

On most days, he comes to this church in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn to volunteer in any way that he can — sorting through clothing donations, moving boxes of food to the kitchen, running a community food bank and other tasks.He is also here to find resources to start his asylum application and the other documents he needs to get work authorization.

“I just need to do the paperwork and process my work permit so I am able to start working to help my family,” he said.

Available resourcesThe church has become a sort of a meeting point for people like Fuentes. There are some English-language classes and there is usually food available several times a day. This is all being run by volunteers, many of them migrants and asylum-seekers themselves.

Gabriel Daudt, a businessman from Brazil who arrived in the US five years ago and lives in the community, volunteers on Thursdays to offer some answers to the many questions people have. He said that about 50 to 60 people come on that day.

“It’s a new world for them, so we [get] all types of questions — from arranging the housing situation, to schooling for their children,” Daudt said. “We also help them get basic documents, as some of them just carry with them the papers they received at the border.”

Adjusting to a new cityPastor Juan Carlos Ruiz, known for his human rights advocacy, connects migrants to organizations that can provide legal aid, since there is no staff attorney on-site. He also helps them make sense of a new city.

Pastor Juan Carlos Ruiz assists migrants file documents at The Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn, New York.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

“They are very confused in terms of how to navigate the legal system. That's one. But I think more than anything, many are really seeking a way to make ends meet,” Ruiz said. “Many of them are really [facing] growing despair because they [have been] here for six, seven months and people cannot really do whatever is necessary for them to get on their feet.”

The Mayor’s office said that 90,000 migrants and asylum-seekers have arrived in New York since the spring of 2022. And while the number of people crossing the border into the US has decreased in recent months, migrants continue to arrive at the Port Authority bus terminal in Midtown Manhattan each week.

Pedestrians pass the Holiday Inn Manhattan - Financial District hotel in New York, March 29, 2023. City officials, operating under new legal mandates, have turned to hotels to house migrants seeking asylum who have been sent from other states.

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John Minchillo/AP/File photo

Emergency sheltersNew York City has opened more than 185 emergency shelters, including 13 large-scale humanitarian relief centers. But with 56,200 migrants currently living there, the shelter population is at an all-time high.

Last week, Mayor Eric Adams said asylum-seekers who have spent “significant” time in shelters will get 60-day deadlines to find a place to live or reapply and get back in line for public shelters.

The Randall's Island Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center, New York City's latest temporary shelter for an influx of international migrants being bused into the city by southern border states, Oct. 19, 2022.

Credit:

Julia Nikhinson/AP/File photo

Adams is not only nudging those in city shelters to find somewhere else to live, he is also asking those who are planning to head north from the southern border to “consider another city to settle in in the US,” as there is no guarantee New York will be able to provide shelter and services to new arrivals.

Adams said he plans to distribute this message on bright yellow flyers in both English and Spanish across border towns.

“We have no more room in the city.”

New York City Mayor Eric Adams

“We have no more room in the city,” Adams said during a press conference on Jun. 19. “We have been very clear that we need to allow asylum-seekers to work. We need the economic support of the federal government, and we need to ensure that there is a real decompression strategy throughout the entire country,” he added.

The announcement has left advocates with a lot of questions about what will happen when large numbers of migrants start needing housing without stable jobs. It has also left many confused on what to do and where to go next.

Anderson Fuentes, 24, (left) and Humberto Cortesia, 28, (right), are currently living in a migrant shelter in Queens, New York. They come to the church to volunteer sorting clothing donations and doing other tasks.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

A block away from Times Square is one of the largest migrant shelters for single men. Dozens of them from places like Mauritania, Senegal and Ecuador could be seen on a given day lingering on the sidewalk, trying to stay cool from the summer heat. Tourists walking by barely noticed them.Many of the migrants did not want to be interviewed, but said they have only heard rumors about the 60-day policy and have not been given any information about it.

But 21-year-old Marcelino José Estee Buitrago from Venezuela said, “If you have to leave after 60 days, they could [just] process your paperwork faster, so you can get a job and don’t end up on the streets.”

For Fuentes at the Lutheran Church in Brooklyn, he is focused on his immigration process and work documents and said he is also unaware of the 60-day deadline. His mother, siblings, wife and 3-year-old son are relying on him, and he said he wants to provide as much as he can for them.

“I would like that my family does not lack anything,” he said. “If I see them happy, I will be happy.”

Those are dreams for the future. Today, Fuentes and thousands of other migrants like him have more immediate and pressing obstacles to overcome.

Related: As Title 42 ends, more migrants from South America are crossing the Darién jungle en route to US

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On a cloudy afternoon, a 24-year-old Ukrainian named Andrei Veklenkov shuffled into the asylum office, looking dazed. A smiling receptionist told him to take a number and a seat.

Veklenkov sat down, clutching a binder of personal papers to his chest.

“I was working in a military hospital in Dnipro as a paramedic,” he said. “But I realized that the war wasn’t going to end anytime soon. I was exempted from fighting, but I decided to leave.”

Life in Dnipro was difficult, Veklenkov said. There was shooting every night. It took him four days to get from Ukraine to Iceland, and he barely slept, he recalled.

Iceland is one of the farthest European destinations for Ukrainians escaping the war, but about 5,000 Ukrainians have already made the trip. One of the draws: They can get their residency and working papers practically overnight. The process starts at the airport.

There, asylum-seekers are greeted by signs in Ukrainian and English directing them to the police in the capital of Reykjavik. The police then escort them to a building, where, in a matter of hours, they become lawful residents of Iceland.

A sign at Reykjavik’s international airport, written in both Ukrainian and English, starts the fast-track process for Ukrainians seeking asylum in Iceland. It now takes about a day for Ukrainians to get residency and employment papers.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

“I was in Romania first, then Italy,” said Veklenkov, who had been in Iceland for exactly one day. “But the people there were not so kind. People here are really friendly, plus I can find a job here.”

Getting working papers in a new country can take months or even years. But in Iceland, Ukrainians are put on a very fast track. The government gives them nearly instant residency as refugees, on humanitarian grounds. It has also created a website in Ukrainian to help them navigate both the bureaucracy and the culture.

Gisli David Karlsson of Iceland’s Directorate of Labor said it’s a one-stop shop.

“An individual from Ukraine that applies this morning? Around 2 or 3 p.m. today he has his Icelandic social ID number,” he explained. “He’s into all the systems, so it’s quite simple. If they find an apartment to rent or if they find jobs,” he said, “they can easily just go onwards with that.”

A one-stop shop: In a single building in Reykjavik, Ukrainian refugees can register with the police and social security, walking out with residency and work papers in the same day.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

How does Iceland manage to process these refugees so quickly? For one, Iceland’s overall population is small — only about 400,000 people. That makes it easier to get things done, said Gilfi Thorstensson, with the Icelandic Red Cross.

“We are few, and that helps, of course,” he said. “I mean, I have the phone number for I think everybody that matters in Iceland: the president, the prime minister and whatnot.”

If need be, he said, he knows he can call them and do whatever needs to be done.

Iceland’s labor office says it’s helped nearly half of the Ukrainian arrivals to find work, mostly in tourism and food production. And it isn’t just the government lending a hand.

Every Monday night, Ukrainian refugees come to a local church to search through piles of clothes donated by locals. Tables are heaped with jackets, sweaters and boots. There’s bread and hot coffee available.

A car with a pro-Ukraine sticker parked outside a local church in Reykjavik, where a small group of Ukrainian refugees have gathered to collect donated clothing.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

Donations at the Reykjavik church include clothing, boots, hats, children's toys and board games. Each Wednesday night, the church hosts this charity event in its basement.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

On a recent Monday, a single mother from Kyiv named Yana Miz was there with her 9-year-old daughter, Marharyta.

Marharyta ran back and forth asking for different toys. Her mom said yes to all of them.

The Mizes were among the first Ukrainians to arrive in Iceland in March 2022. Miz is a psychologist. She previously worked with kindergarteners, and now counsels other refugees.

“This is also my education and this is my passion,” she said. “This is something I want to do and I believe I can be useful.”

It’s better to be useful than idle as she and Marharyta integrate into Icelandic society, she said.

“My daughter already speaks fluent Icelandic,” she said. “I think this is the best country. First of all, it is pretty easy for me to feel like home here. I feel welcome and beloved and I appreciate that.”

Ukrainian refugees Yana Miz and her 9-year-old daughter Marharyta visit a museum in Reykjavik. Free museum passes are part of an all-encompassing assistance package Ukrainians get when they arrive. The Miz’s were among the first to arrive in Iceland in March 2022.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

As the war drags on, Ukrainians continue to arrive in Iceland. They now make up more than 1% of the entire population. But there is one big obstacle looming as the need for rapid resettlement persists: housing. It’s expensive, and there’s not enough of it.

Back at the asylum reception center, Veklenkov was sent by cab to a Red Cross shelter. Karlsson, of the labor directorate, said the government will try to find him housing. But it’s getting harder.

“Housing prices have been soaring,” Karlsson said. “Now, we have interest rates that have also been going up, which has slowed down the market. But we haven’t been building enough houses for a long time.”

Karlsson said he hopes the government will build more emergency shelters and convert empty office space into housing.

“I don’t know if you have heard the Icelandic saying, ‘Þetta reddast,’” he said. “It means, ‘It will work out.’ You just run a bit harder, work a bit harder. And so, many times we say, ‘Where can we house these people?’ And then something happens, and we find a solution.”

Whatever the next solution is, it needs to come quickly. About 200 Ukrainians are still arriving every month. And they will all need roofs over their heads.

Related: Denmark welcomes Ukrainians under special law — with an expiration date

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Stuart Banks was inside the submersible Alvin as it descended to the ocean floor when the discovery was made.

“Suddenly, there was this huge built-up reef that just went on and on and on,” said Banks, a senior marine scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation.

He was one of two scientists and a pilot who were aboard the Atlantis deep-water research expedition submersible when they unexpectedly discovered these deep-sea coral reefs off Galapagos earlier this year.

Stuart Banks, a senior marine scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation, examines a live coral specimen collected from the deep-sea reef during the Atlantis expedition, July 12, 2023.

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Gisele Regatão/The World

Once the shock and awe of the discovery subsided, the scientists went to work.

They used the submersible’s external mechanical arms, nets and a vacuum-like device to collect samples.

It was like striking gold for Banks and the other scientists on the expedition. The reef, Banks said, “was a highly productive, ancient, extremely physically vulnerable, unmapped habitat.”

A few months later, Banks showed off some of the coral samples in a lab room at the Darwin Foundation on Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos.

Corals are laid out on the counter — spiny fossils in plastic bags and live specimens, orange and purple, floating in alcohol-filled jars.

“This is a fossil coral,” Banks said as he held up a dark-colored specimen. “It looks a bit grotty but that’s kind of what fossil coral looks like at the bottom of the ocean.”

Stuart Banks, a senior marine scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation, holds a coral fossil collected from the deep-sea reef during the Atlantis expedition, July 12, 2023.

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Gisele Regatão/The World

The importance of the discovery lies with its location in the deep sea about 1,600 feet below the surface.

These cold-water corals support important marine ecosystems — and they are as vulnerable to climate change as the more recognizable shallow, tropical reefs.

“You have huge areas of the world’s oceans which are completely unmapped which are all deeper than people can easily reach by research diving — like 95% of the world’s oceans,” Banks said.

Michelle Taylor, the other scientist aboard the Alvin, said that when the submersible's outside cameras illuminated the breathtaking view of the reefs, it was like shining a light on the global importance of deep-sea corals.

“These areas are beautiful. They’re diverse. They are going to be impacted by climate change but for the moment it’s out of sight, out of mind,” Taylor said.

Ancient living deep coral reef (Mixed Madrepora sp. and Dendrophyllia sp.cold water coral) framework at 500-meter to 400-meter depth.

Credit:

Courtesy of L. Robinson (U. Bristol), D. Fornari (WHOI), M. Taylor (U. Essex), D. Wanless (Boise State U.) NSF/NERC/HOV Alvin/WHOI MISO Facility, 2023/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Taylor studies deep-sea corals with an eye toward learning how to protect them. Some of the Galapagos specimens are being shipped to her lab at the University of Essex in England for study and analysis.

With the Galapagos discovery, researchers like Taylor can begin to understand the impact of climate change.

“We are going to spend time cataloging all of the animals we saw, the density of them, how many of them there were — we’re going to use that as a baseline,” she said.

Basically, in future dives, researchers can use the baseline to see how changes in the ocean’s temperature and higher acidity caused by carbon absorption have affected the reefs.

Taylor said that scientists in geochemistry at the UK’s University of Bristol will take a different tack — going back in time to study the gene history of coral fossils.

“You can find what the chemistry of the ocean around Galapagos was like 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 years ago, just by looking at coral fossils,” she said. “Then, we can look at all the live stuff we collected and we can start seeing just how different the environment is for these corals now than it was then.”

The Galapagos are an archipelago of volcanic islands about 600 miles from Ecuador’s mainland that sit at the intersection of several ocean currents. They famously support an unrivaled diversity of land and marine life.

A blue-footed booby perches on a cliff on Santa Cruz Island in the Galapagos, part of an archipelago that is supports an rich diversity of animal and marine life, July 12, 2023.

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Gisele Regatão/The World

The islands have long been a center for naturalistic research. It was Charles Darwin’s expedition here in 1835 that resulted in his seminal work, “On the Origins of Species.”

The discovery has done little to pierce the usual routines of the islands. At a dock not far from the Darwin Foundation, local fishermen unloaded their daily catch. Sea lions lounged on nearby benches. Tourist boats returned to port laden with sated visitors after a day of snorkeling.

Fishing boats return to port in Puerta Ayora in the Galapagos town of Puerta Ayora.

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Gisele Regatão/The World

But scientists around the world are fascinated by the discovery. Sebastian Hennige, a leading researcher of ocean acidification and its impact on deep-sea coral at the University of Edinburgh, said deep-sea corals play a big role in the ocean.

“They’re rainforests of the deep. They create these vast structures, and they support thousands of different species,” he said. “So, they're really, really important in terms of the framework and the habitats they build, and the other species which they support.”

He said the Galapagos discovery will result in knowledge vital to the conservation of deep-sea corals.

“The first part in solving a problem is being aware of the existence of the ecosystem, and then how that may be under threat from different things in the future,” Hennige said.

Hennige and the other scientists all agree that more deep-sea exploration is needed to fully understand the impact of climate change on cold-water corals. But these expeditions are complex, expensive and sometimes risky, as seen recently by the implosion of a submersible on a private expedition to the Titanic wreck.

Daniel Fornari is a marine geologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod, which operates the Alvin submersible. Fornari, the co-leader of the Atlantis expedition, said the discovery of the Galapagos reefs has advanced research tremendously.

“The fact that we discovered it and mapped it reasonably well so we can go back to do more work on it is huge from the point of view of scientific productivity and the ability to not have to wait years and years to write yet another proposal and get yet another ship,” Fornari said.

Stuart Banks, a senior marine scientist at the Charles Darwin Foundation, was one of three people aboard the submersible when the deep-sea coral reefs were discovered off the Galapagos earlier this year, July 12, 2023.

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GiseleRegatão/The World

Banks, the Darwin Foundation scientist, is organizing another expedition off Galapagos for this fall.

He and the other scientists are pretty sure there are more reefs down there that are yet to be discovered, and this may lead to more research that will ultimately protect those rainforests of the deep ocean.

Editor's note: Support for this story was provided in part by a PSC-CUNY Award, jointly funded by The Professional Staff Congress and The City University of New York.

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Between 2014 and 2017, Senegal and Mauritania found world-class deposits of natural gas along their Atlantic shores. It was one of the largest discoveries of natural gas in the last two decades. A plan to export that gas abroad has brought hope for the two nations’ economies.

“I want us to profit from the gas,” said Aguibou Ba, executive director of Senegal's National Institute for Oil and Gas. “Because as soon as we start extracting, I expect the electricity prices of fuel — even food prices — will drop and become affordable for us."

A man walks on the beach past an offshore gas terminal in Saint-Louis, Senegal, Jan. 19, 2023.

Credit:

Leo Correa/AP/File

The joint project with Senegal and Mauritania involves two energy giants: BP and Kosmos Energy. The first phase of the project is almost finished, which means it could start producing and exporting liquified natural gas as soon as this fall.

Germany and Poland have already signed deals with Senegal's government.

Experts say natural gas won’t transform Senegal into a rich country overnight, but it could bring significant economic growth.

“It might help the government to achieve universal access to electricity by 2025,” said William Davis, an economic analyst with the Natural Resource Governance Institute in the United Kingdom. “And so, an individual person might get access to electricity that they never had before, as a result of this project.”

But many locals are skeptical about any promises of a more prosperous future from natural gas.

Fishermen on a traditional boat known as pirogue leap over a wave heading out to the Atlantic Ocean as an offshore gas terminal is seen at the horizon in Saint-Louis, Senegal, Jan. 18, 2023.

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Leo Correa/AP/File

In the coastal city of Saint-Louis, in northern Senegal, there is an ancient, vibrant fishing village just 75 miles from the offshore platform where the natural gas is being extracted.

On their way out to the sea, fishermen pass right by the drilling rig.

“We used to have a lot of fish at sea and now we don't have that anymore.”

Pa Badiane, local fisherman in Saint-Louis, Senegal

Pa Badiane, a local fisherman, said this natural gas project has only brought unemployment and poverty to the community. “We used to have a lot of fish at sea and now we don't have that anymore,” he said.

To make way for the drilling of natural gas, access to waters teeming with fish has been cut off, and the fishing boats are not allowed to go into certain areas. “The coast guards pass by every day, you're not allowed to get anywhere nearby,” Badiane said. “And if you do, you will be attacked. Very recently, a pirogue attempted to get nearby, and the marines just cut the pirogue in half. They just hit it.”

A representative of the local government conceded that the natural gas project does have downsides for local fishing communities.

A woman sits next to crates filled with fish as she works at the shore of the Senegal River in Saint-Louis, Senegal, Jan. 20, 2023.

Credit:

Leo Correa/AP/File

“Authorities have to think about gas leaks in the area that can affect the fish population,” said Boun Daouda Soumaré, director of the Communal Development Agency of Saint-Louis.

Soumaré added that people should be patient, as jobs and other benefits from the gas deal will materialize in the future.

Boun Daouda Soumaré is the director of the Communal Development Agency of Saint-Louis.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

But Pa Badiane, the local fisherman, said he doesn’t trust the government, “because we have the feeling that, given all the parties involved, Senegal will not have much on its own. And if there is, it might be taken for other purposes,” he added.

This lack of trust is common in many African countries, as Will Davis explained. “Transparency and accountability [are] key factors in making sure that the revenues are used well for the benefit of the population rather than the political priorities of the government of the day, or even the personal priorities of politicians who are in power.”

The city of Saint-Louis is also grappling with a rise in sea level, which has already displaced thousands of people.

Fishermen interviewed for this story said the natural gas project — combined with the impact of climate change — might be the end of their way of life.

Officials from the two gas companies involved in the project turned down interview requests for this story.

Journalist Borso Tall helped produce this story.

Related: An important fishing village in Senegal is on the verge of disappearing as sea levels rise

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I still own a 1978 paperback edition of “The Exploits of Moominpappa” (later retitled “Moominpappa’s Memoirs”) about the Moomins, a family of hippo-like trolls created by Swedish-speaking Finnish author and artist Tove Jansson nearly 80 years ago.

The pages of my well-worn copy are yellowed now, and my signature inside of the front cover is in blocky, awkward cursive.

Inside the back cover, I penciled checkmarks next to the other seven books that I eventually also read. (Today, many people include a ninth book, “The Moomins and the Great Flood,” in the canon.)

The reporter's 1978 copy of the Moomins book that got him hooked on the series.

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Will Coley/The World

I’m not quite sure how, growing up in the 1980s in a small town in North Carolina, I found the book by a writer in a far-away country. I distinctly remember looking up Finland in an atlas and marveling that countries can be vertical in shape, not just horizontal.

Although the series had plenty of fans all over the world, it wasn’t well-known in the United States. But more recently, the Moomins have found new audiences here.

The reporter's copy of “The Exploits of Moominpappa” contains his signature from when he was a kid.

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Will Coley/The World

Since I started reading the books, the value of the Moomin brand has increased more than 1,000%, growing by double digits every year and is currently valued at well over $700 million globally at retail. According to the Moomin Characters Ltd, Americans comprise the largest percentage of visitors to their website Moomin.com. But Japan is still in a league of its own in buying merchandise.

The reporter's copy of “The Exploits of Moominpappa” contains a list of other books in the series, which he checkmarked as he read them.

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Will Coley/The World

Nowadays, Moomin books are available at most bookstores or libraries (even if the staff aren’t aware of them) in the US. Earlier this year, Barnes and Noble announced a promotional campaign for the Moomins.

Zachary Thomas, the reporter's cousin, is shown reading a Moomins book.

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Will Coley/The World

Also, Jansson’s novel for grownups, “The Summer Book" is going to be made into a movie starring Glenn Close. And, “The Moomin Phenomenon” is a podcast hosted by Lily Collins and Jennifer Saunders.

It’s hard to say why these books, first translated into English in 1950, captivated me. It wasn’t because the Moomins themselves were cute and round (which is one theory about why they’re popular in Japan).

My favorite characters were not Moomins: Instead, I was drawn to Snufkin, the free-spirited, outdoorsy friend of Moomintroll, and the Groke, the monster who everyone fears but who is actually freezing because she’s so lonely.

I love the series because of something that I now call a “Nordic sense of place” — a feeling of quiet, low-level angst that’s soothed by nature.

Back then, the little I knew of the author and illustrator Jansson was from the short paragraph inside the back cover. I love the sentence, “She began writing for children as play, something apart from her work and still creates children’s books out of an enjoyment of fantasy.”

Now, I notice the present tense there because she would have been alive when I read the books. She died in 2001. I couldn’t imagine how someone could create such compelling characters with strong personalities, odd shapes and funny names.

As an adult, I learned that Jansson was openly bisexual. Two of the characters, Thingumy and Bob, may represent her and her first partner. Tooticky, another character in one of the books, was based on her second partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, whose nickname was Tooti. There’s also a theory that Snufkin and Moomintroll were more than friends since they often express their love for each other.

Years later, when I was living in Santa Monica, California, I saw someone wearing a Moomin pin in a coffee shop. I just looked at her and shouted, “Moomin!” and she shouted, “Moomin!” back and we had an immediate connection and conversation. It was a rare occasion when I found someone who knew about the books.

I’ve done my own Moomin outreach. I gave Moomins books to my cousin Zachary Thomas (pictured). When I interviewed him for The World, he said American kids “might love magical stories, especially Moomintroll.”

But he thought they’d be better if there was a big battle with the bad guys, like the Groke.

“Older kids might like it because they love fighting … especially me,” he said.

I never paid much attention to the comic strips or the animated TV shows because I’m a bit of a Moomins purist. I’m not sure I could handle visiting the Moominland theme park in Japan. Something about the repackaging of the characters into 3D, colorized versions beyond Jansson’s simple, black-and-white illustrations feels wrong to me. Like it’s missing the point.

A window of a Barnes & Noble store in New York is decorated with Moomins paraphernalia.

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Will Coley/The World

I realized it was time to look into why so few Americans know about the whimsical Moominvalley even today. Though, the internet has made it easier for fans to find each other.

Newer fans like Devon Dunn, who works at an independent bookstore, report that Tumblr was instrumental in helping them discover the Moomins in the last few years.

Lesley Palin is based in the UK and manages The Moomins Appreciation Group on Facebook, which has more than 14,000 members.

“We have definitely seen an upswing in joiners,” she wrote to me.

When I connected with Roleff Krakstrom, the managing director of Moomin Characters Ltd, I asked him why it’s taken so long for the Moomins to infiltrate the US. He wonders if the American English-language market was so strong, it was just too difficult for foreigners to penetrate.

“But we don’t follow the metrics of entertainment conglomerates and investors who expect a certain rate of return to measure success,” said Krakstrom, who is married to Jansson’s niece, Sophia Jansson, the president of the board at Moomin Characters.

“This is a family-owned company. We’ve never had financing or sought it. But we’ve had 100% growth every year.”

In March, Jansson’s biographer, Boel Westin, happened to be traveling to New York (where I live). So, I met her and a friend of hers at their hotel and took a taxi together to the Barnes and Noble near Union Square in Manhattan to see the Moomin pop-up.

Boel Westin, the biographer of Tove Jansson, is shown by a Moomins display in a Barnes & Noble store in New York.

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Will Coley/The World

There were big promotional stickers in the window. But the display was smaller than we both imagined: basically one side of a tall display table. Two women there, from Georgia, said that they learned about the Moomins in Korea.

Westin noticed the familiar book covers. I asked Westin why Moomins were just now catching on in the US.

“Tove was thinking about it in the late 1940s when she was quite young, because she had a friend who had emigrated to New York,” Westin said. “They discussed it in their letters, but it never went further than these discussions.”

But neither had any contacts in publishing or newspapers so the idea just withered away.

“Later on, in the mid-1950s when she had made a comic strip, she became quite world-famous,” Westin said. “It was published in, I think, over a hundred countries at the same time. And then, Walt Disney wanted to buy the rights for Moomin or the Moomin brand, but she said no. She wanted to keep it for herself and, you know, she wanted her freedom.”

Jansson was first and foremost an artist and among the first generation of liberated Finnish women.

“This is one of my favorites, ‘Moominland in Midwinter,’” Westin said, picking up a copy. “I just love it. It's very Nordic, actually. You know, the description, or how she describes the winter in color and it opens with this, the sky was almost black, but the snow shone.”

I told Westin my favorite book in the series is, “Moominpappa at Sea,” in which the family packs up and moves to an island with a lighthouse.

She nodded in agreement.

“The whole book is very symbolic, actually,” she said. “I mean, the lighthouse, that's an old theme in literature. [Tove] was very, very interested in lighthouses. And she writes a lot about how she wanted to be a lighthouse keeper. And I think you can compare a lighthouse keeper to an author because she's been looking out … watching people and, and showing them the way. And I think in one way, that's what she's doing in her books. She can point out the way for us.”

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Peter Svensson was 12 when he committed his first crime. He stole a bicycle and sold it to two men in his hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden, telling them he could get them more expensive bikes the next day if they were interested.

They were, and the following day, Svensson returned with two mountain bikes. The men were impressed, he said, and that approval started him down a slippery path of crime.

“They made me feel special, like I was good at something and belonged somewhere,” he said.

Gangs in Sweden are recruiting teenagers at increasingly younger ages through crimes like this. Crime journalist Diamant Salihu said older criminals are using boys, often 14 or 15 years of age, to commit serious offenses — including murder.

“They pay them good money, and carrying out a shooting gives teenagers status in a gang,” Salihu said.

People under 18 also receive a lighter sentence if caught, and this leads to older gang bosses seeking out younger members. The increasing use of teenagers by Sweden’s criminal underworld is one of the reasons gang shootings in the Nordic nation are on the rise.

Sweden recorded 62 deaths by shooting in 2022, up from 45 in 2021. The country’s overall homicide rate is about 1/6 that of the US, but it is far higher than most European countries. The 2022 figure for example, is six times higher than Norway, Finland and Denmark combined.

Salihu, who has written a number of books about gang violence in Sweden, said it is relatively easy to smuggle guns into the country. He was tasked with purchasing a weapon by a newspaper editor in 2010 to prove the point. He said that he secured a gun within five hours.

Crime Journalist Diamant Salihu said older criminals are using boys, often 14 or 15 years of age, to commit serious offenses, including murder.

Credit:

Orla Barry/The World

Salihu and his editor were later prosecuted for the stunt, although he said the newspaper paid his fine. Less than a quarter of recent cases of gun homicides in Sweden have been solved. Salihu said it’s not because of a lack of interest by police but the need for greater resources to investigate complicated gang-related murders.

Witness intimidation is also rife. Victims’ families often lose trust in the ability of the police to catch the perpetrators, which has led to further revenge shootings, Salihu said.

‘I didn’t know who I was’ At the age of 20, Svensson was asked to join one of Sweden’s most notorious gangs, The Brotherhood Wolfpack. Svensson was thrilled and gradually worked his way up the hierarchy of the gang, committing crimes mainly involving drugs and extortion.

In 2006, he was sentenced to four years in prison for extortion and a nonfatal shooting, but while inside, he continued to operate as a gang leader. A couple of years into his sentence, Svensson was sent to solitary confinement following a violent incident with another prisoner.

The experience broke him, he said. He couldn’t stop crying and began to question his loyalty to the gang. Svensson wrote a letter to the boss of the prison, saying he wanted to leave his criminal life behind. Surprisingly, he said, she responded and agreed to help.

Svensson began therapy and was put in contact with Exit, a Swedish organization that usually works with people wanting to leave violent extremist groups. In prison, he continued to feign loyalty to the gang, but when he finished his sentence in 2009, he moved to another city, away from his former criminal colleagues in Gothenburg.

Starting over wasn’t easy. Exit provided Svensson with support. but he had little money and few friends. The hardest part, Svensson said, was trying to figure out who he was outside of gang culture.

“Suddenly, I was nobody. I know who I am in the criminal world. But in this life, I didn't know who I was.”

The desire to belong Exit is part of a program offered by Fryshuset, a nonprofit organization that works with thousands of young people across Sweden, many from marginalized communities. The group runs a number of schools and offers training in several areas from music and dance to skateboarding and basketball.

Criminologist Camila Salazar Atias, a manager at the center, said that some of the children attending the school are young people who other sectors of society have often given up on. Fryshuset becomes like a second home for many of them, she said.

“A lot of the kids who go to our schools say they can finally express how they feel when they are here,” Salazar Atias said.

Wesley Teodoro recently graduated from Fryshuset school in Stockholm and is working for the summer in the school’s social media department. Teodoro said he joined the school when he was 14 because he didn't feel comfortable or safe in his previous schools.

“I just needed a place where I could be myself,” Teodoro said.

Wesley Teodoro recently graduated from Fryshuset school in Stockholm and is working for the summer in the school’s social media department. Teodoro said he joined the school when he was 14 because he didn't feel comfortable or safe in his previous schools.

Credit:

Orla Barry/The World

The center gave him an environment where he could build up his confidence as an artist.

“And today, I release music, I perform, I do dance performances. I'm an entertainer,” he said.

Teenagers who end up in gangs usually exhibit similar needs, Salazar Atias said. The desire to belong and the wish to be seen and heard. Some of the kids come from suburbs that the police have described as “problem areas.”

Criminologist Camila Salazar Atias, a manager at Fryshuset, said that some of the children attending the school are young people whom other sectors of society have often given up on. Fryshuset becomes like a second home for many of them, she said.

Credit:

Orla Barry/The World

Around seven years ago, a list of suburbs police deemed problematic was revealed in the press.

Salazar Atias said the students sometimes lie about where they live just to escape the stigmatization that comes with living in so-called troubled neighborhoods. Several of the suburbs blacklisted by the police have high immigrant populations, she said. Far-right politicians have blamed the rise in Sweden’s shootings on immigrants.

But crime reporter Salihu said the majority of gang members he knows are born and raised in Sweden. Some may be second- or third-generation immigrants, he said, but the real problem lies with the segregation of communities and the failure of schools to integrate students, which can lead to young people feeling abandoned by society.

Salihu said many gang members he has encountered in recent years also come from middle-class backgrounds. The issue of gang shootings in Sweden only became a huge talking point in the media recently, he said, when wealthier areas of Stockholm were affected. But this problem has been going on for much longer in more marginalized parts of the city, Salihu said.

Leaving a life of crime behind Today, Svensson is method and development manager with Catena, a group that helps people leave organized gangs and criminal networks. It’s mirrored on the Los Angeles organization, Homeboy Industries. The program runs over 18 months but Svensson said the first three months are the most intensive and involve weekly drug tests.

The first task is helping former gang members develop a new identity.

“You start to change how you look, if you have tattoos, you take them away or replace them, you change the way you talk and most importantly, the place you're staying.”

That’s so that former gang colleagues can’t track you down, he said.

The next step is about helping the person discover what else they can do with their lives, which doesn’t involve returning to crime.

In the end, Svensson said the goal is to change someone's mindset so they can see themselves as more than just a former gang member. Svensson gave himself five years after leaving prison to see if he could leave his criminal life behind. If after this length of time, he still wanted to return to that life, he would, he told himself.

He wrote a letter to his former gang boss saying he wanted out. It was like writing a break-up letter after a long intense relationship with an ex-girlfriend, he laughed.

The boss wrote back offering Svensson huge sums of money to come back, but Svensson resisted. It wasn’t easy, he said.

After the five-year deadline was up, Svensson said, he knew he still had work to do on himself but he also knew that he was never going back to a life of crime.

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Evgenia Baltatarova, a journalist and activist in Siberia, started posting online about her opposition to the war soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022.

Just a week after her posts appeared, more than a dozen police officers showed up at Baltatarova’s apartment with a search warrant as part of a crackdown on Russians who speak out against the conflict, which is technically illegal in Russia.

“I knew that something bad was going to happen, that repressions are coming, because of this war,” Baltatarova said.

Evgenia Baltatarova, a journalist and activist in Siberia, fled to Kazakhstan for her safety after Russia invaded Ukraine. But she and other Russians face an uncertain future, and possible deportation, back to Russia.

Credit:

Courtesy of Evgenia Baltatarova

Police eventually opened a criminal case against Baltatarova for spreading fake news about the war. But by then she had already crossed the border to safety in nearby Kazakhstan.

Baltatarova quickly settled into her new home and found a job and friends. Kazakhstan’s location was relatively close to family in Siberia who could easily visit her.

But as the conflict in Ukraine dragged on, Baltatarova and other anti-war Russians in Kazakhstan started having problems. Kazakh authorities detained Baltatarova when they learned of the criminal charges she faces in Russia. They eventually released her with a strict stipulation: She is not allowed to leave Kazakhstan.

Since her detention, Baltatarova has faced constant bureaucratic challenges to remain in the country. Recently, authorities didn’t renew her work permit. She could potentially be deported to Russia where she said that she faces a jail sentence of up to 15 years.

“This is the most dangerous situation I’ve ever been in my life. I’m not a criminal, I’m just a journalist,” Baltatarova said.

Baltatarova submitted an application to apply for asylum in Kazakhstan, which allows her to legally remain in the country while her case is processed. But even that doesn’t exactly give her peace of mind.

Recently, Kazakhstan deported a Russian officer who also applied for asylum. He is currently serving more than six years in jail for avoiding military service.

Russians, mostly men, lineup to get a Kazakh registration after crossing the border into Kazakhstan from the Mariinsky border crossing, about 250 miles south of Chelyabinsk, in Russia, to Kazakhstan's town of Uralsk, Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022.

Credit:

Denis Spiridonov/AP

Harboring anti-war Russians has become a liability for former Soviet countries like Kazakhstan that border Russia. Many people in the region strongly support Ukraine, but their governments still maintain close economic and security ties with Russia. Countries in the area have increasingly taken measures to not appear welcoming to Russian dissidents.

In recent months, some Russian activists who strongly oppose the war have been detained in nearby countries or even sent back to Russia to face criminal charges related to their opposition to the war.

Russians lineup to get a Kazakh registration after crossing the border into Kazakhstan from the Mariinsky border crossing, about 250 miles south of Chelyabinsk, in Russia, to Kazakhstan in Uralsk, Wednesday, Sept. 28, 2022.

Credit:

Denis Spiridonov/AP

Countries in the region are taking different approaches to dealing with Russian migrants.

Georgia, in the South Caucasus, has become a prominent hub for Russians leaving their country because of the war. While much of the world is severing ties with Russia, Georgia’s government has recently developed closer relations with Moscow. Earlier this year, Georgia even opened direct flights with Russia for the first time in years.

While many Russians continue to arrive in Georgia, the country is off limits for some. Over the last year Georgian border agents have refused to let journalists as well as prominent Russians who publicly oppose the war in Ukraine enter the country.

“Border officials told me I wasn’t allowed to enter the country, even though I had never committed a crime there,” said Katya Arenina, an investigative journalist from Russia who was turned away at the airport in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi.

Arenina, who works with the investigative outlet Proekt, which has produced investigations about Russian President Vladimir Putin, said she was never given a reason why Georgian officials denied her entry into the country.

Russians who have managed to emigrate to the European Union, in countries that are firmly out of Russia’s orbit, still don’t exactly feel welcome. Russians in the EU who spoke to The World said landlords often don’t want to rent to them. And they can’t open bank accounts because of sanctions which makes starting a new life logistically challenging.

A Georgian opposition activist with a Georgian national flag attends a protest against the resumption of air links with Russia standing behind a police line at the International Airport outside Tbilisi, Georgia, Friday, May 19, 2023.

Credit:

Shakh Aivazov/AP

In countries like France, Russians exchange information over Telegram groups about how to remain in the country legally and adjust to life in a place where some feel their presence is not wanted.

Anti-Russian sentiment is tearing up some people’s lives.

Nikolai, a Russian who asked not to use his last name out of security concerns, moved to Estonia before the war to launch a startup. But he said investors are cutting off funding from companies founded by Russians because of the potential liability, which is killing his business and threatening his ability to remain in the country.

“For me, like personally, it is the hardest time in my life,” Nikolai said.

He is currently having trouble renewing his residency permit because Estonia has made the process far more difficult for Russian citizens. His wife and daughter, whose visas were tied to his, have already had to return to Russia because they could no longer stay in the country.

“I'm not psychologically in my best condition because I haven’t seen my wife and daughter for six months,” Nikolai said.

Men are seen fishing near the fortresses of Narva, left, and Ivangorod, Russia, right, in Narva, Estonia, on Wednesday, May 24, 2023. The fortresses along the slender river mark one of Europe's most pronounced borders, between two countries that took radically different courses after the Soviet Union's collapse.

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James Heintz/AP

He also has a son who was attending university in Germany, but officials suddenly failed to renew his student visa. He is now continuing his education in Georgia.

Nikolai is now also facing the possibility of getting deported back to Russia where he could potentially go to jail for opposing the war or get drafted to fight in Ukraine.

The uncertain futures faced by Russians who fled abroad can be an ever present source of anxiety.

Baltatarova, the journalist in Kazakhstan, is also waiting to renew her expired immigration documents.

“You have to face the danger everyday of being deported or extradited, because we are not accepted as victims of this war,” Baltatarova said.

For Russians who spoke out against the war sometimes it feels like there’s nowhere left to run.

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GBH Advisory: This project contains descriptions of violence and dehumanizing language to reflect the horrors that Black people and Native Americans were routinely subjected to during the era of American history when slavery was common. We recognize such language may distress some readers. Discretion is advised.

A narrow red brick path winds through the sidewalks of downtown Boston, connecting 17 historic sites tied to the city’s colonial history as the incubator of the American Revolution.

But the red line of the Freedom Trail also could symbolize the blood of enslaved people who helped make that revolution possible.

Boston is a cradle of American history, and 4 million people a year visit the historic churches, graveyards and parks that make up the Freedom Trail to learn more about the country’s origins.

But rarely do they hear the underbelly of that story: that slavery touched nearly every aspect of the society and the economy of Massachusetts during that period of time. But that is now changing.

In the 1700s, enslaved people likely accounted for about 10% of Boston’s population, according to the city’s tally. An unnamed French writer visiting Boston in 1687 wrote, “You may ... own Negroes and Negresses; there is not a house in Boston, however small may be its means, that has not one or two.”

The malicious tentacles of slavery in the Bay State were widespread, although Massachusetts was not home to massive agricultural plantations like in the Southern colonies.

Boston thrived on shipping that involved transporting enslaved people or the products of their labor. The colony had a huge rum industry, made possible by the sugar harvested in the slavery-riddled Caribbean. And enslaved people in Central and South America mined the silver that Paul Revere used to manufacture his iconic kitchenware.

And those connections can be tied directly to sites along the 2.5-mile Freedom Trail: in the wood harvested by enslaved workers to build the USS Constitution; in the unmarked graves at Boston's old cemeteries and in the history of Boston Latin School, where enslaver Nathaniel Williamsserved as one of the first schoolmasters.

Bricks line the Freedom Trail in downtown Boston.

Credit:

Jenifer McKim/GBH News

In most cases, these connections are rarely talked about. Joe Bagley, the city's archaeologist, said many people don’t realize how slavery was systemic in 18th-century Massachusetts.“We kind of give ourselves a lot of credit for being the first state to banish slavery,’’ he said. “But we were also the first state to make it legal.”

Massachusetts was the first colony to legalize slavery, with the adoption of the 1641 "Body of Liberties," which set out the rules under which a person could be enslaved. Slavery was abolished in the 1780s through a series of court cases brought by enslaved people.

L’Merchie Frazier, former director of education and interpretation for Boston’s Museum of African American History, said the interpretation of the historic sites on the trail, installed in the 1950s, has completely ignored the role of Black people.

“Whose freedom are we trailing and are we tracing as we walk on those bricks?”

L’Merchie Frazier, former director, Museum of African American History, Boston, Massachusetts

“Whose freedom are we trailing and are we tracing as we walk on those bricks?” she asked.

GBH News reporters worked with a group of Boston University journalism students to document the lesser-known history of slavery at each of the sites along the Freedom Trail. For several months, students dug into archives and worked with researchers to piece together information.

Some of the sites have done a lot of this work themselves and were able to share their findings; others, like the Old Corner Bookstore and the Boston Common, are essentially unmanaged and required students to dig through troves of documents and read historical texts looking for clues. While very little of what was found was previously unknown, there’s no easily accessible place to find all the information collected in one place.

View the interactive map:The Enslavement History of the Freedom TrailSuzanne Segura Taylor, the executive director of the Freedom Trail Foundation, said her organization has long trained guides to mention slavery on the tour.

For example, the training materials direct guides to discuss the small grave marker beside the tomb of John Hancock, a two-time Massachusetts governor made famous for his signature on the Declaration of Independence. The small grave carries the name of “Frank,” described as a servant of Hancock’s and who was almost certainly enslaved, historians agree.

“Those are the things we say that must be talked about,” she said.

But, she said, more can be done to elevate the story of Boston’s slave history, and she hopes to share GBH’s findings with her tour guides.

A Freedom Trail guide discusses the history of the Old State House with a tour group in downtown Boston.

Credit:

Paul Singer/GBH News

The Freedom Trail Foundation is just one of countless organizations leading tours of the historic sites. Last month, a GBH News reporter took a 2 1/2-hour walking tour with a private company that covered all 17 sites and never once mentioned slavery.

“There's a lot of people out there conducting tours that we don't know what their outlines are, what they're required to discuss on their tours,” Taylor said.

Frazier said the story that tourists hear about colonial Boston depends on the guide.

“Previously on the Freedom Trail, the only mention of any Black person was Crispus Attucks — and not his history, just that he died on March 5, 1770,” she said.

Attucks, the first person killed in the Boston Massacre on that day, is buried with other victims under a commemorative stone in the Granary Burying Ground, beside revolutionary leader Samuel Adams. GBH followed several tours through the burial ground and the massacre site and heard no mention that Attucks — the child of an enslaved Black father and a Native American mother — had once been enslaved and advertised as a runaway.

Frazier also points out that the story of enslaved people in Boston is not just a story of victimhood. It is also the story of people working together to educate themselves, learn skills and try to build wealth — and fight for their freedom.

It was "a strategized, networked, organized movement to secure their voices, their land, their property," she said. "If you leave out that narrative, that expanded narrative, of Black and Indigenous people here, you have really done a woeful job of delivering history. Especially in terms of considering the principles of democracy."

While there is growing acknowledgement of the city’s ties to slavery on the Freedom Trail, the public-facing recognition of it is intermittent. For example, organizers at King's Chapel, a stone chapel founded in 1686, launched an effort a few years ago to grapple with its history. Many of the founding members, and many of the donors to the construction of the church, were slaveholders, slave traders or otherwise made their money from the work of enslaved people.

Signs around the church now explain those connections, and the chapel recently approved a massive transformation to install a monument to the 219 enslaved people linked to the congregation’s history.

Watch how King's Chapel is reckoning with its ties to slavery:But just outside the church, the city-owned King’s Chapel Burying Ground provides no details about slavery on its signs, even though some of the most illustrious names on its tombstones commemorate people who owned slaves, including John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts.

A “First Governor” plaque in the burial ground marks the family tomb and tells the story of Winthrop’s career, noting that he was “considered religious, prudent, conscientious and pious.” No mention is made of the fact that the governor sent soldiers to sack a Pequot settlement in 1627, taking hundreds of Native American prisoners, many of whom Winthrop sold, gave away as slaves or kept for himself.

Beth Anne Bower, credited as the historical research consultant on those signs, told GBH News that when the placards were made two decades ago, exploring connections to slavery “was not the conversation.” Instead, she said, she was encouraged to focus on the "diversity" of people buried there, highlighting women business owners and French migrants.

The current recognition that “we should start confronting this history” was not part of the mission for those signs, she said. "It should have been."

Walking past the site of Boston Latin School — the oldest school in the nation — visitors would not learn that Nathaniel Williams, one of the school’s first schoolmasters, enslaved two people identified as Richard and Hagar. This fact is not mentioned on the school's own website or on the mural painted on the sidewalk on School Street, which is named for Boston Latin. But these key details are available on other city websites.

Increasingly, the sites along the Freedom Trail — which are curated by different groups, including the National Park Service, the city of Boston, individual congregations and stand-alone nonprofits — have begun telling the stories of the foundation of enslavement that the city’s history stands upon.

The USS Constitution Museum in Charlestown, which receives hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, leads visitors through a hands-on description of how the ship was conceived and built.

An exhibit inside the USS Constitution Museum illustrates the use of enslaved laborers who harvested the wood used to build the ship.

Credit:

Paul Singer/GBH News

Dr. Carl Herzog, the historian at the museum, told Boston University students that the "live oak" — a particualry impregnable species of wood — that the US Navy sought to build the boat with in the 1790s came from Georgia’s St. Simons Island, where it was harvested by enslaved workers. In a blog post published on the museum website late last year, Herzog detailed the use of this wood: “Paying enslavers for the forced labor of enslaved people was an expediency that Navy officials and contractors saw as fundamental to the job. Thus, enslaved people were essential to the construction of naval warships built to secure the very American freedoms they were denied.”

The museum exhibit includes a modern life-sized photo of a Black man dressed as an "enslaved" worker carrying an axe. The attached sign says, "I hate this work. My master earns top dollar for my toil, but me, what do I get? ... [White workers] left. I don't have that choice. Got nowhere to run."

Old North Church, where the lanterns were hung in the steeple “one if by land, two if by sea” to launch Paul Revere’s famous ride, has rewritten its own materials to expose the slave ties of the donors who funded that steeple.

The Old State House has an exhibit about the petitions enslaved people submitted to the Legislature in the 1700s asking for their liberation and reparations.

Stepping off the Freedom Trail, visitors can find even more of this history.

The National Park Service leads tours on a 10-stop Black Heritage Trail that features an alternate slate of sites curated by the Museum of African American History, including the African Meeting House — the nation’s oldest Black church building — and the John J. Smith House, home to a leading abolitionist who helped liberate Shardrach Minkins, an enslaved man from Virginia arrested in Boston in 1851 under the Fugitive Slave Act.

And the city of Boston has unveiled an exhibit inside Faneuil Hall to document some of the enslaved people who lived here and to highlight “Boston’s complicity” in the slave trade. The location was chosen specifically to elevate the fact that Peter Faneuil, who built the building donated to Boston in 1742, was one of the most active slave traders in the colony.

Some social justice leaders, like Imari Paris Jefferies, chief executive of Embrace Boston, who led the 2022 installation of the new civil rights memorial on the Boston Common, say this recognition is long overdue.

“To have more of these historic and legacy institutions on the Freedom Trail tell a holistic story about Boston’s — and by default America's — involvement and engagement in this dark part of our history is an important part of reconciliation," he said.

This story originally appeared on GBH's Morning Edition.

Related: Benin is building a theme park to remember slavery — is history up for sale?

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There’s an expression in Arabic — nus nus — that roughly translates to “so-so” or “half-and-half.”

It’s also the title of a track by 28-year-old Noam Tsuriely, a Jewish Israeli hip-hop artist from Jerusalem, whose debut album drops this summer.

There are many songs that mix both Hebrew and Arabic lyrics, but Tsuriely says they usually miss the point. People end up learning only the verses they understand and ignoring the rest.

So, Tsuriely is trying something different.

“I wanted to make a song that you cannot ignore the other side,” he said. “So, I do … a line in Hebrew, a line in Arabic. And it’s not a line in translation.” He explained that each line is a continuation of the song that can only be understood in its entirety if you understand both languages.

“If you don’t understand both languages, you cannot understand fully what’s happening in your own country.”

Noam Tsuriely, Jewish Israeli hip-hop artist from Jerusalem

“And this is the point of the song,” he added. “If you don’t understand both languages, you cannot understand fully what’s happening in your own country.”

“If we don’t know how to talk, we won’t stop being afraid,” he raps on the track, whose video was shot in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Rapper Noam Tsuriely records songs in both Hebrew and Arabic so Israelis and Palestinians can learn each other’s languages and understand each other better.

Credit:

Fuad AbuGosh/The World

But Tsuriely’s “Nus Nus” hasn’t come without criticism. Some people have attacked him online as a “naïve lefty.” He said, though, that he doesn’t let it bother him.

“I’m not talking about, ‘Is the Israeli side wrong, or the Palestinian side wrong?’ This is not my job, to preach to people what to believe,” he said. “My job is to do good in this world. And for me, telling them, "Yo! It doesn’t matter which side of the conflict you are [on]. You need to learn to speak with the other side!""

Tsuriely said this dawned on him during his mandatory army service when he served in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and found himself face-to-face with Palestinian civilians. It was then that he realized that speaking to each other is the only way for the two sides to ever learn to live together.

Moral messagesTsuriely’s music takes on other issues, as well. One number is called “Greta,” and it is an ode to climate activist Greta Thunberg. He said he finds her to be an inspiration for his own activism. Here are some lyrics from the song:

“She does not take anything lightly, like a Jew in exile —
She is waiting for redemption.
But when anger arises in her, you will not find inaction in her —
Greta is here, and you should cooperate.”

But most of his music is not political at all.

He sings and raps a lot about love, relationships and heartbreak. Because, he said, that’s just who he is.

Hip-hop has been around for a while in Israel and the Palestinian territories. But in recent years, it’s really gone mainstream.

Israeli rapper Noam Tsuriely with his father Yinon Tsuriely.

Credit:

Fuad AbuGosh/The World

Tsuriely said that what Israeli artists are bringing to their music can be captured by the Yiddish word tachlis, which means, “real” or “the heart of the matter.”

“It’s about being brutally honest, sometimes too brutal,” he said. “But I think in our world, this is what the people want to hear.”

A life-long dreamTsuriely said he’s wanted to be a rap star since the 6th grade, when he started listening to Eminem and A Tribe Called Quest. He also had a penchant for classic American soul, funk and R&B.

Yinon Tsuriely, rapper Noam Tsuriely's father, plays the piano in their Jerusalem home.

Credit:

Fuad AbuGosh/The World

But one of his biggest musical influences is very close to home — his own father, Yinon Tsuriely, who plays the piano and who put together his first jazz band at the age of 16.

As Noam tries to get his career off the ground, Yinon reminds his son that the music business is not easy.

“He’s a big boy and he knows that. And he’s fighting to live his dream, to make it true,” Yinon Tsuriely said. “Because I know that he’s very talented, I believe in him.”

Israel is a small country, but Israelis take their music pretty seriously.

Noam Tsuriely said that his goal is to one day be mentioned alongside the biggest-selling hip-hop artists in Israel — Tuna and Ravid Plotnik.

At a recent showcase for unsigned talent in the seaside town of Jaffa, Tsuriely was the headliner, performing solo on piano and vocals.

Meanwhile, his forthcoming debut album that includes the “Nus Nus” track, will be called, in Hebrew, “Melim, Lachan, veh Chazon,” or “Lyrics, Melody and Vision.”

Related: Mahraganat artists in Egypt are defining hip-hop culture, despite government crackdowns

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The quaint fishing port of Akureyri, in Iceland, has set itself a big goal — to become of the world’s first carbon-neutral city by 2030.

Akureyri is Iceland’s second largest city, with 18,000 residents. It gets all of its electricity from hydroelectric dams and all of its heat and hot water from geothermal boreholes.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

New arrivals in Akureyri, in northern Iceland, can begin their visit feeling carbon- and guilt-free. By taking an electric scooter from the airport all the way downtown.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

The 18,000 people who live there are ready to do what it takes to stop emitting more harmful greenhouse gasses than it absorbs.

There are two challenges keeping Akureyri from being carbon-neutral currently. The first is that most people fly in on commercial jets — that carbon footprint alone is giant. The second is gas-guzzling cars — each licenced driver owns about two of them.

But once on the ground, it can almost feel like a challenge to find ways to pollute.

For starters, from the airport into Akureyri, visitors can use a dedicated bike and scooter path for the 10-minute ride into town, carbon-free.

Hydroelectric plants provide 100% of Akureyri’s electricity, powered by snow-fed rivers cascading down from the surrounding mountains.

“The power installation produces electricity for 8,000 to 10,000 electric vehicles,” said Gudmundur Sigurdarson, the visionary behind Akureyri’s carbon-neutral plans.

“In theory, we could produce all the electricity we need for transport from the local river,” said Sigurdarson, who is also the town’s informal spokesman and a guide for all things green.

“We want the people living here to have all the opportunities to live as green a lifestyle as possible,” he said. “So, you can rent a scooter. There are charging stations for cars and recycling stations everywhere. So, there are no excuses not to take part in this green wave.”

Just about everything is recycled here. From soda cans and plastic water bottles to heat-trapping greenhouse gasses like methane.

Sigurdarson walked up to the top of a grassy hill just outside town that used to be Akureyri’s main landfill.

“Under here we have cars, animals, jeans, everything,” he said.

The landfill is not obvious, but for the dozens of black pipes sticking up from the ground.

One of dozens of pipes sunk into Akureyri’s old, buried landfill channels methane gas for use as a fuel for local busses. The methane would otherwise leach out into the atmosphere over time.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

The pipes capture the tons of rising methane that would otherwise escape into the atmosphere over time. Instead, the greenhouse gas gets pumped to a storage station for refinement as a fuel to run the town’s buses. Free buses, to boot. As Sigurdarson might say, there’s no excuse not to use them.

Methane captured from the town landfill is pumped to processing stations and converted into fuel for all of Akureyri’s public buses. Which are free to ride.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

Same goes for Akureyri’s cooking oil recycling bins. The drop-off points are everywhere. The oil gets turned into biodiesel for ships.

One of several cooking-oil recycling bins around Akureyri. The idea is to make it so easy to recycle that no one has an excuse to not do it.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

In fact, nothing organic in Akureyri goes to waste. Uneaten food, grass clippings, even animal carcasses get turned into compost.

“Today these are horses and pigs,” said Christian Olaffsson, who runs the local composting plant. He was pointing to a long conveyor belt piled with animal remains. It all gets mixed with wood chips and grass and other materials, then stored outside for months before being given away — again, for free — to anyone who wants it.

The smell is overpoweringly pungent, but Olafsson said he got used to it.

Christian Olaffsson runs Akureyri’s composting plant.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

The composting plant, the last stop on Sigurdarson’s green tour, seems to embody what Akureyri’s shooting for.

“We talk about the plant as a climate hero,” Sigurdarson said. Because for every 1 kilo that goes in, it reduces our emissions by 1 kilo of CO2.”

In other words, carbon neutrality. But the second of the two things slowing Akureyri’s progress toward that goal are the gas-guzzling cars.

There are some 16,000 of them in town, Sigurdarson said. That’s about two per licensed driver. Getting people to go electric is proving tough, despite all the charging stations, because electric vehicles are expensive.

And besides, Akureyri has a deeply rooted, old-fashioned car culture. In fact, there’s a parade every Wednesday when dozens of guys in vintage vehicles gather along the fjord and then roll out for a slow cruise — creating a lot of noise and exhaust.

Akureyri’s biggest challenge to going carbon neutral is cars. The town has a deeply rooted car culture. Each Wednesday night owners of vintage —and fossil-fuel-guzzling — vehicles parade them around town. The exhaust can be overwhelming.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

One driver said he felt too old to consider switching to an electric vehicle.

“I am 66 years old. Maybe I’ll be buried in a car like this,” he said.

That’s hardly the voice of a green revolution.

But to be fair, the vintage car fellows are a small group of people.

And Akureyri did have a milestone to celebrate around this year’s summer solstice: The number of electric vehicles registered in the town hit 1,000.

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David Mattey works for a cable TV company in Lima, Peru, making around $500 a month. In March, he got his first loan ever — a $3,000 credit for a motorbike.

Mattey said he wanted the bike to get around faster in the congested city and feel “more freedom.” But he also wanted to earn extra money at night, making deliveries.

“When you’re new in a place, it’s complicated to buy some things,” said Mattey, who is originally from Venezuela and arrived in Peru four years ago. “At first, I didn’t know of any banks or companies willing to give me a loan.”

David Mattey rides his new motorbike in Lima Peru. At nights, he uses the bike to make deliveries.

Credit:

Jacob Kessler/The World

Courtesy of Jacob Kessler

Immigrants like Mattey often struggle to access loans because they lack a credit history in their new country.

But increasingly, some startups are taking a chance on these newcomers and finding that lending money to migrants can be profitable.

Mattey got his motorbike loan from Galgo, a Chilean startup that has become one of the largest financiers for motorbikes in South America.

David Mattey is originally from Venezuela and has been in Peru for the past four years.

Credit:

Jacob Kessler/The World

With paystubs from his day job and a local ID card, Mattey was able to secure a loan for his medium-sized, 200cc motorbike, which he is paying back in monthly installments of what equates to $105.

“The process was easier than I thought,” he said. “They even made it seem like it was fun.”

Galgo was set up in 2018 by Diego Fleischmann, a Chilean businessman who had previously run an insurance company.

Back then, tens of thousands of Venezuelans arrived in Chile to escape their country’s economic crisis, so Fleischmann and his friend, Salvador Porta, devised a plan.

Diego Fleischmann launched Galgo in 2018. The company used to provide different kinds of loans, but eventually decided to focus on financing motorcycles.

Credit:

Courtesy of Galgo

“We started with this idea of giving something back to these people who were coming to Chile,” Fleischmann said. “We wanted to help them build a future in our country.”

The company started out by providing loans for motorbikes, cars and rent deposits. It even lent money to Venezuelan doctors, who needed to validate their degrees in Chile and had to pay for exams.

“It made no sense for us that a Venezuelan doctor was working as an Uber driver to save money in order to pay this fee to validate their titles,” he said.

But the company’s earnings nosedived during the pandemic, as many migrants lost their jobs and had no money to pay back their loans.

There was one exception, though.

Galgo found that its motorbike loans usually performed well — because after they purchased their motorbikes, migrants would immediately use them to work for delivery apps, like Uber Eats and Rappi. So, the company decided to focus on motorbike loans.

Galgo has expanded by lending to migrants and other underbanked people. Currently it has more than 400 employees in four Latin American countries.

Credit:

Courtesy of Galgo

“When people make money with the loans that you are giving, they can pay you back much better,” Fleischmann said.

Nowadays, Galgo finances more than 3,000 new motorbikes each month. The company has expanded into Peru, Colombia and Mexico.

But when migrants need loans for other reasons, there are still barriers.

Juan Pablo Luque is an expert on microfinance at Mercy Corps, a humanitarian group that helps migrants and refugees in more than 40 countries. He says that in many Latin American countries, such as Colombia, migrants are denied bank accounts if they don’t have a national ID Card. And that can lead to dangerous situations.

“They tend to go to loan sharks … that require them to pay absurd interest rates,” Luque said. “And that puts them in a very high-risk situation in their communities.”

But Luque said that the barriers to financial inclusion are easing as digital banks start to compete with traditional banks and cater to migrants to build up their clientele.

In the US, for example, Majority has opened more than 100,000 bank accounts for immigrants in the past three years.

Majority helps immigrants to open bank accounts. Although it is mostly a digital company it has also opened offices in some cities with a large immigration population, like Hialeah, Florida.

Credit:

Courtesy of Majority

The digital bank tries to make things simple: Anyone can open an account at Majority with an ID from their home country and a utility bill showing they live in the US.

“Getting inserted into the financial system is still a huge hurdle for a lot of people,” said Juan Pablo D’Alessandro, the head of new markets at Majority. “And that’s why we’re trying to make a big difference, at least in that aspect of a person’s establishment in the United States.”

Back in Peru, David Mattey said he is still wary about taking out bank loans because of the high interest rates.

But the motorbike he acquired with Galgo is helping him to increase his income and build a credit history.

“I feel happy about my life here,” he said. “I think that eventually I’ll get a bigger bike and move on to new things.”

Jacob Kessler contributed to this report from Lima, Peru.

Related: Migrant farmworkers in Spain living in makeshift encampments have little hope for formal work

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Masashi Ikeda, a store manager at a trading card chain in Tokyo, Japan, said the store has recently ramped up security to prevent theft of precious Pokémon trading cards.

“We try to make it really difficult to steal cards by also using dummy cards,” he said. “So, if someone smashes the glass, nothing of value is taken.”

The 27-year-old Japanese trading card franchise has exploded in popularity in recent years, leading to frenzied fans, collectors and Pokémon card players fighting for the best cards.

Pokémon cards are displayed in a glass cabinet. High-value cards are marked as "dummy cards."

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Thisanka Siripala/The World

A pack of Pokémon cards costs about $1.40 in Japan, and they usually come in a set of four cards in a sealed foil packet. Scoring a rare card in a pack is like winning a golden Willy Wonka ticket.

Rare and ultra-rare cards of the characters Pikachu and Charizard are in high demand all over the world. In 2022, a rare Pikachu card sold privately for a record $900,000.

Japan’s Pokémon trading cards are more than just cute characters on paper. Each card features a unique character with distinct strengths and abilities, and players gather at trading card shops across Tokyo to compete in high-level tournaments called “battles.” Each player brings 60 of their strongest cards and the goal is to knock each Pokémon out.

The shops also host weekly Pokémon practice sessions called “gyms” to prepare for these battles.

Players gather to "battle" at a card shop in Shibuya, Tokyo.

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Thisanka Siripala/The World

Trading cards are just one part of the massive worldwide Pokémon franchise — there’s anime, feature films and video, and smartphone games like Pokémon GO. The Japanese company is worth a staggering $118 billion.

And Pokémon isn’t just for children. Tokyo’s trading card stores attract mostly college-age students, adults and a lot of businessmen.

Charlier Hurlocker, a US-based Pokémon card expert, said the average age of a Pokémon card collector is typically between 25 to 35. He said these adults were part of the first generation of kids to consume Pokémon when it was first released. He predicts that the number of Pokémon card players will only increase as this generation has children.

Pokémon’s shift from subculture to mainstream has created a shortage and made card shops a target for robbery. There is also a problem of counterfeits and scalping.

Hurlocker said prices are skyrocketing because they’ve become a financial investment.

“Most of the buyers that we see from Saudi Arabia, they see that as an investment," he said. "In the United States, they see it as half-investment, half-nostalgia. And the Chinese buyers, they have a cultural desire to take possession of cultural relics.”

Pokémon cards can be purchased at vending machines.

Credit:

Thisanka Siripala/The World

The Pokémon company announced that they are focusing on reprinting cards to ease supply shortages. Between March 2021 and 2022, the company doubled its production to a whopping 9 billion cards.

But Hurlocker said supply is not keeping up with demand — the company is cautious about over-supplying the market.

“The machines they are printed on are highly specialized,” he said. “They cost millions of dollars and they take years and years and years to produce.”

Hurlocker said an overproduction of Pokémoncards would be disastrous for small trading card businesses.

“In the past, some card sets were really undesirable. Lots of people lost money and it could mean card retailers go out of business,” he said.

Because of the shortage, animosity is growing between people who play Pokémon cards and those who collect just for the investment.

Hasebon-san is a true Pokémon card fanatic. The official Pokémon Japan website even featured him as an original, hard-core collector.

He blamed investors for causing hyperinflation and cut-throat competition for cards. He said he feels bad for anyone who just wants to start playing the game.

“Pokémon cards are in such short supply that they are hard to buy now and people who really want to play Pokémon can't,“ he said.

For Hasebon-san, retailers selling used cards are part of the problem.

“Resellers make their profit by selling at a high price,” he said. “If everyone who wants to buy the product could buy them, there wouldn’t be a need to buy from resellers.”

Hasebon-san said he wants the Pokémon company to slow the release of new cards in order to cool down the market.

But trading card retailers like Masashi Ikeda are relishing in the current boom.

“The reason why we are making a profit now,” he said, “this is because the exchange between individuals and e-commerce sites is so heated that dealers like us are enjoying a good time. If that goes down, we’ll be affected.”

Just like the message in the Pokémon theme song, competition is part of the game, even if it tests your finances.

Related: A Jewish folk song is preserved in a Japanese video game

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In the fall of 2020, during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hovik Manucharyan got on a plane and flew from the United States to a country at war.

Throughout that fall, Manucharyan’s home country, Armenia, was in the middle of a 44-day war with neighboring Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, which is referred to by Armenians as Artsakh. When the conflict ended, entire towns in the region — which is populated by ethnic Armenians — fell to Azerbaijan.

Thousands of Armenians were displaced as a result. Armenian immigrants in California, like Manucharyan, who moved to Los Angeles when he was a teenager, rallied to send aid to Armenia during the war.

But Manucharyan felt that being so far away limited his ability to support his home country. So, he flew to Armenia during the war to help out as a civilian. He brought much-needed supplies and energy at a time when many Americans were not even aware of the conflict.

When Manucharyan returned home, he and his wife Suzanna, who was also born in Armenia and immigrated to LA, decided to move back to Armenia with their three kids.

“It just sort of feels less stressful being here [in Armenia] than far away and hearing about your homeland and not being able to contribute,” Manucharyan said.

Since moving to Armenia, Manucharyan has tried to use his experience to connect with the Armenian diaspora and inform them about what’s happening on the ground there. He even started a podcast aimed at Armenians living across the globe that focuses heavily on the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh.

The Manucharyans are part of a growing trend of Californians moving to Armenia full time to launch new projects in a country that some of their relatives left several generations ago. For many, the 2020 war provided the impetus to leave California behind. They’re now using skills they gained in the United States to make a difference in a country that many know more from stories than from experience.

Californian transplants have started businesses and nonprofits. Some work in Armenia’s government. Others have helped expand Armenia’s tech sector and worked to develop its infrastructure. In this small country that has few close allies and is still engaged in an ongoing conflict with Azerbaijan, this reverse migration is making an impact.

“I just felt like I wasn’t doing enough in LA, knowing that people my age or younger were being displaced or killed by the war here,” said Mikael Matossian, a 28-year-old from the San Fernando Valley who relocated to the capital Yerevan last year.

The Manucharyan family, who formerly lived in Glendale, moved to Yerevan two years ago.

Credit:

Levi Bridges/The World

Little Armenia There are more Armenians living outside Armenia than in it, with large parts of the diaspora concentrated in places like LA and Moscow. Starting in 1915, hundreds of thousands of people fled the Armenian genocide, committed by the Ottoman empire — what is modern-day Turkey — and wound up all over the world. Another large wave of immigration from Armenia started in the ’90s after the Soviet Union collapsed and Armenia became an independent country.

LA County in California has the largest population of Armenians in the world outside Armenia, with the city of Glendale — sometimes called Little Armenia — considered the epicenter of Armenian language and culture in California. Armenian is widely spoken in LA, with Armenian restaurants and schools scattered around the city. For many, the Armenian diaspora in California provides a grounding community. But for others, the diaspora can sometimes feel suffocating.

“I wanted to get out [of the community] because I really needed space to be myself,” said Kyle Khandikian, who grew up in LA and went to an Armenian school in Encino.

Khandikian, who identifies as gay, said that when he was growing up, LGBTQ issues were a taboo subject in LA’s Armenian community.

“As a kid, I didn’t feel like I could be out and I wasn’t out,” Khandikian said.

When he started college at UCLA, Khandikian tried stepping away from the Armenian community. But being Armenian continued to be an important part of his identity.

“I think that if you asked one of my friends from UCLA, ‘Who is Kyle?’, one of the first things they will say is, ‘Kyle is Armenian,’” Khandikian said.

Once Khandikian got some distance from the Armenian community during college and became comfortable with his sexuality, he felt like his different identities — Armenian and queer — could coexist. That made him want to wholeheartedly embrace his Armenian side in a way he felt like he couldn’t before.

So, he moved to Yerevan to immerse himself in Armenian culture.

“Maybe one of the reasons why I wanted to come here is to let go of some of the baggage that I was given just by way of being born into this place and this people,” Khandikian said.

Kyle Khandikian hiking in Yeghegis, Armenia. Growing up, Khandikian wanted space from the Armenian community in LA that he grew up in, but as an adult he decided to move to Yerevan to immerse himself in his family's culture.

Credit:

Levi Bridges/The World

A reverse brain drainArthur Aghadjanians never planned to move from LA to Armenia. He got stuck there while visiting the country in 2020 due to pandemic restrictions.

Aghadjanians spent that time in Yerevan holed up writing songs on the guitar and discovering local Armenian music. “I had no idea we have so much talent here,” he said.

He decided that he wanted to connect the Armenian diaspora — which he says is linked closely through political issues and common history — through something more fun like music.

So, he now spends most of the year in Armenia, where he operates an online platform called Carpet Jam, which curates videos of Armenian musicians. He has a packed schedule networking and helping musicians produce music videos for the site.

Aghadjanians had never made a music video before he moved to Yerevan. He used to work in construction back in LA, but he always played music on the side.

“Just being around a place like Hollywood, you’ve seen how it’s done right, so you come here and try to follow the same suit,” Aghadjanians said.

Aghadjanians’ startup and the skills he brings with it from the years he spent in California are an example of a sort of reverse brain drain happening in Armenia. Instead of educated, skilled workers moving away from their home countries for opportunities in the US, Armenian Americans are bringing their skills back to Armenia.

Mikael Matossian from the San Fernando Valley used to work in the renewable energy industry in LA. Now he helps Armenia make its energy system less dependent on Russian gas.

“I think there’s a really important role for diasporans to play here to support the ongoing development of the country,” he said.

Arthur Aghadjanians stands on the set of a music video he helped produce recently in Yerevan for his online platform Carpet Jam, which showcases Armenian musicians.

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Levi Bridges/The World

A sense of communityEven though Matossian had never lived in Armenia full time before moving to Yerevan last year, he said the country immediately felt like home. Just hearing people talking in Armenian everywhere, the language he spoke with his parents and grandparents back in LA, gave everything a sense of familiarity.

But moving to Armenia isn’t a seamless transition for many who grew up as part of the diaspora. Matossian — and many other Californians — use a dialect called Western Armenian commonly spoken by the descendents of those who fled parts of the country that were annexed to Turkey during the genocide a century ago.

Many Californians who move here have to master the local dialect, Eastern Armenian, spoken in the capital. Matossian said he initially felt self-conscious when he spoke after arriving in Yerevan.

“I wanted to fit in here, but I’ve since kind of abandoned that idea — I’m comfortable with my dialect,” he explained.

Twenty-eight-year-old Mikael Matossian, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley in California, moved to Yerevan last year and rents an apartment from an Armenian man who moved to LA. “I feel like we traded places,” Matossian said.

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Levi Bridges/The World

Older Californians like Hovik Manucharyan say they want their children to grow up with a closer connection to Armenian language and culture.

The move was a big change for Manucharyan’s three kids, but they felt welcomed when they arrived at their new Armenian school. Manucharyan’s 17-year-old daughter, Vardine, said American students don’t really care when a new kid shows up in class. But in Armenia, students crowded around her on her first day at school, introducing themselves and offering to show her around.

“Schools [in Armenia] are more like family,” she said.

Californians living in Yerevan described feeling closer to their ancestral homeland after moving there. Their families survived a genocide that tried to extinguish Armenian culture.

But the survivors carried it with them when they fled, as if their traditions and language were burning embers that they later rekindled, in places like California, into big roaring bonfires.

Moving nearly halfway around the world makes the Armenian experience more palpable — something they can touch without getting burnt and carry with them wherever they go.

An earlier version of this story originally appeared on KQED. Read the original article.

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When Rayeheh Mozafarian talks about Varzeshe Pahlavani, her eyes light up.

The 37-year-old lives in Tehran, Iran, where she practices the centuries-old sport. She is among the many Iranian women who want to participate officially but are not allowed to. So, she has embarked on a campaign to try and change that.

Varzeshe Pahlavani goes back more than 2,000 years, to what was then the Persian Empire.

“This art of Pahlavani runs like a thread throughout the history of Iran,” said Khashayar Azad, who is based in Sydney, Australia, and teaches the sport.

“There have been several waves of invasions and conquests and empires building and falling, etc.,” he said, “but one thing that they have had in common throughout the long history of Iran and Persian culture has been Pahlavani as an art form.”

Pahlavani combines sports with rhythmic music in a place called the zoorkhaneh, which literally translates to “house of strength.”

Athletes typically form a circle in a pit and they lift two large wooden clubs above their heads and twist them in circular motions.

The men then move an iron bow from side to side and perform what’s known as the shenow, similar to a push up.

According to Azad, step one to mastering Varzeshe Pahlavani is to let go of one’s ego.

That’s why, for example, the pit in the zoorkhaneh dips to a lower level than the ground — to emphasize modesty and humility.

“It is the art of developing and cultivating spiritual strength and physical strength [in] equal measure,” he said.

But what’s not always been equal in this tradition is the exclusion of women from practicing in the zoorkhaneh or mixing with the men.

“This is a national sport. That means it belongs to all Iranians, not just men.”

Rayeheh Mozafarian, Tehran resident who practices Pahlavani

“This is a national sport,” Mozafarian said from her home in Tehran, “that means it belongs to all Iranians, not just men.”

She wants to help women gain access to the zoorkhaneh and be able to form teams of their own. But doing so has been a challenge.

Mozafarian said she has heard all kinds of excuses from officials and male athletes who want to keep women out of the sport.

“For example, one thing they tell me,” she said, “is that this is too tough for women and it’ll make their bodies too muscular and masculine.”

“I tell them to mind their own business,” she added. “I remind them of how women carry a baby for nine months and deliver it, no problem.”

She’s even met with religious officials and said that they are not, in fact, the ones standing in the way. They even issued a fatwa — or religious edict — leaving the door open to women’s participation.

The most intense pushback has come from a small, but vocal, group of purists.

Campaigning onlineTo work around the hurdles, Mozafarian has taken her campaign online, posting about Pahlavani on an Instagram page called Zan va Zoorkhaneh, or Woman and Zoorkhaneh.

She has received videos and pictures of women and girls playing the sport in their homes or in quiet corners at parks. What was surprising, she explained, was that many of them were getting training from their fathers, brothers or husbands, which shows that the men in their lives support their participation in the sport.

Mozafarian has also given interviews to the news media and shares some videos of women practicing Pahlavani at home.

“These photos of women holding the wooden clubs and practicing Pahlavani and playing the music that goes along with the sport,” she said, “all that is helping to break this long-held taboo on women’s participation.”

Even though Mozafarian hasn’t been able to persuade leaders to let women have their own teams and participate, she said the recent protests that began in September against restrictions on women’s freedoms in Iran have helped her cause.

“The protests are like a wake-up call,” she said, “a reminder to men that women in Iran will not stop demanding their rights, no matter how long it takes.

Related: TarantisT bandleader on protests in Iran: 'This is not protest anymore. This is a revolution'

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In early March 2022, Maria Onofreichuk’s life couldn’t have been more unstable.

Just a week earlier, Russia invaded her home country of Ukraine, prompting her to flee to Western Europe.

Days into her journey, Onofreichuk found herself living in a homeless shelter in Calais, desperately waiting for a British visa so she could go and live with a family friend in London.

She was 24, single and traveling without her parents for the first time in her life.

She was worried, afraid and quickly ran out of money.

What a difference a year makes.

At a park recently in North London, Onofreichuk shared some big updates.

“I had a wedding, got married and am waiting for a child,” she said, pointing to her belly. “I am happy now.”

Her new husband’s name is Grisha.

When he temporarily agreed to host Maria in London last year, she knew him as a friend from her hometown near the Romanian-Ukrainian border.

Onofreichuk and her husband at their wedding.

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Courtesy of Maria Onofreichuk

He had already been living in London for several years, working as a plumber when Russia’s invasion began.

“When I came, we fell in love. That’s all,” she told The World.

Well...not quite all.

They fell in love, found an apartment on the outskirts of North London, and have since been navigating the ups and downs of living life as refugees while their home country is at war.

Take their wedding, which took place in late May.

Onifreychuk shared photos of her elaborate bejeweled lace white gown and the ornate Romanian Orthodox Church where the ceremony occurred.

Because of the war at home, their wedding was held in Romania.

“My wedding was very beautiful, but unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of people because of the war in Ukraine,” she said.

Only 43 guests, almost all women, since most Ukrainian men are fighting.

But Onofreichuk isn’t complaining.

She said it’s just another reality of what life is like for many Ukrainians like her living out their formative years amidst conflict.

Today Onofreychuk is still adjusting to her new life in London, a city she’s fallen in love with.

She works in a Polish grocery store in her neighborhood and has been making friends with her coworkers.

Slowly, her English is improving.

She and her husband hope to move into a bigger place before their new child arrives in the fall. Bigger also means more expensive, but they’ve been saving up as much as possible.

She said that the last year had been a lesson in independence.

“I changed myself; I became more of an adult,” she said. “I learned how to live without my parents.”

In other words, Onofreichuk says she’s not afraid anymore. She supposes that’s what it means to become an adult.

Related: Calls for UK to welcome Sudanese refugees the same way as Ukrainians

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When Iryna Kazakova rolled her suitcase down the gravel road last month into Hallingelille, an ecovillage located about 6 miles outside of Ringsted, Denmark, she was greeted with warm hugs.

Kazakova had just returned to Denmark after a two-month stay back home in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, in Ukraine, where she was visiting her parents. Kazakova had fled the city, located just 20 miles from the border with Russia, last summer after it had become a major target of attacks.

“I decided that I want to go to Ukraine to understand if I can [be] able to live there for a long time ... to visit my friends, my family, and to understand if I'm strong enough to live with all these alarms and explosions,” she said.

Iryna Kazakova is one of the founders and coordinators of the Green Road project. She is currently based at Hallingelille ecovillage in rural Denmark.

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Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

But upon her return to Hallingelille, Kazakova was reminded of the work still ahead as one of the founders and coordinators of the Green Road, an initiative to connect Ukrainian refugees with safe places to stay in ecovillages across Ukraine and throughout Europe.

Over the last year, the Green Road project has helped relocate at least 3,000 displaced Ukrainians in 40 ecovillages throughout Ukraine and over 300 ecovillages in Europe, including Denmark. As the war continues in Ukraine, the Green Road has become a testament to the power of international friendships, networks and informal support in times of crisis.

Hallingelille is surrounded by seemingly endless grassy fields dotted with white dandelion flowers.

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Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

Ecovillages are intentional communities formed by people with a common interest in sustainable living. According to the umbrella organization Global Ecovillage Network, there are over 10,000 ecovillages around the world — and no two are alike.

The ecovillage movement is said to have originated in Denmark, with roots in the Danish co-housing movement of the late 1960s. Its 49 ecovillages are some of the most established in the world and often emphasize a communal lifestyle.

Hallingelille, one of Denmark’s newer ecovillages established in 2005, is among the many European sites on the Green Road map.

An example of the unique ecologically designed structures at Hallingelille, an ecovillage in rural Ringsted, Denmark.

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Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

This idyllic, rural community, surrounded by endless grassy fields dotted with white dandelion flowers, is home to about 50 adults and 20 children who live in 20 ecologically designed houses on land shared with several horses, sheep, pigs and a few loud roosters.

A common house overlooking a peaceful lake is the heart of this community — members share communal dinners here at least twice a week.

Over the last 15 years, residents have also built a sauna, a multipurpose warehouse, yoga and meditation center and an art studio. The group also works together to tend a forest, greenhouse and several vegetable gardens.

Far from the bombs and explosions of an ongoing war in Ukraine, it’s here where Kazakova works alongside other Ukrainian and Danish volunteers on ensuring that the Green Road project continues.

Developing the Green Road visionKazakova said that a flurry of phone calls with her colleague, Anastasiya Volkova, founder of Permaculture in Ukraine, and Maksym Zalevskyi, president of Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) Ukraine, led to the idea that ecovillages could provide temporary shelter for Ukrainian refugees.

Within the first few days of the invasion, calls poured in from members of Europe’s Global Ecovillage Network ready to assist — from Germany to Denmark, Hungary to Poland — and these weekly calls became a lifeline, she said.

“It was an island of stability in an unstable world for us,” she said.

A map that would become known as the Green Road began to circulate online along with a Google sheet and volunteer contact information for every ecovillage willing to host within Ukraine and across Europe, including Hallingelille.

A screenshot of the map that later became known as the Green Road helps identify ecovillages across Ukraine and Europe where displaced Ukrainians can find refuge.

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Green Road screenshot via Google Maps

“During the first year of war — especially the first six months — we were quite busy, like we didn't know what would happen, so we had to prepare as much as we could. And that's also why we applied for all these funds,” said Camilla Nielsen-Englyst, the head of Denmark’s National Association of Ecovillages (LOS), who also lives at Hallingelille.

Denmark’s Civil Society and Development organization granted about $90,000 to the Green Road project through an emergency fund — and honored them with an Initiative Prize in April. Several other individual and private donors and organizations have also raised funds and materials for the project.

Nielsen-Englyst said that established working relationships with Ukrainians on prior permaculture and ecovillage design trainings, seminars and summits over the last six years made it possible to act quickly — and collectively — on a humanitarian response.

Camilla Nielsen-Englyst (center) is the the head of Denmark’s National Association of Ecovillages (LOS) and also lives at Hallingelille. She is one of the key organizers of the Green Road.

Credit:

Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

There are currently five Ukrainian adults and five children who have followed the Green Road to Hallingelille.

Plants growing in the expanded greenhouse adjacent to the common house at Hallingelille, an ecovillage in rural Ringsted, Denmark.

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Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

Nataliya Masol and Andriy Parashchenko, originally from Kyiv, were familiar with ecovillages and heard about the Green Road online. Using the map, they sought out shelter with their five children, with brief stays in Romania, the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany before arriving in Hallingelile.

For Masol, expanding the greenhouse and planting tomatoes was the first thing she did when she arrived.

“When we came from Ukraine, it was like, we have no job and we were searching for the job and it was like, the first thing I begin to do because I need to do something. And last year, we had a lot of tomatoes growing,” she said from the sund-renched greenhouse adjacent to the common house where a new batch of tomatoes grow.

Olesia Panchenko, also from Kyiv, had stayed in Denmark before and decided to follow in Kazakova’s footsteps to Hallingelile as a volunteer with the Green Road.

Panchenko said it was a chance meeting with Kazakova at a permaculture design training in Ukraine a few years back that changed her life and set her firmly on an ecological path.

Panchenko entered the country as a tourist and only planned to stay for two months or so. But last year, Denmark passed a law called the Special Act that allows Ukrainians to bypass the asylum system and expedites residency status for a period of two years.

To receive the estimated $800 monthly stipend from the state, registered Ukrainians must take Danish-language classes and actively seek employment.

For Panchenko, that means juggling between volunteer work with the Green Road project, language classes, an unpaid internship, and ecovillage responsibilities like planting trees and tending to the vegetable gardens, though she noted how the Danes don’t necessarily take advantage of the vegetables, opting for the supermarket instead.

“Usually, you have two types of villages. I think in Ukraine, it's a little bit different from Denmark, because in Ukraine, usually, it means that you live and learn to grow your own food. Mostly, you can be self-sufficient. And so, it's mostly about the eco-way, not [the] community way,” Panchenko said.

Iryna Kazakova and Olesia Panchenko work on the Green Road project from Hallingelille, an ecovillage in rural Ringsted, Denmark.

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Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

Andriy Parashchenko, who came to Hallingelille with his family, said he enjoys the community focus here. He landed a job nine months ago as an IT programmer and now makes a three-hour commute back and forth to Copenhagen two days a week, working remotely the rest of the time. He said he’s earning enough to rent a house on Hallingelille where they plan to stay for now.

“In Danish culture, I like [it] a lot and I'm learning a lot — how they can be relaxed in their life and be happy and relaxed and do the same work. And how to say — they can achieve the same goals as if working hard. So, I'm learning to work in the Danish way here — relax and enjoy life,” Parashchenko said.

Hallingelille community members share a meal together in the common house that overlooks a shimmering lake.

Credit:

Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

Support for Ukraine’s ecovillagesWhereas Danish ecovillages have a strong emphasis on community, Ukrainian ecovillages have traditionally focused moreso on self-sufficiency.

Before the war, Kazakova said about 600 people were living in simple, modest ecovillages scattered across Ukraine, and that number doubled when about 600 internally displaced people arrived hoping to survive the harsh winter.

Most of the country’s 40 ecovillages had some food supplies, simple infrastructure and a way to grow food, but not much in the way of accommodations or other critical supplies.

“In the very beginning, we really needed just very simple things because people arrived in the ecovillages without anything. So, we bought food, clothes, some medicines and very, very simple things because there was nothing,” Kazakova said.

But what the villagers had — they were willing to share, she added.

Within the first six months, Green Road coordinators oversaw the delivery into Ukraine of 35 greenhouses, 10 two-wheel tractors, gardening tools, tanks for harvesting rainwater, food dehydrators and equipment for milking animals. They also sent several refrigerators, washing machines, beds and mattresses as well as building materials.

Zalevskyi, who started GEN Ukraine in 2018 with the aim to unite and strengthen the country’s existing eco-settlements, said that many people who fled to rural areas during the war came from Soviet-era industrial cities with no prior experience or interest in an ecovillage lifestyle.

Maksym Zalevskiy is the founder of Ukraine's national ecovillage network and also a co-founder of the Green Road project.

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Courtesy of Maksym Zalevskiy

This has ushered in a “new wave of evolution for our ecovillages,” Zalevskyi said, adding that community-building and conflict resolution has been necessary to mediate the clashing of ideologies — pro-Ukrainian, pro-Russian, and pro-Soviet.

“Our Green Road [connects] all of them and we [connect] because we help refugees ... we have no ideological conflict because war is for helping people in collapse. It [made] us a strong network because everyone wants to help,” Zalevskyi said.

Over the last year, about 300 people eventually moved on to other living situations while 300 have stayed on in the ecovillages. The Green Road project is working with these groups to restore abandoned houses and learn new skills like nonviolent communication, decision-making, and permaculture methods that emphasize care for people and the land and fair sharing.

“We want to save [our] communities and continue community-building and we [are] using tools and instruments ... to do that in harmony with people and mediate conflicts in all communities,” Zalevskyi said.

The project has now shifted to a new stage geared more toward advocacy, capacity-building and networking.

With plenty of bicycles to go around in Denmark, the group launched a bicycle project that they hope will generate income for displaced Ukrainians living in the ecovillages. They plan to collect used bicycles from Denmark to donate to about six ecovillages, and offer workshops on how to repair and build bicycles for resale.

The Green Road is now supporting bicycle workshops in Ukrainian ecovillages as an income-generating initiative.

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Courtesy of GEN Ukraine/Facebook

Nielsen-Englyst, with LOS, noted that there have been challenges along the way. Hallingelille residents have had to adjust to new dynamics as hosts, and the relentless organizing to meet overwhelming needs has inevitably burned people out.

“There are some compromises and some costs and sometimes, also some conflicts,” she said. “And I think that's also what we can see in Ukraine as well, that living together is not always easy.”

Kazakova said she keeps “the millions of Ukrainians who continue to live in fear” at the forefront of her mind while living in Denmark.

As the war continues in Ukraine, so does the Green Road toward a more peaceful and sustainable future.

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Sixty-three-year-old Naglaa Sadik Ahmed Mustaf, sat on a park bench in northwest London. She carefully pulled out an envelope containing a worn photo of her son, Mohsin, on his wedding day in 2014. 

With Mohsin’s hands delicately placed around his new bride’s waist, the happy couple was all smiles. 

But the years that followed that day have been marked by challenge and loss.

“He went through lots of tragedies,” Ahmed Mustaf said. 

Tragedies such as losing his first wife, Houda, who died during childbirth. 

The most recent tragedy came in mid-April when Mohsin, who lives in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, found himself trapped in a war zone. Two opposing military generals launched the country into a civil war, which to date has killed over a thousand civilians and displaced more than 2.5 million. 

“My son, my flesh and blood, he is there amongst the war,” Ahmed Mustaf said.

When they last spoke, Mohsin escaped the shelling and bombings in Khartoum, and was staying with family in central Sudan. But the situation remains precarious. 

Hospitals are barely operating, and electricity, food and water are scarce. 

Ahmed Mustaf is a Sudanese British national. An activist and journalist in her home country, she came to the UK as a refugee about 20 years ago and now works as a professional translator. She said that she’s been working tirelessly to get her son and his family into the UK. 

“I emailed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs here asking, ‘What can I do? My son is there and he is in a dangerous situation,’” she said. 

She said that the British Home Office told her to go to the government’s website for a standard visit visa.

But the British Embassy in Khartoum closed shortly after the conflict began, leaving people like Mohsin stuck in limbo. 

Since April, there have been multiple calls for the British government to open up a special sanctuary program for Sudanese refugees looking to escape the conflict, as was done for Ukrainians fleeing the Russian invasion under the Homes for Ukraine program.

But to date, the government has shown no signs of offering Sudanese refugees a safe and legal route to the UK. 

“The tragic situation in Sudan has really highlighted the hypocrisy of the British system,” said Mark Davies, the head of communications and campaigns at the British Refugee Council. 

Davies applauded the British government for changing its asylum policies within a month of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to welcome hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees, noting the discrepancy between the government's treatment of Ukrainian and Sudanese refugees.  

“But for Sudanese people seeking to come to this country for whatever reason ... it's that much harder,” he noted. 

Activists have accused Britain’s Home Office of operating a “racist” refugee system, but government officials have said their priority is to end the fighting in Sudan.

British Home Secretary Suella Braverman told reporters the government has “no plans” to start looking into safe routes for refugees from Sudan.  

In June, a parliamentary committee heard testimonies from Sudanese nationals in the UK, as well as several nongovernmental organizations. 

Maddy Crowther is the co-director of Waging Peace, which helps Sudanese asylum-seekers process their asylum applications once they arrive on British soil.

Crowther accused the government of keeping Sudanese nationals “in limbo” for not processing asylum applications quickly enough, leaving applicants unable to work or access health care benefits.

“Why are we not letting them rebuild here in the UK in the ways that we know they can, and making the contributions that we know they can?” Crowther asked.

According to the latest government figures from late March, more than 5,000 Sudanese are already in the UK waiting to have their asylum applications processed, with thousands more in other countries waiting to apply.

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India is now officially the world’s most populous country, surpassing China’s lead. Close to 40% of its 1.4 billion people live in its cities — and where you live in Indian cities, like Mumbai, mostly depends on which community you belong to and how rich you are. Recent research has confirmed this.

Indian cities are cosmopolitan. They have residents from communities across the country from different castes and religions, said Naveen Bharathi, an assistant professor of public policy at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, “they all stay in different segregated neighborhoods.”

Privileged communities live in neighborhoods with good-quality education, health and livelihood opportunities. Others struggle to access basic amenities.

Unless this is addressed immediately, India might be headed toward unbridgeable inequality.

Caste segregation The government recognizes New Bhabrekar Nagar in Mumbai, which sits on the marshy beaches of the Arabian Sea, as a "slum" and, therefore, it is required to provide water, electricity and roads to the neighborhood.

However, on a visit by The World, one could see narrow roads with open drains, single-room homes packed together next to each other like a row of matchboxes and a bunch of women fighting for water from a single pipe, with residents storing clean water in 20-liter cans for future use.

Children in New Bhabrekar Nagar go to fetch clean water carrying large cans.

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Raksha Kumar/The World

“Since we get clean drinking water only once in five days, we fight like this almost every week,” Mamta Thakur, who estimates her age to be around 50 years, told The World. Thakur belongs to Other Backward Castes or the middle castes. A majority of residents in New Bhabrekar Nagar belong to middle or lower castes, often called Dalits.

The neighborhood occupies a prominent place in a Mumbai suburb, but did not have electricity until 2011, said Sachin Nachnekar, who works for the local nonprofit Youth for Unity and Voluntary Action.

Many people who settle in these "slums" come from different parts of the country in search of jobs. The architect of India’s Constitution Dr. Ambedkar, who was a Dalit himself, had famously called upon marginalized communities to move to the cities and leave behind caste hierarchies in the villages.

Ambujwadi, Mumbai, is a motley group of temporary shelters on the Arabian Sea.

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Raksha Kumar/The World

He thought the city would be the great equalizer. “What is a village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?" Ambedkar said while drafting the Constitution. That has not come to be, Bharathi said.

“The emancipatory promise of urbanization has failed to fructify for millions of Dalits and Muslims who are relegated to the spaces with poor public services,” according to a February 2022 study.

Thakur is lucky that she has access to clean drinking water at all.

Abutting New Bhabrekar Nagar is a neighborhood of more than 70,000 people that does not find itself on Mumbai’s map, called Ambujwadi. And since it does not exist, the government is not required to provide basic facilities like water and sewage to its residents. Most of Ambujwadi is populated by the Pardi community, one of the lowest in India’s caste hierarchy. The British had termed them "criminal tribes." The residents are expected to pay to install their own hand pumps. Since the neighborhood sits on marshy land there is often no water to be drawn from the hand pump. And when there is, it is contaminated.

Residents of Ambujwadi rely on water from hand pumps, which is mostly contaminated.

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Raksha Kumar/The World

Ambujwadi has temporary shelters made from tin and plastic sheets, slushy mud roads and animal carcasses lying around. A group of women from other neighborhoods bring big bags full of garbage to dump on the roads of Ambujwadi.

“Ambujwadi has one of the highest number of school dropouts in Mumbai,” Nachnekar, of the nonprofit group, said. Most people from this neighborhood stand at traffic signals and beg for loose change. It is very difficult to enroll the children in schools because they have to go along with their families to earn a living, he added.

The country was always segregatedHistorically, India was a mosaic of segregated villages spread out across the country. Even today, Indian villages are divided along caste lines. Over the decades, though, the country saw many waves of urbanization. And every time, Bharthi said, segregation patterns in rural India began to replicate themselves in the cities.

During colonial times, cities were planned and built bearing in mind caste and religious factors, Bharathi told The World. In Bangalore, for example, the difference is starkly visible between the "old Bangalore" parts occupied by dominant castes and the cantonment area that has migrant labor from nearby states.

Tall buildings are visible from Malwani, a neighborhood of lower caste communities and Muslims.

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Raksha Kumar/The World

Since then, in subsequent waves of urbanization in India, communities that moved to the cities ended up settling close to each other.

Until the 1980s, the government was a major provider of urban housing. However, when the Indian economy opened up, the State withdrew from its role in housing. “Now, housing is in the hands of private players, real estate developers and equity is not one of their goals,” said Bharathi. “And when that happens, since class and caste overlap in Indian society, you [find] in very elite neighborhoods, upper caste-dominated people,” he added.

Economist Sam Asher, an associate professor of economics at Imperial College London Business School, recently published a study, along with other academics, on housing segregation in India that shows how it perpetuates inequality. “We found that areas that have a lot of scheduled castes and Muslims are much less likely to get these government facilities,” Asher told The World.

Another major reason for segregation is religious riots. “Segregation is sometimes also a choice made by members of marginalized communities to achieve greater safety,” Asher explained.

Mumbra, on the outskirts of Mumbai, has one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in India. Its population increased after the city of Mumbai saw large-scale riots in 1992. “A neighborhood that is entirely Muslim is half as likely to have a government secondary school as a nearby neighborhood that has no Muslims in it,” Asher said.

A government constructed toilet in Malwani, Mumbai. Since these are not usable, the residents are forced to defecate in public.

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Raksha Kumar/The World

Shireen Dalvi is a translator and publisher who lives in Mumbra. She said her young nieces and nephews have a tough time getting loans from banks or jobs when their resume says they live in Mumbra. Without access to good education, employment or credit, generations of people continue to remain marginalized, she said.

Mumbai is not without its fancy neighborhoods with tall buildings, roads with big cars, uninterrupted water supply and massive shops flaunting big international brands. But most communities that get to occupy it have generations of privilege.Meanwhile, Mamta Thakur said her aim is to move to a different part of her neighborhood, where she can get access to clean water every alternate day.

Related: Hip-hop artists in India call out caste discrimination

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Early last year, just after Russian tanks started rolling into Ukraine, a whole host of nations responded quickly with sanctions against Russia.

At the time, it felt like Russia’s economy was suddenly in big trouble. In one day, the Russian ruble plummeted against the dollar, dropping 30%.

Russian citizens flocked to ATMs hoping to withdraw their money, fearing that the country would face cash shortages.

But then, going into April of last year, the ruble seemed to bounce back. But now, once again, the Russian currency has been in a free fall. Last week, the ruble reached its lowest point against the US dollar since the start of the war in Ukraine. That could have implications for the Russian economy.

Rachel Ziemba, follows sanctions and the Russian economy at the Center for New American Security.

Western nations, she said, “hiked interest rates sharply, and they also imposed capital controls; they made it very difficult for people to take money out of the country, plus the fact that Russia continued to sell oil and gas, helped to stabilize Russian currency.”

So, in the face of sanctions, the Russian economy was staying afloat.

This continues to be something that Russian President Vladimir Putin likes to talk about.

Speaking last month in St. Petersburg, Putin said that “Russia’s economy continues to be robust and ambitious.”

He acknowledged “difficulties” and “problems” encountered by Russia but said they’re just making Russia’s economy stronger. But that positive spin on the sanctions can’t paper over certain realities.

Last month’s attempted mutiny by Wagner mercenary fighters led by Yevgeny Prigozhin brought a level of political uncertainty that Putin had never dealt with. And that’s when the ruble started tanking.

Ziemba said that “with currencies, it’s always that precipitous nature of a decline that's, you know, more concerning. We have heard evidence suggest that Russians did accelerate their pulling of assets outside of the banking system.”

According to the country’s Central Bank, Russians withdrew 100 billion rubles — that’s more than a billion dollars, from banks over the course of just a few days during the panic of the Prigozhin mutiny.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov tried to downplay these concerns last week, saying: “there is no question of economic stability here.”

That interpretation was echoed on Russian state TV.

TV presenter Yevgeny Popov declared “nothing dramatic is happening here,” referring to the plunging ruble. He then said that this is a natural process of Russia’s economy transitioning from Western markets to the east.

Ziemba said that process is taking place.

“Much of Russia’s oil goes to India and China, other emerging markets. So, when we look at it, both Russia’s supplies and the commodities Russia sells are going to a different set of countries than they were two years ago.”

And that’s a direct result of economic sanctions imposed against Russia. The question remains, are the sanctions strong enough to undercut Russia’s economy and have a real impact on Russia’s war in Ukraine?

“This is a case where the restrictive tools can only do so much, especially where as a global economy we still rely on Russian oil and gas. And I think it’s very difficult for a country that is as committed to this sort of military action, it’s very difficult to sway them just on economic terms,” Ziemba said.

The US, along with the G7 countries, have tried implementing an oil price cap to limit Russia’s oil revenues. But it’s still unclear how well that’s being enforced.

Ultimately, Ziemba said that Ukraine’s fate will not just depend on the success of economic sanctions against Russia. It will have a lot more to do with what happens on the battlefield in Ukraine.

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Walk the crowded streets of Cairo and Giza in Egypt, and you're bound to hear Mahraganat — Egypt's homegrown iteration of hip-hop.

The 2011 revolution there served as a catapult for free expression, and the rap and trap scenes benefited.

But these days, Mahraganat musicians are not allowed to perform at public venues. The government has outright banned the music on university campuses in Egypt.

Still, the genre is finding a way to thrive.

Egyptian journalist Yasmine el-Rashidi explores how and why in her new book, "Laughter in the Dark: Egypt to the Tune of Change." We reached her in Cairo for the latest installment in our series Planet Hip Hop.

Marco Werman: Yasmine, tell us about the roots of Mahraganat. Where did it all begin? Yasmine el-Rashidi: Mahraganat is inspired by American hip-hop. It grew out of the deepest alleys in Cairo, in lesser privileged neighborhoods where young people began to experiment with beats, sounds and lyrics expressing their socio-economic realities.So, it really was kind of an expression of frustration before the 2011 revolution. We know many feelings among the public were suppressed under [former President Hosni] Mubarak, and I wonder if you see Mahraganat as almost more of an attitude, a new approach to not self-censor — a generational shifting of gears, even, in Egypt.Absolutely. I mean, hip-hop is a very interesting way of measuring political stamina in Egypt at this moment. And political stamina, I don't mean in terms of actually a political movement, but the will to speak out.Marwan Pablo, first known as Dama, is one exponent of that shift. You call him one of Egypt's most popular and successful young rappers. Marwan Pablo came off the street scene in Alexandria, an especially conservative part of Egypt, right?Yeah, he comes from Alexandria. One of the things that the revolution revealed to us was that Alexandria was sort of the breeding ground of the most ultra-orthodox currents of the Islamic movement: Salafism. It’s part of what makes his rise so interesting. In the song "El Gholaf X Ozoris,” he's talking about drinking to forget … drinking, obviously referring to alcohol. It's really a pushing back against all the norms and expectations, against the history of conforming, silence and swallowing your words. And he speaks very freely about things that certainly my generation was raised to not speak about, from drinking to relationships to even speaking about money.Well, these days, as you've already alluded to, there are many things to push back against. In recent years, Mahraganat musicians have often run headlong into government censors. Things really came to a head at the start of 2020 when two singers, Hassan Shakosh and Omar Kamal, played “Bent El Geran” live at a stadium in Cairo. Why did it stir up so much controversy?The song is “Bent El Geran,” meaning "The neighbor's daughter." And they rap about being so preoccupied with the neighbor's daughter and needing to smoke and drink to forget her. It had been out for a while, but then it headlined at a concert in Cairo Stadium, where tens of thousands of audience members were present. And it was aired on TV. It [had] millions of viewers. The next morning, we woke up, and everyone was talking about the song. By singing those words at Cairo Stadium, where our official football team plays, officials go … it was almost like it was normalizing the talk of smoking hashish or drinking.Right. I mean, it's a song that marked a turning point. Egyptian authorities made the musicians apologize, then released a sanitized version. And then, authorities decided that all Mahraganat musicians would need a license to sing. How did musicians and fans react?On the one hand, of course, there was outrage because as soon as you begin to crack down on music in any form, you're cracking down on culture. On the other hand, there was a big question of how on Earth you crack down on Mahraganat or any kind of music when most music is streamed online.One other artist I want to focus on is Mohamed Ramadan. He's one of Egypt's highest-paid performers. His hit “Tanteet,” released last year, comes with a music video where he flaunts his phenomenal wealth. In the video, he strides into a billionaire's casino with a loaded gun, like he owns the place. It's pretty gangster, and yet he's allowed to perform. How do Egyptian authorities square that circle?It's a bit of a Catch-22. Mohamed Ramadan is extremely popular. He was popular first as an actor. He made his name and his fame from acting. He has reached a level of fame and fortune, sort of like Jay-Z, and he is all about flaunting his private jet rides, his fleet of super expensive sports cars, and his gold and watches. It's tricky because, on the one hand, a lot of Egyptians see him as co-opting social norms and values; on the other hand, you know, one of his close friends, and he's constantly showing this off, is the Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, who is respected and liked. And you can't really stop him. You know, even if the music syndicates and the authorities want to crack down on Mahraganat, there's nothing that they can really do with a personality like that. His wealth has afforded him privilege.There is another rising international Mahraganat star, Wegz, whose song “Ezz Al Arab” was released with a video as part of the official soundtrack to the FIFA World Cup in Qatar last year. I wanted to bring up Wegz because perhaps it tells us where Egypt’s Mahraganat scene is headed. Is this genre a voice for change, or is there a part of this community that's been co-opted by El-Sisi and his government and another that's firmly underground for the foreseeable future?Wegz has exploded now onto the international scene. He's extremely talented, and he's a really good role model. I think he can raise this genre and this form to a new level where the government will not be able to touch it. What is interesting, important and powerful about Mahraganat is that it gives voice to a generation that the government traditionally and historically has tried to silence. And somehow, through this music, they are speaking out, and they are expressing and exploring creativity. The key is how the government will give them opportunity with that. I think that will define where this goes. When people say, "What happened to Egypt," "What happened to the revolution," "The revolution is dead" and "What happened to that energy?" The energy is there. The energy is in this music scene. And in these artists and what they're doing. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Related: Hip-hop artists in India call out caste discrimination

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The city of Saint-Louis, in northern Senegal, is grappling with a dire reality: rising sea levels.

The former administrative capital of French West Africa, Saint-Louis sits between the Senegal River and the Atlantic Ocean. Its highest point stands just 13 feet above sea level, and it gets waves from both fresh and seawater that have become a growing threat.

Fishing is one of the main industries in Saint-Louis. But the city’s fishing village of Guet Ndar is now on the verge of disappearing.

“We had to walk very far to reach the ocean, but now we have it right in front of our houses.”

Cheikh Badiane, retired fisherman

“Growing up, what we used to see is not what we're seeing today,” said Cheikh Badiane, a retired fisherman who grew up in the neighborhood and still lives there with his children and grandchildren. “We had to walk very far to reach the ocean, but now we have it right in front of our houses.”

Several decades ago, Badiane recalled, the water was half a mile away. Now, it washes up to the houses on the shore, sometimes seeping through the windows.

In 2018, a high-tide event destroyed many houses, mosques and schools in Guet Ndar. About 1,500 people were forced to move to Diougop, a displacement camp funded by the United Nations that’s 5 miles away inland. Most of them still live there.

Back in 2018, a school was destroyed by a high-tide event on the coast of Saint-Louis, Senegal.

Credit:

Maria Elena Romero/The World

All the tents at the camp look identical, with white walls, a blue roof and little plastic windows. There are a few trees and everything is surrounded by sand.

“We are here, but that's not what we truly want. We really miss the beachside,” said Sailo Boufal, a mother who has lived in the camp with her kids for four years, after their house was destroyed.

She said the relentless heat is the worst part of it.

“We don't have electricity. We are already dead because of the heat, nobody can go in the tents before 10 p.m.”

Sailo Boufal, a mother at the displacement camp who says she and her kids miss the beachside, lies down on the floor of a grocery shop where she works.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

Boufal said she doesn’t see a future for her family at the camp, even if the government builds new houses for them. So, she said she’s considering getting on a smuggling boat and trying to make it to the Canary Islands, in Spain, like many of her neighbors have already done.

Cheik Badiane, a retired fisherman in the vibrant fishing village of Guet Ndar.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

And even though retired fisherman Badiane’s house was not destroyed at the time, he and his neighbors have received notice from local authorities warning them that they might also have to relocate soon.

Badiane said, though, that he’s reluctant to leave.

“We have decided to become a coalition and stand strong against the government who wants to take us away from here,” he said. “This is all we know, and all we have.”

But Mandaw Gueye, director of the Regional Agency for Development in Saint-Louis, said that in the next few years, about 15,000 more fishermen and their families are expected to move into the area close to the Diougop camp.

“Even if they don’t want to,” he stressed.

He said the government is building a more permanent housing solution there, and arranging to provide shuttle buses for fishermen to reach the coast.

There are also plans to build a new sea wall, scheduled to be completed by 2050, after previous ones failed to prevent floodwaters from reaching the village.

But that might be too late.

It's estimated that in West Africa, over 40 million people in these lowest-lying zones, will be exposed to sea level rises by 2030 — less than a decade away.

The sea walls that have been previously built have not been effective in preventing flooding and erosion.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

Natural barriers at riskSome of the biggest and fastest-growing cities in African countries are on the coasts and vulnerable to rising seas, said Mark Duerksen, a researcher with the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, and an expert on urbanization on the continent.

“It's an open question whether they will all survive and find strategies to host all the people who want to live and work along these bustling shorelines.”

The Diougop camp, where some 1,500 people were displaced by sea level rise, is surrounded by sand.

Credit:

Maria Elena Romero/The World

Frequent flooding, storms and coastal erosion are also destroying natural barriers like wetlands, coastal dunes and barrier islands, which create more vulnerability to sea level rise.

“This is compounded in many African cities where there are relatively weak environmental protections and significant shortages of existing and affordable housing,” Duerksen added.

The United Nations predicts that, over the next couple of decades, around 200 million people could be displaced as a result of flooding and shoreline erosion. The situation is particularly bad in West Africa, where a large percentage of the population lives on the Atlantic shore.

Many young people in Saint-Louis have decided to leave for Europe by sea. "No Barca-Barsak" is a common phrase written on walls and ships in the fishing village of Guet Ndar. It roughly translates to “Don’t go to Barcelona because you will end up in the cemetery.”

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

An important cultural legacy that is also threatened by rising seas in Saint-Louis is the city center — a UNESCO World Heritage site, full of colorful architecture, where important jazz and dance festivals take place every year. It includes historical buildings from the 19th and early 20th centuries, which could all disappear with the rising waves.

Local journalist Borso Tall contributed to this story.

Related: Is it time for Senegal to end its romance with the French baguette?

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It’s known as the “Blue Blob”: a mysterious patch of cold water in the North Atlantic Ocean. It’s just a dot in an otherwise vast, and warming, sea.

But the blob has caught the attention of scientists. The cold water is bringing colder weather to Greenland and Iceland, and slowing the melting of their glaciers — at least temporarily. One of Iceland’s largest glaciers is the majestic Langjökull, located about an hour and a half from the capital, Reykjavik.

About 10% of Iceland is still covered by glaciers — what Icelanders call their “white diamonds.”

On the drive up, the ice looks like a great white wave floating between the earth and sky — immense, immaculate and mesmerizing. Langjökull draws tens of thousands of visitors a year, many of whom arrive on tour buses that speed along the rough volcanic track towards the glacier’s base camp.

Millions of tourists come to base camps like this one, at Langjökull, to hike on the glaciers. About 10% of Iceland is still covered in ice.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

The Shah and Chakore families recently visited the area from South Carolina. They’re originally from northern India near the Himalayas, so they know about the importance of glaciers.

“Well, if they all melt it will be a disaster, obviously,” Chandray Shah said.

“If the glaciers are melting,” said Haman Chakore, “the whole world will be underwater.”

In fact, Iceland’s glaciers began melting a long time ago, going back at least to 1890 when ice melt was first measured. From then through 2019, Langjökull lost 29% of its mass.

Langjökull looms like a white wave over Iceland’s volcanic landscape.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

But there may be a glimmer of hope for this so-called Blue Blob region, an area of ocean water more than one degree cooler than the North Atlantic average temperature. That might not sound like a lot, but glaciologist Guðfinna Aðalgeirsdóttir said it matters. The colder water is lowering the air temperatures on land.

“From 1995 to 2010, we had about a meter of the surface thickness of the glaciers disappearing every year,” Aðalgeirsdóttir said. “And after 2010, at the same time as this Blue Blob was appearing, this rate of mass loss actually decreased” by about half. “So, we see that the glaciers actually sense this cooling effect of this Blue Blob.”

People in Iceland have also sensed the cooling temperature.

“We see a rise in people buying warmer clothes later in the year,” said Johannes Johannesson, a salesman at a camping store in Reykjavik. “People are still buying jackets in June.”

He said, though, that he’d never heard of the Blue Blob.

Glacial run-off feeds Iceland’s rivers and hydroelectric plants. The Blue Blob, a mysterious body of cold water in the North Atlantic, has brought colder weather to shore slowing the ice’s melt.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

Slowing glacial meltScientists know little about where the Blue Blob came from. But scientific modeling suggests it will be around for a while, said glaciologist Aðalgeirsdóttir, though not for long. She also stressed that it’s not completely halting glacial melt, just slowing down the rate of loss.

“So, this is like a regional North Atlantic effect,” she said, “that slows down the mass loss of the Icelandic glaciers until about 2050. And after that, it picks up again.”

Cristian Eli Gunnarsson, who is a guide on the Langjökull glacier, has seen the retreat of the frozen giants firsthand. Since 2020, he said, this glacier has retreated a full mile, leaving just a rocky plain behind.

Across the vast plain are a bunch of metal sign posts marking the years where the ice once was as it retreated: 1940, 1960, 1980. It’s a timeline of loss — and it’s accelerating.

“The distance between the 1940 and 1960 [glacial melt] lines is the same distance from the 2020 sign to today. So, it is now 10 times faster. Which is ridiculous.”

Cristian Eli Gunnarsson, a guide on the Langjökull glacier

“The distance between the 1940 and 1960 lines is the same distance from the 2020 sign to today,” Gunnarsson said. “So, it is now 10 times faster. Which is ridiculous.”

A series of signs marking where the Langjökull glacier once stood form a timeline of loss, as the ice retreats due to global warming.

Credit:

Gerry Hadden/The World

He wondered how much time the Blue Blob is really buying them. And these days, he said that when he takes groups of people up on the ice, they find something different.

“It’s like walking in wet sugar,” he explained.

He’s worried he may be out of work soon, saying that tourists aren’t likely to come for a slog through the slush.

Related: How the Trump administration's climate denial left its mark on the Arctic Council

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Ali Abbas Hasan has been a wheat farmer in southern Iraq for two decades. Each year, he planted his crops in the fall, and would need to water them four times a day.

Year after year, he said, water became more scarce. His only source was the water coming from two major rivers in Iraq: the Tigris and Euphrates, which run from the north to the south of the country.

Hasan made it work for a while, but he said recently the lack of usable water for his crops became so bad, he decided to sell his farm.

“I loved farming,” he said. “It’s beautiful work. It’s hard to suddenly lose what you worked so hard for.”

Hasan is not the only farmer who has sold his land in recent months. He knows several others who have done the same. Because no water means no crops and no income.

Iraq's Ministry of Water Resources has warned that the country is facing its worst water shortage in a century. It said 7 million people are experiencing reduced access to water. Shrinking water levels, rampant salinity and contamination have left communities with no choice but to migrate.

For centuries, people living in what’s now the state of Iraq have relied on the Tigris and Euphrates, and they are still vital for millions of people. In 2016, the United Nations named the marshes of southern Iraq a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But this ecosystem is in danger, and experts are worried.

“The Tigris and Euphrates will be completely dry by 2040,” Iraqi water expert Jamal Ibrahim al-Halbousi warned on television last month. “I don’t think Iraqi leaders really understand. This is the end of Iraq as a country, as a civilization. Iraq won’t exist without its two rivers.”

Environmental activist Laith Ahmed shared a video that shows a man riding a boat in Iraq’s marshes — in the floodplains between the Tigris and Euphrates — where a thick layer of dead fish is floating on top.

“Our boat is sailing through dead fish,” the man said in the video, adding, “What a shame, what a shame.”

Ahmed said when he sees videos like these, his heart breaks. He explained that people of Iraq’s marshlands, known as the Marsh Arabs, have fished, farmed and raised water buffalos for centuries.

But their troubles began in the 1990s when the government of Saddam Hussein drained large swaths of the marshlands to punish the people for rebelling against him.

A series of canals diverted the water, drying up 90% of the marshes and displacing thousands of people. Over the years, the marshlands have slowly started to recover. But today, the region’s people face a new ecological disaster.

“When they lose the water, they cannot live anymore because they are losing their buffaloes. So, they moved from the marshlands to other cities,” Ahmed explained.

This week, the United Nations cautioned that southern Iraq is experiencing its worst heat wave in four decades. Their water levels have dropped significantly as well, it added.

Ahmed Bayram of the Norwegian Refugee Council, listed several factors that contribute to Iraq’s water crisis, including extreme heat waves, low rainfall and two decades of war that destroyed Iraq’s water infrastructure.

Making things worse is the construction of dams in neighboring Iran and Turkey.

“These farming communities around the marshes have been there for centuries,” Bayram said. “Generation after generation have kept that land, have looked after that land. These families are now rethinking their future and that’s what really worries us: when people leave their land.”

When farmers leave, he added, Iraqis across the country suffer because lack of farming will lead to food insecurity.

Last year, Bayram and his team found that some farmers in southern Iraq had lost up to 90% of their harvests.

The water situation is not much better in cities.

“The tap water is not usable unless you are using it to wash clothes or something like this,” said 39-year-old Zuhair Muhammad, who lives in Basra in southern Iraq, and relies on bottled water for drinking and cooking.

Muhammad, who lives alone, spends about $7-$10 on bottled water per week. He can afford it, but many others can’t. That’s why people are moving to other parts of the country in search of better access to clean water.

Meanwhile, as Iraq dries up and as the impacts of climate change makes life more difficult, people like Ahmed are trying to raise awareness about protecting the environment by posting on social media.

“I’m in love with nature,” Ahmed said. “I want to be part of saving this nature and the biodiversity in Iraq.”

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Thirty-six-year-old Kateryna Mischenko said that she could not be more excited about the prospect of spending the rest of her summer lounging in the spacious English garden of her new home in Newport Pagnell, a small village just over an hour northwest of London.

“I just come here and go into the grass without any shoes … it’s so good!” she said with a laugh.

Mischenko, her husband and two young children first settled in Newport Pagnell over a year ago with a host family under the British government’s Homes for Ukraine Scheme.

The landmark program, launched in March 2022, has matched more than 120,000 Ukrainians with UK host families who are given a nearly $450 monthly stipend in exchange for providing refugees with room and board for a minimum of six months.

But the budget for this program was cut in half this year, and thousands of Ukrainians are looking for a longer-term solution, and risk becoming homeless.

Mischenko’s family ended up staying with their hosts for nearly a year. But last August, Mischenko decided it was time for her family to find a home of their own.

“[Our hosts] said if you want, stay with us,” Mischenko said. “But, you know, we are a family. We want our own place. All this time, they paid for water, gas … everything … for us. It’s a big difference to pay for one person versus a whole family.”

Kateryna Michenko at home.

Credit:

Rebecca Rosman/The World

In the fall, Mischenko and her husband began contacting local rental agencies. They were met with silence.

“No answers, nothing,” she said.

When they finally did start hearing back, the Mischenkos were told they needed a guarantor plus a hefty deposit — sometimes up to six months of rent paid upfront.

They moved into their current place in late March, seven months after they began their housing search.

While Mischenko eventually found a happy ending, she said it wasn’t thanks to help from the government but rather a local housing charity called Nadiya, which agreed to act as her guarantor.

The housing charity has helped hundreds of families find private housing in the UK by acting as their guarantors and providing interest-free loans on deposits.

“What we realized in the very early stages was there was going to be a crisis in the UK after six months, when people's sponsorship was coming to an end,” said Derek Edwards, Nadiya’s co-founder.

Edwards said that he is proud of Nadiya’s work, but he thinks that local governments should be doing more to step in and assist refugees in finding private housing once their homestays end.

Many don’t, which is why more than 6,000 Ukrainian households are currently eligible for homelessness benefits in England alone.

In some cases, Edwards accuses councils of pushing Ukrainians out of their districts so they don’t have to deal with the issue.

He gives the example of Milton Keynes, a city 50 miles northwest of London.

“[The Milton Keynes Council] doesn’t want [Ukrainian refugees] on their books because, obviously, housing and the care of refugees is expensive to local governments,” Edwards said.

In June, the Milton Keynes Council was given a $825,000 government grant to support housing for Ukrainian refugees.

In a statement, the council said it was working with families to help with rent, deposit and furniture.

But rents in Milton Keynes are high, which is why they sometimes recommend families look for housing elsewhere.

It’s not just Milton Keynes. Rents have skyrocketed across the UK in the last year, with annual rental prices reaching a 5% increase in May, the highest rate in seven years.

That makes finding long-term housing all the more difficult for Maryna Plakdya, a Ukrainian refugee searching for long-term housing in south London.

Plakdya, who is originally from Odesa, Ukraine, came here with her 9-year-old son Simon about a year ago.

Ukrainian Maryna Plakdy found refuge in the UK after the war at home started. But finding long-term housing for herself and her son has been challenging.

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Rebecca Rosman/The World

Since then, they’ve been living with an elderly couple in London under the Homes for Ukraine scheme.

She said that the family she’s been living with has been great, but they’ve had some recent health issues, and Plakdya agreed to find her own place by August.

Despite having a steady income and sizable budget of around $1,950 a month for a one-bedroom unit, Plakyda said that she hasn’t had any luck in finding a place.

Last month, she signed up with her local council to receive homelessness benefits in the case that she and her son don’t have their housing situation sorted by her August deadline.

Plakdya said that she’s grateful for all the help she’s been given since arriving in the UK, but wishes the government had a clear procedure about what people in her situation should do once their homestays come to an end.

“There are no specific steps or a service in the council who helps or provides answers, like a certain procedure of next steps,” she said.

Edwards, with the charity Nadiya, said it’s unlikely that Ukrainians like Plakdya will end up living on the street — but there’s a larger systemic issue.

“They won't be homeless, but they will be put into some awful short-term accommodation,” Edwards said.

“It's not what you should be dealing with when you've already escaped a war zone six months ago.”

Edwards also said that short-term, emergency accommodation ends up costing the state more money.

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Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy arrived to a hero’s welcome on Tuesday in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, where world leaders met for the two-day NATO summit.

Zelenskiy thanked Lithuanians for supporting Ukraine in the face of Russia's invasion but his main message going into the NATO summit was clear: “Ukraine makes NATO stronger.”

Currently, 31 countries are part of the NATO alliance, and Ukraine’s status with the group was the top agenda item on Wednesday.

Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of NATO, said on Wednesday that Ukraine will join NATO, but the details are ambiguous.

“We will issue an invitation for Ukraine to join NATO, when allies agree and conditions are met,” he said.

Zelenskiy responded on Twitter, saying that it’s “absurd” when a “time frame is not set, neither for the invitation, nor for Ukraine's membership.”

We value our allies. We value our shared security. And we always appreciate an open conversation.
Ukraine will be represented at the NATO summit in Vilnius. Because it is about respect.

But Ukraine also deserves respect. Now, on the way to Vilnius, we received signals that…

— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) July 11, 2023

He also wrote that “uncertainty is weakness.”

Rachel Rizzo, from the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center, said that Ukraine has been trying to sort out a clear path to NATO membership for years. The turning point came in 2008, at a previous NATO summit in Romania.

“What happened in 2008 under pressure from then-President George Bush, was NATO allies agreed that Ukraine and Georgia, at the time, would eventually become members of the alliance, but they made no clear plan or pathway as to when or how that might happen,” she said.

NATO member states have rushed to assist Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country on Feb. 24, 2022, but the pathway to join the alliance remains uncertain.

At this week’s summit, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was asked about President Joe Biden’s position on Ukraine joining NATO.

“The president [Joe Biden] said, quite simply, that he’s not prepared to have Ukraine in NATO now because it would mean that the United States and NATO would be at war with Russia ... ”

Jake Sullivan, US National Security Advisor

“The president said, quite simply, that he’s not prepared to have Ukraine in NATO now because it would mean that the United States and NATO would be at war with Russia now, and he also pointed out that every country joining NATO needs to take on a set of reforms, democratic and other reforms, and that Ukraine has made progress on this path but there’s more progress to make.”

Rizzo explained that the power of joining NATO comes from something called Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which “basically says an attack against one is an attack against all, and obliges countries by treaty to come to the defense of an ally should they be attacked.”

In Ukraine’s case though, the country is currently at war with Russian forces occupying large swaths of its territory. So, NATO allies have embraced Ukraine as a partner, saying that its future is with NATO, but the timeline remains open-ended.

“What the communique said was that Ukraine can join NATO when all allies agree and when certain conditions are met; that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. That is not the clear pathway or the clear timeline that Zelenskiy was hoping for,” Rizzo said.

Still, Ukraine is not walking away from Vilnius empty-handed. Zelenskiy acknowledged that on Wednesday when he said, “The results of the summit are good.”

NATO is creating a new council to strengthen ties with Ukraine. It’s also streamlining the process for Ukraine to join the alliance by waiving something called the “membership action plan.”

And finally, new security guarantees were announced for Ukraine. The G7 nations are now pledging long-term military assistance for Ukraine’s self-defense.

Related: Russia and Ukraine engage in prisoner swaps to retrieve their own fighters

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All over Senegal, baguettes are extremely popular. That’s the long, crusty and airy bread the French left behind in their former West African colonies.

About 10 million baguettes are sold every day in this country of 17 million people, according to Senegal’s National Association of Grain Importers. That means every person eats, on average, more than half of a baguette every day.

But the wheat needed to make such baguettes doesn’t naturally grow in tropical weather, which means Senegal relies almost entirely on imports.

Until last year, most wheat imports came from Russia, according to Claude Demba Diop, the president of the National Association of Grain Importers in Senegal. But when Russia invaded Ukraine, those shipments stopped because the West imposed sanctions that banned payments to Moscow in dollars, the usual currency for such transactions.

“We had to turn to other countries like Poland, Lithuania or Argentina, and prices soared,” Diop explained.

The government froze the price of bread to protect consumers and promised importers it would make up the difference in cost. But the payments have been delayed, and importers are still waiting to get part of the subsidy that was promised. “It’s been a season of sacrifice for importers,” Diop said.

Claude Demba Diop, the president of the National Association of Grain Importers in Senegal.

Credit:

Maria Elena Romero/The World

Earlier this year, Senegal was able to resume most of the imports coming from Russia, according to Diop, and prices are slowly returning to normal. But the crisis helped raise awareness about the risks of being 100% dependent on wheat imports for a baguette-loving country.

“We can't keep on living like this. We have to find our own solutions, our own ways to be independent,” said Mouhamed Moustapha Sall, the owner of Boulangerie Jaune bakery in Dakar that sells baking goods made out of domestic grains.

“The war in Ukraine made this more of a reality,” he said.

Earlier this year, the government imposed new requirements to help local producers of local grains that grow in Senegal, such as corn, millet and moringa.

By 2025, at least 20% of these domestic products must be incorporated into the bread-making process.

Sall is already doing that and investing in a yearslong project to grow local wheat.

Mouhamed Moustapha Sall, director general of L'Ecole des Métiers de la Farine and owner of Boulangerie Jaune bakery.

Credit:

Courtesy of Mouhamed Moustapha Sall

Scientists at the Senegalese Institute for Agricultural Research, a public organization, have been trying out seeds that can withstand heat and recently harvested four wheat varieties on a demonstration plot in Sangalkam, nearly 22 miles from the capital of Dakar.

“We know that we can make anything we want to make with this local Senegalese wheat. We just have to believe in it,” Sall said at his bakery.

While the bread made from this wheat is more nutritious, it’s not quite the same as the traditional French baguette, and some people are not quite convinced.

“It looks and tastes more like whole wheat bread,” said Michelle Jonas, a client at the Point Chaud bakery in Dakar. “It’s kind of heavy,” he added. “I still prefer the white bread, the traditional baguette.”

The biggest challenge to wheat independence in Senegal may prove to be changing people’s habits.

Related: ‘Trade is trade and war is war’: Romanian farmers say helping Ukraine is hurting their bottom line

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The fighting in Sudan is now being described as a civil war. The battle between two rival generals has escalated since it began in mid-April.

The unrest is stoking ethnic tensions, especially in the country's western Darfur region, which has led some observers to suggest another term for Sudan's conflict: genocide.

The World's host Marco Werman spoke with Administrator Samantha Power, who heads the US Agency for International Development (USAID). The group is keeping a close eye on the fighting, while also trying to get humanitarian support to those who need it most.

Marco Werman: This week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that Sudan is on the brink of a full-scale civil war that could destabilize the entire region of northeast Africa. What's the latest you are hearing about the situation on the ground? Administrator Samantha Power: Every day, we get new reports of flare-ups of fighting in different parts of the country. Darfur, of course, is an epicenter of violence right now, but so is the capital Khartoum, which very few Sudanese could have imagined being wracked by a civil war-like conflict as it is now. Additionally, we're getting reports of looting of humanitarian facilities. And if you think of the ultimate embodiment of brutality, imagine a militia that both kills, commit sexual violence and actually loots wheat and ready-to-use therapeutic food for starving children. And that's what we're talking about here in terms of the depravity. It's also really tricky to get access to different parts of the country. So, I can't claim to you that we have perfect knowledge by any stretch of the imagination across this vast country about where the needs are the most pressing. But we are trying to flow resources to trusted partners on the ground. This isn't the first time, as you noted, that Darfur has seen very significant violence. And so, we do have relationships on the ground, and there are brave Sudanese and other international personnel who are there trying to meet the health, food, shelter and other needs, but being able to do almost nothing to stem the violence.So, the violence is being perpetrated by two armies: the national army and this rebel force, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Does it look as if civilians are siding with either general, giving this conflict a sectarian aspect, or do you see it as innocent civilians caught in the crossfire of two armies?I would say largely the latter, as is so true of conflict everywhere with the added wrinkle that both the so-called RSF, the militia that you mentioned, and the Sudanese armed forces have in many parts of the country, sought to mobilize tribes on their side.Listeners will remember, Administrative Power, that before entering government, you were a prominent voice in the human rights community, focusing, among other crises, on Darfur. Also a pioneer on what constitutes genocide. What are you seeing now in Darfur?Well, I think until we get better access, it's going to be very hard to label or to reach some kind of assessment. But what we know is that targeted killings, ethnically motivated killings and attacks are occurring and many of them are being perpetrated by the same individuals in some cases, and certainly the same militias that were active back in that horrible 2004 to 2005 period when genocide was perpetrated. I was in eastern Chad back 20-something years ago when genocide was being perpetrated in Darfur. And I returned this past May, and it was just chilling in the extreme to meet with families who were crossing into Chad from Darfur, Sudan, and who were often crossing for the second, third, fourth time. And in one case, I met a mother whose son had been ripped from her arms and thrown into a fire. And I just thought I was in a time warp, because those are exactly the kinds of stories that I heard back in 2004.It sounds like you witnessed conditions there that possibly could lead to genocide.We have to know what the intent of the perpetrators are and we have to have a better sense of scale. But we already have evidence that executions are occurring, that sexual violence is being perpetrated, that internally displaced person camps that have existed for some time, in part, because of the prior atrocities that those are being attacked.UN officials have called Sudan the toughest place in the world for humanitarian workers. Why is that?Mainly now, it's, of course, violence, mass violence and popping up in very unpredictable ways. But there's also horrific bureaucracy. I know it sounds banal compared to what we've been talking about, but when you actually have bureaucrats who are looking for 10 permissions from various offices in order to allow a convoy to move from one part of the country with lifesaving assistance in it to another part, it just compounds injury with insults, you might say. So, we have been pressing, but because Sudan was in something of a governance limbo prior to the outbreak of fighting, because it had been on a path to civilian rule after years of dictatorship under Omar al-Bashir, who was indicted by the International Criminal Court, the people of Sudan rose up in 2018 in these popular female-led protests, brought down this dictatorship, and the African Union (AU) helped facilitate a path to civilian rule.That didn't last long and and those who felt themselves excluded launched a coup to undermine that. I mentioned all of this history because the will of the Sudanese people is being so defied again and again by these armed actors. But also, it's actually very diffuse right now as to where the levers are to secure greater humanitarian access for these lifesaving goods that are, in some cases, stuck in Port Sudan waiting to flow, but can't get a bureaucrat to sign off, in part, because of the tradition of obstructionism.So, peace talks in Saudi Arabia have broken down. The US and Saudi both seeing little productivity there. Egypt is playing some role, saying it will host leaders from Sudan's neighbors on Thursday. Administrator Power, where do you see glimmers of hope for resolving the conflict peacefully?Well, I think that the leadership shown in the last couple of days, as well, by Prime Minister Abiy [Ahmed] of Ethiopia and President [William] Ruto of Kenya, is encouraging. So, regional leadership efforts that also bring in the Arab-led process that the Saudis have been chairing on the humanitarian front in the town of Jeddah, we need these lines of effort to be proceeding in parallel. I will say also, USAID does a lot with civilians on the ground, with civilians who rose up and demanded the end of dictatorship. They were largely excluded from negotiations about Sudan's future after the coup. We are working hard on the ground to give them the support so they can self-organize. It's really important that civilian voices and women's voices be at the table, and that's not always what happens.Finally, Administrator Power, you mentioned that trip to Chad you made in May, speaking with refugees escaping from Darfur and Sudan. Are there moments from that trip that stick with you today, maybe even haunt you?For me, the most haunting aspect of this is knowing how many people are unable to get out of Sudan. When I met with those refugees coming into Chad from Sudan, what they talked about was lines, processions of people, who were trying to get into Chad and were being blocked or attacked while attempting to flee. So, it's really the people who we aren't able to access, who we know are in desperate circumstances and who are either bunkered in their homes or in displaced person camps or being dressed down for bribes and have run out of money, who are dying of thirst, for all we know, in the very inhospitable conditions in Darfur. I think it is the unknown unknowns, and then knowing too much about who these perpetrators are and how they conduct themselves. It is that combination, I think, that is chilling in the extreme.This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. AP contributed to this report.

Related: Factory that made essential therapeutic food for malnourished children in Sudan burns down

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Xiomara Castro is the first female president of Honduras, a small Central American country about the size of Louisiana. Today, Castro is one of only two women leading countries in Latin America. It is not an easy job in Honduras, a country long considered to be one of the most sexist and violent against women in the region.

Outside of a mall in the capital city of Tegucigalpa, many people blamed Castro for rising inflation. 

“It’s great that she’s the first female president,” said Jessica Kuthe, a mall employee. “But in this last year and a half, she hasn’t done much for the people,” she said. “We, poor, can’t even eat beans. The price of everything has gone up too much, and minimum wage hasn’t gone up with it.”

Castro’s government did increase the Honduran minimum wage by 9.8% in February. But clearly, times are hard.

Activists say the bar is that much higher for Castro, simply because she is a woman.

Early last year, Castro was inaugurated in a wave of hope after the Honduran people had experienced years of challenges. Honduras had been rattled by a coup, accusations of rigged elections, human rights violations and violence against women. The previous president, Juan Orlando Hernández, was extradited to the United States after being indicted on drug trafficking and firearms charges. 

“Honduran women, I will not fail you,” Castro promised in her first speech. “I am going to defend your rights. You can count on me.”

This was a big promise.

“If we look at the number of femicides, if we look at the number of teenage pregnancies, Honduras has one of the highest rates in the region,” said Alice Shackelford, the UN resident coordinator for Honduras. “There is tremendous violence against women and girls, which is the fruit of a deep-seated patriarchy.”

Two months into her administration, Castro signed an agreement with Shackelford pledging to end violence against women and girls in Honduras.

Castro also approved the use of the emergency contraceptive morning-after pill in March. But the rollout has been slow.

“The president is committed to women’s rights,” Shackelford said, “but there has been pushback. Conservative groups are pushing back. So are anti-women’s rights groups. And they are present in Congress and even in different parts of the government institution itself, which makes it very, very difficult to advance.”

The pushback is also a sign of the divisions within Castro’s own government.

For example, Daniel Sponda, Castro’s own education minister, physically tore up a copy of the government’s new guide for gender inclusion in the classroom on a talk show in late June.

“We are not going to promote values that aren’t part of our society,” he said on air. 

Sponda was reprimanded by the country’s human rights minister. But his actions were a sign of the deep divides over women and gender issues in Honduras.

"It’s a symbol of the pact with the church, and with the most conservative ideology in the country,” said Karla Lara, a radio journalist, musician and women’s rights activist based in Honduras.

Protests have hit southern Honduras in recent months against development projects and Castro’s plans for a new progressive tax reform.

In May, opposition congressional officials, who hold a legislative majority, railed against Castro and her party Libre, chanting “Libre never again.”

“They don’t want Castro’s government to succeed,” said Bertha Oliva, a human rights defender and the founder of the country’s Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared. “So, they go against anything she does. They can’t believe that a woman is governing, so they say that ex-president Manuel Zelaya is really pulling the strings.”

According to a recent poll, roughly half the country believes that claim. Castro is the wife of Zelaya, who was ousted in a coup in 2009. According to Oliva, saying he’s really the one making the decisions is offensive to Castro because it insinuates that she isn’t as capable of governing as her husband.

“There is no doubt that much of the attacks and the criticism of Xiomara are clearly a sexist and patriarchal expression,” Shackelford said. “There has been such a huge defamation and misogynistic campaign.”

Analysts agree that female leaders face this same prejudice and discrimination across Latin America. But in Honduras, it’s even more acute, and not just for Castro. Of the nearly 300 Honduran mayors, less than 6% are women.

Lara Bohórquez, of Honduras’ Center for Women’s Rights, said Castro is not perfect. But she’s also fighting an uphill battle.

“We know how hard it is to be a woman in politics. Many women political leaders suffer political, gender violence,” Bohórquez said. “There’s physical, verbal and sexual violence — all part of a strategy to stop women from participating in these spaces.”

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It was a bright June day in Berlin, and four ultralight solar panels lining the front of a balcony were soaking up the sun. They were hanging from velcro straps just below some flower boxes.

This balcony was at the office of We Do Solar, where co-founder Karolina Attspodina was showing her product: easy-to-install, plug-and-play at-home solar.

“Anyone can actually put it up on their balcony, whether they're tech-savvy or not,” she said, pointing to an extension cord. “And everything works from a normal power socket.”

On a sunny day, these panels can meet about a quarter of an average household’s energy needs. That means, in the long run, huge cuts to energy bills.

In February 2022, We Do Solar launched its product in Germany, and early interest was strong. Then, just a few days later, Russia invaded Ukraine.

“As soon as, I think, the war started, people really panicked,” Attspodina said. “The demand just went sky high. We were sold out for quite some time.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year upended energy markets throughout Europe. But no country was hit harder than Germany. At the time, more than half of Germany’s gas came from Russia. The country had to double down on fossil fuels in the short term: keeping coal-fired power plants open longer and building new liquefied natural gas terminals. But in the long term, the war pushed a government falling behind on renewable energy goals to enact some ambitious new policies. Some of those changes are going well, but they face headwinds elsewhere.

For many individuals, soaring gas prices meant bringing solar power home. For the federal government, it meant a new renewable energy target: getting all of the country’s electricity from renewable sources by 2035. To make that happen, Germany adopted a new set of ambitious energy policies last spring. That included removing value-added taxes on solar panels, which has kept We Do Solar busy. Attspodina, who’s Ukrainian, sees these policies as a silver lining to the war.

“Sometimes I feel like something needs to happen for people to move and for people to change.”

Karolina Attspodina, co-founder of We Do Solar

“It is unfortunate that it happened in [the] way that this shift is happening because of the war and because of such a sad situation,” Attspodina said. “But sometimes I feel like something needs to happen for people to move and for people to change. And that's exactly what we're seeing right now.”

Germany’s new energy policy also classified switching to renewable energy as a matter of public safety that can override other public interests, like preserving views that are in place. That means that the government has new power to mandate changes. One being discussed now is requiring electricity-based heat pumps instead of gas boilers in new or updated heating systems.

Henrik Beuster, a spokesperson at the city’s grid operator, Stromnetz Berlin, said switching to heat pumps is necessary to reach Germany’s climate goals. But the policy has been extremely controversial, partly because heat pumps are expensive.

“In Germany, in general, we are not so flexible when it comes to change,” Buster said. “This is something where people said, ‘Okay, I have to do something, and it will be expensive for me.’ So, I think this is what people might fear.”

Beuster said that politicians should take a lesson from the success of solar and offer citizens incentives to opt in. Berlin, for example, is offering a 500 Euro credit for installing at-home solar. By not forcing people but rather offering them an incentive to save money, Beuster said that people would be more willing to make the switch for themselves.

As part of its new renewable energy policy, Germany is also betting big on wind power: In the next decade, they plan to double their onshore wind capacity. That means that outside of cities, the German landscape is undergoing a transformation.

Just two hours from Berlin lies the tiny village of Feldheim: Germany’s first energy-self-sufficient town. After the end of the Cold War, this former communist farm collective decided to pool its resources toward a new shared goal: wind production. By 2010, the town of only 125 people was entirely energy-self-sufficient. Now, they’ve expanded their operations, and residents are reaping the benefits — paying a tiny fraction of the market price for their electricity, and earning a fraction of what’s sold on the national market.

Past acres of massive wind turbines, tour guide Kathleen Thompson says that since the town bought its first turbine in 1995, it’s added 54 more that help keep the lights on throughout Germany.

“We use less than 1% of the electricity that’s being generated here in Feldheim,” Thompson said.

For Germany to reach its goals, more places need to look like Feldheim. The government has committed to covering 2% of its land in wind power by 2032. That may not sound like a lot, but it would more than double the current capacity. But rural Germans have protested the wind intrusion in most nearby towns and nationwide. With hundreds of lawsuits stalling projects, the federal government will likely use its newly mandated power to push wind through.

However, Feldheim’s mayor Michael Knape says there’s another way: If towns can lead their own change, everyone benefits. In the 1990s, he said, it wasn’t so bureaucratic or expensive for a town to produce its own power. Starting in the mid-2010s, new regulations meant a shift in ownership from local citizens to large corporations.

“We chose the right time period with the right laws in place,” Knape said. “I don’t think that if we started today, Feldheim could afford to do the same.”

To Knape, getting local buy-in should mean letting citizens actually buy in. Whether that’s sharing ownership, like in Feldheim, or at least paying neighbors for building near their land.

Germany may be learning that lesson. Its updated renewable energy policy includes new incentives and protections for community-owned renewables. And the government is simplifying the approval process for wind, solar and other projects.

As German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said in a speech last year, the country sees “Putin’s war” as an “accelerator of necessary change.”

Related: Renewable energy seen as an answer to Ukraine’s wartime energy woes

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The shuttering of Cardinal Stritch University north of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was a blow to students and alumni. The school's president said declining enrollment and a financial deficit necessitated the closure.

It was also a loss for Milwaukee’s undocumented community. Stritch was seen as a welcoming place for undocumented students, who face additional barriers to higher education.

Sinai Mendoza is one of them. She always knew she wanted to go to college.

"I worked my butt off through high school, worked really hard," Mendoza said. "I remember I had a picture of Harvard in my locker my freshman year, because that was like inspiration, right? Like I’m going to make it through college."

As an undocumented immigrant, Mendoza wasn’t eligible for federal loans or grants. She also wasn’t eligible for in-state tuition at University of Wisconisn (UW) schools.

Sinai Mendoza hugs her mother at her 2018 graduation from Cardinal Stritch University.

Credit:

Courtesy of Sinai Mendoza

"So I know from my end, I have to be able to get a scholarship that would support me through my four years of college," Mendoza said. "And Stritch did that."Out of all the schools Mendoza applied to, Stritch offered her the most aid. It’s something you hear from other undocumented students as well: The private, Catholic university was the most affordable option because of the level of institutional aid it offered them.

Marilyn Jones, an assistant professor of Spanish at Stritch, said it’s a reflection of the school living out its Franciscan values.

"If I can say something about [Cardinal] Stritch [University], it’s that we embraced our mission to serve the underserved."

Marilyn Jones, assistant professor of Spanish, Cardinal Stritch University

"If I can say something about Stritch, it’s that we embraced our mission to serve the underserved," Jones said. "A lot of people really embraced that mission. They saw that this was everybody’s responsibility to help our students first — feel like they were welcome, they were valued, for who they were."

As a faculty member at Stritch, Jones helped Mendoza and other students form a club in 2017 called Dreamers Welcome.

A booth for Dreamers Welcome, a student organization at Cardinal Stritch.

Credit:

Courtesy of Maria Perez

"It was a pretty rough year because it was when [former US President Donald] Trump had gotten elected, and there was a lot of anti-immigrant rhetoric going on," Mendoza said. "We wanted to start an organization for undocumented and DACA-mented students on campus."DACA-mented refers to recipients of Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a special protection for some undocumented young people who were brought to the US as children. They are also known as Dreamers.

Dreamers Welcome not only supported students, it helped educate faculty and staff about legal and other challenges undocumented students face.

Mendoza graduated from Stritch in 2018. But Dreamers Welcome continued. Its last president was 20-year-old Maria Perez, who just finished her sophomore year.

"Once I heard that Dreamers Welcome was a part of Stritch, I felt safe," Perez said. "Like I felt immediately safe."

Perez is one of about 30 undocumented students who were attending Stritch this past spring, according to a school spokesperson. Her family migrated from Mexico when she was a child and she had to figure out college on her own.

"I remember, one time, my dad told me 'I’m not going to be able to pay for your education,'" Perez said. "So when he told me that, it was like, 'OK, should I even go through with it? I have good grades, but how far can that get me?'"

Perez didn’t need to worry. She received a full-ride scholarship to Stritch. She lived on campus and studied clinical psychology. Then, in April, Perez was at a Starbucks studying for exams when she found out Stritch would close at the end of the semester.

"I went into my car and I just cried because it didn’t feel real. It felt like a dream," Perez said. "And I just kept crying because I didn’t know where my education was going to stand, if other schools were going to accept my scholarships."

In the months since then, Perez decided to transfer to Mount Mary University, which, as part of a "teach-out" agreement, had pledged to match the financial aid and credits of Stritch transfers.

Sinai Mendoza, the Stritch alum, said she is sad that future undocumented students won’t be able to attend her alma matter.

"I’m still thinking about future generations and future students who thought Stritch was going to take them in, and probably that’s not possible any more," Mendoza said.

Mendoza added that the values Stritch instilled in students, including serving the underserved, will live on with them. And Maria Perez said she plans to carry on the work of the Dreamers Welcome club by founding a similar organization at Mount Mary.

Related: 200,000 'Documented Dreamers' are literally waiting a lifetime for a green card

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​​Last fall, Oscar Olivares completed what he said is one of the world’s largest ecological murals made entirely out of bottle caps, in Guatire, Venezuela.

It’s 385 square meters, made out of 400,000 bottle caps and took about three months to complete, according to the 26-year-old visual artist from Caracas.

Olivares' mural features colorful birds, including the macaw, found throughout South America.

Credit:

Courtesy of Oscar Olivares

The endeavor would not have happened without community investment — residents of Guatire and neighboring towns collected over 1 million bottle caps for the project and also helped him complete the mural.

In the process, Olivares was able to educate residents on the importance of recycling. He said that there is no real education or policies about living a sustainable lifestyle, so his bottle cap projects have led to more people wanting to recycle and be part of his work.

The World caught up with Olivares to learn how he does it and how fighting climate change is a community effort.

Carol Hills: Oscar, you started your career as an illustrator. Were you already interested in bottle caps as a way to make art, or did you think of them when you started thinking about pointillism and how to replicate that?Oscar Olivares: Well, it was a mixture of a lot of things. I received a proposal from a municipality in Caracas, and they had a lot of bottle caps they had collected, but they didn't know what to do with them. They wanted to make something with art, but they didn't know anything about what could be done with that. And they told me about that. At first, I was thinking about it, but, you know, I wasn't too interested in the project until I went to this museum in France. At the first moment, I thought we were just going to make one mural. When I returned to Caracas, I just took a lot of bottle caps, threw them on the floor, and said, ‘If I can make an eye, we can make everything with bottle caps.’ This is the kind of art that when you are very close to it, you just see the bottle caps of the brands, some bottle caps [are] very ugly or very dirty because they come from the trash, you know. But when you walk a few steps far from the mural, you can see all the art. So, it was a result of a proposal from this municipality, but also because of this visit to the museum that changed my mind about it.

Olivares said that he received over one million bottle caps donations from residents of Gautire, Venezuela and surrounding states. Many people became interested in his project and were looking for ways to learn how to properly recycle.

Credit:

Courtesy of Oscar Olivares

Walk us through the process of planning a mural. How do you know how many bottle caps you'll need? How many different colors? And how do you design them?The first [thing] I need is the size of the wall. With the size of the wall, I know how many bottle caps. In one square meter, you need 1,100 bottle caps. With that, I begin to make the design of the mural. In the design, I have to think about what kind of colors I'm going to find to make these kinds of murals. Because, for example, in Venezuela, you can find more than 16 different tones of blue. That's not common in other countries. For example, in Mexico, you will find more tones of green.

Oscar Olivares

Credit:

Isaac Paniza

Now, one of your murals, you say, is the largest eco mural in the world, and it's made completely out of bottle caps. Tell us about it.Yeah, that's a mural that is in Guatire. It's a town that is 30 minutes by car from Caracas. [The mural] has more than 400,000 bottle caps. In three months, the community of Guatire collected more than 1 million bottle caps for this mural; we have even bottle caps for more projects in the future. It was an amazing experience. I thought it was going to take us more than three months, but the people were so willing to help us. There were days when more than 100 people volunteered to help us with the mural.

Olivares and volunteers are surrounded by the recycled bottle caps that they used to build a colorful mural in Guatire, Venezuela.

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Courtesy of Oscar Olivares

And what is this mural design of?We have a lot of things because it's very large — 90 meters long. We have the Parranda de San Pedro, which has some people dancing with flags and colors. Then we have four macaws; they’re very beautiful birds with a lot of colors. [They’re] very typical in Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia and the Amazon. After that, we have the troupial, Venezuela's national bird. We have a landscape of the mountains of Guatire, and at the end of the mural, there is the planet Earth because I think this kind of art is not just something for Venezuela, for the kids who are making it, but for the world.

Olivares paid tribute to Venezuela's national bird, the troupial when creating his eco-mural.

Credit:

Courtesy of Oscar Olivares

When people recycle bottles in the US, they tend to throw out bottle caps. I'm wondering, is that the case in Venezuela? And is your art, too, kind of a way to tell people, ‘No, don't throw out those bottle caps, save them, and we're going to use them for art.’Yes. Yes. It's very interesting because, in Venezuela, there are very few policies about recycling and very [little] information about how to recycle. There are a lot of people who want to recycle more, but they don't know how to do it. And the murals have been a very good way to collect the bottle caps in every place we go. For example, there are, and there have been murals in Caracas [where] people from another state have sent the bottle caps to help us in the mural.

With volunteers' help, Oscar Olivares completed a 90-meter-long ecological mural made completely of recycled bottle caps. The bottle caps otherwise may have been thrown in the trash. According to Olivares, there are no hardline recycling policies in the country, and many don't know the proper way how to recycle. His project has fostered conversations that are helping lead to sustainable practices.

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Courtesy of Oscar Olivares

Do you have any future eco murals planned?It's very interesting and exciting because I plan to make the first eco-mural in the US. I'm going to announce it very soon. We also have plans to make some in Panama, Italy and a lot more in Venezuela. We have maybe more than 10 murals confirmed for the next two years. The most special thing is that it's not made just by an artist. It's by the people who collect the bottle caps. That is really taking consciousness about the Earth and recycling.

A mural by Venezuelan artist Oscar Olivares which is set to expand to the floor.

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Courtesy of Oscar Olivares

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Tears rolled down Maliheh’s face this week as she took down the sign of her beauty salon in Farah province in southwestern Afghanistan.

The business she had owned and operated for the past 22 years can no longer operate because the Taliban have ordered all female beauty salons in the country to close down.

“We have no hope in this country,” she said. “Women have no place here.”

When the Taliban took over Afghanistan by force almost two years ago, one of the images that circulated online was that of women’s faces being blacked out on billboards and public signs.

“These photographs were used for advertising on the outside of beauty salons in Afghanistan, and suddenly, they’d been painted over. It was a very powerful visual symbol of how things had changed,” said Heather Barr, associate director of the women’s rights division at Human Rights Watch.

Barr added that suppression of women has been central to the Taliban’s mission in Afghanistan. For two decades, the group indoctrinated its fighters by telling them that women’s rights is a Western concept and a plot to undermine Islam.

“And so, the suppression of women, I think, became part of what their fighters felt that they were fighting for.”

The result of that indoctrination is evident in Afghanistan today. Over the past two years, the Taliban have systematically taken away women’s freedoms. They are not allowed to pursue higher education, work for international, nongovernmental organizations and most government jobs, and they can’t go to parks or gyms.

The recent ban on beauty salons is particularly concerning, Barr said, because it is the first time that the group is targeting women’s ability to work in the private sector.

Until now, the private sector was the only area left for women to earn a living.

The salon ban means that thousands of women head of households will lose their incomes.

Maliheh, who only gave her first name because she fears backlash from the Taliban, is one of them. She is the sole breadwinner of her family. Her husband had a stroke recently and is unable to work. They have four kids.

“Our family of six is now relying on God for sustenance,” she said.

Further north, in the province of Herat, another salon owner, 32 year-old Niloufar, said the news has left her speechless.

She and her two sisters opened up their business in Herat City 10 years ago. She, too, didn’t want me to use her full name, because she worried about Taliban harassment.

Her salon offers a range of services, she explained: haircuts, nails, eyebrow tattoos, and bridal makeup.

The three sisters employ eight women. Now, they’ve been forced to shut down.

“After the Taliban banned women from getting an education, we focused our attention on this salon,” Niloufar said. “It was our only hope.”

Roughly 60,000 women will lose their jobs as a result of this ban, a source from Afghanistan’s Ministry of Commerce told the BBC.

That’s at a time when there has already been a 25% drop in women’s employment since the Taliban took over the country, according to the International Labor Organization.

“The ban on beauty salons will undoubtedly increase poverty among women,” said women’s rights activist Razia Barakzai.

Barakzai herself was among the first women to take to the streets to protest the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021.

She recounted being arrested, taken away and beaten.

“Even under the barrel of the Taliban’s guns and after being lashed, we shouted, ‘The Taliban don't have any legitimacy,’” she said.

Barakzai had to flee Afghanistan and lives in Pakistan with her family.

But even there, she said, she doesn’t feel safe. She rarely leaves the house.

Yet, Barakzai continues to speak out against the Taliban’s assault on women’s rights.

She has been in touch with salon owners in Afghanistan who have told her that the group is going after their male relatives, too, warning them that if they don’t pressure their female relatives to shut down their salons, they will face severe consequences.

Heather Barr of Human Rights Watch said the new ban will have long-term consequences for women in Afghanistan. Because, she added, beauty salons there are much more than a place to get a haircut or a manicure.

“These salons are one of the very, very few spaces, maybe one of the only spaces that’s left in Afghanistan where a woman might be able to go out from her home and see other women and share information and share support,” Barr said.

Now, even that has been taken away.

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On Thursday, hundreds of the Dalai Lama’s supporters gathered at the main Tibetan temple in Dharamshala, India — where he has been exiled for more than seven decades — to sing “Happy Birthday” as the spiritual leader cut a cake with pink icing.

The Dalai Lama, who turned 88, has said he will live to be up to 113. But his health has been deteriorating, and he’s been hospitalized a few times in recent years.

“When we pray, there’s only one prayer, may His Holiness live thousands and thousands of years,” said Tenzin Lekshay, a spokesperson for the Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamshala. “But that's not possible, in fact.”

Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama and the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibetan Buddhists, was forced to flee Lhasa in 1959 when the Chinese occupied Tibet. He is the longest-serving Dalai Lama in history and has come to embody the Tibetan struggle for autonomy.

The scenic town of Dharamshala, nestled in the Indian Himalayas, is home to the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of Tibetans who have been living in exile for decades.

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Sushmita Pathak/The World

But as he ages, the prospect of his demise — and what happens after — is looming.

“The Chinese expectation is that once this extraordinary human being, the Dalai Lama, is not there, the Tibetan unity that he has achieved in exile will splinter and the international support for the Tibetan cause will dissipate. And then, they will be able to succeed in altering the narrative in Tibet,” said Amitabh Mathur, former adviser of Tibetan affairs to India’s Ministry of Home Affairs.

In Dharamshala, ordinary Tibetans grapple with what might come next as they prepare themselves to continue the Tibetan struggle in the absence of their leader.

Tibetans are ‘fully indebted’ to the Dalai LamaTenzin Lekdhen’s grandparents were among the tens of thousands of Tibetans who followed the Dalai Lama to India several decades ago. Lekdhen, who is now 25 and a Dharamshala-based activist at Students for a Free Tibet, grew up in India’s northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh. In his refugee settlement, he said, everyone was devoted to the Dalai Lama.

Posters about the Tibetan struggle and photos of the Dalai Lama adorn the walls of the office of the organization Students for a Free Tibet in Dharamshala where Tenzin Lekdhen works.

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“Every morning, my grandpa and grandma would, the instant they wake up, they would pray to him. And before retiring to bed in the night, they would pray to him,” Lekdhen said. “So, to us since birth, we are fully indebted to His Holiness.”

In exile, the Dalai Lama introduced Tibetans to democracy, setting up the Central Tibetan Administration, essentially a government-in-exile. In 2001, the Dalai Lama announced a semi-retirement from his political role, and in 2011, he relinquished all of his political powers.

A woman lights lamps at the main Tibetan Buddhist temple in Dharamshala, India, where the Dalai Lama has lived in exile for more than seven decades.
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Mathur said he did so to bolster Tibetan unity: “The whole idea of his withdrawing from political role was that the process of democracy should throw up leaders who would have the loyalty of Tibetans across sectarian lines from all four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism, and this leadership would take the Tibetan struggle forward after he is no more.”

Today, the Dalai Lama remains Tibet’s foremost spiritual leader. He doesn’t travel much because of his age, but regularly meets supporters at his home, including some from China and Taiwan.

“The Dalai Lama continues to be the embodiment of the Tibetan struggle,” Mathur said. “And all Tibetan hopes and expectations are centered around him.”

The reincarnation debateAccording to Tibetan Buddhism, when the Dalai Lama dies, he is reincarnated. Other higher monks set out to find the successor — a young boy in most cases, according to instructions left by the previous leader — and groom him.

A hoarding in Dharamshala describes how the Panchen Lama, another high-ranking Buddhist monk, was taken by Chinese forces soon after he was identified as the reincarnation by the Dalai Lama. His whereabouts are still unknown. Tibetans fear something similar could happen when it is time to choose the Dalai Lama's successor.

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The current Dalai Lama has said he will decide on his reincarnation when he turns 90. But Beijing says it will be the one to choose the successor, an idea that Lekshay and other followers reject.

“His Holiness is the only person to decide upon where His Holiness should be born, nobody else,” he said.

A bitter tussle over the rightful leader is likely to unfold in the coming decades. In 1995, soon after the Dalai Lama identified a 6-year-old boy as the reincarnation of another high-ranking monk, the Panchen Lama, Chinese forces took the child into custody and installed someone else — who is rejected by the Dalai Lama’s followers. Across Dharamshala, there are posters about the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama, whose whereabouts are still unknown.

Tenzin Lekshay, spokesperson of the Central Tibetan Administration, says only the Dalai Lama will decide about his reincarnation, not China.

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Sushmita Pathak/The World

“The entire Chinese game plan is based on the [idea] that when [the Dalai Lama] is not there, the Tibetan cause will go away,” Mathur said.

But activist Lekdhen said that the Dalai Lama has been preparing Tibetans for decades to continue the struggle without him.

“I think we should be right now ready to move forward to take the cause in our own hands,” he said.

But he said that he fears how those inside Tibet will react to the Dalai Lama’s passing when it happens.

A wall in Dharamshala, India, features graffiti showing the Dalai Lama who has lived there for more than seven decades since fleeing Chinese occupation in Tibet.

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Sushmita Pathak/The World

“I strongly believe that the Tibetans inside will not pay allegiance to that Dalai Lama whoever China installs. But China will find ways to maneuver around that to somehow control the Tibetans,” he said.

Lekshay, from the Central Tibetan Administration, said that time is running out to resolve the Tibet-China conflict, adding, “Chinese leaders do not have a political will to resolve the issue.”

Dialogue with China, deadlocked since 2010, must resume in the presence of the current Dalai Lama, he said.

But even so, when the time comes, he said, Tibetans will have to be resilient.

“Obviously, it'll be a chaotic situation. Obviously, it'll be a very sad situation,” he said. “But when the sun sets, it is obvious that sun will rise.”

The institution of the Dalai Lama has been through 13 transitions. It will survive another one too, he said.

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The main character in the 1966 animated short “Bon Voyage Sim'' is an African leader depicted as a toad. The film begins with Sim being invited to a neighboring country — a visit that is heralded with all the pomp and circumstance befitting his status.

Director Moustapha Alassane, known as the father of African animation, often featured toads and other animals to create allegorical critiques of the politics in his native Niger. His work was rendered in simple line sketches set against monochrome backgrounds.

Now, contemporary African animators are looking to make their own mark. And the companies courting them are also hoping to cash in on that ambition.

The current writer's strike in the United States jeopardizing content creation for streaming services might, in fact, help international film and television productions fill the gap and reach global audiences. Business Wire has described Africa’s animation industry as one that has “the potential to emerge as an engine of growth for the continent.”

In April, the animation series “Jay Jay: The Chosen One” debuted across Africa on the streaming service Showmax, a partnership between Comcast and South Africa-based Multichoice TV. The series reimagines Nigerian soccer star Jay Jay Okocha as a preteen superhero fighting animal poachers.

"Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire" Executive Producer Tendayi Nyeke (third from right) moderates a Disney+ panel presentation at the AfroAnimation Summit 3.0 held in Burbank, California, May 2023.

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Showmax has pledged to develop more homegrown cartoons and animated content in a bid to compete with Amazon's and Disney’s growing presence across Africa. Company leaders have learned that locally produced shows fare well in countries such as Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. Showmax is also available for streaming in European countries with large African diaspora communities, such as Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Also in April,Netflix reported that a six-year investment of nearly $2 million into African production projects netted millions in profits and created more than 12,000 jobs for the company.

African animation expandsPart of the new strategy includes animation.

The AfroAnimation Summit was created as a networking and recruitment event to connect animators from Africa, the Caribbean and the United States.

It began online in 2021 and went hybrid this year. Co-founder Rio Cyrus stood beaming at the event’s Burbank, California, Marriott venue as she reflected on its progress.

“When we look at our little Afro animation, it looks like a little mini-African Comic-Con. And we're really proud of that.”

Rio Cyrus, AfroAnimation Summit co-founder

According to Cyrus, 2023 was the first year that almost every major studio was a sponsor.

“When we look at our little Afro animation, it looks like a little mini-African Comic-Con,” she said. “And we're really proud of that.”

The Walt Disney Company was one of the studios in attendance. It screened a preview of “Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire,” an anthology of shorts co-produced with South Africa-based Triggerfish Studios that showcases the work of 10 different African animation teams.

South African writer and director Tshepo Moche contributed the supernatural coming-of-age adventure quest, “First Totem Problems” to the anthology. Moche said that making the short film for “Kizazi Moto” opened up new opportunities for her and her team.

Tshepo Moche, a writer-director whose work was included in the Disney+ animated anthology of shorts, “Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire,” at the AfroAnimation Summit 3.0 in Burbank, California.

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E. Okobi/The World

Freelance character designer Gonen Yilpet attended the summit in search of similar opportunities for his career. After the Kizazi Moto presentation, Yilpet explained that animation could do a better job of believably conveying the magical and supernatural aspects that are a mainstay of Nollywood — the nickname for the film industry in Nigeria, where he grew up.Yilpet, like many other AfroAnimation attendees, said that animation is a great format for African narrative themes like ancestral communications, spirituality and the supernatural.

Representation in the industrySouth Africa is heavily represented in the “Kizazi Moto” series. Like many anthologies of African creative work, a number of teams also feature Kenyan and Nigerian content makers.

Executive Producer Tendayi Nyeke credits experience and established infrastructure as reasons why these countries are often overrepresented in Africa’s global media landscape. But she’s convinced that this will change, and says her team was intentional about building greater technical capacity for future collaborations with creative partners in different countries.

However, Boukary Sawadogo — professor of cinema studies at the City University of New York and founder of the Harlem African Animation Festival — explained that anglophone countries in Africa have an advantage when it comes to working with international distribution platforms. He said that South Africa in particular has benefited from a long-standing relationship with Hollywood.

Sawadogo said that African leaders should collectively invest in developing channels, creating training opportunities and generating audiences on the continent and in the African diaspora.

Doing so, he said, would address a common challenge for many African countries: fostering opportunities and meaningful career outlets for young people.

Related: Oscar-nominated 'Wolfwalkers' blends environmental, spiritual history of Ireland

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On a recent Saturday evening, an audience ranging from teenagers to the retired have gathered at the film institute to watch “Isn’t Life Wonderful,” a 1924 movie by the American director D.W. Griffith.

It’s one of Griffith’s lesser known works telling the story of a couple of Polish refugees who fall in love despite the hardships they face in Germany following World War I.

“We have an amazing collection of silent films in the Cinematek,” said Christophe Piette, who chooses which films to screen here.

For most of the world, silent films died out in the 1930s. But in Brussels, the Cinematek — the only remaining cinema in the world with a regular schedule of silent films (and it also has live piano accompaniment) — is thriving.

“It is a museum, like, you could say; Paris has the Louvre Museum. It's a bit pretentious for me to say that, because I'm working here, but it is really the case — it’s a really unique collection in the world.”

Piette said that around 80% of silent movies have been lost forever — at the time they were being made, the industry just wasn’t very interested in preserving its output. But Piette’s predecessors tasked themselves with collecting every single silent film that remained. Now the cinematheque has about 10,000 such movies.

“[The Cinematek] really wanted to share it with the audience and with younger people that are used to younger films — to recent films — and to show them where cinema was coming from. It is our mission, we have a historical mission to show the whole of film history.”

The silent film program has been going since the 1980s, and Piette said it’s as popular as ever. But he complained about a lack of funding from the Belgian government, especially given the program’s unique status and the broad audience it attracts.

Lucas Vienne is 17 years old. He comes to the Cinematek most days and was in the audience for “Isn’t Life Wonderful.”

“I started to come here to see very popular movies, ‘The Shining’ and stuff like that,” he said. “But then, I started to check out films I’d never heard of.”

Now, Vienne said that he doesn’t see much difference between silent film and more recent movies — for him, it’s all cinema.

“I’m also interested in the history of cinema — so, coming back to silent film, it’s interesting to see how film evolved.”

The Cinematek in Brussels, Belgium, is the only remaining cinema in the world with a regular schedule of silent films. It also has live piano accompaniment.

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CC BY 2.0

For the price of a ticket, audiences not only get to see a movie — they also get a live concert.

Hughes Marachel is one of a roster of pianists who accompany every single film. He’s 59 and has been working here part-time for more than three decades.

Marachel’s a professional performer and composer. But when he’s playing here, his main aim is to blend into the background.

“You are not to be the star,” he said. “The star is the movie. The best compliment you can make to a silent movie pianist is: Wow, I forgot you were there.”

Often, pianists are seeing the film for the first time, and everything they play is entirely improvised.

“You just let the picture on the screen, the movie, impress you, and the impression comes in your body and in your fingers. And you play.”

Marachel said that interest in the screenings dipped when film on demand became widely available at home. Now, the movies are picking up again as audiences seek out something different.

“Now, they say, ‘Oh, no, I want a new experience. I want an experience with live music. I want an experience with the big screen.’ Yes, for young people, it's very interesting.”

Many of the films he accompanies are a hundred years old — if not more. But the Cinematek hopes it’ll still be attracting an audience a hundred years into the future.

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As upbeat pop music plays in the background, 38-year-old Vladyslav Sadovnik smiles and practices walking on different obstacles at a rehabilitation clinic in New York.

When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began last year, Sadovnik, who was a teacher, decided to join the military and worked as a sapper, detecting and removing mines.

On Oct. 9, near the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, he was clearing a road.

“I was demining the road and then, on the side, I saw another mine. I went to that area and demined it, and as I was leaving, I stumbled on an anti-personnel mine,” he said.

Artur Tonoian walks laps as Vladyslav Sadovnik uses the treadmill.

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Lydia Tomkiw/The World

Sadovnik’s fellow soldiers quickly applied tourniquets and he was evacuated, but both of his legs had to be amputated below the knee. He’s practicing walking on temporary prosthetics and expecting to get his permanent set this week.

He is one of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and civilians who have been severely injured since Russia’s full-scale invasion. Many have lost limbs and need to be fitted with prosthetics.

Sadovnik came to the US through the nonprofit groupKind Deeds Inc. Since October, 20 soldiers have gone through their program and more are arriving. So far, their focus has been on lower-limb amputations.

Fitting and rehabilitation, on average, takes about two months, according to the group’s medical board director and occupational therapist, Dmitry Shevchenko.

Ihor Loda-Yakymyshyn works with weights during a rehab appointment in New York.

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Lydia Tomkiw/The World

“[The] majority of these guys actually want to go back. So, the physical therapy here is pretty intense,” he said, adding, “So, we want to make sure that they are not just able to walk but they are able to get back to the battlefield if needed.”

Sadovnik said that his time in the US had helped him get on his feet and also make sense of what he lived through. Like the fellow soldiers in his cohort, he wants to go back to the military in some way.

“If there’s the possibility, I could go back and be an instructor and teach the boys about mines,” he said.

Fifty-eight year-old Ihor Loda-Yakymyshyn is the oldest member of the group. After walking up stairs at rehab, he said that he’s making “colossal progress.”

Before the war, Loda-Yakymyshyn had been living and running a business in Italy. He decided to return to his native Ukraine and join the military. He lost part of his right leg when he was serving near Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine in October.

Ihor Loda-Yakymyshyn practices his balance.

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Lydia Tomkiw/The World

He, too, wants to return to service.

“If I can still be useful in the ranks of the armed forces, then I would, with pleasure [to] do that, if it’s possible,” he said.

The soldiers are living in a Staten Island house — and they come from different regions of Ukraine and range in age from their early 20s to their late 50s. For all of them, it’s their first time in the United States.

It’s important for them to have a mental break outside of a war zone and get a chance to see New York City, said Kind Deeds’ executive director, Anastasia MacArthur.

“Everybody is welcoming them; everybody is really nice and kind and tries to support them. We want to uplift their spirits by showing them how much we appreciate them, their sacrifices and what they have done,” she said.

Artur Tonoian speaks with Kind Deeds' Dmitry Shevchenko.

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Lydia Tomkiw/The World

Among the activities, the soldiers have seen Manhattan and its skyscrapers, visited the Statue of Liberty, gone fishing and attended Ukrainian American events.

They’ve been stopped in the street and thanked for their service while wearing their Ukrainian military fatigues, Loda-Yakymyshyn said.

“I really like America, it’s clear it’s a country of opportunities, and America is really strongly helping Ukraine, so I really wanted to see America,” he said.

Currently, Kind Deeds has a waitlist of over 200 people. Other nonprofits have formed in the US to help Ukrainian soldiers as well.

Jon Batzdorff, a prosthetist with over 40 years of experience, has been volunteering in Ukraine since 2014. He serves as a technical adviser to the Ukrainian group Protesz Hub, which works on prosthetics and rehabilitation. He recently returned from a training trip to Lviv in western Ukraine, working with some of the most difficult amputee cases with the goal of building local capacity.

“In terms of prosthetics, every day brings new injuries, so as people are being treated and leaving, there are new ones coming in. It’s an ongoing cycle of not just injuries but lives being changed dramatically,” he said.

And while patients are being fitted abroad, Batzdorff said it is not an ideal practice since it is a short-term solution to a long-term problem. He wants to see more resources going toward building capacity in Ukraine.

A variety of military patches on display at the Staten Island home the Ukrainian soldiers are living in.

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Lydia Tomkiw/The World

Batzdorff is currently advising a Ukrainian soldier who has decided to go abroad and told him to establish a relationship with the prosthetist he’ll be seeing as soon as he returns to ensure a plan of care and that needed adjustments are taken care of.

“When a person loses an extremity and gets a prosthesis, it’s a lifelong need and they have to have a lifelong solution and that’s really where the challenge is,” he said.

It’s an issue that Kind Deeds’ medical director Shevchenko has thought about. He said that they’ve built relationships with doctors, therapists and prosthetists in Ukraine to continue care.

Shevchenko said that he has high hopes for Ukraine and wants to see his homeland scale and build resources since treatment journeys can be complex.

“I’m very optimistic, and the reason I’m optimistic is because we stay in touch with doctors in Ukraine,” he said.

At 24, Oleksandr Havriliuk is among the youngest soldiers who’ve come to the US through Kind Deeds. He’s a career soldier and was injured by a mine near Kherson in October.

Havriliuk returned to Ukraine recently and said he already had plans for ongoing care and more rehabilitation. He too hopes to again be able to defend his homeland.

“We are aiming to return to a full life, understanding that it won’t be the same as before our injuries, but we need to keep living, to have plans and to achieve them,” he said.

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The United States deployed operatives to Ukraine in the weeks before the Russian invasion in an effort to protect Kyiv’s critical networks and to learn more about the Kremlin’s hackers. The man in charge of these defensive cybermissions, known as hunt forward operations, is Maj. Gen. William J. Hartman.

In an interview with Recorded Future News’ podcast "Click Here," Hartman says the cooperation between the US and foreign partners like Ukraine has become important in the effort to deter Russia’s cyberoperations.

Last week, Microsoft released new details about the barrage of cyberattacks that have been visited on Ukraine since the war began and said that a new threat actor — dubbed Cadet Blizzard — is the Russian military intelligence unit that has been leading the charge against Ukrainian networks.

Microsoft said the relatively new group has been linked to the wiper malware known as WhisperGate that showed up in Ukrainian government networks last January. When activated, the malware looked like your run-of-the-mill ransomware but was actually wiping master boot records (MBRs) on Ukrainian networks.

Maj. Gen. William Hartman speaks at a symposium at the University of Rhode Island.

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URI/Nora Lewis

"Click Here" got access to half a dozen American cyberwarriors who were on the ground in Kyiv in the days before the invasion and helped discover and analyze the WhisperGate attack.

As part of that series of interviews, the "Click Here" podcast sat down with Hartman, the head of the US Cyber National Mission Force, to discuss not just the hunt forward operation in Ukraine but also the military’s effort to deploy cyberoperatives around the world.

Click Here: The Cyber National Mission Force hunt teams were in Estonia before the 2020 election and they deployed to Ukraine before the war. Why is it in the interest of the United States to deploy cyberoperatives in this way?Gen. William J. Hartman: Well, it’s in our interest because what we've seen is that oftentimes the same nation-states that threaten us also threaten their neighbors. ... And they will sometimes do so a little bit more aggressively than what we see in the United States. And so we send teams [to those countries] based on an invitation from the partner nation. We're allowed to execute defensive hunt operations, and we're able to observe adversaries operating in those foreign countries. We're able to help our partner remediate their networks while also ensuring that we collect things like malicious software and other indicators of compromise. We bring that information with permission from the partner back to the United States and immediately share it with other US government partners, but also with US private industry. So if we want to talk about getting to scale from a defensive standpoint, gaining access to malicious software in a foreign nation, gaining access to indicators of compromise, sharing it with a private US cybersecurity company that may have millions of endpoints with sensors on their networks, it’s really beneficial to the defense of those things that we care about in the United States.So in other words, if you catch it over there, it's before it has a chance to come over here.Absolutely. Absolutely.What do you think people don't really understand about a hunt forward operation?The best time to build trust is before the Russians invade. Ukraine was a really important mission set for us — it was our fourth mission there. Each mission had gotten a little bit better, but I really do believe those previous missions set us up in order to move rapidly and be successful.Just from an authority standpoint, we have this unique hunt forward authority [that] allows us to deploy these teams to execute defensive hunt operations. We execute these fairly frequently, and we do think it puts us in a really good position to build resiliency and support our partners and allies around the world.And so the number that's been thrown around is 39 cyberteams, 2,000 military and civilian personnel. Are those numbers more or less accurate?So those numbers are accurate. What we have done is organize our teams into jointly manned task forces. So we have six task forces that focus really against the major nation-state adversaries: Iran, China, Russia, North Korea. We have a task force that really looks at emerging threats, mostly ransomware threats to national security. And then we have a task force that really focuses on cyber access, weapons and tactics.Can you walk me through a typical day for a hunt team that’s been deployed?You know, the first thing that you really have to do is gain a real good understanding of the network, get a baseline, right? And then you're going to identify anomalous activity — and the anomalous activity may be bad, it may be some misconfiguration, it may be bad user hygiene. You're going to have a bunch of smart people sitting around a whiteboard, and they're going to say, Hey, the No. 1 priority today is this. The team goes through the investigation and at the end of the day, they're going to decide whether there's a potentially malicious IP, or whether the malware that they found, they wanna know if it's good or bad. That's the No. 1 requirement. We found a piece of software that we don't think should be here. Is it good or is it bad? And if it's bad, how do we find more of it? That's generally the drill. And if there's deeper forensic analysis that's required, we'll work with the mission partner. We have the ability to send the data back [to the US], or the malware back here and do some deeper analysis to provide some more precise information. But generally that's the way the team will operate. They'll open investigations, they'll attempt to close investigations, and then oftentimes we will find things on networks that are simply vulnerabilities — it's not because there's been adversary activity. And we will share that information with the mission partner. And our hope is that [the mission partner] will mediate any vulnerabilities on the network while the team is still there.So a patch basically.It might be a patch. It might be a port that's open that shouldn't be. It might be an admin password that was never changed. It might be a user on their network that's operating in a way that they shouldn't allow a user on their network to operate. I mean, there's a host of things that could be wrong. And again, this isn't a criticism of a foreign partner, we certainly have that occur on US networks.So would most mornings start with a whiteboard? Your priority might be, let's just say military communications and then the operators would swarm that?So generally we will have different teams. And if at all possible, the way we like to organize a team in a US component and a mission partner component, and that team will investigate a case. And then we have host analysts, we have network analysts, we have malware analysts, and so there's different work roles across the force.Explain to me how the intelligence fits in.The way the intelligence fits in for us is first and foremost we sit up here, at the campus of the National Security Agency, and we partner really, really closely with the Cybersecurity Directorate. We get access to, to information that the cybersecurity director has, about adversaries that target the United States or allies and partners. And so ultimately we want to execute an intelligence-driven mission. Because we have intel that tells us that an adversary that threatens us is also threatening one of these partners. But we also sit with the Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, which is the NSA element that really works with hundreds of industry partners, in order to exchange information. We have an organization called Under Advisement that sits out there. And again, the US private industry is extraordinarily powerful as it relates to the cyberindustry. And so information on the industry side can also help us, and we bring that intelligence [to the mission partner]. And it really helps us from a start point with the adversary to sort of know what to look for.So, We've seen this kind of behavior, we've seen these kinds of malware. I know it's basic, but is that the sort of thing that you're talking about?Sure. If we have seen particular infrastructure from the internet targeting the United States allies or partners, when we send a team overseas, I mean, they're gonna look for those IP addresses. And if they're seeing attempted inbound connections, that's like an immediate trigger that hey, they can be concerned about that. There will be malicious software that has already been identified. And if it's a mission like in Ukraine and it's Russia-focused, there is gonna be a set of signatures that will be loaded up on the team's kit of known malicious software that the adversaries we expect are gonna be using. And that's the first thing you look for is known activity. And that's what the team is able to bring with it. And some of that is because of the partnership with NSA. Some of it's because of the partnership with private industry. Some of it is because we do these all over the world and we find malware and we make sure that we don't do discovery learning. That each time we build on what we've done before and get better.How do techniques that you see someplace like Ukraine differ from techniques you'd see used in the US? Is there more chalk on their cleats in Ukraine? Are [the Russians] trying bigger, bolder things?So generally what we have seen in Ukraine is that in this case, an adversary like Russia will generally be a little bit more aggressive than they would in the United States. So in mid-January [2022] we started to see a series of destructive wiper attacks. And those are attacks that weren't going to go unnoticed, that were ultimately going to be attributed. Certainly we have never seen the Russians operate in that manner in the United States or in one of our Western partners. In other words, they try to hide their tracks as opposed to being so blatant. Is that the right way to understand it?I think it's a fair assessment. When it comes to wiper malware, and that's what we've heard coming out of Ukraine, what's different about it?So I think what's different about it is the scale in which it was used. And so in mid-January we saw literally dozens of wiper attacks. We saw some attempt to obfuscate that it was, in fact, a nation-state executing a wiper attack by making it look like a ransomware attack with no ability to pay any kind of ransom or get your data unencrypted. And so to me it was just a fairly blatant attack that was pretty easy to attribute to the Russians in this case. And had we seen wiper malware before and just it was the amount that was different or were there things about it that were new?So I can't really comment on the various categories of wiper malware. But this appeared to be somewhat unique to the operations there in the Ukraine. But certainly this type of malware isn't something new or revolutionary.How do you get adversaries out of networks? Does the partner do that? Do you help them do that?We bring unclassified equipment. When we execute a defensive hunt operation we install that equipment on a partner's network based on an agreement with that partner. And when we identify either malware or some type of misconfiguration on a network, we instruct the partner and the partner will take the remediation actions on their own network.So you'll say, OK, we found X. We've isolated X. We suggest you do Y to maybe get it gone. Or maybe they have their own system of doing that?Generally we will make recommendations on changes that an organization should make to their network to make it more secure. And look, it’s generally based on our experience. It’s based on best business practices. It's based on industry standards. And so at the end of the day, we're generally not getting into these long debates about what's the best way to remediate the network. And if possible, ultimately what we're trying to do is to provide a mission partner advice on how they might remediate an adversary's access to their network in a way that the adversary's not able to easily come back again.What's different about this too is that, because of those Russian soldiers gathering on the border last year, there appears to have been a kind of time-pressure crunch that you don't typically have. How did that change the tempo as you saw it from a command perspective?It fundamentally changed it. We deployed a team in early December to execute what is really a pretty standard procedure for one of these defensive hunt operations. We deployed a team, led in this case by a young officer with about 12 years in our service. The team deploys, they link up with the mission partner, they exchange information, get a copy of network diagrams, get some access to some data. And then generally, we come back to the United States and we make a deliberate plan. We’d configure the equipment that we're gonna use and then we'd deploy the team for a more deliberate defensive hunt operation.In this case, the team deployed early December 2021. The Russians [were] amassing 130,000 soldiers on the border with Ukraine. When the team arrived there, there was an immediate assessment by the team lead that the original plan probably was going to be insufficient. And so instead of executing the normal plan, the team lead immediately got on the phone and asked to deploy the rest of the team. And we immediately went into a hunt operation.Did that change the way the team operated?Certainly that changed the dynamic. And then relatively early in the mission we saw a series of destructive Russian wiper attacks, which fundamentally changed the mission. Now, in addition to the networks we were hunting on, we started a fourth line of effort to help the mission partner analyze the malware and to ensure, based on the [Ukrainians’] approval, that we could bring that malware back to the United States and share it broadly with the US government and private sector partners.If you remember, there were a lot of reports in the news at that point that we were expecting potential Russian attacks in the United States. And so there was a sense of urgency on the Ukrainian side, and there was a sense of urgency on the US side. And then to further complicate it, the team remained there until the end of February. And, again, if we remember the intelligence assessments, there was a wide belief that as soon as the Russians invaded they were going to be in Kyiv within a few days. We've never executed a hunt operation like that before.Did you ever get a phone call in which they said, please don't go yet, or please don't go? I never got a phone call from the Ukrainians saying please don't go. I think I probably got a couple of phone calls from my team saying, please don't make us go. And again, there is a human aspect of the mission that we don't talk about here, right? The team deployed in early December. Their loved ones expected them home 10 days later. The loved ones didn’t expect them to go through Christmas and New Years. And so the team stayed there. The team focused on the mission, and our Joint Task Force there talked to the family members and explained to the extent they could what was going on. But the reality is, as it got closer, the desire from the team was to continue to stay there and work with the Ukrainian partners. And that was a fairly emotional order to say, Hey it's time for everybody to leave the country. I can't speak for the Ukrainians. But certainly for the US team, they still feel a connection with the Ukrainian partners to this day, and I expect they'll continue to do so.One of the things that's really struck me is how many young people are at the pointy end of the spear. You basically have a cohort that’s been digitally literate since the crib. What role does that play in putting together a cyberforce? I think the fact that they're digitally literate is important, but the big piece here is leadership. I remember being a brigade commander a number of years ago when somebody asked me, Hey, what's the No. 1 thing that you're looking for in the cyberbranch? And it's still leadership. And when we talk about what happened in the early stages of the mission in Ukraine, the team lead should be given all the credit. You know, we sent a team lead over there with a plan. [A US Marine Corps major in charge of the mission] decided that our plan really wasn't suited to the environment and the needs that she saw there. And they made a series of decisions that were the right decisions to make, but ultimately the entire enterprise backed the leader up and supported them. So we have these highly technically trained young people that are great leaders, and we put them in positions where, quite honestly, their expertise is what leaders like me have to depend on. And these hunt missions are just a great example of the work that they do.Do you think defensive cyber is at an inflection point? You know, offensive cyber always used to be the sort of sexy part of cyber. Is defensive cyber hunt teams changing the perception that defense is just whack-a-mole?So I certainly think if you interviewed a broad number of cyber soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and you asked them what might have been the most impactful mission that they had done, increasingly you would get a hunt forward with a mission partner in a part of the world that the United States has articulated as critically important to our national security. And so I think that that is really important.Why do you think that is?Well, we all join the service to do things that we believe we could closely link to protecting the United States. And I've been very fortunate to visit six or seven hunt forward missions in a number of locations. You walk in a room, and half of the people in that room are young Americans from the Cyber National Mission Force, and half the people are generally from a similar service in the mission partner. And their ability to work together to take defensive actions against an adversary that is attempting to threaten both their networks and our networks — it's just a really powerful environment. And our service members and our civilians that participate generally derive a lot of personal satisfaction out of being able to do that.How’s the hunt forward operation different now than it was two years ago?I think the difference now is that we've done these enough times that we have a formula. One of the great things is I get a mission brief and approve all these things before I go out. You know, I'll get a chart that'll show me the unit members that are going on the mission. I always ask, Hey, how many people have been on one of these missions before? And generally it's about 50/50. So we’re capitalizing from the previous missions, but we've improved the training we provide to the leadership of the team. We've improved the experience level. Before, if we did a 60-day hunt forward operation, we might get really smart at about day 50. Now, generally within the first couple weeks of an operation, I think we're having meaningful conversations and meaningful mission outcomes for the teams.So is there an attack that you stopped?There are a number of things that we know that we've stopped that I'm not gonna be able to specifically share with you.How about generally?I think generally we have talked about before, during the SolarWinds attack based on our fantastic partnership with the Department of Homeland Security, we were able to get a compromised copy of the SolarWinds server from a US government agency. We were able to replicate that in our persistent training environment. We were then able to train and rehearse on finding that specific malware because we're the military and we do that very well.And then we had a request to send a team to Europe in order to hunt for a suspected SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service) compromise. And we knew exactly what to look for. We were able to censor up the network in question and we were able to: One, find the Russian malicious activity. Two, we were able to advise the mission partner on how to evict the adversary from the network. And three, we were able to watch the adversary attempt to unsuccessfully re-explain that network. And we were able to do that without the adversary having any idea that we were there.And is there any example like that coming out of Ukraine that you think you stopped?We initially sensored up three different networks in Ukraine. And while I'm not claiming credit for those networks not being attacked, certainly the networks we were on were not subject to any of the malicious wiper attacks that we saw in January [2022]. Prior to the team departing [Ukraine], we were able to get access to a significant amount of malware in Ukraine, really based on the partnership with Ukraine. And that's the piece that I haven't talked about yet that's really important is, there's nothing like being there. And so the team is on the ground in Ukraine. Ukraine starts to see a series of destructive attacks, we open up a fourth line of effort, but then we immediately start sharing information. And even when the team departed, we've continued to do that. And so between us and Ukrainian partners, I think we've shared over 6,000 indicators of compromise. And that's stuff that we've been able to see from industry partnerships. That's stuff that they've been able to see from activity on the ground. And that relationship continues to this day.So a lot of people talk about Ukraine as the first hybrid war. Really a marriage of kinetic and cyber in a way we haven't really seen live before. What do you think it's taught us about the future of war?So I think it's reinforced something that we already knew. That this is really hard. I think the Russians had an intent to execute a series of destructive cyberattacks to take out ViaSat, to execute a fairly quick move and seizure of a large swath of Ukraine to include Kyiv. And it's really much harder to execute a synchronized plan like that than it is to have an intention to do it. And so for us, we've got to continue to develop not just cybercapabilities, but ensure that what we're doing is fully integrated with all our other plans. And for us, certainly on a daily basis it's something that we work really closely with the Joint Force Headquarters-Cyber, that supports the combatant commands to ensure that anything we're going to do is fully synchronized.I think there was always this perception that in cyber, Russia was an 800-pound gorilla. Do we still think that?So I think in Ukraine. … Look, the defender gets a vote. And so there should be credit given to Ukraine. 2014 didn't go so well. We started sending teams over there in 2018, and Ukraine made a lot of decisions.They invested resources and at the end of the day, the Ukraine in 2021 and 2022 was much more resilient than we'd previously seen. And so I would tell you that if you go back, read the Microsoft report, look at history, Russia will have executed more cyberattacks in Ukraine than any nation-state has ever executed over a comparative period in the history of the world. But the Ukrainians have proved very resilient. They have gotten a lot of support. They have gotten some support from us. They've got some support from NATO partners. There are US corporations that have done a fantastic job. Moving data from on-prem to off-prem was, was really, really important here. But the lesson here is that the work that we do to ensure that our networks are prepared to operate in this high threat environment are really important. But the defender does get a vote. And if the defender does the right things, we can build resilient networks even in the face of something like hundreds of Russian cyberattacks.Where are hunt forward operations now?One of the things we don't do is ever talk about ongoing hunt operations. And so at any one time we might have anywhere from six to 10 teams that are deployed and executed in operations. But we generally don't acknowledge where those teams are until the missions are done. And then we only do it if the countries we’re operating in have agreed to a public announcement.Is it safe to assume that there are some teams deployed around places that are close to Russia and close to Ukraine?So I've been in command for almost four years, and it's safe to assume there are always teams deployed in the European theater of command.An earlier version of this story appeared on the "Click Here" podcast from The Recorded Future News. Additional reporting by Sean Powers, Will Jarvis, and Sarah Wyman. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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As hip-hop turns 50 this summer, The World’s “Planet Hip Hop” series takes us to places and cultures where the sound has thrived.

Today, France is a place where hip-hop is second only to the US in terms of popularity and influence.

Here to help us navigate some of the ways and reasons why hip-hop has been so influential in France is Samuel Lamontagne, co-leader of the UCLA Hip Hop Initiative, and also a scholar in the history department.

Marco Werman: You wanted us to start off with this band, Cent Treize, or 113. Why does the story start there for you?Samuel Lamontagne: Cent Treize is an important group, especially because they're made of three rappers who all come from different backgrounds within the French African diaspora. Rim'K is from an Algerian background from North Africa, AP is from Guadeloupean background, so the West Indies, Caribbean, Mokobé is from a Malian background, so West Africa. So they all grew up in the same city, which is Vitry-sur Seine and they bonded over hip-hop. So in a way, they kind of exemplify the relationship between hip-hop and postcolonial youth in France, which is a great place to start. Another thing is that the album sonically moved away from American hip-hop influences by strongly blending in dance music sensibilities. And that's because the album was produced by DJ Mehdi, who passed away and who's a legend in French hip-hop because he revolutionized the French rap sounds by bridging French rap with Daft Punk, if you will.France was one of the earliest adopters of hip-hop after it kind of emerged from the United States. Help us understand how and why this happened.So, when hip-hop culture arrives from the US, it quickly became a medium of expression for French racialized people to to see themselves in a way they couldn't before, and hip-hop allowed to bring race and racial politics in the public consciousness, in the public debate in France, in a way that wasn't possible before. So this is the power of hip-hop, you know, through music, sounds, fashion, dance. This is much more, you know, deeper meaning and dynamics going on.As a kid of color growing up in France, I mean, how did you receive this new sound?Yeah, well, as a Black kid, you know, growing up in France, there was no space for me to see myself in the public sphere, in the media, in the public space. And so hip-hop was the only space where I could see myself and where I could imagine and feel as a Black French person, as you know, and growing up Black in France, that was the only space where I could see myself. Hip-hop, we have to recognize, is very male-dominated. And in a country like France, where women celebrities actually push back on the #MeToo movement, I'm just wondering what is the role of women in French hip-hop? Are they part of various hip-hop communities? Women are just as essential as men in hip-hop culture and history. You know, they've always been present and active as participants, organizers, supporters. So from the earliest times, you know, I'm thinking of somebody like Queen Candy, for example, who in Paris had a leading role in the Paris chapter of the Zulu Nation all the way to Diam’s, or Casey or Shay. Women have always been part of the culture and their involvement is generally erased in the way that hip-hop history is being written. So we have to be better in including their contribution to the culture and to the history.So you gave us a few names of artists there. Let's get to the artist, Casey, a song off her 2006 album, "Chez Moi." So, Samuel, this video was shot in the French West Indies in Martinique, why is Casey and this particular song important for you?She's from Martinique, back home, and my family is from Guadeloupe in Martinique, so that song is special to me because she talks about Martinique, which is to this day, still under French rule. So in this song, she talks about the history and the culture of the island, her personal relationship to it, and, you know, breaks down the politics, too.I was in France in the fall of 2005, about a month after that notorious unrest broke out in predominantly African and Muslim communities in Paris. French rappers spoke out and not only gave voice to their communities, but they were there before that upsurge in violence between cops, officials and residents of the housing projects. Help us put into context what those artists were reacting to.I think the first thing to say is that these communities are French communities, you know, they are French people who happen to be Muslim and happened to come from an African or Caribbean background. So there are communities that live in the Beaulieu, so, surrounding Paris, are socially marginalized neighborhoods. And so the 2005 protests were a response to state violence and abandonment. So what really sparked things off in 2005 was the death of two teenage boys from Clichy-sous-Bois who got scared and ran away from the police and tried to hide in an electrical station but got electrocuted and the cops were let off, you know, no sanctions, no nothing. So people from the neighborhood and other banlieues started revolting. The other thing, too, is that, you know, the 2005 protests are usually framed as this, like, exceptional special event, but those kinds of protests in banlieues have been happening regularly since the 1970s. And rappers, you know, were definitely speaking on those frustrations and breaking everything down from police brutality to racism linked to colonialism, to social exclusion and formulating critiques from their experiences.That was 2005. I'm wondering how much the social issues enter the lyrics today. Bring us up to date, what is the current scene for hip-hop in France today in 2023?So, that's a big question because, you know, hip-hop and rap music are now part of the mainstream in a similar way that they are in the US. So hip-hop is an integral part of French culture, and even it transformed the meaning of what it is to be French. And what I love about some of the more recent music is that they blend together influences from all over the diaspora, like rap with Afro-pop, with zouk, with soukous, with compas. Hip-hop remains a medium of solidarity and of communication within the diaspora and beyond.Yeah, zouk from the Caribbean, soukous from Congo, compas from Haiti. It is the diaspora. Are you going to tell us about one more artist, Rsko?The last song I chose ["Bosseur feat. Tiakola]" is just a song that I love, you know, just younger generation rappers coming up right now. And, you know, they're really blending different sonifications together. And every year, new artists come up with new ways to keep that conversation going. And I just think this song is a good representation of that, and again, just like with Cent Treize, it's just a good song, you know? This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Anti-narcotics agents call it deep cover: playing the role of a drug trafficker to mingle with actual criminals.

It’s acting, said former Drug Enforcement Administration agent Michael Levine — “Only, you’re acting with your audience about 2 inches from your face. And you’re going to die if your act is bad.”

It was the summer of 1971. President Richard Nixon had just declared the war on drugs. Levine — a Bronx-raised, federal agent in his early 30s — was gearing up for his toughest deep cover job yet. He’d invented a character for himself: “Mike,” an Italian mafioso from New York City.

“I’m not even Italian,” Levine said. “I’m a 100%, Middle Eastern Jew.”

But he was full of bravado and keen to infiltrate the Southeast Asian drug trade as Mike, a mafia capo eager to import heroin to the US.

At the time, the American media was fixated on Vietnam War veterans returning home addled by drugs — namely, powder-white Southeast Asian heroin produced in the Golden Triangle: a craggy, lawless expanse of Myanmar bordering Thailand, China and Laos.

Golden Triangle heroin refineries supplied kilos to South Vietnam where US troops could buy the drug in $2 vials.

American families feared their brothers and sons would bring home an addiction epidemic that spread across the US. Nixon understood this well: His war on drugs declaration mentioned “Vietnam” thrice.

For Levine, the new drug war was a chance to satisfy his own fix.

“I was addicted to adrenaline,” he said. “President Nixon, he called [drugs] our No. 1 enemy. So, it was an easy thing, if you’re an adrenaline junkie like me — like many of us — to cloak ourselves with that. Like, wow, this feels good. You’re making me into a hero.”

Nixon promised to assemble a new superagency to fight narcotics — what would later become the DEA — but this took time. In the interim, the drug war fell to a scattered array of state police, federal agents and US Customs. That’s where Levine worked: Customs’ Hard Narcotics division in New York City.

Levine concocted a plan. Fly to Bangkok, a regional hub for Southeast Asian heroin. Track down a few heroin traffickers. Go deep cover as Mike and earn their trust. He hoped to work his way up the supply chain, potentially exposing the whole distribution network.

Even before he reached Thailand, Levine had two specific heroin traffickers in his sights: Liang and Geh, both ethnically Chinese.

This duo, based in Bangkok, had recently sent a drug mule through JFK Airport with 3 kilos hidden in Samsonite suitcases — but not hidden well enough. Levine knew this because the drug mule, under interrogation in a back room at JFK, snitched on his suppliers.

Levine convinced him to write a letter, telling Liang and Geh that a mafia buddy (Mike) was en route to Bangkok with a business proposition.

Once in Bangkok, Levine tracked down the traffickers and turned on the charm.

“They were two skinny Chinese men, neatly dressed. And they loved me. I mean, they thought I was the tutti-frutti of the mafia.”

US intelligence files indicate that, in the early 1970s, Bangkok-based traffickers were struggling to set up a high-volume pipeline pumping heroin to the US.

A CIA map of drug-smuggling drug routes from a since-declassified 1972 file.

Credit:

CIA

Mike swooped in with the answer to their problems. No more sending piddly amounts of heroin via drug mules. Levine, as Mike, told Liang and Geh he could smuggle big shipments through New York’s ports.

Levine bonded with the traffickers, carousing through Bangkok’s neon-lit streets.

“They took me out to restaurants, to massage parlors,” Levine said.

They plied him with gifts: good liquor, fancy clothes.

“These two were obviously well-connected. We’d walk into a place and they were revered, with people backing away almost in fear.”

After about two weeks, Liang and Geh mentioned “the factory”: a refinery processing gooey, brown opium into pristine, white heroin.

“They said it could produce hundreds of kilos in a short time. This was it,” Levine said. “To me, the factory was my Mount Everest.”

The factory was located on the edges of the Golden Triangle: Thailand’s Chiang Mai province, which shares a mountainous border with Myanmar. Plans to visit the refinery took shape. The trip was nigh. Levine was staying in one of Bangkok’s snazzier hotels, the Siam Intercontinental, as befit a mafioso of Mike’s caliber. One night, at 2 or 3 in the morning, the phone rang. A caller summoned Levine to the US Embassy.

“They said, ‘Make sure you’re not followed.’”

So, Levine walked the streets for about an hour, making sure he wasn’t tailed, before slipping into the Embassy.

“That’s where I met my first CIA agent.”

The man was a bit older than Levine and “he’s dressed exactly like what you’d expect a CIA agent in a movie to look like.”

Khaki-colored outfit, lots of pockets.

“I remember the guy being pretty businesslike with me. He said, ‘You’re not going to Chiang Mai.’”

Levine was stunned. He’d flown halfway around the world on a crusade backed by the president. He couldn’t back down now.

“I told him, ‘They [Liang and Geh] are going to introduce me to the people running this shit. He says, “Well, we can’t protect you up there.’ I told him, ‘I didn’t take this job to be protected. I want to go.””

“Well, you’re not going,” the CIA officer said. “You don’t understand the big picture.”

Levine left the Embassy that dark morning with a head full of questions. Should he disobey the CIA officer and go to the factory anyway — or stand down? And what was the big picture?

The CIA knew almost everything about the trafficking syndicate entrenched in Thailand’s mountains. Secret CIA files, since declassified, are strewn with minutiae about the syndicate: its secret routes, its military-grade weapons, locations of heroin labs. The CIA even calculated the average speed of the syndicate’s mules — actual, four-legged drug mules lugging sacks of opium from remote Myanmar villages down to borderland refineries.

But the CIA wasn’t hostile toward the syndicate, known inside the spy agency as the Chinese Irregular Forces or CIF. Quite the opposite: This trafficking organization was an intelligence-gathering asset for the CIA. The relationship stretched back to the early 1950s following Mao Zedong’s conquest of China. In China’s far western frontier, Yunnan province, thousands of Chinese people — many of them merchants and landowners — refused to accept Communist rule. Escaping into the jungles of neighboring Myanmar with their horses and mules, they had little chance of survival.

The CIA sent in unmarked planes to drop crates filled with guns and ammo, and urged the exiles to return to China and seize the country from Mao. The secret mission was a precursor to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba 10 years later.

The Chinese exiles tried to take back their homeland but failed miserably. By the 1960s, the anti-communist exiles had all but abandoned hopes of “liberating” China. They instead focused on gathering up opium from Myanmar’s hills, one of the world’s lushest poppy-growing heartlands, and refining it into heroin inside hidden camps along the Thai border.

In short, they morphed into a drug syndicate armed with heavy American-made weapons: mortars, rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.

“Our guys had heavy weapons that no regular civilians could ever lay hands on,”said Jao Kai Wa, a former sergeant in the CIF.

By the summer of 1971 — when Levine showed up to Thailand — this syndicate dominated the Golden Triangle, accounting for “80% of the trafficking from Burma into Thailand,” according to CIA documents, “If the US hadn’t supported us,” Jao said, “we would’ve been screwed. We couldn’t have made it all work.”

The CIA supported the CIF with the help of its junior partner: Taiwan’s military intelligence division. They didn’t just provide exiled Chinese “irregulars” with weapons.

“We received radios, too,” Jao said. “That made everything very convenient.”

The CIA-Taiwan intelligence apparatus built radio towers at CIF bases and doled out long-range radio transmitters: clunky units with dials and antennae that strapped to traffickers’ backs.

Drug trafficking is a logistical exercise — moving stuff from points A to B — and the radios proved vital to running an efficient business. But that wasn’t the reason CIA officers bestowed radios on the syndicate. The spy agency used the CIF and other opium-smuggling armed groups in the Golden Triangle as sentries, surveilling the rugged mountains.

“They’d send these guys way out in the jungle to collect intelligence,” said David Lawitts, the official biographer of Bill Young, a legendary former CIA officer during the Cold War.

Young, raised in Burma, was adept at training Golden Triangle drug runners to work as spies.

“These groups knew who was moving through the mountains,” Lawitts said, “and what products were moving: weapons, ammunition, narcotics. And they knew who had the most power in these regions. Are the communists dominant? Are the host countries’ militaries dominant? They could provide all of that.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, communist guerrillas backed by North Vietnam were infiltrating parts of the Golden Triangle, namely Laos, and attempting to push all the way into Thailand, a US-backed, anti-communist stronghold.

The CIA was obsessed with halting their spread. The agency had long feared that Asian countries, absent US intervention, would be “plucked by the communists like ripe fruit.”

Though drug traffickers served as the CIA’s eyes and ears in the Southeast Asian hinterlands, these operations were kept secret from other wings of the US government — and for good reason. The spy agency knew, according to its own files, that Golden Triangle refineries were built with a specific purpose: serving the “increased demand for heroin by US forces in Vietnam.”

Any federal anti-narcotics agent seeking to expose the region’s heroin supply chain might end up, without knowing it, compromising a US intelligence asset.

“If a DEA agent is trying to run a sting on a particular heroin producer or trafficker, by definition, he’s not going to know if that guy is also allied with the CIA. Because all these operations are clandestine,” Lawitts said. “They’re not going to disclose them to anybody, not unless they have a need to know.”

That was the big picture.

But apparently, Levine — a brash, anti-narcotics agent, fresh off a plane from New York — did not have a need to know.

Back in Bangkok, in the summer of 1971, Levine had a choice to make. Flout the CIA’s orders and head to the factory, potentially blowing the lid off a trafficking syndicate targeting American shores, or stand down.

He stood down. Today, at the age of 83, Levine has no regrets. Asked what might’ve happened if he went to Chiang Mai, he said: “Dead. I don’t know how [I would] wind up dead, but dead. Tortured to death?”

No matter what, Levine said, “I wouldn’t have come back a hero.”

On July 1, 1973, Nixon finally established the Drug Enforcement Agency. Levine was among its first wave of agents, corralled from state and federal law enforcement bureaus and put under one central organization.

Their mission: Span the globe and thwart narcotics syndicates wherever they found them. Levine served the DEA for more than two decades; a fluent Spanish speaker, most of his deep cover work took place in South America.

But Levine said the war on drugs was — and is — fought with a caveat. At any time, CIA officers can shut down DEA investigations by citing “national security” concerns. Though this uncomfortable truth had long undermined White House propaganda — as first lady Nancy Reagan put it, there is “no moral middle ground” in the fight against drugs — disclosing the CIA’s protection of drug traffickers won’t change anything, Levine said.

“Americans will do nothing, absolutely nothing. The powers that be are very aware of that.”

By the CIA’s own admission, it backed drug-running, anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua in the 1980s. More recently, in Afghanistan, the agency supported anti-Taliban warlords who were known opium traffickers. The CIA’s collusion with Southeast Asian drug syndicates during the Cold War was among the first of many secret alliances, auguring more to come.

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Taiwan is now several weeks into a #MeToo movement that has seen dozens of political figures, celebrities, professors and activists accused of sexual misconduct.

The movement was sparked, in part, by an award-winning political TV show. Every day, more survivors come forward with further stories of someone who harassed them, touched them inappropriately, or sexually assaulted them.

Although the movement began within political parties, it’s since spread to many other sectors of society such as entertainment and academia. And in some cases, there’s even been a backlash.

For example, last Wednesday, a TikTok influencer named Chiu Yao-Le held a press conference to accuse a prominent actor and singer, Aaron Yan, of forcing him to make sex tapes with him when Chiu was only 16 years old.

With Chiu only a few sentences in, the accused, Aaron Yan, himself, burst into the room and bowed deeply, just feet away from Chiu.

"I want to solemnly say sorry to you here for making you suffer things that you should not have to bear in life,” Yan said. “I’m sorry.”

Yan said he “absolutely did not secretly film [Chiu],” and that he “did not do anything against anyone's will.” He then left the room.

Chiu, visibly shocked, took a break before resuming the press conference. After coming back, Chiu refused to accept the apology, saying it was insincere.

“In regard to recording intimate videos of an underaged person, it’s illegal, that’s unquestionable,” Chiu said.

It’s an example of some of the factors making Taiwan’s #MeToo movement so unique. Some of the high-profile accusers are actually men. And in many cases, the accused haven’t been afraid to challenge the narrative, or publicly deny accountability.

When #MeToo took off in many countries including the US in 2017, it didn’t reach Taiwan at the same time.

Lu Shengyen teaches history at National Taiwan Normal University. She wrote a book on toxic masculinity and its history in Taiwan. She said that now that the #MeToo movement has arrived, it faces challenges unique to Taiwanese society and culture.

One example that she and other feminist scholars point out is that in many cases when men tow the line around inappropriately touching women, they’re often said to be “eating tofu.”

“They would touch your arms, or put their hands on the small of your back, and slowly slide into danger areas, and probably just stop there … if it happens in America, probably, it’s a very sound [case of] sexual harassment, but in Taiwan, many people will view it as not a crime,” Lu said.

Still, she said that she thinks the #MeToo movement is changing the culture. And she’s not the only one.

Sabrina Lim, a Taipei city councilor, joined several other women in Taiwanese politics to announce legal support for survivors of sexual harassment and abuse.

Credit:

Ashish Valentine/The World

Chen Chien-jou, a former staffer for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, helped spark the movement in Taiwan when she posted in late May about her experience of being sexually harassed by a contractor and bringing it up to a superior, only to have a senior party official cover it up.

In her post, she referenced a hit Taiwanese political TV series, “Wave Makers,” which premiered in late April and explored sexual harassment in politics. She said it helped inspired her to share her story in the first place.

Since the movement in Taiwan began, “There are people who are starting to genuinely self-reflect, especially on their daily interactions like, am I offending? Am I crossing a line?” Chen told The World in the first media interview she has done since she posted.

At the same time, she said, “a lot of the perpetrators are taking actions that are retraumatizing the victims, abusing the law and threatening to sue … there have even been perpetrators, whose spouses, whose wives have had to come forward with them and take responsibility … which, as a woman makes me especially angry.”

Chen said she is amazed at how the movement has grown.

While she said she hoped others would come forward, “I did not anticipate that it would spread to so many different industries such as entertainment and sports.”

But Chen said that stories alone aren’t enough — it will take a lot of work for things to change. Before Chen posted her experiences, she said, she knew not everyone would believe her.

“I had anticipated the negative comments to a degree, but it was obviously very retraumatizing. But I knew I had to be resilient. I knew I had to hold up the movement, partly for other people, partly because I had the conviction that I did nothing wrong … The only fact that mattered was that I was hurt. And the perpetrator should not get away with what he was doing. That's it.”

Chen said she is happy that social media enabled this moment for her and other survivors who were failed by institutions like the political parties or the justice system. But at the same time, she’s familiar with how the movement faced challenges in the US due to accusations that divided public opinion, like the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial, and she’s worried about the potential for false accusations.

“If you abuse the resources, you will be taking space, and opportunities away from true victims who would have benefited from the safe space,” Chen said.

Many gender-rights activists in Taiwan are hopeful that this moment results in meaningful change — but they’re sober about the challenges.

Darice Chang is an international ambassador for Women’s March Taiwan.

“We are more optimistic about a new environment in Taiwan that would be less tolerant toward gender -and power-based violence, unfortunately, with the new developments that have been a lot more mudslinging,” Chang said.

Chang thinks that there’s a danger the survivors’ stories will ultimately be lost in the Taiwanese news cycle — and if the movement fails to seize the moment, Taiwan might not make the kinds of systemic change required to change the culture around sexual harassment and abuse.

For example, reforming political and legal institutions to better handle sexual misconduct cases, and encouraging ordinary people to take bystander training so they know how to react when they see sexual harassment happening in front of them.

Although she was the whistleblower, Chen also can’t predict the future of Taiwan’s MeToo movement, ultimately, she said that going public was her way of healing from a traumatic experience.

“Now there is a chance for people to come forward to tell their stories,” Chen said. “And to know that this is a problem that goes beyond politics. It's time that we face the issue because it's very important for people to start to learn that physical boundaries are to be respected, that human dignity is to be respected.”

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Last spring, 24-year-old Kevin Villagra decided to quit his job at a vegetable store in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to pursue his dream career as a rapper in the country’s booming trap music scene.

“It’s the new soccer, where stars are born,” he said. “Things are moving really fast.”

Kevin Villagra (stage name "Keke") working at a vegetable store in Buenos Aires, Argentina, last March.

Credit:

Alan Ruiz Terol/The World

As Latin American artists top the charts globally, Argentina has become home to some of the most successful music stars in the Spanish-speaking world.

A generation of singers and producers in their 20s have turned into global phenomenons by imprinting their own personality on pop, reggaeton, and hip-hop-inspired genres like trap.

The likes of Bizarrap, Duki, Nicki Nicole, and María Becerra have not only enchanted millions of listeners, but also inspired many in their home country to follow in their footsteps.

With Argentina mired in economic instability, some young artists see music not only as their passion, but also as an escape plan.

“I want to go all-in for something that could change my life, and get me, my family, and my loved ones out of this very unstable situation,” Villagra said.

Villagra grew up in Florencio Varela, a city south of Buenos Aires, and moved to the capital in his early teens when his father got a job as a janitor.

Villagra took voice lessons throughout his adolescence, and in recent years began recording his own music at home studios of friends.

Argentine trap artist Keke on stage.

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Alan Ruiz Terol/The World

He has released a handful of songs under the stage name "Keke," racking up a few thousand plays on Spotify and Youtube, and is currently working on his first EP.

The artificial sound and downbeat energy of trap music is perhaps most present in his track “SUER7E,” which also features other stylistic staples of the genre like synthesizers, an electronic beat, and highly processed vocals with the help of autotune.

Most of Keke’s songs are collaborations with other artists and producers—which in itself is a key feature of the Argentine music scene.

As an example, the song currently at the top of Spotify’s Top 50 chart in the country is “Los del Espacio,” a collaboration between eight different Argentine artists.

“It’s beautiful how artists in the scene help each other out,” Amparo Legorburo, the co-host of the podcast “Musincronía,” from Uruguay, told The World.

Lyrics in Argentine trap are often aspirational, said Legorburo, dealing with one’s place of origin and hopes of a better future, as well as Argentines’ distinct national pride.

This sense of community is reinforced by the online presence of many artists, and their intensive use of social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube channels.

Argentine trap artists Keke (right) and Sosa (right).

Credit:

Alan Ruiz Terol/The World

Trap has become the defining musical genre of present-day Argentina, just like rock nacional from the mid-1960s to the 1980s, or cumbia in the 1990s.

“These were all popular manifestations responding to their times in their own way,” said Varela, who believes Argentine trap has already become a “very important milestone” not only in the country’s history, but also in Latin American music.

While the hip-hop subgenre of trap emerged in the 1990s in Atlanta, the birth of Argentine trap is often associated with the rise in popularity a decade ago of freestyle rap battles, most notably “El Quinto Escalón,” (Spanish for “The Fifth Step”).

El Quinto Escalón was held for the first time in March 2012, in the Rivadavia park in Buenos Aires, with very few people in attendance the first time, recalled Juan Goldberger, known as Juancín.

Goldberger went on to become one of the event organizers and has since released a 26-part video series about the history of El Quinto Escalón on his YouTube channel.

“Trap music exploded and became very popular thanks to El Quinto Escalón,” Goldberger SAID. “It became a platform where many people interested in hip-hop could develop themselves and gain exposure.”

During battles, the rappers would take turns slamming at each other, while the public surrounded them and cheered at every jab — a scene Goldberger compared to Ancient Rome’s shows in the Colosseum.

“The energy of the public, the emotion, it was very intense,” Goldberger said. “With every rhyme, we knew we were witnessing something historic.”

El Quinto Escalón grew bigger, and bigger, attracting thousands of people to the Rivadavia park, while millions followed their favorite rappers online on the official YouTube channel.

By the time El Quinto Escalón ended, in 2017, a new music scene was emerging, with former competitors recording their own tracks, like “No Vendo Trap by Duki,” the song that according to Goldberger really kicked off trap music in Argentina.

Many other artists followed, meeting at the house of whoever had a computer, a microphone and speakers to make their own music.

“To make a trap song you need very little,” Goldberger said. “You can learn all the basics through video tutorials, download some beats from YouTube, turn on autotune and just record yourself.

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Henry Guerrero spent 35 days in a remote patch of the Amazon rainforest looking for four children who survived after a plane crash. The children were found alive on June 9 after surviving on their own for 40 days.

Guerrero was one of the Indigenous leaders who received a medal for participating in the search at a military ceremony headed by Colombia’s president this week.

“This should show the world that Indigenous knowledge is important,” Guerrero said during the ceremony held outside of the presidential palace. “During the search, we proved that as Indigenous people, we have a lot to contribute.”

A photo from June 9 shows soldiers and Indigenous volunteers providing first aid to the children who survived the plane crash, just hours after they were rescued.

Credit:

Handout from Colombian Military Forces

The children, a group of siblings ages 1 to 13, come from the Huitoto tribe. They’re still recovering in a hospital where they have been shielded from the press.

But as the days pass, more details are emerging about how they were rescued in an area far from any villages in one of the world’s most hostile environments.

On Monday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro described the rescue of the four children as an example of how Western technologies and Indigenous knowledge of the rainforest can be “combined” to “save life on the planet.”

“This mission has to be the beginning of an understanding between us,” he said.

Soliders who participated in the search for the children pose for a photo with volunteers from Indigenous tribes who also joined the search party. The Colombian president said on Monday that the rescue operation combined modern technologies with traditional methods.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

Colombia’s military deployed more than 150 troops to the area around the crash site to search for the children who were traveling on a small plane with three adults who perished in the accident.

The troops were joined by five sniffer dogs and more than 70 Indigenous volunteers like Guerrero, who comes from the same reservation as the children.

Guerrero said that the Indigenous searchers were about to give up on June 8 after they had been in the rainforest for a month.

Nicolas Ordoñez (right) is one of the Indigenous volunteers who first found the four Indigenous children who survived the plane crash in the Amazon. He was awarded with one of Colombia's highest honors, the Cross of Boyaca.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

That’s when one of the members of the group decided to take ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic beverage that causes visions. It is used by Indigenous people in the Amazon basin for healing purposes, and also to find answers to difficult questions.

“With our own eyes, we were unable to find the children,” Guerrero said. “So, we turned to ayahuasca to guide us. It was our last resort.”

The following day, a team of eight volunteers slashed through the jungle following the directions of elder Jose Angel Rubio, who took the ayahuasca brew.

Dairo Kumariteke, a volunteer from the Murui Muina tribe, was in that group. He said that by midday, they had found the children.

Eliecer Muñoz, was in the search party that first found the children in a small forest clearing. He said the children were so weak that the volunteers had to carry them on their backs for two hours.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

“We were walking through the bush, and I heard what seemed to be the cries of a baby,” he said. “I stopped, and waited. And then, I heard the cries again.”

Kumariteke said the children had built a small shelter using branches, leaves and a mosquito net that they had taken from the plane.

They had survived because they came across one of the food packages of cookies and cassava flour that the Colombian army dropped into the area from helicopters.

But they also survived because Lesly Mucutuy, the oldest child, knew how to navigate the rainforest.

Indigenous leader Henry Guerrero (right) spent 35 days in the rainforest looking for the children who survived the plane crash. He said that for inspiration, one of the members of the search party took Ayahuasca, a potion that causes visions.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

She fed her siblings with a fruit that falls from palm trees called mil pesos that is rich in carotene and vitamin E. She also collected water in a plastic bottle that she had taken from the plane.

Still, the children were weak and malnourished by the time they were found in a small forest clearing, said Eliecer Munoz, another member of the search party.

Wilson, a military sniffer dog, got lost in the jungle during the search for the children. On Monday, soldiers took his mother, Drugia, to the ceremony.

Credit:

Manuel Rueda/The World

“We had to carry them on our backs for two hours as we made our way back to a meeting point in the forest,” he said. “Then, we handed them over to the military.”

The rescue effort has been widely celebrated in Colombia where Indigenous people and the military are often at odds.

But Colombians are also grieving for Wilson, one of the sniffer dogs who played a key role in the childrens’ rescue, but got lost in the jungle during the search.

The Belgian Malinois ran away from his handler on May 18 as he followed a scent.

But soldiers say his paw prints helped them get closer to the area where the children were found by the Indigenous volunteers.

After the children were flown out of the jungle in a helicopter, dozens of troops remained in the area to search for Wilson.

The military took two female dogs in heat to the area, hoping that their scent would draw Wilson toward the search party. Soldiers also left his handler’s clothes around the crash site in an effort to lure the canine back to safety.

But on Monday, Gen. Pedro Sanchez, the commander in charge of the rescue operation, said that at this point, the chances of finding Wilson in the rainforest are improbable.

“He is a dog, and he is a hazard” to predators in the rainforest, like Jaguars, Sanchez explained.

To honor Wilson, the military brought the dog’s mother Drugia to Monday’s ceremony.

She was saluted by Petro and awarded with a medal.

“We are going to remember Wilson forever, as we do every soldier and policeman who has offered their lives to protect Colombia,” Sanchez said.

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On a breezy afternoon just outside of St. Louis in northern Senegal, Mohammed Fall tended to his sheep in an open-air market just off the main road on a sandy field dotted with trees.

Fall is from neighboring Mauritania, and he said that there are about 20,000 animals waiting to be sold. Dozens of other Mauritanian merchants like Fall have been coming to the town of St. Louis for many years. It’s a painstaking trip but one that is also good for business.

“Almost every region of Mauritania is represented here,” Fall said. “We leave our homes and head to the border with Senegal. Then, we take a ferry boat with all these sheep. And once we cross the border, we load them onto trucks to bring the animals all the way here.”

Depending on its weight, each animal can sell for the equivalent of $100 to $250.

Mauritanian merchants sell sheep ahead of Eid al-Adha in an open-air market just south of St. Louis, Senegal.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

This is one of the busiest times of the year for these men as Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of the Sacrifice, approaches. Following tradition, Muslim families around the world will slaughter an animal, like a sheep or goat, to commemorate the willingness of the Prophet Abraham to sacrifice his son, Ishmael, in obedience to God.

Eid al-Adha is a second, major Muslim holiday that comes after Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan. It is celebrated on the third day of the Hajj, or pilgrimage, in Saudi Arabia.

Muslims in this West African country relish the tradition that also brings moments of prayer and unites families and friends around the table.

Sophie Sèye welcomes many visitors during the time of Eid. She shares her home with her husband MaFall Ndoye, their 18-year-old son and also with Ndoye’s second wife Khady Diamé — whom she refers to as her sister — and their young child.

"Whoever enters this house is welcome, and we will celebrate together."

Sophie Sèye, resident near St. Louis, Senegal

“My sister’s family will come and they will be my guests,” Sèye said.” My brothers and their children will come and she will do the very same. Whoever enters this house is welcome, and we will celebrate together.”

Sophie Sèye, right, shares her house with her husband MaFall Ndoye, left, MaFall’s second wife Khady Diamé. Sèye welcomes many visitors during the time of Eid.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

In the backyard, Diamé points to the sheep that will soon be slaughtered by the men of the household.

A poster of a man wearing a Senegalese kaftan hangs on the wall at the Mar Design tailor shop in central St. Louis, Senegal.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

It will then be up to the women to carve, clean and cook it. A portion of the meat will be frozen to be used later. Parts of it will also be shared with friends, neighbors and those in need.“It’s the joy of having people around that makes it worth all the effort.” Diamé said.

People also want to look their best for all the visitors and family gatherings during the Eid celebrations. It’s also a symbol of renewal. So, those who can afford it will get new clothes to wear.

Tailors at this small shop in central St. Louis have been working long hours to keep up with the demand. In the back, a young man worked the sewing machine while another one ironed a completed piece.

Owner Mar Diop cut blue fabric in the front room.He said the most popular design for men this Eid is a knee-length shirt, or kaftan, and long pants.

Mar Diop cuts fabric at this tailor shop in St. Louis, Senegal. He is working long hours to fill custom-made orders for Eid.

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Maria Elena Romero/The World

Both are made of a lightweight, white cotton fabric that works well in the heat. The shirt is finished with embroidery covering the front buttons.

Despite economic uncertainties and recent political protests in the country that turned deadly a few weeks ago, Diop said he has big ambitions for his shop.

“I want to bring our designs to international destinations,” he explained. “And in the process, I want to allow everyone who works here to succeed in this business.”

He said the shop will stay open until the early hours of Thursday when he hopes to complete the work before joining his family to celebrate.

A young worker sews clothes at the Mar Design tailor shop in St. Louis, Senegal.

Credit:

Maria Elena Romero/The World

As for what he plans to wear for Eid, Diop said he hasn’t had a chance to think about it just yet.

“Tailors are the last to make their own attire,” he said. “I have not even started mine. My customers will get their dresses first.”

Related: Canada unveils a first-of-a-kind Eid stamp this year

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Maia Ernst opened the gate of her tiny wood cabin to reveal a huge yard that is perfect for her pack of dogs. The isolated house is set back off a country highway in the Serbian countryside just outside of Belgrade, the capital.

Above the sound of lots of barking, Ernst said she had five dogs and then, found two more. The one she found on the street was a blind, old beagle, the only dog in her pack that wasn't barking.

Ernst sat on her stoop to scratch ears and rub bellies. To call her a dog lover is an understatement. Ernst and her mom escaped with nearly every seat in her car occupied by dogs when they fled Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine, under heavy shelling in March 2022.

“I put everyone in the car, then found gas,” she said. “It was hard, but thanks to Google, Google showed me some roads between villages where I could buy gas.”

At the time, Ernst had three dogs, but just as they were leaving she got a message that a couple she knew — her friends — had just been killed in their home by a missile strike. Neighbors could hear their two dogs inside the wreckage, whimpering.

“I found some people whom I paid to go get the dogs,” she said, “because it was a problem to catch them. Not even the sister of the woman [who was killed] could grab them.”

Those two dogs, Juan, a Peruvian hairless, and Bella, a Mexican hairless, show signs of trauma.

“The male’s ear won’t stand up straight,” she said, “and we think it's a result of stress."

Three out of seven of Ernst’s dogs, the two hairless and a recently rescued beagle, frolic in the big yard at Ernst’s lender cabin. Ernst says Serbia isn’t ideal for her, but this property is perfect for her pets.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

Ernst’s setup in Serbia is a far cry from her life back home where she worked as an ethnographer at the National Museum of the History of Ukraine. Here, she said, she hasn’t been able to find work. Not even as a dog-sitter.

“I want to try to sell my house in the village near Kyiv, because I need money to live here. I’m just trying not to panic.”

For the moment, at least, Ernst was living rent-free. She and her pack were invited to Serbia by the cabin’s owner, someone Ernst knew from a dog group on Facebook. Ernst said that, as a Ukrainian, the isolated house suited her as she was trying to lay low.

Ernst said some Ukrainians in Serbia have been the target of insults by Serbs who back Russia.

In a poll last year, two-thirds of Serbs said Russia was their most important ally. Nearly as many blamed the West for the ongoing conflict.

Ernst said she, too, has been called names in public, so she rarely ventures out from the little cabin. As much as she wants to go home, she said she will stay until she feels more certain that she, her mom and her seven dogs will be safe.

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Montserrat Caballero knew becoming mayor of Tijuana, in Baja California, Mexico, on the US border, in 2021 came with a heavy cost.

“This seat is not just photo ops,” she said. “In a city like Tijuana, and in a country like Mexico, elected officials understand the risks that this seat carries.”

She should know. Caballero, her son, dog and two ferrets are moving into military barracks following multiple death threats. The decision came at the suggestion of the Mexican National Guard.

In recent weeks, Caballero has received threatening voicemails telling her that “they are going to kill my family unless I stop working,” she said.

Last month, a member of the mayor’s security detail was shot at in downtown Tijuana while scouting a location for an official event. The bodyguard suffered minor injuries and Caballero canceled the event.

The mayor’s move renews focus on Tijuana’s security situation and the state of Mexican democracy.

“I think it raises more interesting questions about the quality of democracy in Mexico and who is running for office,” said Cecilia Farfan, head of research at the Center for US and Mexican Studies at UC San Diego.

People who want to run for public office in Mexico could reconsider if they know being elected comes with death threats, she added.

The situation also casts doubt on elected officials who aren’t being threatened — are they in cahoots with criminal organizations?

In February, the former Secretary of Public Safety Genaro Garcia Luna was convicted of taking bribes from the Sinaola Cartel. In 2020, the former governor of Veracruz was barred from entering the United States because of a corruption scandal connected to the Cartel Jalisco New Generation.

Caballero is framing the death threats as a direct response to her administration’s efforts to combat crime.

“If I had a connection with narcos, they wouldn’t be after me,” she said.

Tijuana’s Municipal Police have confiscated 1,700 guns and arrested more than 60 murder suspects, the mayor added.

More than 2,000 people were murdered in Tijuana last year. And 769 people have been murdered in the first five months of this year.

The mayor has publicly criticized Baja California Gov. Marina del Pilar Avila and State Attorney General Ivan Carpio for not doing enough to combat organized crime. Roughly 30% of the murder suspects arrested by Tijuana police have been released, she said.

The public spat could embolden criminal organizations.

“There is this context of uncertainty with both sides accusing each other of not really coordinating, of not really paying attention to what’s happening with security,” Farfan said.

Caballero’s move to the military barracks also has implications for Tijuana’s tourism and business. Public and private boosters have invested millions in the city’s commercial sector. The mayor being forced to live on a military base could scare off investors and tourists.

“Unfortunately, Tijuana is part of the border narrative that is always cast in this perpetual zone of crisis,” Farfan said.

More than 2 million people live in Tijuana. The vast majority have no interaction with crime. Still, people may be on the fence about visiting the city.

“We know the border is more than just stories of perpetual crisis that we hear in the big national news,” Farfan said. “I think the decision to visit ultimately goes to individual levels of comfort. Do you feel comfortable in this space?”

Caballero is trying to project strength.

“I’m not afraid,” she said. “Today, I was in the streets — I had another event — and I’m here in my office.”

Caballero said US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar suggested she live in San Diego. However, the mayor said she thought it was important for her to stay in Tijuana.

She wants people to believe that Tijuana is still safe and said those who don’t go looking for trouble won’t find any.

Most homicides in Tijuana are connected to drug sales, she added.

However, experts said that is an oversimplification that minimizes violent crime in Mexico as something that only happens to bad people.

“When you turn it into just, ‘Oh, it’s criminals killing each other,’ then unfortunately, there is no incentive to really address the issue,” Farfan said.

The mentality perpetuates the idea that as long as violent crime is confined to poor neighborhoods and doesn’t impact the wealthy tourist areas, then it is under control, she said.

An earlier version of this story was originally published by KPBS Public Media.

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Marta Kostiv quickly finished up lunch in the dining hall before heading off to class at the International People’s College, a residential school located on a tree-studded campus in Elsinore, a historic town just an hour by train from the capital, Copenhagen.

The International People's College hosts about 100 students from all over the world at any given time.

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Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

Hallways here are adorned with photos of the hundreds of international students who have attended the school since its opening over 100 years ago, and each corridor is named after a different part of the world.

IPC hallways are adorned with photos of international students from around the world.

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Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

The IPC, one of Denmark’s oldest folk high schools, focuses exclusively on global affairs, and all classes are taught in English.

Kostiv, a 23-year-old student from Lviv, said that she heard about the chance to study at the IPC when she was still in Ukraine.

“I saw in one of their group chats that IPC is proposing a scholarship for Ukrainian students, so I applied for it, and I'm really glad that I joined this, because I always supported the idea of lifelong learning,” she said.

Marta Kostiv, 23, from Lviv, heard about the IPC through a group chat and decided to apply.

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Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

Since the war started, 27 students from Ukraine have been accepted to study at various Danish folk high schools across the country as part of a special endowment to encourage young Ukrainians to learn about democratic change and civil society-building — a purpose aligned with the overall history and aim of the Danish folk high school system.

Denmark’s 70 folk high schools are residential colleges where young adults come to live and learn together for up to six months with no grades or exams. These schools embody the concept of bildung — a German word for a learning approach that blends personal, civic and moral development through shared values like cooperation, empathy and dialogue.

Sara Mortensen oversees international partnerships at the Association of Danish Folk High Schools.

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Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

The idea for the endowment came from a small group of educators in Ukraine with Bildung in Ukraine, a nongovernmental organization that believes that bildung holds the key to the country's future.

“A very clear message from [Bildung in Ukraine] was to please open your schools for our youth because they need something meaningful to do while the country's in a state of war,” said Sara Mortensen, who oversees international partnerships with the Association of Danish Folk High Schools. “And we need to prepare and democratize [and] build strong individuals for a time after the war.”

A 24-week semester at the IPC costs about $6,500, which the special endowment makes free of charge. Students can apply to attend any type of Danish folk high school; they emphasize everything from gymnastics to the arts to spirituality.

Cooperate, communicateAt the IPC, residents do everything together, sharing meals and cleaning up in the kitchen, working on class projects, attending cultural nights, hanging out in the library and partying together on the weekends.

Students and faculty say the school’s emphasis on small-group dialogue and personal storytelling helps them break through cultural barriers and stereotypes.

“The classes are different, so we have choir, we have intercultural communication, Asian studies, we have all of that, even gardening. And my goal was to try everything I could,” said Kirill Karuna, a 22-year-old student from Kyiv. “You just cannot help but fall in love with this whole concept.”

Kirill Karuna, 22, from Kyiv, said he loves the whole folk high school concept and extended his stay from 12 to 24 weeks.

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Karuna originally applied to stay 12 weeks but was convinced to stay the full 24 weeks and said that he does not regret it — he even discovered his love for filmmaking here.

“What I’ve learned about myself is that it's all right to deviate from society and be on your own,” Karuna added, “but don't go to extremes and don't leave the [community] spotlight for too long.”

Marta Kostiv stands with IPC student Nadeem Abbas, 41, from Pakistan, and Nanami Yamada, 28, from Japan, on the IPC campus in Elsinore, Denmark, May 23, 2023.

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Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

Kostiv, speaking alongside him, reiterated that point.

“I think that the core thing at IPC is communication, to try to live in a society where different people from different cultures are together and to try to like, somehow cooperate with each other, even if we are all different,” she said.

Kostiv admitted that “even if you move abroad, you can’t get rid of your problems,” she said, adding that she is eager to return to Ukraine, find meaningful work and continue to build her life there.

“The thing I will bring [home] with me is curiosity,” Kostiv said, noting how she was encouraged to explore the arts and try new things.

“I also learned that I'm an introvert, so I don't need this many people around me all the time,” she said with a smile.

‘Schools for the living’The 19th-century thinker N.F.S. Grundtvig is credited as the creative genius behind the folk high school system.

“He was a priest. He was a poet. He was a politician. He was a pedagogical thinker. And he was a philosopher. And basically, Grundtvig’s thought was that we need to educate the Danish population — the sons of farmers — who only had very little education at that time,” said headmaster Soren Launbjerg.

Headmaster Soren Launbjerg not only leads the IPC, he also sings and plays piano alongside students and faculty.

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Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

In 1849, Denmark made the leap from an absolute monarchy to democracy with the adoption of its first constitution. In 1864, the country lost 40% of its land and wealth after a war with Schleswig-Holstein, a region in northern Germany.

For Grundtvig, these political and social shifts required a new approach to education that would transform “schools of the dead,” — a system based on discipline, grades and even physical punishment — into “schools for the living.”

“He believed very much in dialogue, which is also, of course, the nature of democracy. So, the spoken word is very important in folk high schools,” Launbjerg said.

Grundtvig himself wrote more than 800 songs about Danish identity and history, and these songs are often sung ritually to this day as a starting point for communal reflection, Launbjerg added.

This book contains Danish folksongs and hymns. The first edition was published in 1888 and the latest in, 2006, includes 572 songs.

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Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

Over time, folk high schools flourished as a fundamental force in the formation of Danish consciousness. Many leaders and activists around the world would later turn to the folk high school system as a working model for civic engagement, nation-building and democracy.

Julie Shackleford, an American anthropologist and teacher at the IPC, oversees the school’s archives in a few crowded offices bursting with historical documents, records and relics.

Shackleford pointed to a framed letter from Martin Luther King Jr. as evidence of the school’s unique role in the American civil rights movement.

Julie Shackleford, an American anthropologist and teacher at the IPC, shows where activist Myles Horton signed the IPC guestbook in 1931.

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Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

She also flipped open to a guest book and traced her finger to the signature of Myles Horton, a student at the IPC in 1931. The following year, Horton established the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which later became an ideological hub in the US struggle for civil rights.

Julie Shackleford points directly to where civil rights activist and educator Myles Horton signed his name in the 1931 IPC guestbook.

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Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

Shackleford underscored the power of expression as a thread that runs through all revolutionary shifts.

“In Denmark, they went from an absolute monarchy to democracy overnight. How do you participate in that when your voice, you've never had a voice before What do you do? So, people needed some training in finding their voice,” she said.

Bildung in UkraineSince 2020, a small group of visionaries familiar with the Nordic approach to education have been working to bring bildung to Ukraine by establishing its first folk high school.

Elena Tochilina, one of the founding members of Bildung in Ukraine, has been in residence at the IPC in Denmark since February to learn more about the folk high school system and find ways to adapt to the Ukraine context.

Tochilina said that the need for social change in Ukraine erupted in 2013-2014 with waves of large-scale protests calling for massive political reforms that became known as the revolution of dignity.

“We were very clear that revolutions sometimes are needed, but it's better to evolve through self-development, through education,” Tochilina said.

About a year and a half before Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine, the group outlined plans, created a road map, established a nongovernmental organization and purchased land for the school.

“When the war started, of course, everything stopped,” Tochilina said.

But the war has also crystallized the need for democratic values in Ukraine, she said.

“And it seems like we've got the key, we've got the knowledge of how to educate a critical mass of people who will be voters in the future and will be making more conscious choices,” Tochilina said.

The folk high school system offers a blueprint for “installing a new mindset” among Ukrainian youth, Tochilina said, but not everything is directly transferable to a Ukrainian context.

For example, Tochilina said the IPC’s habitual morning singing gave her flashbacks to mandatory, Soviet-era Young Pioneer camps she attended as a child.

“You always have to be in the group and you have to stay in the group ... I can notice some of these socialist traces in Danish society,” she said, adding that the Ukrainian approach will require far more flexibility — and freedom.

For now, Tochilina is working to expand the IPC community’s knowledge about the war in Ukraine, and she also hopes that Ukrainian students currently on scholarships in Denmark will carry back the bildung spirit and apply it toward Ukraine’s future.

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Italian couple Davide Fassi and Davide Chiappa talked about wanting to have kids on their first date at a restaurant in Milan in 2009.

In late January this year, the couple who had a civil union in 2019, flew to Portland, Oregon, to attend the birth of their son.

Only one of them — Chiappa — was allowed into the delivery room due to COVID-19 restrictions where Morrisha, their American surrogate, gave birth to a baby boy, Martino.

“It was so amazing to see Martino being born,” said Chiappa, who sent live videos and photos of the birth to Fassi, who was in the waiting room.

The couple chose a surrogate in the US because it is one of the only countries worldwide that permits same-sex couples to have a child via surrogacy.

Now, the Italian government wants to put a stop to the practice altogether, proposing a new law that would prosecute any Italian citizen having a child through surrogacy, even when it’s done legally abroad. If passed, the law will carry a possible prison sentence of up to two years and a potential fine of more than $100 million.

Davide Fassi and Davide Chiappa's baby, Martino.

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Loredana Celano

The proposal was met with protests outside of Italy’s Parliament last week.

Grazia Di Maggio, a lawmaker with Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party, said the legislation would put an end to “womb-lending” in Italy.

Prime Minister Meloni, whose government is heavily promoting the bill, has previously described surrogacy as “an abomination.”

Far-right Meloni has put the concept of the “traditional family” at the center of her government’s agenda in spite of being a single mother, raised in a one-parent household.

History professor David Broder, who teaches at Syracuse University in Florence, said Meloni regularly refers to her own absentee father as the reason she believes so strongly that a child should be raised by two parents of the opposite sex.

It’s a perspective largely supported by Meloni’s conservative base, said Broder, who just published a book titled, “Mussolini’s Grandchildren,” about the reinvention of the far-right movement in Italy since World War II.

Meloni’s government renamed a number of departments after coming to power in September: “The Ministry of Economic Development became the Ministry of Businesses and Made in Italy, so it sounded more nationalist, with a pro-business focus. And the Families and Equality Department added in the word ‘birth rates.’”

Meloni has been less vocal on divisive culture war issues since taking office but her party colleagues have not held back. In a live television interview in March, fellow lawmaker Federico Mollicone, who's president of the Italian Lower House's culture committee, described surrogacy as a crime worse than pedophilia.

David Broder is a history professor at Syracuse University in Florence.

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Courtesy of David Broder

Broder said the comments provoked outrage among government opponents, which is exactly the reaction the far-right party wanted. Broder said for Meloni, it’s a sort of a game.

“She likes to play the stateswoman, standing for Italy on the international stage, whereas her ministers and leading members of her party, they’re more inclined to give some red meat to the base.”

Italy is one of the only countries in Western Europe not to legalize same-sex marriage or gay adoption. But Broder said social attitudes toward homosexuality and gay adoption are more liberal than Italian laws would suggest.

A poll on surrogacy conducted in March by Quorum/YouTrend showed 40% of Italians are in favor of it being legalized for all couples, while 27% said they are against the practice entirely. Younger Italians were more in favor of it than older generations.

Targeting gay fathers Davide Fassi, an associate professor at the design department of the Politecnico di Milano, said he knew things would change under the premiership of Meloni but he never expected the changes to happen so fast.

He said the social environment that Meloni’s far-right government is creating is unsettling for same-sex families.

“I think about my son Martino in five, six, seven years time, and I wonder if this is the environment we really want him to grow up in,” Fassi said.

The couple hasn’t ruled out moving abroad if Meloni’s far-right party remains in power for several years. Some of their friends are also expecting a baby in the fall with the help of a surrogate abroad.

“They're super scared about it to be honest, they’re thinking about relocating outside Italy altogether,” Fassi said.

Alexander Schuster, an Italian lawyer who specializes in LGBTQ issues, said the bill appears to be targeted at prospective gay fathers, in particular.

Schuster, who’s based in Trento in the north of Italy, said heterosexual couples could potentially avoid detection by the Italian authorities if they have a baby via a surrogate abroad. But it will be far more challenging for a male couple arriving back to Italy with a newborn in tow to stay under the radar.

“The fear is that this law, which is apparently neutral, will eventually be used just to criminalize gay fathers,” Schuster said.

But Schuster said Milan couple Fassi and Chiappa are unlikely to be impacted by the proposed law as it can’t be used to penalize parents retroactively.

Schuster said he expects the bill to pass — because the Italian government holds a majority in both the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate. But Schuster said the legislation is flawed, with no definition of when surrogacy can be deemed a crime, and as a result, it will certainly be challenged in the courts.

Still, Meloni’s government has also introduced another rule that is impacting same-sex parents like Fassi and Chiappa. In March, the government told Milan's City Council to stop registering same-sex parents' children in line with a court ruling last December.

Martino’s birth certificate, which was issued by Oregon state, lists Fassi and Chiappa as the newborn’s legal parents. Fassi said this is not being recognized by Italian authorities and as a result Martino is currently considered “an immigrant”: “He’s an American immigrant in Italy.”

Not holding Italian citizenship means Martino is also not entitled to free public health care in Italy or nursery school. Fassi said it leaves them in a state of limbo.

One option open to them is adoption. But the process could take years, and Fassi said it’s offensive to expect parents to have to adopt their own child.

With the recent change of rules on birth certificates for children of same-sex parents and the proposed surrogacy law, Fassi said he dreads to imagine what other laws the far-right government might introduce targeting the LGBTQ community.

Then again, “We are accustomed to dealing with these kinds of challenges and whenever I feel frustrated, I look at Martino and know that it’s all worthwhile,” he said.

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Last fall and winter, Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure knocked out more than half of the country’s capacity to generate electricity. According to UN estimates, the average Ukrainian household spent five of the final 12 weeks of 2022 without power.

Generators helped keep the lights on in many homes and businesses, but they were noisy, susceptible to breakdown and required a steady supply of diesel to keep them humming along.

“At some point, too many of those generators came to Ukraine,” said Andrii Korol from the Energy Act for Ukraine foundation. “You walk on the street, it’s like a street of generators.”

Widespread blackouts are over for now, but Korol and others in Ukraine say the increased focus on energy security has raised interest and demand for renewable energy.

Energy Act for Ukraine, which launched last April, is outfitting schools and hospitals with what it sees as a better alternative to generators: backup batteries that are charged by solar panels. The foundation aims to deploy 150 of these systems in Ukraine and has completed projects at two hospitals and one school so far.

The school, which serves more than 2,000 students in the city of Irpin, was “able to function non-stop” through the winter thanks to the solar panels on the school’s blue corrugated metal roof, according to director Ivan Ptashnyk.

Solar panels are seen on the school’s blue metal roof.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

“There were in-person classes during winter, during blackouts, where students were in classes and were using power thanks to the solar panels,” Ptashnyk told The World through an interpreter earlier this summer.

The rooftop solar panels charge up a bank of batteries in the school’s basement that can meet the school’s critical energy needs for the eight-hour school day, Ptashnyk said, including powering lights in classrooms, the basement bomb shelter and the internet.

The school also has a generator, but the solar energy, Ptashnyk said, is free.

“We don’t pay a dime for it, and this is our future.”

Ptashnyk is not alone in that view.

Ivan Ptashnyk happily shows off the "free" solar energy that keeps his school running.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

The Ukrainian government outlined ambitious targets for renewables last year in its national recovery plan. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said the country will become “a leader in building modern green energy.”

DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private power producer headed by Alexander Selischev, is also touting its small but growing renewables business.

“Now we understand, especially after this winter, that energy matters,” Selischev said. “And more and more, our authorities, investors, general public understand that energy security and renewables, it’s like the same.”

All eight of DTEK’s traditional thermal power-generating stations have been damaged by Russian strikes or occupation, according to Selischev.

Most of the country’s wind turbines are currently in occupied territory, but at least renewables can be more dispersed, Selischev said, less centralized and vulnerable to attack.

“It’s much harder to destroy thousands of turbines than destroy one thermal block,” Selischev said. “So, it’s more safe.”

A bomb shelter at the school.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

The company recently finished construction on the first phase of a new wind farm in southeastern Ukraine, just 60 miles from the front lines. It produces enough energy to power a small city, and Selischev said that completing it amid frequent air attacks sends an important message.

“We believe that our industry, our country, has a future, and we continue construction,” he said.

The Ukrainian government is seeking to align itself more closely with Europe, including its energy sector. But it would need to roughly double its prewar renewable energy capacity to bring it up to the European average. So far, it’s rare to see solar panels on a rooftop in Ukraine, “but that’s already started to change,” said Hanna Rutkovska, a renewable energy expert at a leading Ukrainian environmental organization called EcoAction.

Rutkovska told The World that interest in renewables has spiked since the full-scale invasion started.

“And I think that it changed because people who had money said, ‘Okay, I actually can give these high upfront costs, but I will have [an] energy supply during disruption,’” she said. “‘It will make my life normal — I want to work,’ and renewables became this option for people.”

EcoAction is offering grants to organizations launching renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. It has seen a strong demand for applications. It’s also installed solar panels and a heat pump at a hospital outside of Kyiv.

“I think that during the recovery, we’ll see much more of these projects,” she said.

But to translate these small projects into a national energy transition, Rutkovska believes the national government needs to make clear whether it’s prioritizing renewables over other power sources as it seeks international funding to rebuild.

“We are talking a lot about it, and we see the Ukrainian government talking a lot about it,” Rutkovska said of a renewable-fueled recovery. “But we also need actions, and we need a clear plan and roadmap in our head.”

Some more details emerged last week during a conference at which Ukraine courted international funding for rebuilding in London. The Ministry of Energy announced new targets for expanded wind, solar and energy storage capacity by 2050. But Rutkovska said the government still hasn’t released the kind of renewable energy roadmap that experts like her are watching for.

Related: A year of war in Ukraine: A timeline of key moments

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Jose Potes traveled to El Salvador from Colombia in January hoping to find work.

But the journey turned into a nightmare the following day, when the 24-year-old welder was arrested by a military patrol as he left a shopping mall with a friend.

“They took us to a police station, and they strip-searched us,” he said. “Then they started to take photos of our tattoos.”

Jose Antonio Potes, (right) and his friend Manuel Castrillon, made a stopover in Panama City, before arriving in El Salvador in January.

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Courtesy of Jose Antonio Potes

In El Salvador, thousands of people have been imprisoned over the past 15 months as the government tries to stop gang violence through a law known as the “state of exception.”

The law expands the police’s powers to detain suspects, and enables judges to keep them in prison for an unlimited amount of time while their cases are investigated.

Many citizens have said they are content with the crackdown despite the suspension of civil liberties, because security has improved greatly in the Central American country.

But others warn the police have gone too far — and are now even arresting foreign visitors, including citizens of the US, Panama, Guatemala and Colombia.

Potes ended up spending four months in Salvadoran jails, where cells are crammed with prisoners who have been accused of belonging to gangs.

Now, he is speaking about his ordeal from his home in the Colombian town of Riofrio, where he arrived in May, after his story made headlines in Colombian media outlets, and he was released by Salvadoran officials.

Potes said that he went to El Salvador because he heard it was a safe country where he could earn wages in US dollars and send money to his family.

He has a tattoo with his grandmother’s name that covers the left half of his chest, and also shows some hands holding a rosary.

Jose Antonio Potes has a tattoo on the left side of his chest depicting his grandmother's name.

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Courtesy of Jose Antonio Potes

According to Potes, that was enough for police in El Salvador to be suspicious of his motives, and have him locked up with his friend, Manuel Castrillon.

“They accused us of being members of Barrio 18,” one of El Salvador’s main gangs, Potes said. “But that group doesn’t even exist in Colombia. It was outrageous.”

The young welder and his friend were transferred to a crammed prison in the town of Soyapango, where at one point, they stayed in a cell with no bathrooms. “There were only a few buckets to defecate in,” Potes said.

Potes said that many people had to sleep on the floor, due to the lack of space. “Those places are crammed with people,” he said. “The first few days we cried, and were very scared.”

More than 66,000 people have been imprisoned in El Salvador since March of last year, as President Nayib Bukele deploys emergency measures to curb gang violence.

“In many cases, detentions appear to be based on the detainees' appearance or their social background,” said Leonor Arteaga, an expert on El Salvador with the Due Process of Law Foundation.

She added that most foreigners who have been arrested are held for a crime called “criminal association,” which basically means being a gang member.

“You can be on a corner [in] the community talking with two or three of your friends, and the police come and they arrest you because they think you were planning to commit some crimes,” Arteaga said.

The government of El Salvador has not published any stats on how many foreigners have been arrested during the state of exception.

But Potes, who was detained for four months, said he saw people of several nationalities while he was in prison, including Honduras, Panama, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

Potes said that in February, 72 foreigners, including himself, were transferred from the Soyapango prison to a smaller jail in the town of Jucuapa.

“That prison was only for international people,” he said.

US officials have also warned travelers about this crackdown.

In March, the State Department issued a travel advisory for El Salvador, which said that “several” US citizens had been arrested there in an “arbitrary manner.”

In May, US citizen Walter Huetes was detained in El Salvador, when he attended a party with some friends.

Huetes is a native of Los Angeles, who has Salvadoran roots. His wife, Jenny Bustillo, said that he was in the country to help his stepdaughter with a visa application.

“His arrest was totally arbitrary,” Bustillo said. “It looks like they grabbed him just because he has some tattoos.”

Huetes has a small cross on his wrist, and an LA Dodgers logo on his right hand. Like most people who are arrested under the state of exception, he hasn’t been allowed to call his family, although he has spoken to a US consular officer.

US citizen Walter Huetes (left) was arrested in El Salvador in May. He has an LA Dodgers tattoo on his right hand.

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Courtesy of Jenny Bustillo

“What is happening is very unfair,” Bustillo said. “We are contractors and we have a new business. And it's falling apart because he’s not here.”

In Colombia, Ana Muñoz also said that she is still waiting to hear from her husband, Andres Felipe Castañeda, who was arrested in El Salvador in December.

She’s only been able to confirm with Colombia’s consulate that her husband was detained and is in prison awaiting a trial.

“It’s very tough,” Muñoz said. “We have small children, and they ask about their father each day.”

Colombian citizen Andres Felipe Castañeda was arrested in El Salvador in December and still hasn't been able to contact his family.

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Courtesy of Ana Muñoz

Despite these situations, President Bukele had a 90% approval rating in a poll conducted in March.

Arteaga worries that while Bukele remains popular, civil rights are deteriorating.

As elections approach in places like Guatemala and Ecuador, politicians there have said they want to emulate Bukele’s policies.

“For some people, that might not seem that important or that relevant,” she said. “But when you are a victim of this scenario with no rights, you see how high is the price that we pay.”

Those who have been on the receiving end of those measures have a warning.

“You don’t want to go there,” Potes said. “Thousands of innocent people are being locked up. And they won’t even let you call your mother.”

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On a sunny evening in Hvidovre, a quiet suburb of Copenhagen, Denmark, Tanya Herasymova enjoyed coffee and pastries with about a dozen other Ukrainians who fled the war at home with Russia.

She said she comes regularly with her mom to this makeshift café for refugees, which was organized by the Danish Red Cross inside a cozy, community space in the Filmbyen area.

Tanya Herasymova is a disability rights advocate with Fight for Right based in Ukraine.

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Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

Herasymova, a disability rights advocate who uses a wheelchair, is originally from Kamianske, a city in eastern Ukraine. When the first bombs went off in Ukraine, Herasymova said she and her colleagues with Fight for Right, a disability rights organization, had already made evacuation plans. She traveled by road through Poland and Germany before reaching Denmark in March last year.

She only planned to stay two months. But as the war continues, life has become unpredictable for Herasymova along with the nearly 37,000 Ukrainians who have fled to Denmark since Russia invaded Ukraine 16 months ago.

“It's changing all the time,” Herasymova said. “Sometimes, it's so nice to be here, it's so supportive and we will win [the war]. That’s our big wish. But sometimes, you feel upset with the bureaucracy … and you need to manage, and you need to follow many, many rules.”

In March of 2022, Denmark passed a law known as the Special Act allowing Ukrainians to bypass the asylum system and expedite the process of obtaining a two-year residency permit along with employment and social assistance. But when the law expires in 2024, it remains unclear whether Denmark’s centrist government — with its overall, hard-line stance against immigration — will extend these temporary protections for Ukrainians.

When refugees arrive in Denmark, they typically go through a lengthy process that begins at Center Sandholm, a reception center where asylum-seekers stay for at least the first month, said Niels Svankjær Christiansen, section chief of the Danish Red Cross.

Refugees are then moved into state housing with limited social assistance and undergo multiple interviews, which can last, on average, from six months to two years.

“Ukrainian refugees have had some benefits that we don't see among other refugee groups, primarily from the fact that they're allowed to travel directly into Denmark and stay in Denmark, in the Danish municipalities, from the beginning,” Christiansen explained.

Niels Svankjær Christiansen, section chief of the Danish Red Cross, stands in the lobby of DRC headquarters in Copenhagen, Denmark, May 22, 2023.

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Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

Ukrainian refugees, once registered in one of Denmark’s 98 municipalities, must then take Danish-language classes and actively seek employment in order to receive approximately $800 a month as well as assistance with housing, employment, health care, education and other social services.

According to Denmark’s Ministry of Immigration and Integration, 36,872 Ukrainians have received residency permits under the Special Act, and 28,876 Ukrainians are currently registered with a municipality.

Herasymova is one of 241 Ukrainians registered in Hvidovre as of April.

At first, she said it was hard to adjust to Denmark — especially because of the language barrier.

“In the beginning, it was hard also, because the [Danish] language, it's so hard to understand. It's not familiar, not with English, not especially with Ukrainian, and also, people were so kind, trying to understand us.”

Herasymova said she has also gained more fluency in English over the last year. At the cafe, she offered to translate for several other Ukrainian women who were eager to tell their stories.

Like Svitlana Pinonik and her adult daughter, from the Zhytomyr region, who came to the café for the first time.

“All the people are so kind and nice. I really appreciate this because people are so helpful, supportive to me, and [make me] feel safe again. I am really, really thankful,” Pinonik said through translation by Herasymova.

Svitlana Pinonik and her adult daughter, from the Zhytomyr region in Ukraine, came to a café organized by the Danish Red Cross for the first time.

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Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

Pinonik just learned that her home had been destroyed in recent attacks.

“I am still in shock,” she said. “I lost my house, and I still don't know [what will happen] because it's still very stressful.”

Denmark’s ‘paradigm shift’ in refugee policy

Ukrainian and Danish flags fly side by side at the central train station, Copenhagen, Denmark, May 22, 2023.

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Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein/The World

At Copenhagen’s central train station, flags of Ukraine wave proudly next to Denmark's flags, and there are signs of support for Ukraine nearly everywhere around the capital.

On June 20, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen announced plans to add $3.2 billion in military, civilian and business aid toward Ukraine in addition to the $1 billion fund pledged in March.

Kasper Sand Kjær, a member of Parliament with the Social Democrat Party, who sits on the immigration and integration committee, said the exceptional reception for Ukrainian refugees was a “no-brainer,” citing Ukraine’s proximity to Denmark as European neighbors amid an active, ongoing war.

He also said that the Special Act will likely get extended after it expires in 2024.

“Europe has a special responsibility when it's a European country that is being invaded … so that was, I think, the obvious way to handle it,” he said.

Yet, this tension between long-term integration versus repatriation remains a major issue in Denmark. The government continues to stand by its zero-asylum goal and Denmark is the only European country that has revoked the residency permits of Syrian refugees, claiming that it was deemed safe for them to return home.

Many human rights and refugee advocates have condemned the mismatched treatment in Denmark.

“The strange thing about the Special Act for Ukrainians is that they actually don't have any rights,” said Michala Bendixen with Refugees Welcome Denmark, an advocacy organization that offers free legal advice to refugees and asylum-seekers.

“A refugee has rights according to international legislation. But Ukrainians, they're not refugees [in Denmark]. Legally speaking, they have this permit only because of their nationality, not because of any risk or danger.”

Bendixen said this “paradigm shift” in refugee policy away from long-term integration and future protection means Denmark is only obliged to give temporary protection under acute danger, and expect them to return when conditions improve even slightly at home.

“You can't integrate anybody in a few years. It actually takes a long time, maybe 10 years, before people really start to pay back to society,” she said, adding, “The more you make people feel welcome and feel that they are an active part of society, the more successful integration will be.”

But Denmark’s current political climate indicates a hard-line trend in the opposite direction, she said. Neighboring countries like Sweden are following Denmark’s lead when it comes to tightening restrictions on refugees and asylum-seekers, she added.

Finding home in DenmarkBack in the suburb of Hvidovre, Olesia Olinyk, from Kyiv, Ukraine, joined her Danish friend Mona Elgaard on the back deck at her home.

It was a national holiday, so the Olinyk family of four rode their bikes over to the Elgaards' to enjoy the day off together. When they arrived, Mona Elgaard was in her brightly lit kitchen making coffee while her two daughters, Astrid Elgaard and Kaya Elgaard, hung out with their pet hamster in the adjoining living room and their youngest child, Neel Elgaard, took a nap.

The two mothers met through another Danish Red Cross program that connects Ukrainian and Danish families to encourage friendships. Their families hit it off right away, they said, adding that the two text each other nearly every day.

Olesia Olinyk, from Ukraine, and her friend Mona Elgaard, from Denmark, met at a gathering organized by the Danish Red Cross.

Credit:

Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

Here on the back deck with the sounds of crowds cheering from the nearby football stadium, Olesia Olinyk told The World that her family made a harrowing escape from Kyiv early on in the war. They fled with her husband, Vitaliy Olinyk, and their son, who is also named Vitaliy Olinyk, and their daughter, Angelina Olinyk.

The Olinyk family poses for a portrait in the backyard in Hvidovre, Denmark, May 18, 2023.

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Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

Olesia Olinyk said her husband volunteered briefly for the military, but was given permission to leave the country when they showed them their daughter's medical papers indicating problems with her blood that needed special medicine. After a brief stay in Poland, she said, the family traveled by land to Denmark, and eventually, registered in Hvidovre.

The couple both managed to find work in Denmark, but securing long-term, affordable housing remains elusive. The Hvidovre municipality helped the couple find a subsidized apartment near the train station, but they have to move out by the end of June because the apartment is too expensive, and the couple doesn’t bring in enough of a joint income.

Olesia Olinyk is trained as an electrical engineer and now works three days a week at a cafeteria; her husband works full time as an engineer for a Scandinavian company.

When Olesia Olinyk spoke to The World in May, she said that her husband had written the city authorities three times asking for a solution so that they could stay in their place. And Mona Elgaard even wrote a letter on the family’s behalf. But they were all told that Olesia Olinyk must also have a full-time job, like her husband, and earn a minimum of about $2,100 per month in order to stay in their apartment.

“It’s just really difficult to find an apartment in Hvidovre because, of course, all the small apartments are difficult to get because people with a lower income will want them,” Mona Elgaard chimed in.

The Olinyk and Elgaard families pose together for a photo in the backyard, Hvidovre, Denmark, May 18, 2023.

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Pernille Baerendtsen/The World

Still, Olessia Olinyk tries to remain hopeful and continues to look for a better-paying job in her field.

“One year ago, it was a bad world, a bad life, but now, we feel, of course, we have a better life,” she said.

With the looming uncertainty of war in Ukraine, Olessia Olinyk said the family can only plan hour by hour, but they intend to stay in Denmark for now so that their children can finish their education.

Angelina Olinyk said that adjusting to a new life in Denmark has been challenging but she loves how Danes are so friendly and smile at her on the streets.

“I have some new relationships, I have some new friends, I know a bit of a new language [and] that is totally something new for me,” she said.

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MARCO WERMAN, HOST:

Despite the challenges, American campuses remain the top destination for international students. The path isn't always easy. We asked you to share your stories of moving to the US to attend school.

Here's a note from one of our listeners.

JOSE JUBE:

Hello, my name is Jose. I came to the US from Brazil on a full basketball scholarship in the late-1980s and I've been here under an F-1 visa and then an H-1B visa, which is a working visa, a green card and I'm waiting for my citizenship that I hope will happen sooner rather than later. I had some dreams to play in the NBA out of college, which didn't pan out for me. But nevertheless, I got a great education out of the opportunities that I have been given. I'm very thankful, very, very grateful and very humble for everything that that I was able to experience in the US. I own a home, a beautiful home in Hawaii. I have three beautiful kids who live here who were born here. I have been able to get great jobs even though I had, to do some very odd end jobs in the beginning, from pizza delivery to dishwashing, you know, you name it. I did it all. But nevertheless, it's been nothing but great. I hope that we can continue to give people like myself the opportunity to come into this country and live the American dream. The American dream is possible. It does exist. I'm proof of that. And for that, I'm grateful and thankful for all the people that helped me along the way. Thank you very much.

MARCO WERMAN, HOST:

That was listener, Jose Jube, sharing his uplifting story starting with that basketball scholarship to a US college. Thank you so much for that, Jose Jube.

Jose Jube with one of his children.

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Courtesy of Jose Jube

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The lawns of the United Nations headquarters in New York were dotted with yellow yoga mats as hundreds of people gathered on Wednesday morning to stretch together. Among them was Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — leading International Yoga Day celebrations as part of his three-day trip to the United States.

The Indian leader has visited the US several times since taking office in 2014. But this trip is a rare state visit — the highest diplomatic honor for a foreign leader. President Joe Biden has only invited two other leaders — French and South Korean — for such visits, and Modi is only the third Indian leader to receive such an invitation.

On Thursday, Modi will hold bilateral talks with Biden and address a joint session of Congress, followed by a lavish dinner reception at the White House. The US and India have long enjoyed warm relations, but this visit is particularly momentous.

“Every once a decade or thereabouts, you have a visit that really moves the ball forward,” said Richard Rossow, chair of the US-India Policy Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And it feels like both governments are talking about this visit as kind of along those lines.”

Despite Delhi and Washington not seeing eye to eye on some key issues, the Biden administration has bestowed Modi with the honor, even as human rights groups raise concerns about Modi’s allegedly anti-Muslim policies back home.

In India, Modi supporters see the visit as a moment of pride. One pro-government news channel used the hashtag #ModiMagicInAmerica with its anchor Arnab Goswami saying that the US had more at stake than India.

Guests wait for President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden to welcome India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a State Arrival Ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House, Thursday, June 22, 2023, in Washington.

Credit:

Evan Vucci/AP

“It is just one more telling statement, ladies and gentlemen, of how India’s place in the world has risen in the Modi years,” Goswami declared during his news segment.

The US and India have had strong people-to-people ties for years, with a large and influential Indian-American diaspora. Trade between the two countries has also been flourishing for decades. But Modi’s visit this week could see the two nations join hands to strengthen another pillar of their partnership.

“There will be a great deal of focus on defense and security cooperation, as well as technology cooperation,” said Lisa Curtis, director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. “The US is setting the stage for an announcement that it will co-produce jet-engine technology with India, which is a huge deal. Only a handful of countries have this kind of technology capabilities.”

India is also close to signing a deal to buy MQ-9B armed surveillance drones from the US. Earlier this month, the US defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, met India’s defense minister, Rajnath Singh, in Delhi to set up a road map for defense industry cooperation.

While the US wants to help India enhance its military capabilities, Curtis said, “Part of the goal here is to wean India away from its dependence on Russian military technology.”

About half of India’s weapons imports come from Russia. This defense partnership is the cornerstone of the close ties between Delhi and Moscow, which date back to the Cold War. It’s also why India has not condemned Russia for invading Ukraine. While the US isn’t particularly happy about this, Curtis said it has largely accepted it.

“India is too important for the United States over the longer term, and so, there is a willingness to set aside the US-India differences over Russia,” Curtis said.

On the Indian side, there has been a “sea change” in the outlook towards the US, said Rajan Menon, director of the Grand Strategy Program at the Washington-based think tank Defense Priorities.

In the 1970s, relations between the two were “frosty,” Curtis said. During the India-Pakistan war of 1971, Washington sided with Islamabad as Delhi turned to Moscow. But over the past two decades, and under Republican and Democratic administrations, the US has warmed up to India. In recent years, the two nations have also been pushed toward each other by another Asian giant.

“China is playing matchmaker here,” Rossow said.

Tensions between the US and China have been at a historic low. Meanwhile, India and China are engaged in a standoff over their disputed border in the Himalayas, where fighting breaks out sporadically. Besides security concerns, Rossow said, Biden and Modi will also discuss cooperation in strategic commercial sectors to keep China’s rise in check.

“Areas that are important for global growth and technology evolution, and those areas where China has a market moving position, so critical minerals and rare earth, 5G and 6G, undersea cables, artificial intelligence, quantum, even commercial space exploration,” Rossow said. “Can we break China's stranglehold and their ability to use these things as commercial threats against other countries?”

Menon said that this is a “new chapter” in US-India relations and one that is “largely China-driven.” And while India is welcoming deeper ties with the US, it is also careful not to upset other nations.

India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugs President Joe Biden after Biden spoke during a State Arrival Ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House, Thursday, June 22, 2023, in Washington.

Credit:

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

“India’s government will have to balance how it handles the relationship with the US with its long-standing relationship with Russia,” Menon said. “It doesn't want to alienate both China and Russia simultaneously. So, there's a kind of a delicate dance going on.”

In India, Modi’s visit is being seen as proof that Delhi has played its balancing act between Washington and Moscow well.

As the White House prepares to welcome Modi for a state banquet, human rights groups are protesting against his visit, saying his policies back home target religious minorities. Modi was once denied a US visa for his alleged role in anti-Muslim riots in 2002.

“[The US] talks a good game on the human rights front, and sometimes, we're sincere, but when it comes to concrete interests, we're perfectly willing to put them to the side,” Menon said.

Rossow said that the Biden administration will raise human rights concerns with Modi, but in private.

“They're not going to want to tip over the applecart by pushing too hard,” he said, because the broader relationship with India is too important.

In 2006, then-Sen. Biden laid out a grand vision for US-India relations.

“My dream is that in 2020, the two closest nations in the world will be India and the United States. If that occurs, the world will be safer,” he said then.

“I don’t think we’re quite there; it is more aspirational right now,” Curtis said.

India and the US are not allies and probably never will be, she said. But they are strategic partners with mutual interests that span several areas.

Related: Amid war in Ukraine, India maintains 'strategic partnership' with Russia

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At the bustling Black Tank market in Freetown, food vendor Hande Sesay voiced apprehension about Sierra Leone’s current economic state ahead of this Saturday’s presidential elections.

Sesay, now 60 years old, has witnessed several political regimes in Sierra Leone since the nation gained its independence from Britain over six decades ago.

"The economic predicament we face today is undeniably tough,” Sesay said. “The prices of rice, sugar, oil, and other food items have gone through the roof. So for me, this election is an opportunity to cast our votes in favor of the person who possesses the vision and capability to make Sierra Leone better again."

Food vendor Hande Sesay says the current state of the Sierra Leonean economy threatens her livelihood. She’s on the lookout for candidates whose manifestos center on addressing inflation and reducing poverty.

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Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

As the country prepares for this crucial election, economic stagnation, corruption and national security are top issues for voters and main contenders alike.

Incumbent President Julius Maada Bio, with the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP), is seeking a second term. He is facing off against Samura Kamara, of the All People's Congress (APC), a formidable opponent who narrowly missed victory in the previous election.

President Julius Maada Bio of the Sierra Leone People’s Party is seeking reelection with the promise of creating 500,000 jobs within five years to fix the country’s growing youth unemployment.

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Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

Five years prior, Bio emerged victorious in the presidential election, securing a narrow lead of 43.3% in the first round over Kamara, who received 42.7% of the votes. The winner needs 55% of the vote to clinch victory in the first round or it goes into a runoff within two weeks. Bio went on to secure a narrow win in the second round. Kamara lost despite his endorsement by outgoing President Ernest Bai Koroma, who himself was ineligible to run for reelection, having served two terms in office.

The rising cost of living led to protests in Freetown and other parts of the country last August. The demonstrations resulted in the deaths of 20 people as security agents fired at protesters.

Sierra Leone, a diamond-rich nation with a population of nearly 9 million, grapples with high poverty rates, with two-thirds of the people living on less than $2 per day.

The country is still struggling to recover from an 11-year civil war that ended in 2002, only to face subsequent challenges such as the Ebola outbreak in 2014, and more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sierra Leone is a diamond-rich country with nearly 9 million people. But poverty is high with two-thirds of its people living on less than $2 a day.

Credit:

Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

As of April, Sierra Leone, which has one of the world’s weakest currencies, saw inflation rise to more than 43% — from a high of more than 41% in March — and the exchange rate against the US dollar is under pressure, according to economic analysts.

The dire economic situation, however, is not the only concern dominating this year's election — peace is also paramount.

"The most important thing we want in this election is peace,” Sesay said. “Because when there is war, the rich can always find refuge. It is always poor people like me who suffer the most.”

Fatmata Bangura, a vegetable seller at the Black Tank market, shared similar sentiments.

"Sierra Leone's strength lies in its diversity, and it is high time we leveraged it to build a united nation,” Bangura said. “Our next leader should be someone who can bridge the gaps between different communities, promote dialogue, and ensure equal opportunities for all.”

The upcoming election holds significant weight, with nearly 3.4 million registered voters, representing nearly half of the country's population, eagerly waiting to cast their ballots.

Between Bio and his contender, Kamara, the electoral outcome is expected to hinge upon the younger demographic, as people under the age of 35 constitute roughly 60% of the voting-age population.

Kemoh Sowah, a professional driver from the Kaningo neighborhood in Freetown, said young people are on the lookout for candidates that prioritize youth-centered issues like unemployment.

"We need jobs, we need space for the youth. We need representation everywhere to develop the country till we see that Sierra Leone is a better nation,” Sowah said.

Professional driver Kemoh Sowah says the candidate that prioritizes issues that affect young people, like unemployment, could win their votes.

Credit:

Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

While Sierra Leone has been lauded as one of Africa's most successful post-conflict states, its democracy remains fragile.

The prevalence of violence among disgruntled youth remains a critical issue, with approximately 70% of young people underemployed or unemployed.

President Bio, whose achievements include free, quality education and social welfare initiatives, has promised a youth employment scheme with the aim of creating 500,000 jobs in five years. Kamara also promised to intensify efforts in job creation and pledged to work toward transforming Sierra Leone from a consumption to a competitive production economy.

For Ibrahim Marah, a student at the Makeni University in northern Sierra Leone, economic recovery cannot be achieved without addressing corruption.

He said the next leader must not only prioritize anti-corruption measures but also foster a culture of accountability and transparency.

"Our fight against corruption should be relentless, and we must hold our leaders accountable for their actions,” Marah said.

Opposition political parties have expressed concern regarding the electoral process and voter registration.

In late 2022, Bio proposed electoral reform, implemented by the Electoral Commission for Sierra Leone. It replaces the current way of electing representatives, where seats are assigned based on the proportion of votes each party receives. With a minimum threshold of 11.9%, this may leave out smaller parties.

Despite political controversy, the Supreme Court deemed the reform legal in January this year after a challenge by the main opposition APC.

The Electoral Commission Building in Freetown prepares for Sierra Leone's pivotal elections on June 24, 2023. Nearly 3.4 million people – around half of the entire population – are registered to vote in what is set to be a keenly contested election.

Credit:

Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

While previous elections have also faced delays and logistical issues, Christopher Jones, with the Electoral Commission for Sierra Leone, reassured the public that the upcoming election will be “free, fair, transparent and credible.”

However, skepticism remains among some civil society organizations.

Charles Keif-Kobai, executive director of FORWARD, an organization that empowers vulnerable individuals in Sierra Leone, highlights the country’s divisive politics — especially around ethnicity.

“Our politics has been an ethnic census as to which tribe carries the largest endorsement in the country. And this is why we are polarized, the country is divided, and it's a recipe for violence," he said.

Security analyst Adib Saani said Sierra Leone's peaceful election holds greater significance against the backdrop of escalating regional political turmoil — referring to recent troubles in Senegal, Burkina Faso, and Mali.

"A successful and peaceful election in Sierra Leone can serve as a beacon of hope for the entire region. It can demonstrate that political stability and progress are achievable through peaceful means,” Saani said, adding that this could inspire neighboring nations to reevaluate their own political processes and strive for peaceful transitions of power.

With the election just days away, the country stands at a critical juncture.

Freetown driver Sowah has a message for his peers:

"You don't need to go to the streets to create violence. You don't need to go to the streets and create chaos. Go out and vote peacefully," he said, "and then go back home."

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Trigidia Jiménez was born in an Indigenous village in the Andean mountains of Bolivia at 14,000 feet above sea level.

She grew up in a family of farmers, and she loved working the land.

But like many others in her town, she moved to the Bolivian capital in search of new opportunities and eventually became an agricultural engineer.

She worked and got married, but after 15 years of being in the city, she realized she wanted to return to the mountains.

“I needed to be in touch with the sun, fresh air and work our land,” Jiménez told The World over Zoom.

Trigidia Jiménez said that her ancestors would eat a cup of cañahua for breakfast every day, similar to the way one eats oatmeal.

Credit:

Courtesy of Trigidia Jiménez

Back in the Andes, she started thinking about an ancestral green that was almost extinct — cañahua.

It's similar to the quinoa plant and virtually unknown outside of Bolivia and Peru.

“That's what our ancestors used to eat every day. A cup of cañahua for breakfast,” Jiménez said. “We make it like oatmeal.”

Cañahua is "nutritious, high in protein, amino acids and iron.” It has also proven to be very adaptable to climate change, according to Jiménez. Despite unusual and extreme weather conditions, the crop can grow “everywhere around here,” she said.

Jiménez started small, with about an acre of land, producing enough grain for just one family. Two decades later, cañahua is being produced on approximately 5,000 acres.

Bolivia's government offers subsidies to low-income families to buy cañahua, and that's helped build the market.

“Now, this crop provides a source of income for 1,500 families,” she said.

A need for crop diversityAs climate change impacts agriculture in many parts of the world, the need for crop diversity is becoming more urgent.

“We realized that we've been reliant on too few food crops,” Jeff Maughan, a professor of molecular genetics at Brigham Young University in Utah, told The World.

He said it’s a scary idea to just be reliant on five or six plant species when you start to think about diseases or changes in the weather.

“It'd be like having a portfolio for your 401K, but only had five stocks in it,” he said. “Nobody would do that. You need to spread that security.”

Twenty years ago, Maughan and other researchers at BYU got interested in quinoa as a higher protein crop for subsistence farmers in the Andean region. At the time, he recalled, people would ask him, “What is quinoa?”

Today, quinoa is everywhere — from your favorite supermarket to fancy restaurants. Maughan and his team have successfully introduced the South American grain in Morocco, Rwanda and Saudi Arabia.

“It's important to learn from Indigenous communities about foods they've been producing for thousands of years,” said Juan Gonzalez, an expert in sustainable development at Columbia University.

He said that we’re learning from how it's been done during most of human history so that we go back to that.

Cañihua is a nutritious grain originating from the Andes, now with over 200 varieties. It is often likened to the quinoa plant.

Credit:

Courtesy of Trigidia Jiménez

“And what I mean by go back is not that everyone has their own plot of land and start producing their own food,” Gonzalez said. “That's not the society we live in, but rather learn from the techniques that are being used by more traditional communities and understand that there's value in that.”

Trigidia Jiménez earned international recognition for helping to revive cañahua cultivation.

“Cañahua made me a stronger woman," she said. “Powerful and happy.”

It's also helped sustain the local communities where it's produced.

Jiménez is now looking at ways to expand her business and export the ancient grain to the United States.

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Editor’s note: This interview aired in two parts on The World on June 20, 2023. Listen to part one by clicking the audio player above. And part two is below:

For Secretary of State Antony Blinken, meeting this week with Chinese leader Xi Jinping was something of a high-wire act.

One misstep, and the painstaking efforts to reestablish substantive communication between the two superpowers could come crashing down.

The conversation was not a sure thing. In fact, Monday's meeting reportedly was not even confirmed until 45 minutes before the two men shook hands.

Nicholas Burns, the US ambassador to China, had a ringside seat. He was in the room when Blinken sat down with Xi.

The World spoke to Burns on Tuesday morning about China's evolving relationships with Taiwan and Ukraine and what a more stable US-China relationship might look like.

Marco Werman: Can you give us the lay of the land here?Nicholas Burns: We have to have the capacity to be able to discuss an ongoing set of disagreements on issues that really matter in the world. You know, we don't agree with what the Chinese have done militarily and trying to intimidate and coerce in the Taiwan Strait, for instance. We don't believe that China should be as supportive politically of what President [Vladimir] Putin is doing in this illegal and barbaric invasion of Ukraine. We have a lot of concerns about Chinese mistreatment of American companies — punitive actions taken by the Chinese government against five American companies just in the last couple of months. And the fentanyl crisis, of course, has hit America in every town and county across the United States. And the precursor chemicals that make up most of the fentanyl are exported by black-market Chinese firms, private-sector firms to the drug traffickers in Mexico, and that fentanyl comes up. And it’s the leading cause of death in the United States between adults 18 to 49. We're asking the Chinese — the government here — to shut down the flow of precursor chemicals. So, you can't make progress on any of these issues if you're not meeting. And it had been five years, which is rather extraordinary when you think about it, between the last visit by a secretary of state and this visit. So, I know that Secretary Blinken felt — I saw him off at the airport last night — and he felt really good about the visit.You went down a long list of things there. Lots of potential to the relationship, but as you point out, there are a lot of things that hang over the US-China relationship. Most worrying, perhaps: Beijing has not agreed to resume military-to-military cooperation with the US. Why is Beijing hesitant to do that? The problem is, our two militaries operate in very close proximity in the Spratly and Paracel Islands of the South China Sea, in the East China Sea and in the Taiwan Strait. And we want to make sure that when our Navy operates in international waters or when our Air Force operates in international airspace, which they are legally, of course, able to do and have a right to do, that everybody plays by the rules — that there aren't unsafe intercepts by Chinese aircraft and Chinese naval vessels. We've seen twice, Marco, in the last three weeks, incidents — one in the Taiwan Strait by naval vessels and one in the air — where we believe the People's Liberation Army here in China has acted irresponsibly and threatened to cause accidents. You need these military-to-military channels because if, God forbid, there is an accident between our military forces, you want to be able to intervene, lower the temperature and defuse a crisis before it gets worse. Why are the Chinese not accepting this? It's a very good question. We've asked that question. Secretary Blinken said repeatedly to the Chinese leadership: It's in the interest of both of our countries to make sure that we have contact with each other. Now, obviously, as the ambassador here, I have the ability to call people in the government in a crisis like that, and my staff does as well. But there's no substitute for military officers who are in close proximity to be able to have that communication at a moment's notice. Looming over all of this, of course, is the war in Ukraine. How did Ukraine come up in the discussions between Secretary Blinken and Xi Jinping and where did things land? Well, it was a big part of the discussion with the foreign minister and with Director Wang Yi. And what we have said very consistently is that obviously, China has influence in Russia. They have a very close relationship, and we hope that the government of China will use its influence to convince President Putin to, frankly, stop the war. Now, the Chinese have launched somewhat of a diplomatic mission. Ambassador Li Hui was an experienced Chinese diplomat, took a trip to Moscow and Kyiv, to Warsaw, Berlin and Paris as an attempt to try to begin discussions for how to end the war. We don't think they made much progress on that trip, but we said, look, if you can contribute to a peaceful resolution of this dispute that honors the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Ukraine, the victim, then, of course, we would be supportive of that. But I think it remains to be seen whether China is going to try to exercise that kind of honest broker role or whether China will continue, in essence, to provide political support to Putin.At this point in time, do you see any indication that China might be providing Moscow with technology to help prosecute the Kremlin's war in Ukraine?We have not seen indications that China has provided lethal military support to the Russian government for the war in Ukraine. But we're watching very carefully. We're going to continue to watch it. We raised this question, as Secretary Blinken did over the weekend. The Chinese know that we're watching, and we have a lot of concerns.Yeah, a lot of people watching the situation look at the erosion of trust and the limited communication between Washington and Beijing and wonder what that might mean. For example, it is easy to imagine how relatively minor accidents during military exercises or surveillance operations could dramatically escalate. What are the leaders from the two countries doing to prevent that from happening?Well, the US has taken the position that it's precisely when we have tension in a relationship, and we do with China, when we have major differences on important issues, as we certainly do, is precisely then when you need open diplomatic channels. Now, I have the ability and my great team here at the Embassy has the ability to talk to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. There's no problem in that. But we want to accompany that with military-to-military talks. That's the responsible thing to do. President Biden has talked a lot about the fact that we are in competition with China, and we certainly are, and we don't shy away from that. But he also believes — and we believe — that we've got to be responsible in the way that both sides wage that competition. We have a responsibility to make sure that we don't end up in conflict. And we certainly need to be responsible to have a peaceful relationship. The way you do that is you open the lines of communication so that we can talk to each other about difficult subjects. And if a crisis occurs, we can have instantaneous communication. We will continue to press this issue with the Chinese leadership. It makes perfect sense. And if you think about it, Marco, in the old Cold War — the first 10 years of my own diplomatic career were the last 10 years of the old Cold War — we were able to get to a point 60 years ago after the Cuban Missile crisis, where President [John F.] Kennedy and then President [Lyndon B.] Johnson and their successors were able to have at least the assurance that we could reach the Soviet leadership during a crisis. We need to do that now with China. It's an important principle for us. As Secretary Blinken said in his press conference in Beijing before he left, he was going to persist on this and in pressing for this, and I certainly am going to do that on behalf of him and President Biden. Do the Chinese seem as concerned of something bad accidentally happening, as you are expressing?Oh, I think there are many people in the Chinese system who understand how important this is. We have to convince the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese Ministry of Defense to go along with this. But, you know, it's something that I think sooner or later is going to happen.So, how can the relationship — and communications — with the Chinese be improved?We had these channels until the Chinese closed them back in the first week of August 2022 following their protest — we thought it was unjustified — but their protest over Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi's visit. It's just a question of turning them back on. I should say, Marco, they also froze at that time our climate change talks, and they've since reengaged. They froze our anti-narcotics talks — that's on fentanyl. We've been having trouble talking to them about that. But they have a responsibility on an acute issue like that, that I think Americans feel very deeply about. But the government here has a responsibility to help us out and stop the flow of these precursor chemicals. So, you know, this is a very difficult relationship to manage. There are some issues where we can work well with the Chinese. There are many where we cannot, but we don't give up. We show up at work every day, and we're working hard to make this a more effective relationship.Amid all of these high-level points of tension, I'm wondering where the space is now for the US to continue pressing China on human rights. For example, what's to be done about what's been widely called a genocide of Muslim Uyghurs in western China?Well, Secretary Blinken raised these issues in a very forthright way on Sunday and Monday here in Beijing with the Chinese leadership. He talked about our opposition to forced labor and what they're doing in Xinjiang. He talked about human rights violations in Tibet. He also discussed the denial of freedom to the people of Hong Kong and the dramatic change we've seen in the crackdown on civil liberties there. He also raised specific cases of Chinese individuals who've been thrown in jail for exercising rights that we think that all people should have. We don't shy away from promoting human rights here. We've got a lot of issues on the agenda here that are vital to the future of America, but we are a democratic country that deeply believes in human rights for all people. And so, as a matter of course, I raise these issues on a very regular basis with the Chinese leadership, and we won't stop doing that.What role does the US-China economic co-dependence have in salvaging this relationship?It's an irony. At the same time that we've had so many disagreements in the relationship, our two-way trade relationship grew last year to $690 billion. China is now our third-largest trade partner after Canada and Mexico. And so, it's actually a very important place for American businesses. The US-China Business Council in a recent report said that about a million Americans’ jobs depend on trade with China. Secretary Blinken was very open. You know, we're not trying to decouple the American economy from the Chinese economy. We're not trying to end all trade between China and the United States, but we are trying to “de-risk.” What does that mean? It means that, you know, we learned in COVID during the COVID years we were too dependent on China for certain critical minerals and critical materials. So, we're trying to diversify our supply chains so that we don't end up in a crisis, unduly dependent on China. And on technology, which is really the heart of the competition between us, we've taken actions over the last year or so to prevent the export of certain American advanced technologies like advanced semiconductors that could be used by the Chinese against us for military purposes, for the development of sophisticated military weapons. And there is no reason why we would want to do that. In fact, we want to shut off the possibility that American military technology could end up being used against us. So, we have a very hard-headed approach to the economic relationship. It's important in a field like agriculture — China is our largest market for American farmers and ranchers and for the American fishing industry. But on certain technology grounds, we're going to begin to take tough actions to block the export of technologies that could be injurious to our national security.Which side do you think is more responsible, really, for the deterioration of the US-China relationship?Obviously, the United States believes that we've tried to put our best foot forward here. You know, we look at the relationship this way, Marco: It's a highly competitive relationship on human rights, on technology, on the lack of a level playing field for American businesses. Certainly from a security perspective, you know, we want to maintain the power of the American military working with our allies, Japan and Australia and South Korea here in the Indo-Pacific. We're competing with China in all of those realms. But on the other hand, obviously, we're the two largest carbon emitters, so we have a self-interest and, frankly, a responsibility to work with them on climate change. So, the relationship is a lot of competition — probably the majority of what we do. But we want to live in peace with China and cooperate when we can. It's that kind of a relationship. And that balance is a difficult one to strike. I was back in Washington last week. I met with many members of Congress, both in the House and the Senate. And while there are some differences on Capitol Hill, in large measure, I think most Republicans and Democrats agree, we've got to compete, but we also have to engage at some point with the Chinese. And I think getting that balance right is tricky. But I think we've got it largely right. And so, we think we've acted in the right way here. We don't think it's right for the Chinese to shut down channels of communication. So, that's our major issue right now. We're trying to stabilize the relationship in a responsible way.This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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When the Afghan capital of Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021, thousands of young people faced an uncertain future — especially if they worked for causes that did not align with the new government.

Shams, a 27-year-old Afghan student based in Kyrgyzstan, said that his work as a development worker got him blacklisted for refusing to pay taxes to the Taliban.

“These were things that the Taliban didn’t really like, and that kind of put me in their blacklist,” said Shams, who asked not to use his last name.

In 2021, an international group of volunteers, organized in part by faculty at Bard College in New York, worked to evacuate more than 300 young Afghans to Kyrgyzstan, including Shams. The same team helped them get student visas and scholarships to continue their education.

After two years of study, Shams and other students who graduated this spring again face an uncertain future. Many who cannot return to Afghanistan are now trying to make it to the United States.

Students sit at the 2023 graduation ceremony inside the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

Credit:

Levi Bridges/The World

Many students had ties to the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), which closed just before the Tabilan reached Kabul. And most have now applied for a program called P-1 that would allow them to enter the US as refugees. But getting their cases accepted is taking longer than many expected.

“Most of us are worried that Trump might win the presidency back from Biden and we won't have the chance to go there,” Shams said.

Some students have already completed two master’s degrees, and, if their applications are not approved by the end of summer, they may have to begin a third master’s program in order to maintain their student status and stay legally in Kyrgyzstan.

Some of the students have already gained approval to come to the United States soon through the P-1 program. But nearly 150 are still waiting for news about their status.

Students stand outside the American University of Central Asia after the 2023 graduation.

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Levi Bridges/The World

The uncertainty makes some of them anxious about their futures.

“I want to get married and have kids, but I can't plan for these things right now,” Shams said.

But even in these circumstances, the students said they are still grateful to be in Kyrgyzstan.

A 24-year-old Afghan woman who just graduated from AUCA – and declined to give her name for security reasons – said that she felt like all of her education had been in vain when she heard that Taliban entered the capital in 2021.

“The only thoughts in my mind at that time were that my dreams are all gone and I'll be like a housewife.”

The Taliban eventually banned women in Afghanistan from attending high school and college.

The young woman said that the opportunity to come to Kyrgyzstan was a blessing, but she also feels sad and frustrated sometimes because of what her friends back in Afghanistan are living through.

“I cannot fully enjoy the rights I have here because my close ones – my Afghan women – they are suffering,” she said.

Millions of Afghan women are no longer studying. In this challenging situation, other institutions are doing everything they can to help educate Afghans, including the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF), which still doesn’t have a physical presence in the country.

“We haven’t stopped for a minute,” said AUAF President Ian Bickford.

Bickford said the university was able to resume classes for students online just two weeks after the government changed in Afghanistan. The university recently reopened in Qatar.

But there are still far more Afghans who want a shot at an education than are receiving aid.

A traditional Kyrgyz yurt outside the American University of Central Asia, in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The university educates a diverse group of students who represent the many different cultures of Central Asia.

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Levi Bridges/The World

Jonathan Becker, acting president of AUCA, said that US institutions, especially, could do far more.

Becker said that he and his partners have actually found scholarship money to pay for Afghan students’ room and board, but some US universities still refuse to host them.

“There are many institutions which have a huge amount of resources which they could put toward supporting Afghan refugees, and they choose not to use these resources,” Becker said.

Jonathan Becker, the acting president of the American University of Central Asia, in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, accepts an award at a recent ceremony where Afghan students thanked the university for helping to bring them to Kyrgyzstan.

Credit:

Levi Bridges/The World

Afghan students in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, are doing what they can to help educate Afghans back home. The students have raised money to start a school back home, launch work training programs for women and founded a mentoring organization to help Afghans study abroad.

“It is difficult now to return back home, but it is not difficult to make a meaningful contribution to the community,” said Wasal, 25, a graduate student in anthropology at AUCA, who also asked not to use a last name.

The students in Bishkek feel they have a huge responsibility to use their education to help Afghanistan.

As the world’s attention shifts away from their homeland, it feels like no one else will.

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Daniil Kuznetsov, a 24-year-old game designer from Russia, said that starting over in Serbia means that old rituals become new again — including the simplest things, like exercising.

From his tiny apartment in the quiet city of Subotica, where he now lives and works, he said he got winded after his first workout since fleeing Russia eight months earlier.

About a dozen Russian game developers like Daniil Kuznetsov have wound up in this city, on the border of Serbia and Hungary, to start over after escaping from Russia. Some left after facing arrest for aiding Ukraine, while others wanted to avoid getting drafted.

Daniil Kuznetsov said life was good in his home city of Voronezh, in central Russia, where he worked for an American game publisher. When the war started, he was against it, he said, but he hung tight hoping things would calm down. Then, he lost his job.

“A lot of publishers just cut off the Russian employees,” he said.

“They said, we cannot work with you. We don’t know how to send the money. We don’t actually know if we can send you the money because maybe they [will] get sanctions from our government.”

Daniil Kuznetsov was suddenly without income as the war continued to escalate. His mother had fled Russia for Serbia weeks earlier, so he packed a suitcase and headed to the airport.

“I was just praying to heaven,” he said. “I was going to the passport control. I was sweating. What was I gonna say? I say, OK, I’m going on vacation. [I did] not mention anything about war or army.”

Daniil Kuznetsov made it out just in time. Two weeks later, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered young men of his age to be drafted.

He said that the threat of mobilization forced him to grab his things and go.

The online video game designer said he already found a new job in Subotica.

And he also changed his image. He showed off a closetful of stylish sports coats he picked up from thrift stores. Every couple of weeks, he dyes his hair a different color. On this day it was pink.

Daniil Kuznetsov stands in front of his apartment building in Subotica. Having to flee the war, he says, lit a fire inside him. He’s now socializing like never before. And he’s dyed his hair pink.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

But he said the biggest change is socializing much more — even with strangers — something he was not accustomed to in Russia.

Barhopping is how he met about a dozen other Russian game designers here in Subotica, including Boris, a young man from St. Petersburg. This isn’t his real name—he asked to change it due to fears of reprisal against his family in Russia.

Boris said that back in Russia, he was offering free game design classes to anyone donating money to the Ukrainian army. He said he raised about $43,700 before the operation began to feel too dangerous.

“We [organized] people who took the money to Ukraine,” he said. “And if our government knew about this, they can take us to prison for our whole lives.”

Rather than sitting in prison, Boris now works for an American gaming company. This pays his rent, but he said skateboarding makes him feel most at home — and it’s become his way of connecting with his Serbian neighbors. Skating is apolitical, he said. To ride, you need your eyes facing forward.

Russian video game designers Daniil Kuznetsov and Boris enjoy a beer on a night out in the Serbian city of Subotica, on the Hungarian border. About a dozen game designers have landed in this quiet city after fleeing Russia due to their opposition to the war.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

For Daniil Kuznetsov, he said staying apolitical is also important, but it’s not always easy. Even with new clothes, new hair and new friends, adjusting to a new home can still be challenging.

Daniil Kuznetsov’s 18-year-old brother Artem Kuznetsov spent some time in Subotica, but ultimately went back to Russia. He said his brother felt lost in this new world. But since returning to Russia, he said his brother’s mental health has only gotten worse.

“He is actually very depressed,” he said.

He reached his brother by phone one morning. He said he was feeling better, and thinking more about his future.

Daniil Kuznetsov offered him a place to stay in Serbia, but he declined.

“Better the devil you know,” Artem Kuznetsov said before hanging up.

Daniil Kuznetsov said he understands even though he is quite worried about his brother getting drafted. At least Artem Kuznetsov avoids what Daniil Kuznetsov calls the “Russian expat dilemma.”

“When you leave, you are hated in Russia and you are hated outside Russia,” he said. “That’s the problem. You cannot go anywhere and think, OK, I am OK here.”

He hopes that in Serbia, a traditional ally where citizens generally admire Russian culture, things might be different.

“I love the country because, you know, it’s the strange feeling that Serbians love Russians more than Russians do,” he said. “I feel here more at home, more than in Russia.”

At this point, he said it’s possible that he will settle here for good.

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When Tiko Tuskadze was a little girl growing up in Georgia, her family used to take her on holiday every year to Borjomi, a popular vacation town in the center of the country.

Borjomi, nestled between steep foothills alongside a wide, curvy river, became famous throughout the far reaches of the former Soviet Union for its mineral springs.

“I still remember the taste, it was like having a lemon,” said Tuskadze, who now runs two Georgian restaurants in London and penned the Georgian cookbook, “Supra.”

The naturally carbonated water gives off a sulfur scent with a distinctive flavor.

For more than a century, water from mineral springs in the Georgian town of Borjomi has been bottled and sold throughout the former Soviet Union. To this day, Borjomi remains a well-known brand from Kyiv to Kazakhstan.

Credit:

Levi Bridges/The World

Love it or hate it, Borjomi water is here to stay.

But the company that bottles and sells the city's water has run into some major problems since Russia invaded Ukraine, one of Borjomi’s biggest foreign markets. Sales dropped significantly after the war started due to logistics problems — and sanctions targeting some of its key shareholders.

“Last year was a bad year for the company,” said Levan Bagdavadze, president of IDS Borjomi Georgia, the company that manages production and sales of Borjomi.

Advertisements for Borjomi mineral water boast of the water's health benefits.

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Levi Bridges/The World

The company formerly transported Borjomi from Georgia by ferry to parts of Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe across the Black Sea, but transiting the ocean south of Ukraine became far more dangerous due to the war.

The company started shipping the water overland through Turkey by truck, which proved far more expensive.

To make matters worse, a Russian Israeli oligarch based in Britain named Mihail Fridman, who owned a majority stake in the Borjomi company, along with partners from Russia’s Alfa Bank, were sanctioned by the European Union and the United Kingdom.

Borjomi then had problems doing business with some of the Baltic countries because the company could not receive bank transactions from them.

“There was some rejection with the transactions,” Bagdavadze said.

During the chaos, the company temporarily suspended production at its bottling plant in Borjomi. And some workers went on strike because they were paid lower wages during the time production stopped, according to news reports.

In an attempt to solve Borjomi’s problems linked to sanctions, Fridman’s investment group handed over some of their Borjomi shares to the Georgian government, so the majority of the company would be owned by Georgians, not Russians.

Bagdavadze said sanctions are not a problem for the company anymore, and the issues with striking workers have been resolved.

The bottling factory is back up and running. And multiple business owners in the Baltic States as well as other parts of the EU confirmed to The World over the phone that they now have no problems buying Borjomi.

Missing from the tableGeorgians are used to having the refreshing beverage at most meals — but the beloved drink has been much harder to find lately on the market.

“There was no way you opened the fridge and there was no cold Borjomi in there,” Tuskadze said, reflecting on her childhood experiences in Georgia.

Old bottles of Borjomi that show the product's previous labels over the decades stand in the town's museum

Credit:

Levi Bridges/The World

After the first water bottling factory opened in Georgia in 1854, the drink became an essential part of Georgian cuisine.

A historic photo shows workers in one of Borjomi's very first bottling plants.

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Levi Bridges/The World

On trips to Borjomi as a child, Tuskadze said her grandmother always insisted that they visit the town’s fountain to sample the water each day. And she scolded Tuskadze when her face showed an obvious distaste for it.

But Tuskadze said she developed a taste for Borjomi as an adult and it now plays an essential role in her work as a chef. She said her grandmother even used to substitute baking soda with the fizzy water while cooking.

Locals in the Georgian town of Borjomi frequent one of several public springs to fill up their own bottles with the town's beloved mineral water.

Credit:

Levi Bridges/The World

The water has become such an important part of Georgian cuisine, she said, that it’s now a key player on the table for a Georgian feast, known as a supra.

Tuskadze said she still can not purchase enough Borjomi wholesale to stock the Georgian restaurants she runs in London.

“It’s really upsetting. It’s like if somebody goes to a pizza place and, ‘Oh, sorry, we are not able to serve you pizza today,’” Tuskadze said.

Healing watersBeyond its position as a cultural mainstay, there is a deeper reason why Borjomi’s popularity has withstood the test of time — its power to heal.

The mineral springs first gained notoriety when a group of soldiers from the Russian imperial army stumbled upon them back in the 19th century.

Mineral springs throughout Georgia have long been renowned for their health benefits and word quickly spread about the potential of the Borjomi springs.

Locals in the Georgian town of Borjomi frequent one of several public springs to fill up their own bottles with the town's beloved mineral water.

Credit:

Levi Bridges/The World

Not long after their discovery, according to local legend and a statement from the company that produces Borjomi, the Viceroy of the Russia Tsar Yevgeni Golovin in the Caucasus traveled to Borjomi with his sick daughter so she could cure an ongoing stomach issue.

“If you’re bloated, or have gas or are feeling sick to your stomach, this water will cure what ails you,” said Irina Shevchenko, a retired hydrogeologist who sells bottles of pomegranate wine to tourists near the public fountain in Borjomi.

Locals often line up with empty jugs by the fountain, where anyone can sample the famous water for free.

“The water is really good for a hangover,” said Borjomi employee Ketevan Kochladze, looking on from nearby.

The multipurpose elixir has endured in a culture that may have a tendency to overimbibe at times.

After all, there are few drinks in the world that hold such an important place at the dinner table — both during and after a party.

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Far away from the front lines in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin met recently with Russian war correspondents and military bloggers in the Kremlin.

Putin blamed the Ukrainians for starting the war and accused the US of provoking this international security crisis. He boasted of territorial gains, heavy Ukrainian losses and a successful Russian military recruitment campaign.

But so far, the situation on the ground tells a different story. Ukraine’s counteroffensive appears to be off to a good start, even though it’s early days. 

“Russia is becoming aware that it is losing the war,” said Kurt Volker, the former US special representative for Ukraine negotiations, and a fellow at CEPA, the Center for European Policy Analysis.

“They are not able to advance on the ground, they exhausted themselves in the last-ditch effort at Bakhmut, they have resorted to just shelling Ukrainian cities, because they’re not able to do much else.”

Volker said the Ukrainians have started sending capable, well-equipped units into the fight. 

But the recent destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in southern Ukraine has implications on the battlefield. 

“In those parts which are now flooded, the maneuverability of our armed forces is limited, and it’s obvious, but at the same time this is not something that will take us off balance and make us change our major plan which is to de-occupy all of Ukraine,” said Yuriy Sak, an adviser to Ukraine’s minister of defense.

Sak laid the blame squarely on Russia for causing the largest eco-disaster in recent European history. He said Ukraine’s priority in the areas affected by flooding are now largely humanitarian.

“You need weather conditions to carry out certain military operations, plus right now, of course, when it comes to those regions, we are focused on first of all saving lives of people, evacuating people, making sure they have drinking water, making sure they have shelter, so that is what is happening there right now,” he said.

In other areas, including the Donetsk and Zaporizhia regions, Sak said he is confident in Ukraine’s military capabilities. 

But this counteroffensive will not be easy.

“We have to understand that Russians have had a long time to dig in, they’ve built very, very strongly fortified multilayered defense systems. We will not say that this is an easy fight, but at the same time, we can say that we are determined to continue our battle and inch by inch, we will be liberating our land.”

Saks said that Ukraine will suffer losses.

Over the last week, there have also been reports of some Western-provided equipment, like Leopard tanks and Bradley armored vehicles, that were lost or damaged in the field.

Sak expressed gratitude for support from Ukrainian partners, something that Ukrainian officials often repeat because it’s a big part of what is making this counteroffensive possible.

“It’s a David-against-Goliath scenario,” he said. “So, we know that we are weaker, smaller, and have less ammunition to spare, but at the same time, we are smarter, we are more organized, we are more determined, and this is our major advantage, and this gives us an upper hand.”

This is just the start of Ukraine’s counteroffensive. It still has many Western-trained and equipped units that have yet to be deployed, for what’s likely to be months of heavy fighting.

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For international students, the place to study has long been the United States, the best teachers, the best labs and innovation that few countries could match.

But American colleges and universities have started to stumble when it comes to attracting top talent.

The focus is on China because it sends the most students to the US. But those numbers are in fact slipping and many graduates now get their diplomas, then quickly head back home to better understand what's going on. 

Yang Ye Ma, who teaches sociology at Syracuse University and has written extensively about Chinese students experiences in the US, and Tire Huang, a senior at the University of California San Diego, studying philosophy and economics, discuss the challenges with The World's Marco Werman.

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When you hear about the US-Mexico border, it's often in reference to migration and protocols designed to keep people from crossing the border — walls, barricades, asylum hearings.

But for thousands of students who live in Mexico and go to school in the US, crossing the border is just part of the daily commute.

Carlos Tenorio knows this routine.

He has dual US and Mexican citizenship, lives in Tijuana, Mexico, and attends Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California, just east of San Diego.

Thousands of students like Tenorio who attend US colleges and universities reside in Mexico. Many live with their families and living costs are cheaper.

But when border wait times can be two to four hours long, it takes a special dedication to get to class each day.

Tenorio said many students check in with an online Facebook community to get the most accurate wait times at the border on a daily basis.

Wait times can also be affected by what Tenorio called "secondary inspections."

"It often happens that they send you to secondary inspection also just randomly."

Carlos Tenorio resides in Mexico and studies at Southwestern College in the US. He crosses the border daily.

"It often happens that they send you to secondary inspection also just randomly. And I mean, you're waiting for hours to cross the border and they send you randomly to secondary inspection and they have you waiting for 40 minutes. And that's really, really messed up," Tenorio told The World.

A United States Customs and Border Protection officer points toward a line of people at the entrance to the San Isidro Port of Entry, linking Tijuana, Mexico with San Diego, Thursday, June 1, 2023, in Tijuana, Mexico.

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Gregory Bull/AP

Joanna Esser, who teaches English as a second language at Southwestern College, works with many students who live in Mexico and cross the border daily to study in the US.

She said student arrival times are often unpredictable.

"I get WhatsApp calls and messages at all times...so we're always trying to be mindful of the challenges that students face in arriving on time and being there for the entire duration of the class."

Joanna Esser, teacher, Southwestern College

"We have WhatsApp chats so students can contact us. I get WhatsApp calls and messages at all times ... so we're always trying to be mindful of the challenges that students face in arriving on time and being there for the entire duration of the class," she said.

She added that bus strikes and family emergencies can also impact student learning.

About 900 students at Southwestern currently reside in Mexico, Esser said, and about 46% said it takes them more than two hours to arrive on campus.

For Tenorio, he said he wakes up at about 8 to reach campus for a first class at 11. But what motivates him is his love of filmmaking.

"I hope I make something big one day, something that really, like, identifies me, something that says my name on it."

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Only a few universities and colleges offer core classes in languages other than English. But at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV), bilingual professors can teach in Spanish, or in both English and Spanish.

UTRGV is classified as a Hispanic-serving institution, which means more than 25% of the students identify as such. Right on the US-Mexico border, over 90% of the student body identifies as either Hispanic or Latino, according to Hispanic Outlook on Education Magazine.

The World's host Marco Werman spoke to UTRGV professor Juan Madrid, who teaches astronomy in both Spanish and English.

While Madrid said it isn't difficult to offer bilingual classes, the challenge is finding professors qualified to teach them, as few Hispanics get advanced degrees.

Marco Werman: When you're in the classroom at UT Rio Grande Valley and you’re teaching astronomy, what language do you use for instruction?Juan Madrid: I'm using both English and Spanish. So, I'm teaching a bilingual class in astronomy.Take us into the classroom. How does teaching in both English and Spanish actually work? Like are you conscious of when you're going to switch between the two?Not really, it's not a big effort to do that because I'm naturally bilingual. I grew up speaking English and Spanish. And so, the same is true for my students. The vast majority of the students at our university are bilingual, so they speak both English and Spanish. So no, I don't think too much when I'm switching between English or Spanish at all, actually.

UTRGV astronomy professor Juan Madrid at the Hobby Eberly Telescope in West Texas, August 2022.

Credit:

Courtesy of Constantine Poulos

And I'm wondering if there are any challenges you run into when you're using Spanish interchangeably with English in a classroom setting?I don't really see any big challenges to teaching a bilingual class. Here in South Texas, everybody here is bilingual, or most people here bilingual. When we do all our business, we’re bilingual. So, perhaps the one exception is our university classes, where the vast majority of classes are in English. So, this is what we're trying to change.Right, so it's available when you have a professor like yourself who is fluent in both languages, but for the most part and other departments, you're saying, that's not the case?No, there is still a lot of work for us to do in that respect. As you said, you need to find those professors who are bilingual. If I can bring a point here, to be a university professor, you normally need a PhD in your field. And one of the biggest issues in science is the fact that very few Hispanics actually go into science and go into advanced degrees in science.Yeah, I mean, it's certainly the case that some of your students will go on to get master's degrees and postgraduate degrees. What do you say to critics who say using Spanish in the classroom, that these kids will be less well-prepared?No, that's absolutely not true. Actually, being bilingual and being able to be fluent in Spanish, actually, is a requirement for many jobs these days. Certainly, for many jobs here in South Texas, Mexico is the biggest trading partner of the state of Texas.So, why have you chosen to teach in both languages?I have chosen to teach bilingual classes to make students feel welcome in the classroom. And I just don't want students feeling that they have to do this code-switching into this different persona that only speaks English, when they speak Spanish at home, when they're bilingual at home, when they go to the grocery store and they speak Spanish and English. I want them to feel that the university is part of their lives.Your school is classified as a Hispanic-serving institution, which means more than 25% of the students identify as Hispanic. You wrote an article last year where you compare those institutions to historically Black colleges and universities, HBCUs. And you wrote that those schools were doing it right, but that Hispanic-serving universities were missing the mark. Explain that.Yeah, that's absolutely true, Marco. Historically Black colleges and universities have this big pride in serving the Black community. That is somewhat missing for Hispanic-serving institutions. So, for me, the solution to this is basically to embrace the culture, to embrace the language of our Hispanic students.Yes, so just finally, what needs to happen, do you think, to more deeply embrace that culture and duplicate what you're doing in the department of astronomy?Well, look, we need more professors who are able to teach bilingual classes. If we have more bilingual professors, I think more bilingual classes will be able to be offered. The university administration also recognises the importance of offering bilingual classes here in South Texas. Even the Texas legislature has recognized that, and one of the objectives of our university is to become fully bilingual. As we hire more professors who are able to teach my bilingual classes, those classes will be offered for sure.This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Related: Catalan separatists want university classes taught in the local language. Spanish academics resist the change.

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Alejandro Rodriguez, an engineering professor at the Polytechnical University of Catalonia, starts his Intro to Radio Frequencies class the same way every Friday — in Spanish.

“I can do it in Catalan, I can do it in English,” he said. “But Spanish is the language in which I can teach better. I think I should have the right to decide which language to use.”

Rodriguez’s students are a mix of Catalans, who’ve grown up speaking Catalan and Spanish, and Spaniards from elsewhere. Throw in some international students, Rodriguez said, and teaching in Spanish makes the most sense.

But now, he may have problems with school administrators. Under a new higher education initiative, he’ll soon be forced to lecture, answer questions and correct papers all in Catalan.

The semi-autonomous region of Catalonia has two official languages: Spanish and Catalan. But authorities there have decided that Catalan will be the lingua franca for higher education. Their goal is to have 80% of university classes in the region taught in Catalan by 2025. Professors who don’t adapt could soon be out of a job.

Although the measure has its supporters, others, like Rodriguez, are angry.

“I have been teaching for more than 25 years,” he said. “Spanish is my mother language, and I have never had any problem with my students.”

Catalan education officials say there are a lot of reasons for the new law, starting with wanting to protect Catalan students themselves.

“Our pupils have the right to learn in Catalan,” said Jordi Matas, the University of Barcelona’s vice rector for language policy. “It’s enshrined in regional law.”

Languages don’t have rights, Engineering professor Alejandro Rodriguez says; they’re just tools for communicating. People have rights. He defends his, to teach in Spanish, which is an official language in Catalonia alongside Catalan. Catalan education authorities say Catalan students have the right to learn in Catalán. The debate can seem endless but one thing is clear: The Catalan language is inseparable from the regional identity of many of Catalonia’s roughly 8 million residents.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

The law stipulates that professors who don’t pass a Catalan-language proficiency test will lose their posts. It sounds drastic, Matas said, but what’s at stake is nothing less than existential.

“The Catalan language is a symbol of our identity,” Matas said. “There are cultural and historical aspects that differentiate us from the rest of Spain, and our language is essential to our sense of belonging.”

In recent years, politicians in Catalonia have tried to exploit that sense of identity. Tensions culminated in 2017, when Catalan separatists staged an illegal referendum on seceding from Spain. Crowds who came out to vote were met by police officers wielding truncheons.

The drive for an independent Catalonia drew international attention. And that’s what Catalan education officials want now.

Catalonia’s universities commissioner Gemma Geis spoke at a press conference recently.

“We’re convinced that we can express ourselves in Catalan and become internationally renowned for our universities. We embrace the world — in Catalan,” she said.

Catalonia’s public universities accept about 13,000 international students each year. But not all of these pupils embrace Catalan.

“For us Italians, speaking in Catalan is a problem,” said 21-year-old exchange student Alexia Scalarandi, speaking in fluent Spanish.

She’s come to the University of Barcelona from Turin, in northern Italy, for the year.

Engineering professor Alejandro Rodriguez in his office at the Polytechnical University of Catalonia. Rodriguez is against a new measure requiring 80% of classes in public universities here to be in Catalán. He’s fluent in Catalán and Spanish, but more comfortable teaching in the latter. He says higher education is about imparting knowledge in the best way possible, not about protecting languages.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

“A lot of professors here teach in Catalan, and we can’t understand them,” she said.

To avoid losing both time and knowledge, Scalarandi switched out of classes taught in Catalan.

“I’m studying Russian, Spanish and German,” she said. “I don’t have time to learn Catalan, too.”

That’s hardly the international acceptance that Catalan educators are after. And it raises the question: If all classes are in Catalan, will international students and professors still come to these universities? Or even those from outside Catalonia, for that matter?

They likely will, but it doesn’t matter, said 22-year-old college student Jan Figueras Gibert. Catalan must be preserved no matter what, if not restored to its former glory, he said on a recent stroll through downtown Barcelona.

“Catalan has a spectacular history,” Figueras said. “Europe’s first cookbook was written in Catalan.”

In addition, for centuries, Catalan was the language of commerce and law around much of the Western Mediterranean, “but modern nation-states have been slowly exterminating Europe’s minority tongues,” he said.

“We need to fight, so that every place can maintain its cultural richness. And that includes Catalan.”

Figueras is studying Catalan history. He looks like he’s just stepped out of one of his textbooks — dressed in clothes from the 1730s. But what makes Figueras really stand out: He won’t speak Spanish, ever.

“Whether I’m in class or anywhere else,” he said. “My sense is that if I don’t speak in Catalan, my native language will lose its place in society.”

It already did once, Figueras said, under the dictator, Gen. Francisco Franco, from the late 1930s until the 1970s. During that time, the use of Catalan was banned in public institutions.

“If I had my way, Catalonia would be its own country, with 100% of all classes in Catalan,” Figueras said, adding that Spanish would be treated as a foreign language.

Catalonia’s new education initiative won’t exactly reduce Spanish to a foreign language. But it will anchor higher education to Catalonia’s other, deeply cherished tongue.

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For the past two weeks, Nathaly Villareal, who is from Venezuela, has been staying at Casa Tochan, a shelter for migrants in Mexico City.

After she’s done with her daily chores, she gets on her phone and logs onto CBP One, an app by the US government that schedules appointments at border posts for those trying to seek asylum in the United States.

But getting an appointment is far from guaranteed. Only 1,000 spots are granted each day.

“This is like winning the lottery.”

Nathaly Villareal, migrant in Mexico from Venezuela

“This is like winning the lottery,” Villareal said as she tapped on a blue button. “I know some people who have been logging in for two months and haven’t had any luck, while others try for a week, and they get it.”

A month ago, migrants from many countries could cross the US border on foot and turn themselves in to officials to begin asylum proceedings.

But that changed on May 12, when the US rolled out new procedures for asylum seekers.

Nathaly Villareal logs into CBP One, a US government app that schedules appointments at border posts for people who want to claim asylum. But getting an appointment is far from easy.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

It’s now much harder for people who cross the border without permission to present themselves for asylum. And those who are turned down are subsequently banned from reentering the US for the next five years.Because of these obstacles, migrants like Villareal are playing it safe by applying for appointments online.

“The border area is full and it’s dangerous,” Villareal said. “So, we are applying for the appointment in Mexico City, and will stay here until we can get it.”

The new policies for asylum seekers have reduced encounters with migrants who cross the border illegally to about 50% of the number of daily encounters in April, according to data published by the US Department of Homeland Security.

But these regulations have also put pressure on shelters within Mexico. Even shelters far from the border are struggling to accommodate the growing number of stranded migrants.

Migrants have breakfast at the Casa Tochan shelter in Mexico City.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

Crowded sheltersCasa Tochan, which has 45 beds, is now hosting 75 people, and has rented a nearby apartment to accommodate women with children.

Meanwhile, in the north of the city, 500 migrants are staying at the CAFEMIN shelter, even though it’s designed to house only 80 people.

Most people sleep on the floor on top of gym mats that have been laid out on the shelter’s basketball court. Mario Monroy, the shelter’s outreach coordinator, said that the shelter must limit the number of days that people can stay, and has had to turn others away.

“It’s very hard,” he said. “The team here is maybe 22 to 25 staff. And we don’t have the time, don’t have the energy, the food.”

Monroy said the situation has been critical since last October, when the US started to return thousands of Venezuelan migrants to Mexico, and Mexican immigration officials left hundreds of people at the shelter’s doorstep.

Now, with many migrants waiting in Mexico for appointments at border posts, he said the shelter has had to make changes.

“We’ve had to install new bathrooms and set up water tanks,” he explained. “It’s a complicated situation.”

Seeking alternativesSome migrants said they’ve given up on going to the US because of the new policies.

In the upscale Mexico City neighborhood of Roma, amid craft beer bars and trendy cafés that cater to digital nomads, a camp was recently set up by hundreds of Haitians in a local park.

They wanted to sleep near a government office that processes asylum requests for people wanting to stay in Mexico.

Hundreds of Haitians set up a camp at a park in Mexico City's trendy Roma neighborhood. They wanted to sleep near a Mexican government office that handles permits for those who want to live in Mexico.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

Leonci Fendi, a 31-year-old farm worker staying in one of the tents, said he had been living in Chile for several years, but had to leave due to stricter immigration laws there.

“If there is a chance to work in Mexico, I’m fine with staying here,” he said. “I just want to have a permit so that I can bring my family.”

But the camp in Roma was recently dismantled by Mexican immigration officials who had contractors shovel up and discard everything the migrants couldn’t take with them.

The migrants were then taken to a government-run shelter that was opened on the city’s outskirts, where it’s impossible for them to find work.

Haitian migrants were loaded onto buses and taken to a recently opened shelter on the outskirts of Mexico City.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

Human rights groups have urged the municipal government to open more practical shelters with better services.

A Venezuelan migrant helps a migrant from El Salvador to trim his eyebrows at the Casa Tochan shelter in Mexico City.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

“These people need something useful to do while they’re here waiting for their paperwork to be resolved,” said Gabriela Hernandez, the director of Casa Tochan. “It’s urgent for the local government to come up with a real policy for migrants.”At Hernandez’s shelter, migrants are offered support from a psychologist and provided with orientation outlining the steps they need to take to get work permits in Mexico.

Still, many at the shelter said they will push to go to the United States. They log onto the CBP One app every morning in hopes of securing one of the scarce border appointments.

“We need to be patient,” Venezuelan migrant Gabriela Lendo said. “We’ve been through a lot to give up on this now.”

Related: Migrants stranded in Mexico rush to cross the US border before Title 42 ends

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Last weekend, in Barcelona, Spain, as the Primavera Sound festival was drawing to a close, local pop star Rosalía took a break between songs to address the 70,000-strong crowd.

She recalled being among the public a few years ago, looking up to the artists on the festival’s main stage. “I dreamt of being a headliner,” she said.

Now, in the span of a week, Rosalía is headlining the Primavera Sound festival not once, not twice, but three times.

In addition to the Barcelona show, the artist performed at Primavera Sound’s Portuguese franchise in the city of Porto on Thursday and played in Madrid over the weekend for the first-ever edition of the festival in the Spanish capital.

Later this year, during springtime in South America, Primavera Sound is also scheduled to hold back-to-back festivals in São Paulo, Brazil; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Bogotá, Colombia and Asunción, Paraguay.

By adding new locations and dates, even if repeating the exact same line-up, one of the biggest music festivals in Europe is growing even bigger.

The move echoes a larger industry trend: Coachella has been holding double editions for over a decade on consecutive weekends; Lollapalooza, which started in Chicago, now has six franchises in Europe and Latin America.

There are multiple reasons for expanding, starting with the most obvious: meeting demand.

Throughout its 21 editions in Barcelona, Primavera Sound has grown in size because more and more people want to attend, festival organizer Joan Pons told The World.

“Selling out is nice until you realize that 10,000 or 15,000 people are mad at you because they didn’t get any tickets,” said Pons.

Primavera Sound’s success is partly explained by Barcelona being one of the biggest tourist destinations in the world.

For Gemma Kaur-Brown, who traveled from the UK, Primavera Sound 2023 was both her first time at a music festival and in Barcelona. “The idea that I could basically kill two birds with one stone, like come to a festival for the first time and then come to Barcelona for the first time, was a no-brainer,” she said.

More than half of all attendees at the festival this year were foreigners, mostly from other European countries and the United States.

U.S. artist Maggie Rogers performs at this year's Barcelona’s Primavera Sound.

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Alan Ruiz Terol/The World

However, managing growth can be difficult. Last year, the festival returned from the pandemic hiatus in full force, with its first, and so far only, double edition in Barcelona. Nearly half a million people attended over two consecutive weeks, and many complained of huge crowds and long lines.After disagreements with local authorities in Barcelona, the festival moved its second week to Madrid this year.

Another big reason festivals expand to new cities and repeat their line-ups is being more competitive when hiring artists.

“If you're offering an artist just one show in a geographical area, it may not be worth it for them. Offering three gigs in a week, though, is more persuasive.”

Joan Pons, Primavera Sound festival organizer

“If you're offering an artist just one show in a geographical area, it may not be worth it for them,” said Pons. “Offering three gigs in a week, though, is more persuasive.”

Apart from Rosalía, other artists performing at the various editions of Primavera Sound in Barcelona, Porto, and Madrid are US singer Halsey, Brit-pop legend Blur and US rapper Kendrick Lamar.

Scaling up also allows festivals to cut infrastructure and logistics costs, like setting up the stages, said Carlos Chirinos, a music and global health associate professor at New York University.

“Those setups cost the same if you use it once or if you use it three times or if you use it 10 times,” said Chirinos. “So, if you can have those costs and then repeat them, then you can increase your profit.”

Additionally, growing larger helps build a brand that can be recognized internationally — and good branding brings good sponsorship deals.
At Primavera Sound, company logos were everywhere. Each of the 16 stages was named after a sponsor, be it a bank, a beer label, a clothing store or a carmaker.

According to Chirinos, one of the biggest changes in the business of music festivals in recent times has been the availability of capital following the acquisition of major events by corporations like Live Nation and AEG Live, among others.

“In order for a festival to grow and build an audience, there needs to be consistency and repetition – ‘We're going to do it this year, and then we're going to do it next year and the year after,’” said Chirinos. “Festivals that do not have access to capital cannot guarantee that.”

In 2018, the Yucaipa Companies, a fund owned by US businessman Ron Burkle, bought a minority share of Primavera Sound. The festival stressed it remains independent.

But even with large sums coming in, festivals are becoming more expensive, even prohibitive for many fans.

Barcelona local Enric Ayguadé complained Primavera Sound was getting “too expensive” and recalled paying about $215 for this year’s early-bird tickets. “That’s what tickets cost a few years ago on the last day,” he said.

Ayguadé spoke of friends who used to attend the festival but decided to pass this year. “The price was definitely a thing that made them not come,” he said.

NYU professor Carlos Chirinos said the growing price of festival tickets is part of a larger story of how the internet radically transformed the music industry and its revenue sources upended.

The Primavera Sound is held in Barcelona’s Parc del Fòrum, a large seaside complex for massive outdoor events. Two hundred fifty-three thousand people attended the 2023 edition of the festival in Barcelona. Over half of all attendees are foreigners, mostly from other European countries.

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Alan Ruiz Terol/The World

“The public does not give that much importance to recorded music anymore because it's easy access. And that's basic economic theory: If something is easy to access, you're not prepared to pay for it,” he said.

With streaming services like Spotify and Youtube Music offering millions of songs for free, revenue from record sales has plummeted.

“However, [the] music experience in a live event has not changed. In fact, it not only hasn't changed, it has improved,” said Chirinos. “The industry knows these and has increased the ticket prices.”

The craving for live music, if anything, increased following the pandemic.

“You can watch a live performance from home, from 15 different camera angles, but if you go to a concert, that’s something else,” said Primavera Sound organizer Joan Pons. “It’s a collective experience of being physically together with people who share the same passion.”

Related: Young people in Spain use punk rock to vent their frustrations

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Half Moon Bay is probably the most famous beach in Antigua and Barbuda. But on a gorgeous day in late May, it was completely empty. The only person on the sand was a tractor worker, removing sargassum, a type of seaweed that was covering the whole beach.

“We got to do what we got to do,” said Avery Henry, the owner of Beach Bum Bar and Grill, a restaurant right at the beach. “In Florida now they are crying, and we have been crying for ages. But now they are starting to feel what we are feeling.”

Avery Henry, the owner of Beach Bum Bar and Grill on Half Moon Bay, said tourists get here and turn around after they see the sargassum covering the sand.

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Gisele Regatão/The World

Those planning a Caribbean trip this summer better check the sargassum forecast. This seaweed has been growing in excessive amounts in the Caribbean since 2011, and now growing in Mexico and parts of Florida, as well. Earlier this year, scientists detected a record bloom.

In late May, the only person at Half Moon Bay in Antigua was a tractor worker, removing sargassum that was covering the whole beach.

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Gisele Regatão/The World

On many islands, locals like Henry have to cope with piles of the macroalgae on the sand — and its stinky smell — which sometimes leaves his restaurant totally empty. Tourists get here and turn around, he said, which is a huge contrast from a few years ago.

“At one point, Half Moon Bay was ranked top five in the world,” Henry said.

Avery Henry, the owner of Beach Bum Bar and Grill on Half Moon Bay, was dealing with an empty restaurant as sargassum filled the sand.

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Gisele Regatão/The World

In the ocean, sargassum is an important nutrient for fish and other sea animals. The problem is when it gets to the beach. As it decomposes, it attracts bacteria and produces a gas that smells like rotten eggs.

Nobody is certain about what brought sargassum to the Caribbean 12 years ago, according to Chuanmin Hu, an oceanography professor at the University of South Florida. “As of today, it's still a mystery,” he said. “But there are some hypotheses, some of which are more plausible than others.”

One viable hypothesis is that, in 2010, there was an ocean current much stronger than usual. It came from the northern Atlantic and pushed sargassum to the tropical Atlantic, where it found perfect conditions to grow. “Light, nutrients, temperature,” Hu said. “In the tropical Atlantic, everything is just right. So, we started to see more and more sargassum.”

Hu’s team detected a record amount of sargassum in the Caribbean in March.

“I was a little scared, because I know the worst is yet to come in the summer,” he said. The May report showed a drop, but Hu said sargassum is still going to be all over the Caribbean, Mexico and parts of Florida, particularly in June and July.

In the ocean, sargassum is an important nutrient for fish, but when it gets to the beach it decomposes, attracts bacteria and produces a bad smell.

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Gisele Regatão/The World

Local authorities can try to collect sargassum in the ocean using boats, he said, but that’s expensive.

“It's hundreds of miles. It's not just a local thing. So, there's no way to stop this phenomenon in nature. This is just like, nobody can really stop a hurricane,” he said.

A few miles from Half Moon Bay, another beach on the island of Antigua was sargassum-free last month.

Fabio Giorgi, the general manager of The Inn at English Harbor, said that at this beach, Freeman’s Bay, it only comes about three times a year.

“You can see even today, there is some out there, there is some brown,” he said, pointing to dark puddles in the ocean. “But they don’t come in, they keep going up, so we are lucky.”

In Freeman’s Bay, also in Antigua, sargassum is a rare appearance, and locals say it only appears on the beach about three times a year.

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Gisele Regatão/The World

When the seaweed does come in, Giorgi said, they can call the environmental department to do the cleaning, but they take care of it themselves. The process takes about three days.

“We clean, but there is still some in the sea when that happens, so then you need to wait until the next day for them to come up,” he said.

While the sargassum keeps coming, local communities are also finding new uses for it. According to Hu, it can be used as fertilizer, and other things.

“A lot of people make bricks, construction material from sargassum, and they make shoes, or even clothes,” he said.

Hu said there might be some pharmaceutical use for sargassum as well, but research is in development.

But for most of the Caribbean, there is still no remedy for it.

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The walls outside Kharkiv Pre-trial Detention Center Number 27 are faded yellow and topped with barbed wire. The facility has a maximum capacity of about 1,500 inmates.

This detention center in Kharkiv, Ukraine, has a long history going back more than 170 years.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year, the facility served as a regular jail. But it now includes a different population of inmates: Russian prisoners of war.

It’s one of the dozens of sites in the country where captured Russian troops are being held, housing about 90 POWs at a time.

Deputy warden Dmitry Kholod said that Ukraine’s military started sending POWs to this center about a year ago. Russian POWs are kept separate from the rest of the inmates.

Dmitry Kholod is a deputy warden at Kharkiv Pre-trial Detention Center Number 27.

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Daniel Ofman/The World

They typically spend a few weeks there before being transferred to a facility in western Ukraine designated specifically for POWs.

The World spoke with several Russian prisoners, and although Ukrainian guards were not present during the interviews, under these circumstances, it was hard to say if the men were speaking completely freely.

A Russian prisoner of war at a detention center in Kharkiv, Ukraine.

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Daniel Ofman/The World

The World is not revealing the prisoners’ names and other details out of concern for their safety.One prisoner in a camouflage jacket, in his late 20s, said that he had worked at a supermarket back home in Russia.

He said he was drafted early this year, and that he only got two weeks of training before being sent to the front lines in Ukraine’s Donetsk region.

“We were put in trenches, on the second line of defense, and we were told to defend our position,” he said.

But a couple of weeks later, he said he came to the conclusion that he no longer wanted to fight.

So, one night, he hopped out of the Russian trench and walked toward the Ukrainian side, where he was taken as a prisoner.

He was brought to the detention facility where he was interrogated by Ukrainian security officials.

He said that, overall, he’s been treated well, getting three meals a day, clean clothing and even books to read.

Other prisoners shared similar experiences.

Kharkiv Pre-trial Detention Center Number 27 has a long history going back more than 170 years. The facility has a maximum capacity of around 1,500 inmates.

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Daniel Ofman/The World

A second prisoner said he was captured in an ambush, was injured and then received medical care after being taken prisoner.

All the men shared the hope to be included in a prisoner exchange so they could go back home.

Prisoner swapsAll parties to an armed conflict, whether or not they are state actors, are bound by international humanitarian law and must abide by the Geneva Conventions.

"The basis of the [Geneva Conventions] is that prisoners of war should be treated humanely..."

Wayne Jordash, international criminal lawyer based in Kyiv

“The basis of the law is that prisoners of war should be treated humanely, that’s the underlying premise of all treatment of prisoners of war,” said Wayne Jordash, an international criminal lawyer based in Kyiv. “So, the Geneva Conventions, in a sense, codified all of that to establish this standard framework.”

But Jordash said he sees a disparity in the treatment of POWs captured in the war in Ukraine.

“I think you can see the difference between prisoners of war that have been held by the Ukrainian side and those that are being held by the Russian side,” he said. "Those who’ve been held by the Russian side often seem to emerge looking emaciated, looking like they have not received proper medical treatment, telling stories of torture and ill-treatment,” something Jordash said could amount to war crimes.

Spartak Borisenko, who is the head of the special department for war crime investigations at the Kharkiv prosecutor’s office, described what happens with Russian POWs once they’re taken into Ukrainian custody.

“They’re being taken by the military, once they’ve been captured by the military they pass them on to military police,” Borisenko said. “The military police then register them and then bring them to the pre-trial detention center.”

Spartak Borisenko is the head of the special department for war crime investigations at the Kharkiv prosecutor’s office.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

At centers like the one in Kharkiv, Russian POWs are questioned about potential war crimes, and their statements are recorded as evidence.

Borisenko said he hopes that the evidence being collected “will be then used by the investigators of the International Criminal Court at the Hague, or any other venue, for investigation of these crimes.”

Most of the cases make their way through Ukraine’s court system.

Borisenko said that Ukraine is currently investigating about 85,000 cases of potential Russian war crimes. And in Kharkiv, a few dozen Russian troops have been found guilty.

But Ukrainian law allows for the transfer of Russian POWs, even after they’ve been convicted, so they are used in prisoner swap negotiations to retrieve captured Ukrainian soldiers.

“We are arranging exchanges every two weeks, or even twice in a week,” said Petro Yatsenko, with Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for Treatment of POWs.

Petro Yatsenko is the spokesman for Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for Treatment of POWs.

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Daniel Ofman/The World

And although Yatsenko won’t disclose how many Russian prisoners of war are in Ukrainian custody, he said that because of the exchanges, which have been happening throughout the war, the number of Russian POWs is diminishing.

“During the first period of war, Russia captured a lot of Ukrainian soldiers,” Yatsenko said. So, he said he hopes that the long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive that is now reportedly underway will result in the capture of more Russian soldiers — who can then be exchanged for Ukrainian POWs.

Earlier this week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said that more than 2,500 Ukrainians have so far been freed through the prisoner swaps. He then called on the international community to keep pressuring Russia to help Ukraine bring all of its citizens back home.

Volodymyr Solohub contributed to this report.

Related: 'We lost everything': African students who fled war in Ukraine continue to struggle

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Dozens of people have come forward in recent days accusing prominent figures in Taiwanese society of sexual harassment and abuse, in what many experts are calling Taiwan’s #MeToo moment.

Starting late last week, several people accused officials in Taiwan’s ruling political party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), of sexual harassment.

The allegations have since spread to both major parties and across Taiwanese society, with dozens of survivors coming forward with accusations of sexual harassment and abuse.

Taiwanese audiences turned on their TVs last week to see officials from the DPP bowing deeply to apologize for a sexual harassment allegation.

A former DPP staffer mentioned in a May 31 Facebook post that her superior had refused to take the allegation seriously when she first brought it up and even asked why she didn’t scream for help at the time the harassment took place.

The official accused of covering up the scandal — DPP Deputy Secretary-General Hsu Chia-tien — resigned on June 1.

The next day, new allegations surfaced, which the DPP met with a new apology and promises to change how the party handles sexual harassment. A further three DPP officials resigned due to the additional cases.

Then, a third day of allegations, a third apology and an adviser to President Tsai Ing-Wen resigned.

Party chairman and presidential candidate Lai Ching-Te said in a televised speech, "I once again express my deepest apology to all those who have been injured in the DPP because I did not stand with you when you needed it most…In the face of gender equality incidents and workplace bullying, there is absolutely no need to ‘focus on the big picture.’"

That expression was a reference to a hit political series called “Wave Makers,” which debuted in late April on Taiwanese Netflix.

In the first episode, a young political staffer named Chang Ya-Ching is touched inappropriately by a colleague. She talks to her supervisor, Weng Wen-Fang, but since she has no proof, she initially decides to drop the case.

Her supervisor, Weng, remembers her own experience with harassment and how she dropped it to “focus on the big picture.”

In an iconic scene, they talk on a late-night phone call.

“Many things can’t be forgotten,” Weng said. “If you do that, you’ll slowly die.”

Slowly, they repeat after each other…

“Let’s not let this go.”

That last expression, which in English roughly translates to “Let’s not let this go,” or “Let’s not forget this,” “我們不要就這樣算了/Wǒmen bùyào jiù zhèyàng suànle” in Mandarin, became the first line of the Facebook post that launched this whole movement in real life.

The phrase has popped up across Taiwanese social media as people discuss the allegations and share their own stories of harassment and abuse.

“This is the biggest anti-sexual harassment movement in Taiwan so far,” said Chen Mei-Hua, who teaches sociology at National Sun Yat-sen University.

Chen would know. She studies gender rights and used to lead a prominent gender equality NGO, the Awakening Foundation. She said when the #MeToo movement spread globally a few years ago, it didn’t impact Taiwan much.

“Taiwan already has very strong anti-sexual harassment legislation,” Chen said.

She said the problem isn’t that the laws aren’t already on the books — but organizations, especially in politics and the private sector, just aren’t following them.

Taiwanese women actually participate in politics at relatively high rates. Over 40% of Taiwan’s legislators are women, who make up most of the mayors and county magistrates. Taiwan’s President, Tsai Ing-Wen, is also a woman.

Sabrina Lim, a Taipei city councilor, joined several other women in Taiwanese politics to announce legal support for survivors of sexual harassment and abuse.

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Ashish Valentine/The World

But underneath the surface, politics is hardly an equal playing field, said Sabrina Lim, a city councilor in Taipei.

“Even though Taiwan has more female politicians in higher places,” Lim said, “Overall, women in the workplace still face a higher level of scrutiny compared to men.”

Lim said that sexual harassment in politics is unfortunately quite common.

“When in public, I’ve also sometimes been sexually harassed but couldn’t directly point it out,” Lim said. “Most of the time when this happened, all I could do was smile and leave the situation.”

This is why, when accusers came forward in the past week, Lim, along with other women in politics, publicly announced their support for the survivors and committed to providing legal assistance to any who need it.

The scandal is already impacting Taiwan’s upcoming general election, and a win for the opposition Kuomintang (KMT) could push Taiwan closer to China.

So far, Wen-Ti Sung, a political scientist at Australian National University, noted that the KMT had gained a few percentage points in the polls in recent days, but the DPP’s strategy of taking responsibility and promising to reform seems to work as it hasn’t fallen in the polls yet.

Sung said there’s only one solution for Taiwan’s ruling party.

“When faced with challenges like #MeToo sexual harassment cases, these are issues where there's clear morally right and wrong positions to take,” Sung said. “For [the DPP] to get out of this political quagmire, the only way out is through. They need to do better.”

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Last week, people hit the streets of Uruguay’s capital Montevideo for the latest in a string of protests. They attacked the government's response to the ongoing drought that’s struck the country over the past several years and the increasingly salty taste of the water pouring from their taps. Many marched with their traditional maté gourds, from which they drink South American green tea.

Ahora. Iniciamos la marcha en defensa del #agua como un derecho humano fundamental. No es sequía, es saqueo! #JusticiaAmbiental pic.twitter.com/nBIvhf6Tnw

— REDES - AT Uruguay (@redes_at) May 31, 2023

"You drink maté and it tastes salty,” said teacher Paula Padilla. “The water’s not potable. So, you have to start to buy water, but that’s not viable for everyone. There are families with six children or more."

Until recently, Uruguay supplied residents with fresh water from several lakes, but it has now been cutting that with water from brackish reserves drawn from the Rio Plata.

In early May, Uruguay increased its maximum limit for sodium levels in the country’s water system by nearly 160% to 440 milligrams per liter.

View of the Canelon Grande Reservoir, which supplies water to the city of Montevideo, in the department of Canelones, Uruguay, May 15, 2023.

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Santiago Mazzarovich/AP/File photo

“The historic levels of sodium in Montevideo water were between 30 and 40 milligrams per liter,” Montevideo Mayor Carolina Cosse said in a press conference in May. “And now, the average is 10 times higher than this."

"The water is not potable in the perfect definition of potability,” Environment Minister Robert Bouvier admitted recently. “But we say the water is consumable and drinkable, which is another definition."

Some Uruguayans have turned to science to criticize the state of affairs. In one video posted over social media, a man in an orange shirt lit up a tiny bulb by passing an electric current through the salty tap water, something that could not happen in freshwater.

“This is dangerous, really dangerous for poor Uruguayans,” the man said.

Uruguay’s Health Ministry has recommended that pregnant women and those with certain preexisting conditions not consume the water. And sodium consumption can be particularly dangerous for those with high blood pressure.

"Safe water is vital for all of our patients,” Loren dos Santos told a local news outlet. She’s with Uruguay's Pulmonary Hypertension Association, which is organizing to provide water to its members.

"The idea is to buy it and for it to arrive quickly, and if the situation continues, we’ll have to just keep it up,” she said.

The government says this is the nation’s worst water crisis, but that it’s doing its best to tackle the problem.

"We have never seen anything like this in the history of Uruguay."

secretary to the president of Uruguay

“We have never seen anything like this in the history of Uruguay,” said the secretary to the president, Álvaro Delgado, in a recent address. “And we are working for today and for tomorrow.”

Among the projects is a new water plant that could be operational in two years, providing water from the Rio Plata to 1.75 million more homes.

But many Uruguayans say it’s not enough.

Many people have shared videos over social media showing water from broken mains spilling across the streets of Montevideo.

Federico Kreimerman, the president of the state water company union, said the company has been downsizing when they should be hiring more workers instead.

“Everyone sees these broken pipes across the city, and they take a long time to repair,” he told a local news outlet. "Why? Because we don’t have enough people to fix these problems. We have a crisis of personnel.”

Environmental experts are also blaming the current water crisis on poor management of the country’s water systems.

“We have allowed the over-exploitation of freshwater for productive activities — agriculture, irrigation and big industry — this has been the priority,” said Mariana Meerhoff, an ecology professor at Uruguay’s Universidad de la República. "And in this crisis, we believe that it took too long for the alarm to be sounded and to take measures."

Low water levels are seen at the Canelon Grande Reservoir, which supplies water for the city of Montevideo, in the department of Canelones, Uruguay, May 15, 2023.

Credit:

Santiago Mazzarovich/AP/File photo

Meerhoff said it's bad now, but that climate change will make droughts like this even worse. And it’s a sign that the country has serious work to do.

“There are a series of measures that can be taken,” Meerhoff said, including protecting watersheds and prohibiting certain agricultural activities. “But,” she added, "it starts with recognizing that this problem is not going to go away the day it rains.”

Nevertheless, that is exactly what every Uruguayan has been hoping and praying for — rain.

Related: Negotiators meet in Uruguay to map out global plastics treaty

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Fifty years ago this summer, a Jamaican DJ named Kool Herc wanted to throw a party in his new neighborhood — the Bronx.

His concept: a celebration with music that would echo the "dance hall" scene he remembered back home in Kingston.

Music historians like Samy Alim, a professor of anthropology and director of the Hip Hop Initiative at UCLA, point to that August night in 1973 as the birth of hip-hop.

“My introduction to hip-hop was very early on,” Alim said. “I was born in 1977, and then about 10 years after that, I was probably 8, 9, 10 when I started hearing all of the music of that period blasting out of my older brother's room.”

Alim, co-editor of the book "Freedom Moves," is now steeped in the study of hip-hop. More than that, he sees how hip-hop has become a teaching tool for communities around the globe. When he first heard the sound, it struck him as multi-layered, and he saw its potential.

“I was listening to something musical, that was poetic, that was political, that was strong, and it was funky, and it had a rhyme and dance to it,” Alim told The World.

He said that hip-hop was “all of those things that kids love,” but that they were also being educated at the same time.

“So much of the hip-hop at that time period was about gaining knowledge of self that was so critical,” Alim explained. “So many of the artists, right? Yeah, That's Stetsasonic, Public Enemy, Queen Latifah, you name it. Everybody was sort of kicking that knowledge of self and trying to pass it on through the music."

The World went into more detail with Alim about the early influence of hip-hop and how it's grown around the world as a tool for the youth to express themselves politically.

Marco Werman: Talk more about the idea that hip-hop provided this knowledge of self.Samy Alim: That's right. So for me, there's a very important story. When I was growing up, I remember a song by Stetsasonic, and it was called "A.F.R.I.C.A.," and I knew Zimbabwean fans, at the outset, beat out Mozambique and Botswana, so I've written about the motherland. And that was so critical as a 10-year-old listening to that because, you have to remember, in public education and public schools, we didn't learn anything about Africa. This is the miseducation that most folks were going through in the United States and continue to go through. You don't learn anything about it. So, to have to learn about Africa through hip-hop music was revolutionary to me. I learned more as a 10–year-old through that one song, let alone the rest of the music, I did my entire schooling as a child. I know this.You've selected three other tracks that have relevance to our discussion. Let's pair A.F.R.I.C.A. by Stetsasonic with this one from Cape Town, South Africa. It was released in 1995. Who is this, and what's this track about?So, “Never Again” is a song by Prophets of da City, and this song is so important to me. This is transitioning now from high school to college. This is the Prophets of da City celebrating the end of the apartheid regime [in South Africa] — the return of Nelson Mandela. And you have their album, “Age of Truth,” being banned by the apartheid regime just one year earlier. So, for them to play at the inauguration of Nelson Mandela is huge, huge, huge historically and politically. I think hip-hop, again, continues to be so critical to resistance movements and to revolutionary movements all around the world. And this song by one of South Africa's pioneers really demonstrates that.That really shows how hip-hop has become a global form of activist expression. Samy, you're not alone in this adventure, if we can call it that. Hip-hop is global, arguably the most influential music genre in the world today. Can you help us understand the appeal? Why is it so influential to kids in places as diverse as South Africa and South Korea?It's so interesting because I teach a course on hip-hop, race and social justice, From South Central to South Africa, and we travel around the world. One of the things we realized together as a whole group of students is that everywhere around the world, where you have youth fighting and resisting their marginalization and oppression, hip-hop, in some way, shape or form, becomes sort of that call for that resistance. That soundtrack for their liberation. So, these youth are in love with the music and now turn to gaining a knowledge of themselves, and "what does it mean that we are here oppressed? Why don't we pick up this art form and use it as our weapon to fight our oppression?" It is a powerful, powerful thing to see.Do you find that call and response a lot between the source of hip-hop — the US — and the rest of the globe?I love that you frame it as a call and response. And I do. There are so many ways hip-hop culture in the United States has set trends for global hip-hop culture. That's the call. Initially, the global response was to, sort of, imitate and emulate what was going on in Black American music, which was hip-hop music. Eventually, that response became, "Let's do this with our own twist."So, we just heard the role of hip-hop in ending apartheid in South Africa, Samy. The next track [you] selected takes us to the occupied territories in the Middle East.This song by DAM, it's a Palestinian group in the occupied territories within Israeli borders. The song is called “Min Erhabi?” [translates to “Who is the Terror?”]. From the song's title, you get that this is within the hip-hop tradition of flipping the script by asking the question, "Who is the terrorist?" This Palestinian group is clearly pushing back against descriptions and narratives of Palestinians as terrorists. So, they're sort of pushing back and saying, "Who is the terrorist? Who has the power here? Who is occupying homes?" And they're raising that question through hip-hop music. This is what I mean by hip-hop going global and youth all around the world picking it up as a source of inspiration for their struggle and their movement.It is easy to see how DAM impacts Palestinians living under Israeli law and how they think of their situation. I am thinking of perhaps a whole cohort of listeners for whom hip-hop is not their thing. They may feel that hip-hop has not had an impact on their life. I think of writer James McBride, who famously wrote in 2007 that he ignored it, only to realize later that hip-hop rules the world. So, I'd love to know from you, Samy, how you see the impact of hip-hop on those who may feel it does not touch them in some way?I have to tell you, it's hard in this day and age to find folks like that, honestly, because hip-hop has moved from hip-hop culture to popular culture. It's almost everywhere you look. You can't even walk into Whole Foods in the United States, a Trader Joe's, or your bank or gym … anywhere ... without hearing hip-hop culture. In Palestine, in places like Syria and elsewhere, that will not be the case. But hip-hop has sort of galvanized a certain political consciousness.You mentioned Syria, so let's check out one more song. You've selected the tune #Jan25, a collective of African American and Arab American Muslim artists inspired by the Arab Spring, the anti-government protests that erupted throughout the Middle East in 2011. One name I know here is Omar Offendum. Remind us who he is collaborating with and what the song is about.Omar Offendum is another incredibly talented creative artist. He has collaborated with artists around the world. He has continued to push not only the poetic envelope but the political envelope. So #Jan25 refers to the date that the Egyptian people rose up against their government, and they want to use that hashtag to create a certain sense of solidarity for all the people in that region who were rising up at that time.Samy, it seems we've only touched the tip of the iceberg. We do live on Planet Hip Hop, but aside from the sound and lyrics, I'm just curious how you measure whether hip-hop has served as an agent of change for the grievances that emerge when artists express them.As it spreads around the globe and as a scholar of global hip-hop culture, everywhere I go, I see this. I could tell you I went to Thailand, I was in Bangkok, and I was in the streets walking on the day before my lecture, and there was an entire B-Boy [and] B-Girl dance competition happening on a stage in the streets. Everywhere I go, I see those flavors of hip-hop culture. I could take you back. The first time I was in Cairo — this was in the '90s, I would say mid-'90s — and there on an ancient wall crumbling to the ground is graffiti commemorating Tupac [Shakur] and Biggie [Smalls]'s lives in a place you would least expect. A remote sort of countryside outside of Cairo on a crumbling building. It was incredible, Marco. Imagine me as a kid. So I'm there, and I'm seeing these walls, right then I'm walking in the street, and I'm in Alexandria at this point, and walking off, this young Egyptian kid, they must be, I don't know, eight, nine, or 10 rapping, and I'm hearing them rapping The Notorious B.I.G. in English. They are Arabic speakers who are learning English through hip-hop, and it's just blowing my mind all over again. Right? So, it's an interesting, phenomenal and very powerful thing to witness as a person who travels through these different areas.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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As Ukrainian forces step up strikes inside Russia and appear to be launching long-awaited springtime counteroffensives, we take a look at one of the dominant players on the field: the Wagner Group. It has been feuding with the Russian army, and that tension appears to be escalating. There have been reports of friendly fire near the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, and Wagner allegedly detained the commander of the Russian Army’s 72nd brigade. Wagner said Lt Col Roman Venevitin ordered his troops to fire on its mercenaries.

For years now, Wagner has been working behind the scenes to help Russian President Vladimir Putin extend his reach around the world. Wagner’s mercenaries are protecting local government officials in Mali, mining blood diamonds in the Central African Republic and, most recently, have been front and center in the war in Ukraine.

The group is thought to have lost some 9,000 soldiers since the war began in Ukraine and suffered tens of thousands of casualties, so it has embarked on a multimedia extravaganza aimed at convincing young men to replenish its ranks. The Click Here podcast spoke with one of its former members, Marat Gabidullin, to get an idea of what it is like to be a Wagner soldier and what lies ahead for the group.

Click Here: How did the Wagner Group recruit you?Marat Gabidullin: That was actually me who found them. I was in the Russian military. I had worked as a paratrooper but had been fired over an administrative error. After I lost my job, I spent time in prison for shooting and killing a representative of the crime community. I was not able to reinstate myself in the Russian military. I decided to join the Wagner Group because it did not matter whether you had a criminal history or not.Were you worried that because you had been to prison, you weren't going to find another job?It was a difficult period of time for me. I was under a lot of stress and didn't know if I would succeed anywhere else. I thought the Wagner Group would be a good place to start.How did you sign up with the Wagner Group?Once I found out about them in 2015, they specified the address to sign up and I went there. It was like a military tent with command personnel in there. So, I went in and showed my documents, and they put me on the list of candidates. There were between 300-400 people getting tested. At the time, you were required to have some kind of military background. I did meet a few people that I served with before.And had other people also gone to prison like you?No, I wouldn't say so. I think the percentage of people who were in prison before was probably less than 10% at that time. [Editor’s note: Wagner has since focused a lot of its recruiting in prisons.]What did the Wagner Group’s testing to enlist involve?My knowledge of the military, my physical and medical condition. There was an interview, including the polygraph. During the first conversation, they tell you right away what they expect of you.And what did they tell you that you would be doing?To participate in war. Only thing you're going to be doing is doing combat operations. They say anything can happen. You can get killed or become disabled.How long were you there for this screening?Two days.So, you’re approved to join the Wagner Group. What happens next?Then I chose the subdivision that I wanted to join. I spoke to the commander of that subdivision, and he agreed to include me in his group.Is this the way they still get people? Do recruits arrive at tents with their military papers?As far as I know, right now, the level of requirements has dropped significantly. So now, I don't think they ask for any kind of proof of prior military service or proof of good physical shape. All you have to do is show your passport, a paper saying that you don't have COVID-19, and some other medical documents. At this point, they need to hire as many people as possible to fill their ranks. And for that reason, they're trying to hire anyone who is able to hold a gun.While you were with the Wagner Group, you were stationed in Luhansk, Ukraine, not long after Russia invaded Crimea. Can you tell me about that mission?At that time, there were no combat operations yet. So, the operation lasted more than one month, maybe about two months. Very often, Ukraine was subject to shelling from Luhansk. Very often, the mercenary groups were crossing the line into Ukraine and did the ambushes there and combat operations there against the Ukrainian military. My commander at that time — who was a Serbian national — was trying to avoid combat operations. I'm grateful for that.Did you think that that was a righteous cause, fighting Ukraine?In the very beginning, yes, absolutely. In the very beginning, I was still affected by all this propaganda and I was convinced that if there is a threat to Russia from the Western nations, then this was [is] justified. However, after two months of being there, I realized that our propaganda was just supplying lies.You talk about the propaganda. These days, the Wagner Group tries to reach out to more recruits using entertainment. It releases catchy songs, rap music and GoPro footage posted on social media. There are also action movies that resemble Hollywood blockbusters. They’re even produced by the leader of the Wagner Group. Have you seen any of these films?Yes. I watched two movies. One is called ТУРИСТ, and there is another called Солнцепёк. I couldn't watch anymore. It's full of lies.So, what upsets you about the movies is not emotional, something that reminds you of the fight. What upsets you is the lies?Oh yes. Everything is very untrue. But people do like it, and many people buy it.These tactics remind me of how ISIS tried to draw in young male recruits. Do you see these comparisons?I don't really think so because ISIS is based strictly on ideology. On the other hand, the Wagner Group does not have any stable ideology.I agree that ISIS is about ideology, and Wagner is not. But do you see similarities in the way these two groups recruit?Well, I think generally there are a lot of common things between different groups. They use all the tools and means that they have available to attract people. For ISIS, they hire professionals who are kind of masters of their trade and who know what they're doing, who can very artfully convince other people and deliver the message. With Wagner Group, everything is much simpler. Wagner does not have propaganda people like that, professionals.So, you’re saying ISIS and the Wagner Group use the same sort of techniques, but Wagner isn't quite as polished as ISIS?Yes, absolutely.I know in Syria, you were part of the Wagner contingent that went toe-to-toe with ISIS.Yeah, in 2018, I was performing functions as a senior adviser with regard to ISIS in Syria. And this was the year where I was kind of rethinking everything that was going on. That included the goals of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group.

Marat Gabidullin.

Credit:

Courtesy of the Click Here podcast

Did you ever meet Yevgeny Prigozhin?Yes, I was working for four months in the office with him as his assistant for tactics and operations. The entire office is basically like a kingdom of fear. Even his personal assistants, when they're preparing for a meeting, you can tell they're very nervous. He started appointing commanders to different units and groups, not based on their military background, but based on how close they were to him. He surrounds himself with people who are absolutely dedicated to him. They could do whatever they wanted. They were like little kings or czars. Wagner, as a private military company, started to convert from mercenaries into basically slaves, like military slaves, combat slaves.So, in a sense, military discipline was gone?Well, actually, military discipline was there, and that was always the main part. The only difference is that before the military, discipline was sustained by people understanding why they're doing it and kind of willing to do it, and then it switched to maintaining the discipline only based on the sense of fear of punishment.How did you leave the Wagner Group?I submitted a resignation letter, and it was declined. They said, “No, you still have tasks that you need to complete, so not allowed.” And I said, well, I'm leaving no matter what. I went with my friend to Damascus, the capital of Syria, and spent like two days there just drinking. Prigozhin then ordered my resignation so that I could be sent back to Russia. I did not ask for forgiveness.And now you’re in exile, living in Paris. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, did he or anyone from the Wagner Group call on you to return to the battlefield?No, because at that time Prigozhin already declared me his personal enemy, so Wagner would not call me up, but other structures did.Who did?Those were other military structures, different from the Wagner Group, but I absolutely refused and I said that, no, there is no way I'm going be taking part fighting against Ukraine. There was no threat from Ukraine to Russia. They were not threatening them or anything like that. So, this was absolutely unjustified. The only threat was for the Russian government because the Russian government was not able to achieve certain goals in terms of democracy.We've heard that the Wagner Group has changed since the invasion of Ukraine. Do you think it has?I personally think that the Wagner Group did not become any weaker. I even think they became stronger and the positions of Prigozhin himself are strong enough. He's still needed and in demand by the Kremlin. The private military group Wagner has always been dependent on the Ministry of Defense of Russia. Basically, they used the same ideology. They always depended on the same logistics. In Russia, the Wagner Group kind of creates a bit of a false impression of what the state is and what the functions of the state have to be.What do you mean?The Wagner Group has not been legalized within the Russian Federation, however, they're openly present and acting there. They can hire prisoners, for example, while bypassing all the rules and the laws. They also advertise through their information sources very cruel executions. And this creates a false impression among people that only those who have power are in power. So, only those who are close to Putin are empowered to do whatever they want and the constitution and laws don't apply to them. All information that's being spread about Wagner Group and Prigozhin right now, the main objective of that is disinformation, and specifically disinformation among Ukrainians.It sounds like what you're saying is that the Wagner Group seems to embody everything that's wrong about Russia today. Standards, rules don't apply.Yes, absolutely.An earlier version of this story appeared on the "Click Here" podcast from The Record. Additional reporting by Sean Powers and Will Jarvis.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Four days after a deadly train collision in India’s eastern state of Odisha left more than 275 people dead and thousands more injured, the country is still reeling.

Though rescue efforts are winding down, families of victims are still desperate for information as the focus shifts to investigating the cause of one of the worst crashes in India’s history. India’s top investigative agency opened an official inquiry on Tuesday into whether the crash could be attributed to criminal activity.

The crash on Friday evening occurred when a crowded passenger train in Balasore District suddenly diverted onto a different track, where it collided with a parked freight train at 80 miles an hour. The impact sent several of its coaches veering onto a neighboring track; and then, they crashed into a third train moving in the opposite direction.

One survivor told Indian broadcaster NDTV about the horrifying minutes after the crash: “When I came out of the coach, I saw limbs scattered all around. A leg here, a hand there. Someone’s face was disfigured.”

A full-scale rescue operation was in place through Saturday, as the Indian Army, National Disaster Response Force, police and other rescue teams desperately hunted for survivors. Two hundred ambulances shuttled survivors to hospitals as sniffer dogs surveyed the wreckage for bodies. Since then, families have rushed to hospitals for news of their loved ones, and 100 bodies still remain unidentified.

On Saturday, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the accident site and offered his condolences to the grieving families.

“The people we have lost, we will not be able to bring them back,” he said. “But the government is with their families in their grief.”

The prime minister promised that those responsible will be severely punished. The government also said that victims will be compensated — $12,000 for the families of those who died, with smaller amounts for those who were injured.

Many will need this financial support. It’s likely that a large number of migrant laborers who support their families through low-wage jobs were on the train.

Swapnil Garg, a former officer of the Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineers, said, “Indian Railways are the lifeline of India. It is the most affordable mode of transport, most convenient mode of transport, and just about available everywhere.”

Railway safetyIn the aftermath of the collision, there are renewed calls for improving safety for the 13 million riders who use the railways each day. Many experts say the railways don’t have enough staff to meet the high demand. There’s simply too much strain placed on a network originally built in the British colonial period in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Although Garg said that he feels railway officials do prioritize safety, he added: “If you run a system at 100%, 100% of the time, then it’s going to break.”

However, high capacity and understaffing are not the only issues. In recent years, the government has invested in flashy, new infrastructure projects, while an auditor general report found that funding for safety measures has been reduced. In fact, before the train collision led him to travel to Odisha, Modi had been slated to inaugurate a new, semi-high-speed train in the western state of Goa.

This has prompted some railway experts to argue that large-scale government funding would be better spent improving safety of the existing trains.

Still, the network that carries 8 billion people to their destinations each year has become a lot safer with time. In 2020, the government announced that for the second year in a row, there were zero passenger deaths due to train accidents. 

Investigating the collisionSince Friday’s tragedy, the government has faced mounting pressure to explain what happened.

Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw asked for patience while facing calls for his resignation: “Let the inquiry report come out. But the cause of the accident has been identified, and the people responsible have been identified.”

Critics say that anti-collision technology, known as the kavach system, (which means “armor” in Hindi) could have prevented the accident. But so far, it has only been added to 2% of the tracks.

For his part, Vaishnaw said the technology would not have stopped the disaster. Instead, he announced that the error was caused by the train’s “electronic interlocking system.” That signaling system may have mistakenly led the first train to steer onto the wrong track.

Additionally, the government took the unusual step of asking the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to look into the collision. On Tuesday, the CBI officially took over the investigation, sending officials from the bureau to examine the crash site.

The CBI’s involvement suggests that the government is considering whether this was negligence or sabotage. Jairam Ramesh, a leader of the opposition Congress Party, has criticized the move, calling it “nothing but headline management.”

Meanwhile, family members press for answers and accountability while still searching for their missing loved ones. 

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On a bright spring day, Ayyad Mohmmed Ali stood at the edge of his farm, facing a row of about a dozen new construction sites nearby. A river separated his farm and the buildings.

“It’s really painful to see this,” he said. “In Iraq, we don’t like to build vertically and now, you’re seeing all these lands being turned into buildings.”

Mohmmed Ali has planted date palm trees and vegetables at his boostan, which is Arabic for grove, for the past three decades.

This green bit of land is his sanctuary, he explained. It’s where he comes to escape the noise and pollution of the capital Baghdad, a city of roughly 8 million people.

Ayyad Mohmmed Ali says his palm tree grove is his sanctuary, where he can escape the noise and pollution of Baghdad, a city of roughly 8 million people.

Credit:

Shawn Yuan/The World

In the early 1980s, Iraq had an estimated 30 million palm trees. It used to be among the top producers of dates in the world. But war, construction and the impact of climate change have taken a toll. By 2009, there were fewer than 9 million date palms left in the country.

“This is like the hair of the Iraqi desert and we’re watching the Iraqi landscape go bald with the stresses of war,”

Kali Rubaii, assistant professor, Department of Anthropology, Purdue University

“This is like the hair of the Iraqi desert and we’re watching the Iraqi landscape go bald with the stresses of war,” said Kali Rubaii, who teaches anthropology at Purdue University, and has researched the environmental impacts of war in Iraq.

As part of her research, Rubaii interviewed date farmers who were displaced after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and she said the lack of date farming told a story of dispossession.

Iraq used to be among the top producers of dates in the world, but war, construction and the impact of climate change have taken a toll on the country's palm trees.

Credit:

Shawn Yuan/The World

Palm trees need consistent care: watering, pruning and fertilizing. And when farmers had to leave, the trees suffered.

“So many people are forced to sell their land for very cheap and, oftentimes, farmers have found themselves working on land that they used to own,” Rubaii explained.

Iraq has also been getting hotter and drier. According to the UN, it is the fifth-most vulnerable country to the impacts of climate change.

“There’s a section of the southern part of Baghdad, if you drive through, you can see a lot of trees that look like they’ve been decapitated,” Rubaii added, “because sometimes when trees die, they keel over or, if they’re not surviving, sometimes they get cut from the top.”

Making matters worse is Iraq’s construction boom — especially in bigger cities like Baghdad. It means that more farmers are choosing to cut down palm trees entirely to make way for building projects.

More farmers in Iraq are choosing to cut down palm trees to make way for building projects.

Credit:

Shawn Yuan/The World

“The farms have a problem,” explained Labeeb Kashif al-Gitta, “there is no water, there is no commercial income from this farm, so I cut the palm trees and I build buildings instead and get more profits.”

Labeeb Kashif al-Gitta created the startup Nakhla with some friends in 2018 to help landowners maintain their palm trees.

Credit:

Labeeb Kashif al-Gitta/The World

In 2018, Gitta and a few of his friends came up with an idea to help address the problem. They created a startup called Nakhla — Arabic for "palm tree."And the concept was this: homeowners with palm trees on their land could sign a contract with Nakhla to have the company take care of the trees.

Many times, Gitta said, people just cut down the trees because they are too much work to maintain.

“Palm trees, for them, is [a] very heavy project. They need to take care of it four times per year,” he said.

Nakhla’s team waters, prunes, fertilizes and vaccinates palm trees — to protect them from things like fungus.

Come harvest time, Nakhla either packages and hands over the dates to the tree owner or takes the product to market, depending on the type of contract.

These types of services are not common in Iraq, but Gitta said the company is growing.

It is expanding its client base and recently signed a contract with the municipality of Baghdad to take care of the city’s many palm trees.

“Last year, in houses, we had 300 palm trees, in farms, we had 1,000 palm trees, and in the street, we had 6,000,” Gitta explained.

The Iraqi government is also funding reforestation projects.

But biologist Ayyad Wajeh al-Shahwany explained that to truly bring back Iraq’s palm trees, a lot more needs to be done.

Private projects like Nakhla and others are good, he said, but they need more support from the government and international organizations.

In the early 1980s, Iraq had an estimated 30 million palm trees. But by 2009, there were fewer than 9 million date palms left in the country.

Credit:

Shawn Yuan/The World

Kali Rubaii, from Purdue, said that many Iraqis see the value in helping to save the country’s iconic palm trees.

“People are stubborn and they are not going to stop. They are finding different grassroots tactics to keep their trees alive and also to keep the date economy alive, and maybe even grow it back.”

Iraqi date palms are incredibly resistant plants, she added. They can cope with all kinds of environmental stress, like storms, wind and drought.

They just need a little help to thrive.

Related: 'It's a mass ecological crisis': Extreme weather in Iraq hits those already struggling the hardest

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Editor's note: In collaboration with The Associated Press, we have the story of one family's tragic migration experience along one of Asia's most dangerous migration routes. The wind had whipped the waves to nearly three times the woman’s height when her panicked voice crackled over the phone.

“Our boat has sunk!” Setera Begum shouted, as a storm threatened to spill her and about 180 others into the inky black sea south of Bangladesh. “Only half of it is still afloat!”

On the other end of the line, hundreds of miles away in Malaysia, was her husband, Muhammed Rashid, who picked up the phone at 10:59 p.m. his time on Dec. 7, 2022. He had not seen his family in 11 years. And he had only learned days earlier that Setera and two of their daughters had fled surging violence in Bangladesh’s camps for ethnic Rohingya refugees.

Now, Rashid feared, his family’s frantic bid to escape would cost them the very thing they were trying to save — their lives. For despite Setera’s pleas, no help would come, not for her or for the babies, the 3-year-old afraid of the sea or the pregnant women also on board.

Rashid listened to his wife’s terrified voice with growing dread.

Fishing boats sit on a beach in Teknaf, Bangladesh, on March 9, 2023. On Dec. 1, 2022, around 180 Rohingya refugees fled from this beach, hoping to escape escalating violence in Bangladesh's Rohingya refugee camps. Their boat, which was bound for Indonesia, vanished a week into its journey.

Credit:

Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP Photo

“Oh Allah, it’s sunk by the waves!” Setera cried. “It’s sunk by the storm!”

The call disconnected.

Rashid tried to call back. On board the boat, the satellite phone rang. But no one answered.

Rashid tried again. He tried more than 100 times.

The phone rang out.

In this combination of photos, relatives hold images of some of those lost when their crowded boat carrying around 180 people sank in the sea south of Bangladesh on Dec. 7, 2022. Top row from left are Muhammed Khanif; Mezanu; Majida Bibi; Dildar Ullah; Majida Bibi and Dildar Ullah; Samira Begum holding her son, Tasin Ahmed; Kabir Ahmed and Saiful. Bottom row from left are Yasmin Ara and Noor Kaida; Ziabul Hoque and Azizul Hoque; Kabir Ahmed; Asmat Ullah; Mubarak Hussain; Asma Bibi; Noor Hassan and Noor Hashim.

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AP Photo

The Rohingya are a people nobody wants.

This stateless Muslim minority has suffered decades of persecution in their homeland of Myanmar, where they have long been viewed as interlopers by the Buddhist majority. About 1 million have fled across the border to Bangladesh, only to find themselves trapped for years in a squalid camp and held hostage by migration policies that have given them almost no way out.

And so, in a bid to get somewhere — anywhere — safe, they are taking to the sea.

It is a life-or-death gamble. Last year, more than 3,500 Rohingya attempted to cross the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea — a 360% increase over the previous year, according to United Nations figures that are almost certainly an undercount. At least 348 people died or went missing, the highest death toll since 2014.

It’s impossible to know whether any of those lives could have been saved, because almost no one was looking to save them in the first place. Instead, the Rohingya are often abandoned and left to die on the water, just as on land. Even when officials knew the boats’ locations in recent months, the United Nations’ refugee agency says its repeated pleas to maritime authorities to rescue some of them have gone ignored.

Governments ignore the Rohingya because they can. While multiple international laws mandate the rescue of vessels in distress, enforcement is difficult.

In the past, the region’s coastal nations hunted for boats in trouble — only to push them into other countries’ search and rescue zones, says Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, which monitors the Rohingya crisis. But now, they rarely even bother to look.

An illustrated map showing a general boat route taken by Rohingya refugees from Bangladesh to Malaysia.

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AP Illustration

The lucky ones are eventually towed to shore in Indonesia by local fishermen. Yet even rescue can be perilous — a Vietnamese oil company saved one boat, then promptly handed the Rohingya over to the same deadly regime in Myanmar from which they’d fled. And the Myanmar authorities themselves patrol for Rohingya migrants.

There is no reason why regional governments could not or cannot coordinate and rescue these boats, says John Quinley, director of human rights group Fortify Rights.

“It was a total lack of political will and extremely heartless,” he says. “The accountability and the onus really lies on everyone.”

Several countries in the region did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The reasons the Rohingya escape are written on face after gaunt face, in haunted eyes and across slumped shoulders. Any hope that once existed in the Bangladesh camps has long since died, replaced by a stoic sadness and a palpable fear. These are a people who have come to expect nothing, and often get that or worse.

Most of the Rohingya in these camps fled what the United States has declared a genocide in Myanmar in 2017. In recent years, however, brutal killings by gangs and warring militant groups — many in broad daylight — have become commonplace.

Rohingya refugees look on after a major fire which left thousands homeless in the Balukhali camp in the Cox's Bazar district of Bangladesh, Sunday, March 5, 2023.

Credit:

Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP Photo

Fires are frequent, some of them acts of arson. One afternoon in March, a blaze that investigators say was set by criminals tore through thousands of shelters. The billowing smoke was so thick and black it blocked the view of the sun. Wide-eyed children huddled together, crying, as the inferno left 15,000 homeless.

Beyond fear is hunger. The Rohingya are banned from working and rely on food rations, which have been slashed due to a drop in global donations. Meanwhile, a military coup in 2021 in Myanmar has made any safe return home at best a distant dream.

And so, out of options, they do again what they have done before: They flee.

Jutting up from the dust and the dirt of Nayapara camp in Bangladesh are bamboo, tarp and tin huts jammed along labyrinthine pathways.

This tight-knit warren is Block H, home to Setera and 64 other passengers, including the boat’s captain, Jamal Hussein.

Virtually everyone in Block H was connected to the boat somehow. Many residents have spent most, or all, of their lives here, after fleeing Myanmar during earlier waves of violence. Their shelters now bake below sun-scorched mountains that are home to violent gangs.

Jamal himself was afraid for his life, says his sister, Bulbul. Inside her shadowy shelter, she weeps at the memories of her brother. “He was my heart,” she says.

Back in Myanmar, Jamal was a rice farmer and a youth leader of their village. After his dad died, he became a father figure to his younger siblings, including Bulbul, who was 15 years his junior.

Their life in the camps was difficult, she says, but they managed. More recently, though, Jamal had received death threats, Bulbul says. He started making plans to get out.

He bought a boat and took a video of it to share with prospective passengers. In the video, obtained by The Associated Press, the wooden vessel sits docked in murky brown water. It appears old and shabby, with a cramped compartment below deck, and clearly too small to safely carry 180 people 1,100 miles to Indonesia, Jamal’s target.

A man holds an undated photo of Jamal Hussein, who was the captain of a boat carrying around 180 Rohingya refugees that vanished in December, in Teknaf, part of the Cox's Bazar district of Bangladesh, on March 8, 2023.

Credit:

Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP Photo

This image from video provided by Ro Mohammed Zowlal Ryz shows the boat of Jamal Hussein, who was captaining the vessel when it sank in rough seas south of Bangladesh on Dec. 7, 2022, carrying around 180 Rohingya refugees. Hussein shot the video and shared it with prospective passengers around Bangladesh's Rohingya refugee camps.

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Jamal Hussein/AP Photo

This image from video provided by Ro Mohammed Zowlal Ryz shows the boat of Jamal Hussein, who was captaining the vessel when it sank in rough seas south of Bangladesh on Dec. 7, 2022, carrying around 180 Rohingya refugees. Hussein shot the video and shared it with prospective passengers around Bangladesh's Rohingya refugee camps.

Credit:

Jamal Hussein/AP Photo

From there, most passengers planned to make their way to their ultimate destination, Malaysia.

Though Bulbul denies it, residents of Block H say Jamal was a seasoned captain who had successfully guided several other boats of Rohingya refugees across the sea. It was his experience, they say, along with his willingness to put 16 of his own relatives on the boat — including his wife, six children, five grandchildren and two pregnant daughters-in-law— that prompted so many to trust him. One mother said Jamal promised her he would watch over her teenage son and daughter along with his children.

In a shelter a short walk from Jamal’s, Setera’s father holds up a photo of his daughter, with her full lips and wide-set eyes so much like her mother’s.

“She was the most beautiful person in our family,” Abdu Shukkur says.

Shukkur had never heard anyone say a bad word about Setera, a warm and doting mother to her own daughters. She rarely complained, despite raising her girls on her own in the misery of the camps since 2012. That’s the year her husband, Rashid, fled to Malaysia to support his family with the wages he sent from his restaurant job.

But the money had also made the family targets of kidnappers, Shukkur says, and Setera had begun to fear for their lives. The local gangs know which of the block’s residents have relatives abroad who could afford a ransom.

Two years ago, they snatched Setera’s 4-year-old nephew and took him to the mountains, Shukkur says. They held him there for six days, drugging him to keep him quiet. The family eventually paid a ransom of $2,800 to get him back — a fortune in the camps.

In late November, Setera went to her father and asked his permission to go on Jamal’s boat, along with her two younger daughters, aged 18 and 15. Her eldest daughter was married and would stay behind.

Shukkur forbade her to go.

“If you want to go to Malaysia by boat, just divorce your husband,” he told her. “It’s too dangerous.”

His wife, Gul Faraz, intervened. “She’s been living without her husband here for 11 years now,” Faraz said. “Let her go.”

Abdu Shukkur shows a photo of his daughter, Setera Begum, at the Nayapara refugee camp in Teknaf, part of the Cox's Bazar district of Bangladesh, on March 8, 2023.

Credit:

Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP Photo

Shukkur relented.

Grief steals his breath as he recounts his goodbye with his granddaughters, and he pauses to calm himself. They had a habit of stealing Shukkur’s unripe guavas, plums and mangoes whenever they visited, prompting scoldings from their grandfather.

“Grandpa, you will not need to scold us anymore,” one of the girls told Shukkur. “Everything will be all right.”

Setera, angry that her father had tried to stop her, did not come to say goodbye.

In a nearby shelter, another family was in agony.

Jamal’s cousin, Muhammed Ayub, was fighting to stop his daughter, Samira, and her children, ages 6, and 9 months old, from getting on the boat. But his son-in-law, Kabir Ahmed, was resolute. Villagers outside the camps had beaten him with an iron rod, and he was afraid.

“It is not safe here. People are getting killed every day,” Ahmed told his father-in-law. “If you stop me from leaving, I will not visit you anymore.”

And so, powerless, Ayub hugged his daughter and son-in-law goodbye. Then, riddled with anxiety, he wrapped his grandsons in an embrace. His entire body ached as he watched them leave.

“They were my lovely ones,” he says.

At the southernmost tip of mainland Bangladesh lies a wild, wind-swept beach, fringed to the east by forest and mountains and to the west by the Bay of Bengal. This stretch of grey sand is barren but for a few wooden fishing boats and an army of bright red crabs that hide in their holes when any human comes near.

It was from here that a small fishing boat began ferrying passengers to Jamal’s waiting vessel. The AP has reconstructed their journey based on interviews with 28 relatives of those on board, audio recordings of calls from the boat, interviews with three eyewitnesses, and photos and videos.

Late on the night of Dec. 1 and through around 4 a.m. the following day, many of those on Jamal’s boat called their anxious families.

It was only then that Setera told her husband she and two daughters were headed his way.

Rashid had told them countless times never to get on a boat. But this time, Setera would not be stopped. She told him she’d sold her jewelry to help pay for their passage, a total of $3,400.

Rashid was stunned. He apologized to Setera for any mistakes he’d made in their 20 years of marriage. And then, he says, he heard Jamal tell Setera to get off the phone. She hung up.

Rashid began to cry with excitement and fear. He couldn’t believe he might soon see his girls.

Setera's husband, Muhammad Rashid, calls from Malaysia to have a video conversation with his daughter, Tasmin Tara, center, in the Nayapara refugee camp in Teknaf, part of the Cox's Bazar district of Bangladesh, on March 8, 2023.

Credit:

Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP Photo

Setera made at least one more call, to her father, Shukkur.

“The boat is waiting for fuel,” Setera said. “We’re leaving soon, and we’ll be out of service.”

Shukkur was too angry to speak. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t even come to say goodbye. So he passed her mobile number onto his nephew in Malaysia, and told him to ring Setera and order her to come home.

Meanwhile, Jamal’s daughter-in-law, Bibi Ayesha, called her parents to say she and her family had also made it on board. Alongside Bibi was her 17-year-old brother, her husband, and her 3-year-old son, Abu.

The little boy was frightened of the water. Bibi and her husband passed him back and forth, trying to comfort him, as they spoke with her parents. “Pray for us,” they said.

Jamal got on the phone with the parents to reassure them. “The boat is big,” Jamal said, according to the couple. “We have enough food for 15 days.”

Asma Bibi, who was married to another of Jamal’s sons, also made a call to her mother, Hasina Khatun. Eighteen-year-old Asma was 9-months pregnant, and excited to meet her child after a stillbirth with her first baby one year earlier.

Asma hadn’t wanted to go on the boat, Hasina says. But Asma’s husband did.

“How can I stay here without my husband? I’m pregnant,” Asma had told her nervous mother days earlier. “How can my child survive without a father?”

Hasina Khatun shows a photo of her 18-year-old daughter, Asma Bibi, who was 9-months pregnant when she and her little brother fled the Rohingya refugee camps in December 2022 and boarded a boat bound for Indonesia, during an interview in the Nayapara refugee camp in Teknaf, part of the Cox's Bazar district of Bangladesh, on March 10, 2023. The boat, which was carrying around 180 Rohingya refugees, disappeared a week into its journey.

Credit:

Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP Photo

And so, Hasina gave her daughter two sets of baby clothes — one pink, and one white, since they didn’t know the baby’s gender. She also gave her daughter medicine, towels and a green blanket to wrap the newborn in after birth.

Asma packed them along with snacks from her father’s shop, plus three sets of clothes to fit her pregnant and postpartum body. Then Asma reluctantly followed her husband onto Jamal’s boat, along with her 13-year-old brother.

At 4:04 a.m., back in Block H, Jannat Ara’s phone rang. It was her aunt, Kurshida Begum, who said she’d boarded with her husband and two sons, ages 3 and 4.

In the recorded call, shared with the AP, Kurshida recites a prayer, then asks her niece to do the same.

“The journey has begun,” Kurshida told her niece.

News of the call quickly reached Kurshida’s mother-in-law, Momina Begum, who became hysterical. She had no idea Kurshida and the boys were on the boat.

“Where are you going with these children?” Momina screamed. “Why are you crossing the dangerous sea with these children?”

But it was too late. Jamal’s boat was headed into the Bay of Bengal.

Kafayet spotting Jamal’s boat.

Credit:

Peter Hamlin/AP Illustration

What happened next is best told through the eyes of the refugees on yet another boat that set out for Indonesia one day later.

On board were 104 people, including a man named Kafayet Ullah. According to Kafayet, he was merely a passenger. According to others, he was the captain.

Not long into the journey, Kafayet spotted a boat in the distance. As they moved closer, they realized the boat was Jamal’s. And it was in trouble.

Jamal called out that his engine was having problems. He borrowed some electrical wire from Kafayet’s boat and went to work repairing the fault.

Kafayet was worried. His own niece and nephew were aboard Jamal’s vessel, which looked old and overloaded, the passengers packed in tight like animals.

But unlike Kafayet, Jamal had experience and a satellite phone. So when Jamal finished fixing the engine, he set off again, and Kafayet followed.

Boats on the horizon.

Credit:

Peter Hamlin/AP Illustration

Four days later, the sky cracked open.

A powerful storm descended upon them. The boats thrashed in the merciless waves. Kafayet’s terrified passengers sobbed as the rain pounded down and the tempest washed their supplies overboard.

The water in Kafayet’s boat began to rise, and a man on board spotted sharks. The passengers prepared themselves to die.

Through the darkness, they could see a light shining on Jamal’s boat. It was still above water.

But not for long.

The recording of Setera’s call to Rashid lasts 44 seconds.

“Oh Allah, our boat has sunk!” Setera shouts into the satellite phone. “Only half of it is still afloat! Please pray for us and tell my parents!”

“Where are you?” Rashid asks.

“We are about to reach Indonesia.”

“Indonesia?” Rashid repeats.

“Please tell me the name of the place,” Setera says to someone else on board, before replying to her husband: “Yes, it is India. Please try to send…”

“Are you in India?” Rashid asks, bewildered.

“Our boat has sunk! Our boat has sunk!”

“Who?” Rashid replies in a panic.

“Oh Allah, it’s sunk by the waves, it’s sunk by the storm!”

“Oh, is it sunk by the storm?” Rashid repeats. “Oh Allah...”

The call cut out.

Rashid began to pray.

Not even the shrieking wind could drown out the screams of Jamal’s passengers.

Kafayet could just make out the shape of Jamal’s boat as it made a sharp turn in the waves, and then flipped over. Kafayet threw empty water drums overboard in case his niece or nephew or any of the others could grab onto them.

He says he couldn’t see anyone in the water. But he could hear them screaming.

Then the screams stopped. The light on Jamal’s boat blinked out.

“I saw with my own eyes,” Kafayet says. “The boat sank.”

Within hours, the recording of Setera’s call spread through Block H. In shelter after shelter came the wails of families cracking apart.

Jamal’s cousin, Muhammed Ayub, was lying on his mat when he received the recording. As he listened, he began to howl in agony.

All he has left now of the grandsons he called his “lovely ones” are their clothing and his memories. He stares at a pair of little brown shoes with Velcro straps that 6-year-old Tasin once wore, and weeps. When he holds them, he says, he feels he is holding his grandson.

Crouched on the floor next to him, his wife, Minara Begum, inhales the scent from their daughter Samira’s yellow dress. Then she presses a pair of 9-month-old Samir’s tiny blue shorts to her face, the fabric growing damp with her tears.

“Oh, my grandson, why did you leave?” she moans. “Where have you gone?”

Families already pushed to breaking point are now broken. One man who lost four relatives tried to kill himself.

Momina Begum, whose young grandsons were on board, feels she is burning in a fire or sinking under water. She sits next to a plastic basket of her 4-year-old grandson’s toys and searches for the will to live.

“It would be better to kill us by poison instead of taking away my family,” she says.

Momina Begum speaks about losing her son, Muhammed Ibrahim, his wife, Kurshida Begum, and their two children, Muhammed Shahin and Muhammed Fahim, during an interview at the Nayapara refugee camp in Teknaf, part of the Cox's Bazar district of Bangladesh, on March 8, 2023.

Credit:

Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP Photo

Hasina Khatun, whose pregnant daughter, Asma, and 13-year-old son were on the boat, now finds herself begging to hold other people’s babies. She wasn’t able to hold her daughter’s stillborn baby, either, she says through tears.

Hasina, like some others, still holds out hope her loved ones are alive. Without their bodies, they say, their deaths are difficult to accept.

One man, Muhammed Rashid, believes he sees his teenage son, Saiful, in an online photo of Rohingya refugees in Indonesia. He had it laminated.

Muhammed cradles Saiful’s backpack in his lap. He pulls down a sack of his boy’s belongings and dumps it on the bed, a strangled sob erupting from his throat. Then he tenderly kisses his son’s English book, on which Saiful had scrawled: “I love you.”

“My son is everything,” Muhammed murmurs. “We believe he is alive.”

But the only known survivors from that night were Kafayet and his passengers.

After Jamal’s boat sank, they drifted for another 10 days, their engine damaged, their food and water gone. Kafayet’s brother could not stop crying, thinking about what must have happened to their niece and nephew.

Delirious with thirst and hunger, they suddenly spotted a speed boat in the distance and frantically waved their clothes in the air. The Sri Lankan navy towed Kafayet’s boat to shore.

Rohingya refugee Kafayet Ullah in Sri Lanka participates in an interview in a video call, seen in the Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh, on March 6, 2023.

Credit:

Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP Photo

“Allah gave me a new life,” Kafayet says from a Colombo shelter.

His brother, Muhammed, knows how close they came to death. He hopes no one else will attempt to do what they did.

Yet back in the camps, such plans are already underway. In early March, Jamal’s sister, Bulbul, listened in horror as her 20-year-old son told her he was preparing to leave by boat.

Her heart stopped. “I will never allow you to go on this dangerous journey,” she told him. “My brother died on a boat.”

So he agreed to stay — for now. If he flees, she says, she will die of worry.

Rashid’s eyes are ringed with black, a result, he says, of crying for months for Setera and their daughters.

He accepts now that they drowned in the dark, screaming for help from a world gone deaf.

“I spent a long time here for my family. But now I’ve lost them,” he says.

“I feel I am dead.”

Bulbul, a Rohingya refugee and the sister of the missing boat’s captain, Jamal Hussein, cries as she shares memories of her brother during an interview at her shelter in a Rohingya refugee camp in the Cox's Bazar district of Bangladesh, on March 5, 2023.

Credit:

Mahmud Hossain Opu/AP Photo

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On any given day, you can find Sergei Grin, a.k.a. “Gringo” sitting on his back porch, having a smoke, riffing on his guitar, Jack. His dog, Jim, lying at his feet.

This could be a scene straight out of the Mississippi Delta. But it’s Bačka Topola, a village in northern Serbia, a one-café town at the end of the bus line.

It only took one listen for Grin to hear the blues and know that's what he was meant to play. Grin, who is originally from St. Petersburg, Russia, now travels around Serbia with his guitar, singing American country music and blues.

“I feel that this music is like my pulse,” he said. “That's a strange feeling, a really magical feeling. I said to myself, ‘Sergei, maybe the blues is something more than music.’”

Grin has written an entire blues opera titled, “Tumbleweed.” It tells the tragic story of a broken-hearted man, with nothing left but his six-string and the lure of the train tracks stretching to the horizon.

Grin has the blues down, but he’s never been to the US. In his head, though, he’s traipsed across the country with his guitar on his back. He also picked up English listening to blues legends such as Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy.

Grin said there’s a small blues scene in St. Petersburg and Moscow. But he said singing the blues in Russian is like watching a film with voiceovers. Something essential is lost.

“Some mystical cooperation between the words and the sound of a guitar, for example. You know, it burns inside of you like a little fire,” he said. “Or maybe a great fire.”

Grin said he left Russia last fall in search of a more peaceful place to let those creative fires burn. He said he had no plans to hitch a ride back anytime soon.

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With the NBA Finals underway, Nikola Jokić, the two-time MVP playing for the Denver Nuggets, is at the center of attention. 

On Thursday, Jokić led his team to a decisive Game 1 victory against the Miami Heat. 

And the 28-year-old, 7-foot Serbian basketball star is certainly making waves with fans back in his hometown of Sombor, Serbia. 

“Nikola's success [means] so much to Serbia fans because Serbia is [a] country of basketball and especially Sombor, people talking on every corner about finals today,” said Srdjan Vlaskalic, a Sombor resident. 

Last night, Vlaskalic said he was at a watch party with over 100 people, where the game started at 2:30 in the morning. He anticipates this level of enthusiasm at every game in the series.

Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic, right, jogs on the court during the second half of Game 1 of basketball's NBA Finals against the Miami Heat, Thursday, June 1, 2023, in Denver.

Credit:

Jack Dempsey/AP

Another fan, Miroslav Ćuk, was also watching the game from his home in Pancevo, a town just east of Belgrade. The electrical engineer is also a diehard Denver Nuggets fan.

For three years now, he’s hosted podcasts about the Nuggets in both Serbian and English, and he talks a lot about what makes Jokić stand out. 

“We kid, in our Denver Nuggets circles, that [Nikola Jokić] has a supercomputer inside of his head, and is just so quick you think it’s not even computing at all, it’s just perfection in an unathletic body,” Ćuk said. 

Many commentators have said that Jokić doesn’t necessarily look like a superathlete but that his decision-making and passing ability is pure genius.

Yet, Jokić has never been a typical player.

His official introduction to the league came  during the 2014 NBA draft. However, when he was selected by the Denver Nuggets, the ESPN broadcast cut to a Taco Bell ad. And he wasn’t chosen until well into the second round, where players rarely go on to become big stars.

Jokić is now one of the highest-paid players in the NBA, but he doesn’t seem to relish speaking with the press and he is definitely not on Twitter. He enjoys his privacy and has also said that he thinks social media is a waste of time. 

In the offseason, Jokic tends to a stable of racehorses in Serbia and he said that’s the only reason why he would get online. 

“My goal is to [not] use my phone when I finish my career so I can go without most of them, I just need YouTube to watch horse racing and that’s basically it,” he said. 

Jokić fans are now hoping for him to become an NBA champion.

Ćuk said that Jokic is a prime example of how the game is taught in Serbia, which was formerly part of Yugoslavia.  

“When we speak about the Yugoslav school of basketball, when you have young boys and girls that start to learn basketball, you don’t put them into separate groups, like these will be the guards, these will be the forwards, these will be the centers. No, everyone needs to learn everything,” he said. 

Everyone needs to learn how to dribble, pass, shoot and defend — and that’s what Jokic does. Some say he is the best player in the world right now — but an NBA championship would be a first. 

“This would be actually the first championship where the guy from Serbia is the main guy. Right now, Dirk Nowitzki is the greatest basketball player of all time from Europe, and if Nikola wins it, it will be the change on the throne, that’s a really really big thing to be excited about,” Ćuk said. 

Jokić was the leading scorer in Game 1 of the Finals, with 27 points.

After winning Game 1, the Denver Nuggets are now three wins away from their first title in franchise history.

And Jokić fans are on call to celebrate.

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This week, Brazil’s lower house approved a controversial bill aimed at gutting Indigenous Land Rights.

Conservative congressmen who are tied to the country’s big ag caucus applauded the vote. The bill now moves on to the Senate, but Native peoples are concerned that if approved, it could roll back gains made over the last 35 years.

“Today, you have Indigenous blood on your hands,” said Indigenous lawmaker Celia Xakriabá on the congressional floor. “When you negotiate the rights of Mother Earth, you are negotiating the possibility of life on this planet. You are selling off your own mothers.”

This was no ordinary bill.

Bill 490, originally drafted 16 years ago, questions Indigenous peoples' rights to their land based on a theory called marco temporal or “the timeframe.” The Supreme Court will decide on marco temporal constitutionality on June 7. In essence, it states that only those Indigenous peoples recognized as being on their land on the day of the passage of Brazil’s Constitution in 1988 have legal rights to their territory today.

Some lawmakers fear that the bill’s passage could lead to a cascade of lawsuits questioning Native peoples' rights to their land, even those territories that are already well-established or demarcated.

“This is going to decide the life of Indigenous peoples,” Indigenous Peoples Minister Sonia Guajajara said on Instagram, in an appeal to Brazilians to reject the vote. “It blocks any type of process of demarcation of Indigenous lands.”

This week, Indigenous peoples blocked major highways in several spots around the country against the impending bill. In São Paulo, they sang and chanted. They set fire to debris on the highway to stop cars from passing. Their demand: No to bill 490.

“We are not aggressive or violent,” local Indigenous leader Arapotu told a Brazilian news outlet. “We just want to be heard. Because this bill 490 is a law that will kill us. It will exterminate us.”

Anthropologist Antenor Vaz, who worked for many years at Brazil’s Indigenous agency, said that all Indigenous peoples will be impacted by this bill, adding, “but isolated and recently contacted peoples will be impacted drastically, because it’s almost impossible to prove that they were on their land on Oct. 5, 1988.”

Fourteen other bills are tied to the legislation, which could open Indigenous territories to mining and resource extraction from outside entities.

The vote, which was fast-tracked last week, caught many people by surprise.

“I didn’t think that this would even come up now under Lula,” said Cleyson Juruna, the young chief of the Juruna people in the Amazonian state of Pará. “Because Lula’s discourse before he was elected was that he was an environmentalist and in favor of Indigenous peoples, but today we don’t even know what to expect.”

Since his election, Lula has advanced Indigenous rights, creating an Indigenous Peoples’ Ministry, pushing back on illegal miners and recognizing six new Indigenous territories last month.

All congressional members of Lula’s Workers Party voted against the bill. But Brazil’s Congress is the most conservative in decades. The country’s big ag caucus — the Congressional Agriculture Front — wields tremendous power.

According to the leader of the group, Pedro Lupion, 300 of 513 congressional representatives in the lower house are members of the groups. And it has long been looking to open up Indigenous land for development. The group's allies say Indigenous peoples have acquired too much land.

“This bill is so important,” said Rodolfo Nogueira, an ally of former President Jair Bolsonaro who voted for the bill. "And without a doubt, it will contribute to food security for the whole world.”

Indigenous peoples have promised to continue to fight to defend their land and their rights.

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For 21-year-old Ariya Tok, the Fancy Cuts hair salon in a strip mall in North Long Beach is a sort of hyperlink to the past, present and future of her Cambodian American self.

“[My mom] renovated this entire place by hand with my dad,” she said as she sat in a salon chair while her mother curled her short hair.

Ariya Tok's family has owned and run the salon since 1994. Her mother styles hair there and gave jobs to family members.

“She helped put everyone through college because of the salon … it's the sole reason why my family is thriving here and why I'm able to graduate.”

On Sunday, Tok, her mother, father, brother, grandmother, aunt and uncle met at the salon at 9 in the morning for Tok to get her hair done for a very important graduation ceremony. She's earned her bachelor's degree in art history from California State University, Long Beach. The university ceremony took place earlier in the week, but on this day she would take part in an on-campus ceremony organized by the Cambodian Student Society (CSS).

“I feel so proud of her,” said Dannaly Tok, her mother. “She’s grown up, not a baby anymore … I feel like I’m graduating with her.”

Ariya Tok prepares for her graduation ceremony by getting her hair done by her mother Dannaly Tok.

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Ashley Balderrama/LAist

Ariya Tok is one of nearly two dozen Cambodian American graduates who took part in the Cal State Long Beach cultural ceremony, an event with special significance to the Cambodian Americans living in an area that has the largest such population in the United States.

Some family photos on display at Fancy Cuts, the hair salon owned by Ariya Tok's mother, Dannaly Tok.

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Ashley Balderrama/LAist

Nearly 50 years since a genocide in their home country brought thousands of Cambodians to Long Beach and other parts of the US, people in that community say the awarding of college degrees to this third generation of Cambodian immigrants symbolizes both a response to that genocide and the strengthening of a people they hope US society will begin to see in their full scope as human beings, not just the victims of genocide.

The ancestors are in the salonIn many ways, Fancy Cuts feels like the model of a modest hair salon, with its black leather chairs, assortment of hair products, and the hanging photos of gleaming hair styles.

Then you notice the other touches, linking this place to a faraway land, other times, and possible futures. There’s the Buddhist altar with used incense sticks atop a hair product shelf, and black-and-white photos of people in studio portraits.

Ariya Tok’s mother keeps two framed photos near her chair. In one, a man in a white shirt and skinny black tie tilts his head in a pose like that of a Hollywood headshot. It’s Tok’s grandfather.

“He worked for the American embassy back then because he spoke seven languages,” said Dannaly Tok of her father.

He disappeared after the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975, while Dannaly Tok was a small child. She was 14 years old when she left Cambodia in 1981 with her mother.

People urged her over the years to go back and look for her father. Her eyes began to well up with tears as she said that she refused to do so.

A picture of Ariya Tok's paternal grandparents is tucked into the mirror at her mothers station.

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Ashley Balderrama/LAist

“I don’t want to talk about it too much,” she said.

Tok said 80% of her family died in the Cambodian Genocide. Her two kids have heard her pain.

“I was the first generation to be born here,” said Matt Tok, Ariya Tok's older brother.

“We carry a lot of weight on our shoulders to honor something that we personally didn't experience but we hear it all the time,” he said.

Ariya Tok gets help from her mother Dannaly as she puts on traditional Cambodian attire to attend her graduation ceremony at California State University Long Beach.

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Ashley Balderrama/LAist

Architects of genocide tried to kill off Cambodia’s educated peopleThe Khmer Rouge was a Maoist revolutionary group that sought to eliminate perceived Western influences and class structures within Cambodia. It sought to transform Cambodia into a wholly agrarian society. It carried out its ideology after seizing power in April 1975 by clearing cities and shipping people to the countryside. People with higher education, professionals, anyone perceived to be “educated,” were targeted for death. The Khmer Rouge murdered three million people in the ensuing genocide, one-quarter of the country’s population.

While some Cambodian students had settled in Long Beach in the 1950s and 1960s after enrolling at Cal State Long Beach, thousands arrived in the region after the Khmer Rouge took over, and even more arrived in the early 1980s after Vietnam invaded Cambodia.

People in the United States may know the rough outlines of the genocide. In Southern California, people also know the many doughnut shops popularized by Cambodian Americans.

The Pew Research Center found that just 21% of Cambodians residing or born in the U.S. have a bachelor's degree. That’s lower than for all Americans (33%) and all Asians (54%) in the United States. Every degree has signficance.

Cambodian Student Society Adviser, Dr. Leakhena Nou.

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Ashley Balderrama/LAist

“This is a rebirth of Cambodians,” said Leakhena Nou, a Cal State Long Beach sociology professor and the only tenured Cambodian faculty at the university.

Long Beach City College says 1,138 students of Cambodian descent enrolled this past academic year. Cal State Long Beach says 591 students of Cambodian descent were enrolled in the most recent spring semester.

“We want to prove to the world that Cambodians are more than just victims of the Khmer Rouge,” said professor Nou, who’s also the advisor to the Cambodian Student Society.

Long Beach is a 'sacred' space for Cambodian AmericansLong Beach is officially a sister city with Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital.

“Long Beach is a very sacred city in the history of the Cambodian people because it gave us an opportunity to survive,” said Sotheara Lim, a 2012 Cal State Long Beach graduate who works for Microsoft as a project manager.

“For Cambodian graduates … for them to … graduate and attain education is a very sacred thing because at one point in the history of our people, if you were educated, you were going to be killed,” he said.

Graduates line up to receive their certificate at the Cambodian Cultural graduation ceremony at CSULB on May 21, 2023.

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Ashley Balderrama/LAist

Lim attended the Sunday graduation ceremony to give the keynote speech to about 200 people.

The families at the Cambodian cultural graduation ceremony cheer on their graduates.

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Ashley Balderrama/LAist

The speech was equal parts reminder to be grateful for the support from their families and warning of the challenges that come with being Cambodian in today’s United States. He reminded graduates that if Asian Americans are an “invisible” group that’s hardly understood by mainstream America, Cambodian Americans are even less understood.

Only about 10% of Cal State Long Beach’s Cambodian students are active in the Cambodian Student Society. The current generation is growing up without seeing positive images of themselves in popular culture.

Richthida Bovannat opens the Cambodian Cultural Graduation at CSULB with a traditional performance.

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Ashley Balderrama/LAist

“Before I joined CSS, I didn’t have a strong sense of our community and sometimes I felt like I didn’t know what it meant to be Khmer,” said Emily Touch, a third year student and co-president of the Cambodian Student Society this academic year.

Ariya Tok's name, and the other graduates, in the program at the Cambodian cultural graduation ceremony at CSULB.

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Ashley Balderrama/LAist

Khmer, pronounced kuh-MY, is the word for the Cambodian language and the Cambodian people.

Touch gave the closing remarks at the ceremony. Before she congratulated the graduates and their families she shared the insight she gained from her involvement in the student group.

“It helped me realize that we all have different answers to what it feels like to be Khmer,” she said.

Carrying out the legacy of her ancestors in a different homeAriya Tok was at the end of the line as graduates walked to the stage during Sunday’s ceremony. Names and majors were called, “Pomp and Circumstance” played on the PA, and each graduate held a certificate as photos were taken.

Ariya Tok and her family just before they head to her graduation ceremony at California State University Long Beach.

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Ariya Tok and her family just before they head to her graduation ceremony at California State University Long Beach.

Ashley Balderrama/LAist

Ariya Tok majored in art history. Her goal is to have a career in US museums, and along the way help institutions do more to bring Cambodian Americans into galleries.

“Someone in our family many hundreds of years ago loved art as much as my sister,” said her brother Matt Tok, who is nine years older and has a nursing degree.

“It's kind of a full circle thing … she's honoring somebody in our lineage that we've never met before,” he said.

The feeling that he and his family are standing on the shoulders of many generations of Cambodians, he said, makes the burden of the genocide easier to hold.

An earlier version of this story was originally published by LAist.com.

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It’s hardly surprising that Ukrainians are embracing symbols of their national identity — like their language, their flag and their music.  

But another way many Ukrainians express their patriotism is on their bodies.  

Mykola Dubrovin got his first tattoo eight years ago — and he didn’t start small.

“The first design was [a] rose, and the session was, I think, five or six hours,” he said. “After this session, I said, OK, please book me on the next one.”

The next one was 10 hours, and Dubrovin said he was already imagining the design for yet another tattoo.

“The feeling that I make something special on my body and maybe inside of me something tells me that OK, this is art. [If] you like the art, you need to continue doing this.”

Mykola Dubrovin, a tattoo shop owner in Kyiv.

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Credit: Anastasia Vlasova/The World

Tattoos became his passion.

In 2019, he opened his own studio in Ukraine’s capital, and the business thrived — up until Feb. 24 of last year, when Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Dubrovin said all of his windows were broken because a rocket fell onto his apartment building.

He was forced to shut down his business while everyone was scrambling to get their families to safety.

Three months later, when life in Kyiv felt safer, he reopened the tattoo studio.

“The first three or four months, 80% of people [wanted] patriotic tattoos,” Dubrovin said. “People want to make Ukrainian symbols to improve their feelings and show the Ukrainian culture.”

People came in and got Ukrainian flag tattoos, the Ukrainian trident, a map of the country, and other national symbols, Dubrovin said.

And the trend continues to this day.

Andriy Lukachyk is one of the tattoo artists at Dubrovin’s tattoo shop.

Andriy Lukachyk (L), tattooing client, Andriy Vasyanovych (R).

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Credit: Anastasia Vlasova/The World

“At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, a lot of military people would come, and I would do a lot of tattoos for the soldiers,” he said. 

Lukachyk said that many soldiers would get tridents, symbols of their units, their battalions, and some would get portraits of their relatives.

At the time of this interview, Lukachyk was working on Andriy Vasyanovych’s right arm, which is almost completely covered in ink. 

A close-up of Andriy Vasyanovych's tattoo of a Ukrainian warrior, the famous Motherland Monument in Kyiv. 

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Credit: Anastasia Vlasova/The World

Vasyanovych pointed to the image of a Cossack, a Ukrainian warrior, the famous Motherland Monument in Kyiv, and a quote from the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko.

He said he wanted to get Ukrainian-themed tattoos before the invasion, but the war gave him that final nudge.

Darya Kurudymova is 27 years old, and she said she’s wanted to get a tattoo since she was 16.

“I’m a pretty indecisive person,” Kurdymova said. “But with war, there’s a feeling that you might not get a chance to do the things you’ve dreamed about for a long time.”

She said that the war helped her overcome many of her fears, and one thing she was afraid of at first was facing the tattoo needle. 

Darya Kurudymova.

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Credit: Anastasia Vlasova/The World

Kurudymova also said that during her sessions at the tattoo studio, air raid sirens went off on a couple of occasions, and they even heard explosions outside.

But she said that they would just keep going, no matter what.

The whole tattoo experience, she said, has had a calming effect on her.

Tattoos are not just art, Dubrovin said; in many cases, tattoos can give people confidence and and even courage, which he hopes can be another permanent outcome of his work.

“We are making big projects, [and] for these projects, we need to spend at least seven days, so while in this [process], we are [getting to] know each other really good,” Dubrovin said. “We are starting with clients and finishing with friends.”

Volodymyr Solohub contribute to this report.

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Best Studios is one of the largest adult webcam companies in Romania with 170 models employed.

The studios are located on the top floor of an old shopping mall in central Bucharest.

Best Studios operational manager Maria Boroghina said that they have various safeguards in place. For starters, they advise models to keep their clothes on for as long as possible.

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Raul Stef/The World

Maria Boroghina, the operational manager there, said that a top-earning webcam model can make up to $50,000 per month.

“How much you earn depends on how good you are at communicating with the clients, and how many hours you work,” said Boroghina, a former webcam model herself.

Romania has the biggest adult webcam industry in Europe, reportedly employing more than 400,000 women and 5,000 companies are registered in the business, according to recent figures from ANAF, the National Agency for Fiscal Administration in Romania. 

Best Studios is one of the largest adult webcam companies in Romania with 170 models employed.

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Raul Stef/The World

Webcam studio owners there say the business is perfectly legal. But following the arrests in December of US-born Andrew Tate, an online influencer, and his brother, Tristan Tate, who ran a webcam company in Romania, the country’s industry is under new scrutiny.

The Tates, who face allegations of human trafficking, rape and forming an organized crime group, and two Romanian female suspects are now under house arrest pending a criminal investigation.

Boroghina, who said she wasn’t familiar with the Tates before their arrests, said the case shows that the adult industry needs better regulation.

A bedside in a room at the Best Studios webcam business in Bucharest, Romania.

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Raul Stef/The World

In Romania, webcam work is legal as long as women are on camera alone and no violence or coercion is involved.

But it is not regulated under Romanian law or recognized in terms of taxation, so the women work as “online service providers” based on a copyright contract.

Boroghina said that Best Studios has various safeguards in place. For starters, they advise models to keep their clothes on for as long as possible.

“We encourage our girls to get into conversation with the customers,” Boroghina said, although “99% of the time, they are asked to get naked.” (Men also work as webcam models in Romania but Boroghina’s company only employs women.) 

The majority of their clientele are based in the US.

Best Studios, a webcam business in Bucharest, Romania, has 50 bedrooms that all have a different aesthetic.

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Raul Stef/The World

“They pay anything from $1 to $10 per minute for a private conversation with our girls,” she said.

The company avoids clients from Romania in case they know any of the models — it’s one way, she said, to prevent women from being targets on social media or in person. Boroghina said the women usually make contact with her company looking for work after seeing their adverts for jobs online.

But not all webcam companies operate through transparent, official channels. And, Romania is a primary source country for sex trafficking in Europe, according to the State Department’s 2022 report on human trafficking. The country is also one of the poorest in the European Union where the average gross monthly salary is about $1,316.

Silvia Tăbușcă, a law lecturer at the Romanian American University in Bucharest who has worked with prosecutors on trafficking cases, said several webcam operators have been involved in abusive practices where the women are coerced or forced to meet with clients in person.

In Romania, webcam work is legal as long as women are on camera alone and no violence or coercion is involved.

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Raul Stef/The World

“The women are threatened with different videos of them performing online, that are taken by the companies in order to meet real clients and to prostitute themselves,” she said.

Tăbușcă has met with webcam models seeking legal advice about the abuse they have suffered but the women rarely press charges. She recounted the case of two young webcam models from Bacău in eastern Romania who were forced to meet with clients in Dubai.

Each bedroom inside of the Best Studios webcam business in Bucharest, Romania, is decorated differently. 

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Raul Stef/The World

“They were effectively tortured for a week and sexually exploited in every possible way,” Tăbușcă said.

Maria Boroghina, the operational manager at Best Studios in Bucharest, Romania, said the majority of their clientele are based in the US.

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Raul Stef/The World

The women declined to testify to the Romanian authorities because they had been warned that videos of their online performances would be released, she said.

Monica Boseff’s organization, Open Door Foundation in Bucharest, offers support and shelter to victims of sex trafficking.

Clothing available to the models at the webcam business Best Studios in Bucharest, Romania.

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Raul Stef/The World

She said the most common tactic continues to be the “loverboy method” — where men convince young, often vulnerable women to fall in love with them and then coerce them into webcam work.

Andrew Tate wrote in a now-deleted page on his website that more than half of the 75 women he said were working for his webcam company started out as his girlfriend.

Maria Boroghina, the operational manager at Best Studios, said that clients pay anything from $1 to $10 per minute for a private conversation with one of their models.

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Raul Stef/The World

Boseff said many of the women she has supported were lured into the work by the “loverboy method” and a large percentage started out as webcam models.

Boseff said efforts are improving in Romania to crack down on trafficking but little has been done to target webcam operators who may be engaged in illegal activities. And she said no attempt has been made to penalize the clients who pay for any illegal services.

Silvia Tăbușcă, a law lecturer at the Romanian American University in Bucharest who has worked with prosecutors on trafficking cases, said several webcam operators have been involved in abusive practices where the women are coerced or forced to meet with clients in person.

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Raul Stef/The World

It’s only ever the women who suffer, she said. Boseff rejected the claim by webcam bosses that women choose to work in the industry. If it’s such a desirable profession she said, then why aren't they training their own daughters to work in the business?

“It's because they know exactly what it does to the human body, mind and soul,” she said. 

Raul Stef contributed reporting to this story.

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A film called “The Kerala Story,” released in India earlier this month, claims that thousands of Hindu and Christian women from the southern Indian state of Kerala are being tricked into converting to Islam and then being forced to join the terrorist group ISIS.

The filmmakers have claimed that it is a “never-before-told true story — revealing a dangerous conspiracy that has been hatched against India.”

But many have objected to this message, saying it is divisive. Last week, a heated debate on social media soon escalated, leading to dozens of people gathering outside the police station in the central Indian town of Akola, where one person died and eight others were  severely injured. Authorities suspended the internet in the region and arrested more than a hundred people.

Meanwhile, the state of West Bengal — which has a significant Muslim population — had preemptively banned the film in order to prevent such violence from breaking out.

The filmmakers took the ban to India’s Supreme Court. And last week, the court reversed it, but directed the filmmakers to add a disclaimer that the film is fictionalized. 

Art or propaganda?

In November 2020, the US State Department stated that only “66 known Indian-origin fighters” were affiliated with ISIS, and that not all of them were from Kerala, nor were they all women. About a year later, India’s National Investigation Agency said that it had arrested 168 people connected to 37 cases linked to ISIS. But there is no evidence that anyone was coerced or tricked into joining the group.

“It was quite obvious from the trailer itself that this was propaganda through and through. It is toxic, divisive propaganda.”

Therefore, critics say “The Kerala Story” grossly exaggerates true events and indulges in significant misrepresentations of the Muslim community in Kerala.

“It was quite obvious from the trailer itself that this was propaganda through and through,” said Deepanjana Pal, managing editor of the website Film Companion. “It is toxic, divisive propaganda.” 

Pal said that youth radicalization is an important topic that should be discussed, and that there should be films made on the issue. But, she added that “The Kerala Story” is as simplistic and Islamophobic as inciting WhatsApp forwards.

According to her, the film presents a clear cause and effect: “When a good Hindu woman is not aware of her faith and its rituals, etc., she becomes vulnerable to Islamic propaganda, and obviously the next thing is a) to become pregnant by a terrorist and b) to join ISIS.”

Sowmya Rajendran, a film critic originally from the state of Kerala, said the film gives the impression that every Muslim in Kerala is evil and is out to convert people from other religions, and then force them into terrorism.

“Every single Muslim in the film is represented as a violent savage person who just has one agenda,” she said. 

Such messaging plays into the narrative of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has endorsed the film, while two BJP-ruled states made the film tax free. And some political leaders even hired buses to ferry their constituents to theaters to watch the film.

“The film is clearly an attempt to defame the state,” Rajendran said.

Kerala is known for its religious diversity and high levels of development.

Meanwhile, some film critics drew parallels to another film released last year called “The Kashmir Files.”

“Both ‘The Kerala Story’ and “The Kashmir Files” have been used by the politicians for their campaigning and exhorting the public to watch [them],” managing editor Pal said. 

Film does good business

“The Kerala Story” was released on May 5 and has made about $25 million.

“That is an obscene amount of money for a low-budget film to make,” Pal explained. “This is a producer’s dream.” 

It was marketed as a movie that reveals a certain truth that had been deliberately hidden from the public. This raises everyone’s curiosity, said Rajendran. Moreover, these films are popular because it is easy to convince people that they are absolutely true, she said.

“That happens because we are already a society that has ghettoized Muslims. That divisive communal feeling is there in a lot of people and it has only become more acceptable in India to voice it,” she said. “And people who voice this are being rewarded.” 

Not only are ideas of bigotry acceptable, but the subjugation of women seems to be another popular theme that resonates with the audience.

“We are a deeply patriarchal society. So, it appeals to us when somebody comes and says you have to keep your girls at home and only men from our community can have access to them,” Rajendran said. “When men from other communities develop relationships with them, then it cannot be an equal relationship. It can only be seen as a relationship where the woman is being lured into something. Or is being cheated. It is not as if she has made that choice.”

Related: Indian govt removes parts of Muslim history from federal textbooks

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Debora Magina is taking part in a religious ritual that goes back to the Middle Ages.

“I’m here in the oldest tattoo studio in the world,” said the native of São Paulo, Brazil, who is Catholic and on a pilgrimage in Jerusalem.

“This trip has lifted my faith, so I’m marking this moment with a tattoo and that’s really important for me.”

Magina’s new tattoo is simply the word, gratidão (“gratitude” in English), written in a delicate script across the inside of her wrist. It’s the sort of religious-themed body art that the proprietors at Razzouk Tattoo have been doing for generations.

Wassim Razzouk is showing off his Harley tattoo. 

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Fuad AbuGosh/The World 

“We are a family that continues the tradition of tattooing pilgrims in the Holy Land,” Wassim Razzouk said. “I am the 27th generation, and my two sons are continuing this beautiful tradition.”

The Razzouks are Coptic Christians, originally from Egypt, who’ve been doing religious tattoos since the 14th century. They relocated to Jerusalem around 500 years ago, and the family has been tattooing Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land ever since.

Razzouk grew up in the Old City of Jerusalem.

“I watched my father do tattoos, my aunt do tattoos,” he said. “I can’t remember my grandfather because he died when I was 3 years old.”

Today, the family tattoo business is located in a quiet alleyway of the Old City, not far from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, one of the holiest sites on Earth for Christians.

“I would easily say 90% of the people who come here get tattoos as pilgrimage tattoos,” Razzouk said.

In Israel and the Palestinian Territories, Christians make up less than 2% of the overall population. But Christians make up more than half of the tourists who visit the Holy Land every year. Most of the people who come to Razzouk’s studio looking for a new tattoo are Christian pilgrims from abroad.

“I would easily say 90% of the people who come here get tattoos as pilgrimage tattoos,” Razzouk said.

Mike from Holland is one of the tattoo artists at Razzouk Tattoo in Jerusalem.

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Fuad AbuGosh/The World

In ancient times, Razzouk said that pilgrims wanted to go back home from the Holy Land with a tattoo showing that they’d successfully made the perilous journey here. It was also a status thing, he said. Nowadays, people like the idea of carrying on the tradition.

“They want to feel that they have become different now after they have become pilgrims, that they have renewed their faith, that they have walked the steps of Jesus, that they have lived the Bible that they have read on paper.”

Razzouk said he’s done tattoos for people in their 70s, 80s and 90s who never had any interest in tattoos before coming here on pilgrimage. A lot of his customers are Westerners. But he also does tattoos for Christians who live in this region.

Stickers from Razzouk Tattoo in Jerusalem. 

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Fuad AbuGosh/The World

“We are the minority here, in Israel and in the Holy Land. Because we are the minority, they think we are weak,” Razzouk said.

“It’s not easy. It’s very difficult to be a Christian in the Holy Land. It’s very difficult to be a Christian in the Middle East among people who sometimes never even heard about Christianity. And sometimes, they know that you are a Christian and that is a reason to hate you even more, and not only to persecute you, but also to attack you.”

And for that reason, he said that some people get religious tattoos on parts of their bodies that their clothes will cover.

Some of the most popular tattoo designs at Razzouk Tattoo go back centuries. 

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Fuad AbuGosh/The World

Still, some Christians from the region, Razzouk said, choose to get something like a cross on their lower wrist, to identify their faith, whatever the risk.

Some of the most popular tattoo designs here in the studio go way back in history. There’s the image of St. George slaying a dragon, and the Jerusalem cross — that’s a plain, Greek cross surrounded by four smaller ones.

Razzouk has a Jerusalem cross in red on his left arm, next to another much larger tattoo.

“This is one of my Harley tattoos with the eagle and the engine of the Harley. It’s the heart of the Harley Davidson. I love Harleys. I love bikes. It’s part of my life.”

Razzouk said he managed to do a pilgrimage of his own a few years ago, traveling to the Black Hills of South Dakota for the annual motorcycle rally at Sturgis. He said that he didn’t end up getting a tattoo on that trip, but that he did bring home more than one T-shirt. 

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Oleksandr Pipa was the original bass player for the Ukrainian rock band, Vopli Vidopliassova, just as an underground rock scene was beginning to emerge in Kyiv in the 1980s. 

The band recorded hits like “Tantsi,” or “Dances,” the title track on a 1989 album. People would copy it, share it with friends or sell it on the black market.

Now, the album, “Tantsi,” is being rediscovered by a new generation of fans — it was rereleased last month. 

“Tantsi,” which was originally meant to be a demo tape and was mostly recorded in one night, is a time capsule from late Soviet Kyiv, as the Record Store Day website says. It’s also about rebelling against repressive rule from the Kremlin, and imagining new possibilities. 

Songs like “Politrok” and “There Were Days” poke fun at Soviet-era politics.

Another original member of Vopli Vidopliassova, Oleg Skrypka, who’s still the frontman, said the band’s popularity started with the song, “Tantsi.”

Oleg Skrypka, lead singer of Vopli Vidopliassova.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World 

 “When we played this song, it was like [an] explosion, people [went] crazy.”

At the time, Kyiv bands were imitating Russian bands.

“So, when we started to sing in Ukrainian, we instantly became legends and stars and it was time to record.”

Pipa, who now has his own band, Attraktor, said it came about because Maria Sonevytsky, a professor from Bard College, was working on a book in 2019 about “Tantsi,” called “Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi.”

After she got in touch with Pipa, he said, he dug up the original recording. 

Oleksandr Pipa, original Vopli Vidopliassova bass player.

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Daniel Ofman/The World 

“I gave it to Maria, she took it and flew to the United States, found the studio, and then, the master engineer, really; he made it even better than it used to be.”

Pipa said that hearing those old recordings after so many years was a welcome distraction from the war in Ukraine.

“Kyiv was under constant missile attacks from Russia. On [the] one hand, there is this horrible war, and at the same time, some connection to normality; and it made me kind of feel that everything is going to be OK.”

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Ukrainian musicians Taras Shevchenko and Kateryna Pavlenko from the band Go-A were thinking about starting a new folk electronica project back in February of 2022. But on Feb. 24, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion in Ukraine, the pursuits of many of Ukraine's leading artists and cultural institutions came to a halt.

Since the war began, artists and cultural workers swiftly shifted their focus to contributing to war efforts, while also working to maintain and promote Ukraine's unique artistic and cultural heritage. 

The World takes a look back at the myriad ways in which war impacted artistic and cultural expression in Ukraine, and how advocates worked tirelessly to keep making art against all odds.

Ukrainian musicians Taras Shevchenko and Kateryna Pavlenko founded Go-A, a folk-electronica band. 

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Daniel Ofman/The World

A race to save cultural heritage 

In early March, as Moscow escalated its bombardment of civilian areas, museums and churches in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv were targeted. Residents of Lviv raced to ensure their city did not suffer the same fate. For a city synonymous with music and the arts, the most common sound in the city became hammering and drilling.

Workers construct metal scaffolding around the statue of Greek goddess Amphitrite in the medieval Market Square in Lviv, Ukraine.

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Andrew Connelly/The World

Artists on the front lines 

Ukraine's military made it mandatory for all men to stay in Ukraine to serve in the war. But when the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra mobilized to go on tour as part of a cultural diplomacy mission, the Defense Ministry granted special permission for its male members to leave the country.

The Kyiv Symphony Orchestra rehearses at the National Philharmonic in Warsaw, Poland, the day before the premiere performance of the "Voice of Ukraine" tour that took them to nine cities across Poland and Germany, April 20, 2022.

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Emily Johnson/The World

Other musicians, like Taras Topolia, the lead singer of the Antytila band, immediately joined Ukraine's military and served on the front lines. At the same time, Topolia continued to advocate for Ukraine through his music.

Some of the Ukrainian band Antytila's members have been serving on the front lines of the war in Ukraine.

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Antytila on Twitter 

Svyatoslav Vakarchuk, who might just be Ukraine’s biggest rock star, also volunteered and joined Ukraine's armed forces, where he became a lieutenant. Most of his service entailed helping troops and civilians living near the front lines. To provide emotional support to the troops, Vakarchuk performed a song “Chovan,” meaning “Boat,” near the Antonivskyi bridge, in the Kherson region, which was destroyed by Russian forces.

Ukrainian singer Svyatoslav Vakarchuk

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Daniel Ofman/The World

As intense fighting in Ukraine tore apart entire villages, Ukraine's underground rave scene got behind Repair Together, a volunteer group that hosted "clean-up raves," a mix of traditional clean-up efforts with dance parties, to relieve stress and connect with others.

Repair Together hosts a clean-up rave in Ivanivka, Chernihivska oblast.

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Repair Together/YouTube

Translating war, protecting literature  

The war in Ukraine sparked a new wave of interest in Ukrainian history, culture and writing. Ukrainian literary translators have been working on overdrive as the war drove new demand for Ukrainian publications. US-based writer Dralyuk has been translating poetry and literature from both Russian and Ukrainian into English.

A visitor reads a book at a book fair during a Publishers Forum in Lviv, Ukraine, Sept. 19, 2018. Since the war in Ukraine began nearly six months ago, the demand for Ukrainian translations and literature has increased.

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Mykola Tys/AP

Creating normalcy amid war

During rehearsals at Odesa’s opera house, it was sometimes easy to forget that Ukraine was a country at war. Inside the elegant, neo-Baroque building from the late 19th century, the conflict outside felt distant. Odesa National Academic Opera and Ballet Theater is located in Ukraine’s busiest port city, which became an early target of Russia’s military, but it continues to be a central cultural hub.

The Odesa National Academic Opera and Ballet Theater is known as the heart of the cultural city of Odesa, Ukraine.

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Daniel Ofman/The World

Finding home on international stages

When war broke out in Ukraine, the Shchedryk Children’s Choir from Kyiv was poised to celebrate its 50th anniversary with a world tour. Conductor Saul Zaks went on a mission to make sure the world continued to experience the choir’s "magical" sounds. By December 2022, the choir headed to Carnegie Hall to celebrate a Christmas sensation known as “Carol of the Bells.”

Children’s choir Shchedryk rehearses on Thursday evening at St. Paul’s in New York City. 

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Emily Johnson/The World

Ukrainian ballet dancers displaced by the fighting found a home on international stages. The Ukrainian Classical Ballet went on a charity tour in Italy and Romania in May, with the company in Bucharest, for a performance of “Giselle.” 

The Ukrainian Classical Ballet company holds up the Ukrainian flag onstage during curtain call while the Ukrainian national anthem plays as part of a performance in Bucharest, Ukraine.

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Elena Graham/The World

And despite six months of grueling war with Russia, several acts from Ukraine were represented at the Edinburgh International Arts Festival, the world’s largest arts festival, held yearly in Scotland. For the performers, it was a bittersweet experience.

Some Ukrainian students were evacuated from Ukraine thanks to a Czech circus company, Cirk La Putyka. “Boom," a performance they took to Edinburgh, was rewritten to reflect the students’ perspectives of war and displacement.

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Andrew Connelly/The World

Raising spirits

Artists from Ukraine’s hip-hop scene have also been speaking up. The genre, which became popular in the country by the late 1990s, largely emerged from the easter city of Kharkiv, not far from the Russian border. Alyona Savranenko, known by the stage name Alyona Alyona, has been using her music to raise the spirits of her people as the war goes on.

The popular 28-year-old Alyona Savranenko prides herself on defying the stereotype of what rappers look like in Eastern Europe and the rest of the world.

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Courtesy of Alyona Alyona/Instagram

This article was originally published on Feb. 21, 2023 and has been updated.

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The day the Taliban took over Afghanistan almost two years ago, Farzanah Ayubi was giving a speech in Kabul.

When she heard the news, she decided to finish the speech. The audience stayed, too.

“I won’t ever forget that moment,” Ayubi said.

Afterward, she said, she stepped outside into what felt like a very different city. There was chaos and panic. She couldn’t find a taxi. It took her five hours to get home — a journey that would typically take 20 minutes.

Since that day, the Taliban have imposed on women one restriction after another. The latest came in December, when they banned women from working for nongovernmental organizations. Thousands of women lost their jobs overnight. The months since, women NGO workers say, have been among the most difficult.

Agencies have been pressuring the Taliban to reverse course, and on Thursday, the head of a major aid organization said that the Taliban have agreed to consider allowing Afghan women to resume work at the agency in the southern province of Kandahar, the religious and political center for the country's rulers.

Jan Egeland, the secretary-general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, met officials in the capital Kabul and Kandahar to persuade them to reverse the ban on the organization’s female staff.

“We have an agreement to start immediate talks on a temporary arrangement that will enable our female colleagues to work with and for women and others in Kandahar,” Egeland told The Associated Press. “If we get a provincial exemption in Kandahar, we should be able to replicate it elsewhere.”

In January, the Taliban said they were working on guidelines for women to return to work at NGOs. Egeland said earlier this week that key officials told him they are close to finalizing these guidelines. But they were unable to give a timeline or details.

Mission to ‘liberate’ Afghan women

Ayubi’s NGO, which helped low-income women get better access to health care and education, was shut down and her team was sent home.

“[The Taliban] told us if we don’t shut down, we’ll face problems,” Ayubi said.

Next, she received threats and had to leave the country, first to Pakistan and then to Canada.

Today, she's trying to resume her work once again, but it's hard to do from afar — and without her employees, she said.

For many women, the situation is reminiscent of Taliban rule in the past.

During the early days of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, one justification given by the Bush administration was to “liberate” Afghan women.

“Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes,” first lady Laura Bush said in a radio address four days after the fall of Kabul in 2001. “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

More than two decades later, Afghan women like Diba Farahmand, who used to run an NGO called Women Empowerment, are once again being confined in their homes.

Farahmand employed 73 people, mostly women. Now, she said, she has no job and no income. For years, Farahmand said, helped Afghan women in need. Now, she needs help herself.

“My former employees call me in tears,” she said from Kabul. “They say their kids are going to bed hungry. They’re desperate, and I don’t know what to tell them.”

The Taliban’s ban on women’s employment could not have come at a worse time. Afghanistan is facing a devastating humanitarian crisis. After the fall of the Afghan government, direct international aid to the country stopped.

Two-thirds of Afghanistan’s population need urgent aid in order to survive, according to the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Witnesses say the aid that does get into the country is not being distributed fairly.

“The distribution system is male dominated, so many women are simply left out,” explained Shamail Tawana Nasiri, who conducted an informal survey in parts of Afghanistan recently.

American officials have also raised questions.

Last month, the head of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, John Sopko, spoke on Capitol Hilland complained about a lack of transparency.

“Unfortunately, as I sit here today, I cannot assure this committee or the American taxpayer we are not currently funding the Taliban. Nor can I assure you that the Taliban are not diverting the money we are sending from the intended recipients,” he said.

The Biden administration said it has systems in place to make sure aid is getting to those who need it.

A Taliban spokesperson did not respond to questions about aid distribution.

Afghan women continue to fight back. They have started underground movements and organized protests.

Nasiri in Kabul said that protesters are using a range of tactics to avoid getting caught. She said they change locations for protests at the last minute, when leaving the gathering, they switch outfits so they are not easily identified, and they don’t return home immediately.

“The women are scared,” Nasiri said. “Many have stopped coming to protests because of the Taliban crackdown.”

But, she added, “we have to speak up for ourselves. Because if we don’t, no one else will.”

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A couple of weeks ago, millions of Brazilians received a text from messaging application Telegram saying that Brazil was about to pass a law that would "end freedom of expression."

The app also claimed that the bill would give the government "censorship powers without prior judicial oversight."

The legislation requires internet companies, search engines and social messaging services to find and report illegal material themselves, or face heavy fines.

Brazil’s Congress is debating the proposed law, which if passed, would be one of the world’s harshest laws against fake news. The bill has already been approved by the Senate and it’s now awaiting a vote in the lower house. But the “Fake News Bill,” as it’s being called, is extremely controversial. 

Congressional leaders attacked the Telegram message on the floor of the lower house.

"They are spreading lies saying that the Brazilian parliament wants to approve censorship. That [it wants] to end democracy. This is scandalous,” said Orlando Silva, the sponsor of Bill 2630. "It’s a scandal that a multinational corporation wants to push the national Congress onto its knees.”

Silva added that lawmakers had specifically invited Telegram many times to participate in the debate over the legislation, but the company had declined.

Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes then threatened to take Telegram offline for 72 hours if it didn’t delete the message.

The platform finally complied. But it was a sign of just how heated the debate over this bill has become in recent weeks.

Censorship accusations

Analyst Alan Ghani, of the conservative news outlet Jovem Pan, has called the forced removal of the Telegram message: “Censorship, pure and simple.”

He added: “Would we punish a newspaper editorial, when many outlets have come out against the fake news bill in their editorials? It’s the same thing.” 

But the head of the government coalition in the Senate, Randolfe Rodrigues, told the media that the platforms are very different. He said there are government regulations for TV and news outlets, and that the same is needed for social media firms.

“To the heads of the big tech companies and their shareholders anywhere in the world, Brazil will not be no-man’s-land,” he said. “You will not be permitted to do what you want here without punishment.”

David Nemer, a Brazilian media studies professor at the University of Virginia, has researched social media platforms for years.

"These platforms are not neutral,” he said. "These platforms are not just publishers. They are part of the message. And they curate the message."

Fake news has been a major issue for Brazil in recent years.

"[Fake news] has harmed public debate,” said Luciana Santana, a political scientist at the Federal University of Alagoas. "[It’s] gotten in the way of serious discussions over public policies, and influenced political races in Brazil.”

Experts say it played a decisive role in the 2018 election of former President Jair Bolsonaro. During the pandemic, he told Brazilians that getting COVID-19 vaccines could turn them into crocodiles.

Creating transparency

But, this bill isn't just about fake news.

"It’s more about bringing transparency, from the big techs in terms of access to the algorithm, access to reports about the algorithm, understanding how these platforms behave, so we have a more transparent way of understanding … the role of these platforms in everyday life,” Nemer said.

Brazilian journalism professor Rogerio Christofoletti said this bill is also about holding social media firms accountable when dangerous, hateful or misleading content is shared on their platforms.

"These digital platforms have the means to reduce the reach, to adjust their algorithms, to not promote specific content,” Christofoletti said. "The platforms can do more than they have. And a law like this can force these platforms to use their technical power to combat disinformation.”

Nemer added that these companies are pushing back for a reason.

“This is why the big techs are playing hardball in Brazil,” Nemer said. “Because they know that if Brazil passes this bill, then it sets the precedent and the other countries will follow as well. So, they're trying to close the gate as much as they can so other countries will not follow suit and pass their own internet laws.”

Nemer is concerned that the bill may not find the votes it needs to pass, in part, because many politicians elected to Congress ran campaigns based on disinformation, and actually benefited from an unregulated social media. 

And although the bill has already been approved by the Senate, the vote in the lower house has been postponed several times in recent weeks, as the governing coalition pushes to shore up more votes.

Related: The future of Bolsonaro in Brazil remains uncertain

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Joshua Opoku Agyeman owns a secondhand car lot with a fleet of refurbished vehicles in Accra, Ghana.

Agyeman scouts online for old and used cars in the US, which he buys and resells.

“I have so many Ghanaians I am working with in America,” he said. “And once I am done negotiating, I notify any of my partners in any location in the United States who do my shipments for me. And then, the container is shipped down here.”

Joshua Opoku Agyeman imports used and old cars from mostly the US to Accra, Ghana.

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Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

Over 100,000 cars are imported into Ghana every year, mostly from the United States. And 90% of the cars on Ghana's roads are imported used cars. Many are either salvaged or obtained from accidents; plenty of them are more than a decade old.

At the same time, US consumers are snapping up electric vehicles — they are helping the country meet its climate goals, and new owners may qualify for a tax credit. And while many of their old cars that end up on Africa's roads provide vital transportation in poor countries, they are often polluting and unsafe.

Kwesi Koranteng is a supervisor in the repair shop at Agyeman’s dealership.

Kwesi Koranteng has been refurbishing imported old and used cars for the past 15 years.

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Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

“[The] majority of the people here in Ghana cannot afford brand new cars, so the demand for used cars is on the rise,” he said. “And so, when the used cars are in, we do the body work, fix the air conditioners, and do other servicing, too.”

These older cars can lack air bags or anti-lock brakes and other safety features that drivers in the US take for granted.

Ghana’s National Road Safety Authority’s Pearl Adusu Gyasi said that efforts to discourage importing overaged cars have yielded few results.

“What people are failing to notice is that every aging engine in these imported, rickety cars is a potential time bomb,” she said. “Affordability should never outweigh the value we place on our  lives.”

Many older vehicles release a toxic cocktail of air pollutants. It’s common to see trucks and cars belching black smoke. Those vehicles typically lack modern emission controls. Or their catalytic converters, which filter the exhaust, are removed and sold for their valuable metals.

Most of the old and used cars that are shipped to African countries like Ghana need work.

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Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

These cars are one of the reasons that Accra’s traffic-clogged streets are among the most polluted in the world, said Cordie Aziz of the Institute for Environmental and Sanitation Studies at the University of Ghana.

She said that, on average, air pollution there is 11 times higher than the World Health Organization sets as safe.

“The air pollution becomes more centered in highly populated areas where you see a lot of vehicle traffic,” she said. “These are all areas that have shown to have higher levels of pollution based on the EPA sensors that were placed around the city. The situation is really alarming.”

In Accra, an estimated 40% of the city's air pollution concentrations stem from vehicle transport emissions.

Pearl Adusu Gyasi works with Ghana’s National Road Safety Authority and is concerned about African countries like Ghana being treated like a dumping ground for the West’s cars that are
not roadworthy. The authority says public education and awareness to discourage the importation overaged has yielded very little results.

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Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

Children who walk to schools along busy roads and informal vendors lining the roads are most at risk of the health effects of these toxic fumes.

Aziz said that the enforcement of laws to check the situation is lax, putting people at risk of chronic respiratory diseases, as well as contributing to climate change.

The UN Environment Program has warned that the world cannot meet its zero-emission targets under the Paris Agreement on climate change unless efforts are made to regulate the used car trade.

“Africa is already bearing the biggest impact of climate change,” Aziz said. “We cannot allow it to become a dumping ground for used and rickety imported cars.”

But that is not all. When these used cars are no longer roadworthy, they end up in the hands of scrap dealers who dismantle them for various parts, including the batteries.

Amina Yussif lives at Agbogbloshie in Accra, close to a car-battery smashing site that she said exposed her 4-year-old son to lead poisoning. She said that his developmental milestones have been severely affected.

Inside a repair shop in Accra, Ghana, workers are seen giving the old cars a fresh paint job.

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Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

“When I found out that he had been exposed to lead, it was like my world came crashing down,” she said. “As a mother, seeing your child struggle with health issues every day is just heartbreaking.”

Ghana tried to implement a ban on the import of used cars that are 10 years old or more in 2020. But the government backed down after pushback from importers. People now have to pay additional taxes when they import those old cars.

But the business continues to thrive because imported old and used cars are still cheaper than foreign brands assembled in Ghana, like Volkswagen and Toyota.

Chineyenwa Okoro Onu, an environmental sustainability consultant in Lagos, Nigeria, said that she is concerned that Africa is fast becoming a graveyard for polluting cars.

“The worst-case scenario will be that these used cars will not meet the emission standards set by the country of origin and, therefore, have even worse environmental impacts in Africa. We deserve better as a continent,” she said.

She said, as more people get rid of their gas guzzlers to be environmentally friendly, the more used cars are likely to be exported to Africa.

But Theo Acheampong, an energy economist at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, said he disagrees: “Even in Africa, in Ghana, there is a big, growing momentum for electric transportation and other cleaner mobility solutions.”

He said that Ghana's abundant lithium resources and advancements in extraction technology pave the way for battery manufacturing facilities.

Acheampong said the continent’s wealth of natural resources, including solar and wind power, can be harnessed to provide clean, renewable energy for effective public transportation.

“So, these buses could run on things like hydrogen, or they could run on electric batteries and that would allow a lot of people to move around without necessarily having to have their own private cars,” he said.

Onu has other solutions, too. She said a range of incentives, like tax breaks and subsidies, can shift Ghanians to driving electric cars.

“To ensure that African countries like Ghana catch up with this transition for cleaner transportation, we need to incentivize the adoption of sustainable alternatives as much as possible,” she said.

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On a recent weekday morning, dozens of tourists are lined up on a pedestrian ramp in the heart of the Old City in Jerusalem.

A recorded message reminds visitors of the significance of the place: “Please respect the holiness of the site and the worshippers. Please dress and behave appropriately during the visit.”

The ramp passes by the Western Wall and goes up to the Mughrabi Gate, one of the entrances to probably the most iconic location in the city of Jerusalem. It’s the Temple Mount, as Jews know the site, or the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, as Muslims call it. This is also the location of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and golden Dome of the Rock.

The place holds an important place in religious scripture. It’s where the universe was created, where Adam stepped out of the Garden of Eden, where Abraham told God he was willing to sacrifice his own son, and it’s where Muhammad prayed with Jesus and other prophets before ascending to heaven.

On a recent weekday morning, dozens of tourists are lined up on a pedestrian ramp in the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem. The ramp passes by the Western Wall and goes up to the Mughrabi Gate, one of the entrances to probably the most iconic location in the city of Jerusalem. It’s the Temple Mount, as Jews know the site, or the Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, as Muslims call it. This is also the location of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and golden Dome of the Rock.

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Matthew Bell/The World

Recently, the holy compound has seen clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian Muslims, along with vandalism and rock-throwing between groups of Jews and Muslims. But authorities managed to avoid a worst-case scenario at the holy site during the overlapping religious holidays of Easter, Passover and Ramadan that ended a few weeks ago.

In many ways, things are getting back to normal here. But the status quo framework, an agreement between Israel and Jordan from 1967 with roots that go back to the 1800s, that governs how the holy site is run, is something that many people on both sides are not particularly happy about.

The holiest site in Jerusalem continues to be an ongoing source of contention between Jews and Muslims.

“We come here to pray, not to make problems for anybody,” said Khalil Maas’hal, who was at the mosque with his two adult sons.

Maas’hal explained that Muslims have a religious duty to visit this place.

“Every prayer on this spot,” he said, “is multiplied 500 times.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy visited the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem in late April.

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Matthew Bell/The World

Maas’hal, who is from Ramallah, about a 30-minute drive away from Al-Aqsa, said he’s got a special ID card that gets him through the Israeli military checkpoint to pray there.

“The problems happening here are created by the Israelis,” he said.

Ikhlas Malhi, who came to the mosque from East Jerusalem with her daughter, said that she’s witnessed many instances of violent clashes.

“I have seen Israeli soldiers stamp on the Quran. I have seen them attack the youth. I have seen them hit women, beat them up and arrest them. I’ve seen all this violence against people entering the mosque.”

Last month, Israeli police said they were forced to confront Palestinian Muslims who barricaded themselves inside the mosque with piles of rocks and fireworks. Under the status quo framework, Israel’s police forces maintain security at the Temple Mount. They also control the entrances to the holy site, where non-Muslim prayer is forbidden. The Waqf — a Muslim trust under the supervision of the government of Jordan — is in charge of running the religious and administrative affairs at the Noble Sanctuary.

Abeer Ziad is an archaeologist with the Waqf. And, like many Palestinians, she said that what she fears most is that the Israelis intend to demolish the Al-Aqsa Mosque to make way for a new Jewish temple.

“This is what they ask for. You can go to all the websites of the Temple groups. This is what they [demand], to demolish the place and build a temple and this place to be just for them.”

Abeer Ziad is an archaeologist with the Waqf. And, like many Palestinians, she said that what she fears most is that the Israelis intend to demolish the Al-Aqsa Mosque to make way for a new Jewish temple.

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Matthew Bell/The World

Lots of Israelis say this fear is entirely overblown, that Israel’s government has controlled the Old City of Jerusalem going back to 1967 and it’s maintained the status quo arrangement ever since.

But some point out that things have changed here at the Temple Mount, with more Jewish nationalists making a point to visit the place on a regular basis.

Groups of Jewish visitors are always accompanied by a police escort here to prevent scuffles with Muslim worshippers and ensure that nobody’s breaking the rules under the status quo.

Jewish visitors are accompanied by Israeli police at the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

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Matthew Bell/The World

Only Muslims are allowed to pray at the holy compound. But a security guard with the Waqf, who didn’t want to be identified, said he sees Jewish visitors going against the rules all the time.

Daniel el-Meleh, a retired software engineer from Jerusalem, said that he tries to come here every week, even though prominent rabbis in Israel say the Temple Mount is too holy and that Jews should not be setting foot there.

“I’m not coming for a religious purpose. I’m coming for [a] national purpose. Just to be here. To say, I’m part of it. That’s my home. It’s like you go back to your home, and you want to sit there because that’s yours. So, I’m here to say, ‘That’s mine.’”

Meleh said that he doesn’t agree with the status quo framework.

“It’s not OK, because I’m telling you, that’s the only place in the world, on the planet where I don’t feel comfortable.”

He said that he’s not comfortable because Jewish prayer is forbidden on the Temple Mount, and because Jews are only allowed to visit during certain times of the day.

On Sunday, Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made his second known visit to Jerusalem’s holiest site. In a video released by his office, he said the presence of Israeli police “proves who’s in charge in Jerusalem.”

US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said the Biden administration was concerned by Ben-Gvir’s “provocative visit … and the accompanying inflammatory rhetoric.”  

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For Alona Toftul and her family, most of what remains of their old life on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, is saved on her phone.

She scrolled through some old videos of her children — Agata, 14, in piano class, Arkhip, 11, in their kitchen with his guitar, his fingers barely reaching the highest strings.

“When we fled, we didn’t bring Arkhip’s guitar,” she said. “It was hardly priority luggage. We left with what we could carry in small backpacks.”

The Toftuls’ house was just four miles from the village of Bucha, where Russian soldiers are accused of torturing and massacring civilians at the war’s outset.

Akim and his 14-year-old sister, Agata, enjoying a sunny morning in Cazilhac, France. When they first arrived after fleeing Ukraine they would flinch at the sound of airplanes passing overhead.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

The Toftuls are Ukrainian, but ethnic Russians, so Russian is their first language. They don’t talk about what they saw at the outset of the war, but Andrei Toftul — Alona Toftul’s husband — said they were lucky that they left when they did. And he’s emphatic on one point: They’re never going back.

“They stole everything, and even booby-trapped some homes with mines.”

“Our house is still standing, but there’s nothing in it. All of the houses were abandoned when the Russians came in,” he said. “They stole everything, and even booby-trapped some homes with mines.”

Millions of Ukrainians fled their country after Russia's full-scale invasion last year. While many have returned, some can't or won't. They're starting over in new places and confronting new challenges.

The Toftuls ended up in Cazilhac, France, which has a population below 2,000 people.

When the war broke out, Toni Carvajal, the mayor of the village, asked locals to open up their homes to refugees.

“I said to the town council, ‘we ought to do our share,’” Carvajal said. “I started collecting clothes, medicine and food from surrounding villages. And I already had a license to drive a bus.”

So, Carvajal recruited a nurse, his friend Jean-Francois Carrasco and others, then drove a bus for two days to Poland in March of last year. They pulled in just as the Toftuls, and hundreds of other refugees, were walking across the border from Ukraine, desperate and dazed.

The Toftul children with their mother, Cazilhac, France.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

“We brought back 32 families with us,” Carvajal said with a hint of pride.

Among them was a single mother, Elena Khairulina, and her teenage son. 

“War is scary, but I was especially concerned for my son,” Khairulina said. “And as a young mother, well, we all know what’s been happening to young women at the hands of the Russians.”

Khairulina was alluding to rape as a weapon of war in Russian-occupied areas. The United Nations has documented dozens of cases of sexual attacks by Russian soldiers through January. Human rights nongovernmental organizations have actually put the number much higher.

Khairulina comes from a small village right next to one city where atrocities are a daily event: Bakhmut, a city that Russia’s been trying to take for months, even at the cost of tens of thousands of its soldiers. 

Olena Khairulina reached Cazilhac on a volunteer bus driven by village mayor Toni Carvajal. On the bus was French volunteer Jean-Francois Carrasco. Months after returning he and Khairulina fell in love. She’s learning French and working in a hotel, and has no plans to return to her village in Ukraine near Bakhmut.

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Gerry Hadden/The World

Like the Toftuls, Khairulina said that she’s never going back. She has a job now working in a hotel and is learning French.

She’s also now in a relationship with Carrasco, the mayor’s friend, whom she met during his trip to Poland.

“She’s getting better and better each day,” he said about her language skills.

Khairulina seems happy with the here-and-now. But she still has plenty to worry about. Her son just returned to Ukraine, against her wishes. She said that he wanted to finish high school in his own language — Russian — before returning to France for good.

“It’s not OK,” she said, starting to cry. “I am scared for my boy.”

The Toftul family is divided as well. And they’re not alone. Of the 32 families that arrived in Cazilhac last year, 29 of them have already returned home, despite the risks.

Andrei Toftul found a job as a handyman for the town — painting, fixing plumbing and other odd jobs — while his wife learned how to do manicures.

And the Toftul children are starting to adapt to their new life.

They are safe now, said Alona Toftul. And they no longer duck at the sound of airplanes.

She added that her next goal is to make life feel as normal as possible, saying she plans to sign them up for classes at the local music school, even if they don’t have their own instruments with them from home.

But Andrei Toftul’s parents refuse to leave their home country, despite the ongoing fighting.

“My father wants to die in his country,” Andrei Toftul said. “I understand him. He’s worked hard his whole life for what he has. He can’t just leave it all behind.”

Related: Ukrainian refugees create their own school in Romania

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Fazlullah Safi was a captain in the Afghan National Army’s medical unit treating soldiers until the government was toppled by the Taliban in August of 2021.

He said that his family remains in hiding in Afghanistan from the Taliban because of his affiliation with the former Afghan army. The Taliban searched for him at his family’s home several times, bringing a photo of him in his army uniform.

“I cannot go back to Afghanistan because they [will] target me,” Fazlullah Safi, 28, said, speaking from an iftar gathering hosted by the Afghan American Foundation and ICNA Relief in Woodbridge, Virginia, at the end of Ramadan last month.

Fazlullah Safi is among the more than 78,000 Afghan refugees who arrived in the United States in the days following the fall of Kabul through the humanitarian parole program called Operation Allies Welcome, which was set up by the Biden administration to accommodate the urgent evacuation.

The Department of Homeland Security’s humanitarian parole program allows the refugees to remain in the country for around two years. Similar programs were set up in the past for refugees from Vietnam, Cuba and Iraq. However, the program does not grant permanent resident status or provide a pathway to US citizenship — and it expires this summer.

Recently arrived Afghans attend an iftar in Woodbridge, Virginia, at the end of Ramadan. 

 

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Valerie Plesch/The World

Earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it is establishing a process starting in June that will allow Afghan nationals to request reparole so they can continue living and working legally in the United States for another two years.

But this is only a temporary fix for protections from deportation. DHS has encouraged Afghan refugees to pursue permanent status through other avenues, including asylum — a lengthy and expensive process.

Fazlullah Safi’s cousin, Nazanin Omarzada Safi, 29, also a parolee, said she has been waiting for over a year for her asylum case to be approved. She was a doctor with the Afghan army and was injured during the evacuation.

A Quran rests on a table during an Iftar in Woodbridge, Virginia, at the end of Ramadan for recently resettled Afghans. 

 

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Valerie Plesch/The World

As a woman working in today’s Afghanistan, especially having worked for the Afghan military, she said it would be a death sentence for her to return to Afghanistan.

In addition to needing a legal pathway to stay in the United States, she said that she is unable to apply for certain benefits and jobs as a parolee. The permanent solution to situations like hers, she said, is for Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, a bipartisan bill that would allow the refugees to stay permanently. 

Nazanin Omarzada Safi was a doctor with the Afghan army and was injured during the evacuation. 

 

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Valerie Plesch/The World

Mustafa Babak is the executive director of the Afghan American Foundation, which has been advocating for the Afghan Adjustment Act. It was introduced by the last Congress, but it wasn’t included in the omnibus bill before the end of last year — despite strong support from senior military leaders.

“We have done a lot of advocacy around a permanent pathway for Afghans to make America home,” he said. “We believe there are moral responsibilities for the United States, with whom Afghans, in general, actually, fought in promoting democracy, in bringing peace and stability and economic development.”

Mustafa Babak, executive director of the Afghan American Foundation, during an iftar in Woodbridge, Virginia, at the end of Ramadan.

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Valerie Plesch/The World

Sen. Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, a co-signer of the Afghan Adjustment Act bill last year, is negotiating with potential additional co-sponsors to create a strong, bipartisan group that will reintroduce the bill to Congress.

“I've heard dozens of stories in person, by phone, through email, about Afghans who were relocated to the United States and who are here under humanitarian parole, which expires this summer after two years, who are anxious and are concerned about the lack of a clear path towards permanent residency,” Coons said.

If the bill isn’t passed, he said, the “alternative is a badly broken asylum system that is swamped by a backlog.”

As of February, fewer than 5,000 Afghans who were evacuated to the US have been able to obtain permanent residence.

Joseph Azam was born in Afghanistan and moved to the United States in the early 1980s and serves on the board of the Afghan American Foundation.

Azam said that although the Afghan parolees were able to obtain employment authorization and send their kids to school, all of that is “just contingent on their continuing to have legal status. … The public doesn't understand that the clock is ticking.”

Azam said that he is concerned about Afghanistan falling off the public’s radar.

Meena Khalil from ICNA Relief speaks during an iftar in Woodbridge, Virginia, at the end of Ramadan. 

 

Credit:

Valerie Plesch/The World

“The world is changing, and attention shifting,” he said. “And so, it's going to be harder and harder to keep this front of mind for people, but we are trying.”

Opponents of the Afghan Adjustment Act who blocked the bill say that Afghan refugees need to undergo more security vetting.

But some say resistance to passing the Afghan Adjustment Act is part of a larger issue around immigration.

“Any topic on immigration, whether it's about the border, about Dreamers, about Afghans, about even high-skilled immigrants who can really contribute to our economy, Congress is really struggling to act on immigration,” said Julia Gelatt, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.

“Congress is just having a hard time passing anything. Every single piece of legislation seems to become politicized and really difficult to pass,” she added.

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More than a year of war has changed Ukraine forever — but it is also reshaping Russia, with opinion starkly divided on what should happen to the country after the conflict.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is hoping its borders will be expanded and his own grip on power will be strengthened. Many outside Russia are pushing for a future without Putin, in which Moscow will never again be in a position to invade its neighbors.

But some Russians themselves are calling for a restructuring of the country and a rethinking of Russian national identity — often at great personal risk.

Alexandra Garmazhapova, a Russian citizen originally from the Siberian region of Buryatia, now lives between Brussels and Prague.

Earlier this year, she said, she was put on Russia’s wanted list over her work with a group calling for greater autonomy for Buryatia.

“If I try to go back, I’ll be arrested as soon as I get off the plane,” she said.

She also voiced fears about other activists and opposition figures who have been poisoned by Russian agents.

Garmazhapova is one of a number of ethnic-minority activists who are using the conflict in Ukraine to highlight racism within Russia and fight Moscow’s top-down rule of the country.

About 70% of Russians are ethnically Slavic, but the country is also home to almost 200 other ethnic groups, like Buryats, who have historically been badly treated.

Garmazhapova said it’s absurd for Putin to call himself an anti-fascist, and say that he invaded Ukraine to fight naziism there.

“He’s the xenophobe in chief,” she said. “He’s a chauvinist who has proudly described himself for years as a Russian nationalist.”

The president often talks about Russia’s multi-ethnic makeup. But in reality, authorities have long targeted ethnic minority activists and tried to limit the teaching of minority languages.

Thousands of miles from the capital, Buryatia is one of Russia’s poorest regions. It has historic ties to Mongolia but was colonized by Tsarist Russia from the 1600s.

Garmazhapova said that she would often be told to “go home” to China or Uzbekistan, because of her Asiatic appearance.

“I’d say, ‘Actually, I’m a citizen of the Russian Federation. I have the same passport that you do.’”

At the start of the invasion, Garmazhapova’s Free Buryatia Foundation helped soldiers from the region escape army contracts and return home.

The group said Buryat men were used as “cannon fodder” as their lives were seen as less valuable. Then, they were unfairly blamed for committing the worst atrocities of the war.

But bringing soldiers back from the front has become all but impossible under new laws.

Now, Garmazhapova is campaigning for genuine local government in Russia — like in the United States or Germany.

That dream might be a long way off.

Putin has spent the last two decades centralizing power in the Kremlin, and anyone who challenges this in a meaningful way is arrested, forced to flee the country, or in some cases, killed.

Some ethnic minority activists want to go even further than Garmazhapova. They don’t want their regions to be part of the Russian Federation at all — they want to be completely independent.

Among them is Raisa Zubareva, an activist from Yakutia, a far eastern region. She now lives in Warsaw.

“Russia mustn’t carry on existing as it is. In its current form, it will always be a threat,” she said, adding that the mineral resources that provide the money for the military come from regions like hers.

Most politicians in the West, she said, are reluctant to publicly back the breakup of Russia, rejecting it as too extreme.

But she suggested that, if you keep repeating an idea, eventually, it will become normalized.

Zubareva said that she doesn’t see a problem with activists like her living outside Russia.

“If they stay there, they will be arrested, and you can’t communicate with the public from prison.” Her Free Yakutia Foundation sees its work as informing the public and changing attitudes.

Activists might be divided on whether they want independence or just greater autonomy. But they all agree that the war in Ukraine has given them an important opportunity to bring their plights to global attention.

They say that invasion has laid bare Russia’s imperial, colonial mentality, which is not just killing Ukrainians, but also harming ethnic minorities within its own borders.

Abubakar Yangulbaev is a human rights lawyer from Chechnya, which was brutally subjugated by Moscow after fighting for its independence. He now lives in Paris.

“After Russia invaded Ukraine, we started to talk about racism, chauvinism and xenophobia inside Russia,” Yangulbaev said. “And it's a big problem, because in Russia, Russia never fought against racism.”

Now, people are starting to pay attention to what life is actually like for minorities in Russia.

“Right now, many national minorities have resources, we have a network.”

While Russian society becomes ever more nationalistic as the war drags on, conversations around racism and decentralization are beginning to happen.

People from minority groups are increasingly interested in their own cultures and history, these activists say. Whatever the challenges ahead, they believe another Russia is possible.

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The US has once again buckled under pressure from European allies and Ukraine's leaders and agreed to provide more sophisticated weapons to the war effort. This time, it's all about F-16 fighter jets.

Ukraine has long asked for advanced fighter jets to give it a combat edge as it battles Russia's invasion, now in its second year. And this new plan opens the door for several nations to supply the fourth-generation aircraft and for the US to help train the pilots. President Joe Biden laid out the agreement to world leaders meeting in Hiroshima, Japan, on Friday, according to US officials.

So far, however, the US has provided no details and said decisions on when, how many, and who will supply the F-16s will be made in the months ahead while the training is underway. Details on the training are equally elusive. 

In Hiroshima, Biden was asked whether these decisions could potentially escalate the war.

“I have a flat assurance from [Ukrainian President] Zelenskiy that they will not use it to go on and move into Russian geographic territory, but wherever Russian troops are within Ukraine and the area, they will be able to do that,” Biden said.

Zelenskiy said that his priority is to strengthen Ukraine’s air defense as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine from the sky. The battle for air superiority in Ukraine has been ongoing since Russia's invasion, and now, Ukraine hopes that F-16s can help them counteract Russia's advantages. 

Already, US equipment has been instrumental in Ukraine’s air defense.

Earlier this month, Ukraine shot down multiple Russian hypersonic missiles called Kinzhal, meaning “dagger” — which Russian President Vladimir Putin has called “unstoppable.” The missiles were reportedly shot down with the American-supplied Patriot air defense system.

Valery Romanenko is a Ukrainian aviation and air defense expert.

“Last year, we were able to hit only the Russian planes, helicopters and cruise missiles. Now, we can hit all the Russian types of attack weapon, ballistic missiles including.”

Romanenko said that air warfare in Ukraine is evolving in other key ways as well.

“The Ukrainian Russian war is the first war of drones. Russians use both attack and recon drones and are very dangerous for us.”

Russia has often deployed these drones to damage Ukraine’s electric grid.

But in recent months, Ukraine has mostly withstood these attacks.

“Our air defense confirmed their high efficiency. For example, [in the] last two drone attacks, all 100% of drones were destroyed.”

Ukraine isn’t just defending itself from drones. It’s also using them as a weapon.

Juice is a 30-year-old Ukrainian fighter pilot. Juice is his call sign. He doesn’t reveal his name or his face because of security concerns.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

Yaroslav Markevych commands a drone unit in the northeastern city of Kharkiv.

Markevych said that at drone command centers, they’re able to provide intelligence to troops fighting on the front lines. They use drones to gather intelligence, and then that information is uploaded to a digital map that Ukraine’s military uses.

“We can see our enemy’s positions,” Markevych said, adding, “As a result, our decision-making is much more effective.”

Drones are also useful when soldiers are low on heavy ammunition. They use the drones as a replacement for artillery — they’re rigged with grenades and other munitions that can be dropped on enemy positions.

But he said, “The enemy is also adapting.”

Russia jams Ukrainian signals, which is the most effective way to take out drones. Markevych said that he believes that drones are the future of modern warfare. But the military insists it also needs modern jets to win the war. 

 Yaroslav Markevych commands a drone unit in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, Ukraine.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

“We needed to start the process like a half year ago, and nowadays, we would have combat-ready pilots,” said a 30-year-old fighter pilot who goes by his call sign, Juice. He didn’t reveal his name because of security concerns.

“At the moment, we have almost no air-to-air capabilities against the Russian air force,” Juice said. “We are absolutely not able to counteract Russian fighters and bombers, because of very outdated radars, because of very outdated and not capable at all air to air missiles.”

That’s why Juice is so adamant that Ukraine needs modern jets like the F-16. But until Ukraine has those jets in hand, Juice said that the country’s fighter pilots will still manage to pull off some successful missions.

“Usually, it’s like one mission per day, and you’re ready to get in your jet in like a few minutes and just to take off as soon as possible to intercept missiles or drones.”

Yaroslav Markevych, who commands a drone unit in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, Ukraine, shows a model of a munition that can be attached to a drone.

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Anastasia Vlasova/The World

He called this a multilayered air defense system. Missile batteries try to shoot down Russian projectiles from the ground and fighter pilots try to shoot them down from the sky.

“You’re feeling adrenaline and you’re talking with your jet, like, let’s try, please, let’s do it, let’s kill these missiles, let’s intercept them, let’s save the people on the ground.”

Juice said that F-16s would significantly improve his ability to hit incoming Russian missiles.

He also said that these jets will help Ukraine’s offensive capabilities.  

“We can’t just wait for a miracle. We need to fight, we are ready to fight, we are trained, we are motivated, we need the tools.”

After Biden’s announcement in Hiroshima, it looks like Ukraine’s pilots will get the tools that they’ve been waiting for.   

The Associated Press and Volodymyr Solohub contributed to this report.

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Passersby do a double take when they see Kaz Kobayashi and Ikki Goto.

The two men glide through Tokyo’s bustling Ikebukuro district in full-length samurai outfits, while wielding objects that look like swords. They are members of the Gomi Hiroi Samurai or the trash-collecting samurai.

Kaz Kobayashi and Ikki Goto, part of the Gomi Hiroi Samurai group, are actors who perform as samurai who clean up Tokyo.

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Julia Kim/The World 

“Yesterday was Friday so people are smoking and drinking around here, so there’s a lot of trash,” Kobayashi said.

On closer inspection, their samurai swords — or katanas — are actually just very long tongs, used to pick up litter. Kobayashi said the tongs are important for novelty value.

“We’re doing this as entertainment … but it can be tiring sometimes. It’s tough, man.”

The Gomi Hiroi Samurai do this three times a week. There’s four of them, and they’re professional actors. In their spare time, they volunteer to keep the streets of Tokyo clean. Goto formed the group in 2009. Since then, they have become a viral sensation on TikTok, with over 700,000 followers and counting.

 

Kaz Kobayashi and Ikki Goto, part of the Gomi Hiroi Samurai group, are actors who perform as samurai who clean up Tokyo.

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Julia Kim/The World  

Here in Ikebukuro, they target back alleys and parking lots, which are rife with litter. Kobayashi and Goto, working in sync, slice and spin their tongs through the air, meticulously seizing cigarette butts one by one before tossing them into the wastebaskets strapped to their backs.

Manaka Nishibiro, a nursery teacher trainee, watched them from a distance.

“Picking up trash is unpleasant for most people, but their performance makes it look so fun,” Nishibiro said, adding that she hopes it might encourage others to do the same.

Kaz Kobayashi and Ikki Goto pick up litter in Tokyo as part of an acting troupe, the Gomi Hiroi Samurai, who have an environmental mission.

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Julia Kim/The World 

An hour later, Kobayashi and Goto took their wastebaskets to a recycling base. There, they separated out every piece of rubbish they’ve collected. They said that they hope to recruit more Gomi Hiroi samurai  in Japan — and around the world — to spread their message: “We punish immoral hearts.”

It means that trash in and of itself isn’t bad. Instead, it’s people and the actions that stem from their negative mindsets. And a growing sense of negativity is something that Kobayashi said worries him.

“This is a problem in Japan,” he said. “People don’t go outside.”

Kaz Kobayashi and Ikki Goto, actors, use their roles in the Gomi Hiroi Samurai as a way to entertain and encourage people to keep the outdoors clean.

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Julia Kim/The World 

Last month, a government survey showed that 1.5 million people are living as social recluses in Japan. With loneliness and depression on the rise, Kobayashi said he hopes that their fun, zany take on something as mundane as trash-collecting helps people reengage with the outside world.

Kaz Kobayashi and Ikki Goto, part of the Gomi Hiroi Samurai group, are professional actors who volunteer to clean up litter in Tokyo. Their mantra is “clean space, clear mind.”

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Julia Kim/The World  

“Samurai is a warrior,” he said. “Our philosophy is to help people.”

For these eco-warriors, “clean space, clear mind” is more than just a saying — it’s the way of the Gomi Hiroi samurai.

Listen to the other stories in the four-part Waste Pickers series on The World:

Trash sorters in Ghana face health and safety risks

In Mumbai, waste pickers do the heavy lifting of recycling

‘We were treated as disposable beings’: Waste pickers in Colombia fought for their rights after 11 murder

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Back in 1992, security guards at the Universidad Libre in the Colombian city of Barranquilla came up with a way to help the medical school — and themselves.

On quiet nights, they lured waste pickers onto campus to collect old cans and cardboard boxes — it was a trap. The guards beat them with bats, and shot them, according to court documents. Then, they sold the bodies to the medical school, where the students needed cadavers to learn on.

This went unnoticed for weeks, until one waste picker survived. After he was put in a bathtub full of formaldehyde, the man escaped and alerted the police. On March 1, as the city celebrated its annual carnival, officials found the bodies of 11 waste pickers in the university’s morgue.

“It’s something that still makes us feel pain,” said Marisol Mogollon, a waste picker in Bogotá.  “Just to think that we were treated as disposable beings.”

Waste picker Alfredo Rodriguez separates cardboard from plastic at a park in a wealthy area of Bogotá, Colombia.

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Manuel Rueda/The World 

The crime shocked the nation but it also galvanized waste pickers in Colombia. They went from being one of the most marginalized groups in the country to being highly visible, fighting for their rights in the streets and in courts. Nowadays, Colombia is a global leader when it comes to granting rights to these workers, said Federico Parra, an urban anthropologist who specializes in grassroots organizations.

“This [crime] created a huge movement that impulsed the waste pickers' organizations to fight for their rights,” he said.

Many waste pickers in Colombia are now recognized as public service providers, and they can go anywhere in the city to collect goods that can be recycled — without fear.

Miguel Lugo organizes cardboard at a warehouse run by ARAUS, the Usme Waste Pickers Association.

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Manuel Rueda/The World 

A lot of them still get around the city on foot, pulling heavy wooden carts. But they have formed associations that own trucks, and collect their trash at designated points. Previously, waste pickers had to drag their carts for several miles to get to warehouses where they sold items like cardboard, bottles and tin cans.

Alfredo Rodriguez is a waste picker in Chapinero, a wealthy district in the north of Bogotá. As he pulled his wooden cart along a street lined with office buildings and expensive apartments, he said the job still pays little, and requires long hours. But slowly, the conditions have been improving.

“We used to fight over trash bags in the street,” he said. “Now, it’s more orderly, and we also get gloves, face masks and boots with steel tips.”

In Colombia, waste pickers have filed several lawsuits against city governments that have privatized waste collection and given some recycling responsibilities to government contractors.

In 2011, the nation’s Constitutional Court ruled that municipal governments had to take actions to protect waste pickers, because they are a vulnerable group that provides an important service.

Miguel Lugo and William Lugo stop at a school where they are going to collect trash that can be recycled. The ARAUS waste pickers association owns a truck that has helped it to increase its monthly haul. 

 

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Manuel Rueda/The World 

Following that groundbreaking ruling, cities like Bogotá have begun to require that contractors pay waste pickers a portion of the funds that they get from waste management taxes.

So, in Bogotá, waste pickers don’t just get paid for what they sell to warehouses each day. They also get a monthly fee that comes from the waste management tax. It’s known as the tarifa.

“We get anywhere from $30 to $90 from the tarifa, depending on how much [trash] we gathered,” said Sandra Martinez, a waste picker in Usme, a district at the southern edge of Bogotá. “It’s not much, but it helps to pay the bills.”

At the end of the month, waste pickers’ associations also get paid a fee, which varies according to how many tons their members collect.

Waste picker Emiliano Martinez pushes his cart through a neighborhood in Usme, where he collects trash door to door. 

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Manuel Rueda/The World 

Jorge Ospina directs ARAUS, the waste pickers association in Bogotá’s Usme district. His association has 75 members and gets about $5,000 a month from local taxes.

“Thanks to the tariff, our association has enough money to rent three warehouses, and we’ve also bought a truck.” he said.

At one of the warehouses, two employees stripped labels away from hundreds of plastic bottles, so that they could sell them to a local recycling plant.

Thanks to the warehouse, there’s no longer any need to sell trash to middle men. And the association’s members can get better prices for what they collect.

Waste picker Edgar Rodriguez loads cardboard on a truck owned by ARAUS, the Usme Waster Pickers Association. The truck helps the association to collect more trash and makes things easier for waste pickers in the district of Usme. 

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Manuel Rueda/The World

But waste pickers in the city still face many challenges. Prices for some items, like cardboard, have fallen recently. And for some waste pickers it’s also become harder to gather decent amounts of trash.

Martinez said many Venezuelan migrants who are out of work are also roaming the streets of Bogotá looking for items that can be sold to recycling plants.

“They open the trash bags before we can get to them,” she said. “And with the economic crisis, even homeowners are holding on to stuff, and selling it themselves to warehouses.”

But the biggest challenge for Bogotá’s waste pickers are large contractors that are also trying to get a piece of the recycling business.

Jorge Ospina, (center) standing with other waste pickers who are affiliated to the ARAUS association. Ospina has been the group’s director for more than 20 years and under his leadership they have been able to rent warehouses and get their own truck.

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Manuel Rueda/The World 

Ospina, from the ARAUS association, said that some of these companies have even formed dubious associations that are trying to claim some of the monthly payments that are reserved for waste pickers.

“Before the tariff system began, we only had around 40 waste pickers’ associations in Bogotá,” he said. “But now, there are 450. The city government has to eliminate the fake organizations, so that only the authentic waste pickers benefit from the monthly payments.”

Still, for many waste pickers in Bogotá, like Martinez, this is an industry that has changed for the better, even if these transformations were sparked by a horrible set of murders.

“Our job has more recognition now,” she said. “We used to be perceived as junkies, or disposable people. But now, our role in the city is respected.”

Listen to the other stories in the four-part Waste Pickers series on The World:

Trash sorters in Ghana face health and safety risks

In Mumbai, waste pickers do the heavy lifting of recycling

Tokyo’s trash-collecting samurai takes a fun, zany approach to cleanup

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The monthlong fighting in Sudan doesn’t seem to be relenting. The Sudanese Army and the militias of the Rapid Support Forces continue to face off in urban areas like Khartoum.

About 200,000 people have been forced to flee to nearby countries, and over 700,000 have been displaced inside Sudan, triggering a humanitarian crisis. Many more remain trapped in the country.

Amid this humanitarian crisis, a food factory was burned down last week, leaving many children at risk of starvation.

The Samil factory made life-saving products called RUTFs, which stands for ready-to-use therapeutic food.

RUTF was invented by a French scientist 25 years ago, and it is used to treat severely malnourished children under the age of 5.

“It is a bit of magic food because you do bring a child back from the brink of death,” explained James Elder, spokesperson for UNICEF. “It’s a dense energy paste. It’s full of micronutrients, peanuts and sugar, powdered milk, vitamins [and] oil. It’s got everything, it really does.”

UNICEF worked with the Samil factory in Khartoum to procure the RUTFs it needs to feed children in Sudan.

Elder said he doesn’t know who was behind the fire at the factory — whether it was a deliberate act or if it was just the consequence of the two sides fighting.

What is clear, though, is that 15,000 boxes of the food have been destroyed.

“The factory that produces 60% of this ready-to-use therapeutic food for Sudanese children [was] burned down, the production line, the machinery and all the ability to keep producing. So, it was yet another blow to children that are under attack from so many directions,” he said.

The UN estimates that 19 million people are at risk of starvation in Sudan.

Many have fled but for those who remain, venturing out to get food can cost them their lives. Banks have been closed down, and people are running out of cash.

Elder added that UNICEF is now trying to bring in the ready-to-use food from other countries. But the ongoing fighting makes deliveries challenging.

“This was already a cruel place for millions and millions of children. It just got that [much] more difficult,” he lamented.

The US ambassador to Sudan, John Godfrey, described the factory as the backbone of humanitarian child supplemental feeding programs in Sudan.

He said in a tweet that 3 million children in Sudan already suffered from hunger and malnourishment. This conflict has increased that number, he added.

The burning down of the Samil factory is part of a pattern of destruction of food supplies that makes life for residents so difficult, they decide to leave.

On Monday, aerial footage showed a large fire in the market in the Sudanese city of Omdurman, northwest of Khartoum.

In the early days of the war, The World Food Program said its warehouses were looted and that more than 13 million dollars worth of food was taken.

“We are looking at 25 to 30,000 refugees crossing the border [into Chad] in the last few days,” Eujin Byun of the United Nations Refugee Agency told The World in a WhatsApp message, adding that more than 90% of them are women and children.

Byun said her team has seen a lot of children crossing the border by themselves.

“We see a lot of orphans without relatives, without their parents crossing the border. It is indeed a children’s crisis.”

Elder of UNICEF said according to his organization’s tally, just in the first 11 days of the war, 190 children were killed. This is probably an undercount, he said, given the difficulties in confirming the deaths in a conflict zone.

Now, with the news about the only factory making food for severely malnourished children out of operation, fears are growing about the survival of millions of children.

Elder said timing is crucial in saving malnourished children, so supplies must arrive fast.

If that doesn’t happen, even if the children survive bombs and bullets, they could die of hunger.

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A vyshyvanka is an elaborately embroidered shirt or dress traditionally worn in Ukraine — it’s one of the country’s best-known symbols.

Despite the ongoing Russian attacks on Ukraine, Ukrainians around the world are celebrating Vyshyvanka Day on Thursday.

Kateryna Vozianova, who owns Indposhiv, a men’s fashion brand based in Kyiv, said the vyshyvanka isn’t something she thought about before the full-scale Russian invasion. The company is known for its high-end, custom-tailored suits. 

But now, Vozianova said, it’s important for her brand to reflect this moment in history when many Ukrainians — herself included — are rediscovering their national identity. That’s why Indposhiv pivoted to producing vyshyvankas.

“Before the war, it meant nothing to me, because I didn’t feel that I needed to emphasize that I’m Ukrainian,” she said. “Right now, it has changed completely because it’s the symbol of Ukrainian struggle, everything we are going through right now, and the changes inside yourself and inside everyone.”

Vozianova said that more vyshyvanka orders are coming in because of the holiday. It takes up to six weeks to make one, so Indposhiv ran a social media campaign, she said, asking people to order in advance. She said that she is celebrating the holiday by wearing her vyshyvanka at work.

This vyshyvanka at Indposhiv, a men’s fashion brand based in Kyiv, Ukraine, is embroidered with military symbols reflecting the fact that the country is at war.

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Daniel Ofman/The World 

At first glance, the company’s vyshyvankas look pretty typical — embroidered patterns, colorful and comfortable. But they have veered away from traditional symbols, like flowers, trees, birds — some of the vyshyvankas depict drones, tanks or military symbols and come in army green. 

“The idea is to translate that we are going through war, this is why on this vyshyvanka you can see all this military machine, tanks, the resistance and the unity of our people,” she said.

Indposhiv, a men’s fashion brand based in Kyiv, Ukraine, produces vyshyvankas that display military symbols to show national pride.

Credit:

Daniel Ofman/The World 

Roxolyana Gera, who lives in the trendy Podil neighborhood of Kyiv with her family, collects vyshyvankas, including some modern ones.

“First, I started to buy books about embroidery and about vyshyvanka and about Ukrainian culture, and those books opened a galaxy of Ukrainian culture for me.”

Gera was inspired. She started going to flea markets and joined vyshyvanka collector groups on social media.

“I wanted to find vyshyvankas from each region of Ukraine, and it was my aim, and I’m almost there.”

Roxolyana Gera, of Kyiv, Ukraine, belongs to vyshyvankas collectors groups on social media. She collects old and new ones and is trying her hand at the embroidery herself.

Credit:

Daniel Ofman/The World 

Gera remembers growing up in western Ukraine, when her family would wear Vyshyvankas on special occasions, like Christmas and Easter.

“I was born in [the] Soviet Union, actually, and it was prohibited to celebrate all the religious holidays, so we still gathered at our granny’s house and we [would] wear Vyshyvankas as a protest and a sign, we remember our roots.”

These days, Gera said that she’s dabbling in traditional embroidery herself. 

Roxolyana Gera, who lives in the trendy Podil neighborhood of Kyiv, Ukraine, with her family, collects vyshyvankas, including some modern ones.

Credit:

Daniel Ofman/The World 

“I started doing my first vyshyvanka last year, during the air alarms because, while sitting in the corridor or safe place, you have nothing to do because it’s very difficult to start reading because you are a little bit stressed.”

Just sitting with a needle and thread, she said, can be therapeutic and a welcome distraction. 

Volodymyr Solohub contributed to this report.

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Ali Mohammad, a recycler in Dharavi, an informal settlement in Mumbai, one of India’s largest cities, sorts through a mountain of plastic ice cream cartons, which are destined to become anything from hair combs to water buckets.

“The life of plastic never ends. It breaks, then, in one month or so, it comes back as another thing,” he said.

Ali Mohammad sorts through ice cream containers for recycling.

Credit:

Justin Nisly/The World 

After moving here from Uttar Pradesh, a large state in northern India, Mohammad has spent the past four years separating, washing and chopping plastic as part of Dharavi’s bustling recycling operation.

In Mumbai, home to 20 million people, waste ends up in Dharavi ​​with recyclers like Mohammad. A quarter of the people living here are employed in recycling at least 60% of the city’s plastic — a recycling rate far higher than the average in the US.

The recyclables that Mohammad digs through in a one-room, independent shop come from waste pickers who gather the recycling from the landfills and streets. Both groups of workers are crucial — and interlinked — in India, which is grappling with how to manage the rapid growth of plastics and other solid wastes.

Ice cream containers from popular Indian brands wait to be recycled.

Credit:

Justin Nisly/The World 

In Mumbai, a city crushed by the amount of garbage discarded each day, waste pickers help make this metropolis livable. And for every bottle and bag collected, that’s less plastic that ends up in the ocean.

The process begins in neighborhoods like Bandra, 20 minutes from Dharavi where Sheikh Salim gathered litter on the side of a road.

Salim, a waste picker, set down an enormous bag and listed the contents so far: “There is paper, these are bottles, this is a metal container, a thin sheet of plastic.”

He added, “I will take this waste to the scrap dealer who will weigh it and whatever, 150 rupees [$1.80], I will get.”

From the scrap dealer, most of the dry waste will eventually go to a recycler. In Mumbai, that could be a small-scale operation in Dharavi.

Though municipalities often also have a centralized, official version of waste management — for instance, garbage trucks that collect each day from households and some recycling centers — they tacitly rely on waste pickers and unlicensed recycling centers to augment their services. 

Separating the recycling

 Swati Singh Sambyal, an independent waste management expert, said that this interconnected waste management process is convoluted: “There’s a formal system of management, there’s an informal system of management, and that’s where the chaos is.”

Sambyal noted that since the Indian government issued its Solid Waste Management Rules 2016, the mindset of many Indians has been changing — and that is a good thing.

Sheik Salim collects recyclables in his bag along a street in Bandra, in Mumbai, India.

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Justin Nisly/The World 

These rules, which mandate that homes and businesses should separate dry, wet and hazardous waste, have sparked a growing awareness about the importance of scientifically managing trash.

Still, many households don’t. Instead, they might toss plastic water bottles in with food scraps and diapers. And Sambyal said that even when families do separate their trash, the city garbage collectors might toss it all together.

“Perhaps, if I’m doing it [waste segregation] as a resident, it’s being collected and then mixed, and then, say, going to a facility where it’s burned. Me segregating then goes down the drain.”

​Or, municipal sanitation trucks might just dump everything into landfills that other waste pickers then dig through, which is dangerous work.

As experts consider ways of improving this system, Sambyal said an important question to ask is: “How do we formalize the informal sector, or if we’re not able to do so, how do we bring them into our processes?”

It’s a question Sushila Sable is also asking. She is part of a women’s empowerment group in Mumbai called Stree Mukti Sanghatana.

For decades, she did the hazardous and difficult work of gathering recyclables from a nearby dumping ground. Now, she works to organize them.

Sable said it is high time that waste pickers be officially recognized for their important role.

Sushila Sable, a former waste picker, now manages a women's empowerment group.

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Justin Nisly/The World 

“From the year 2008, we have been demanding that we be given an identity card, to be recognized and live a life as humane as possible given the circumstances we work in. But [we] have not got the identity card.”

Official IDs protect them from police harassment, reduce the stigma of the job, and waste pickers say it could improve their access to subsidized housing, health care and education for their kids.

New approaches to a growing challenge

 The good news is some Indian cities have already begun to incorporate waste pickers into their waste management systems. For instance, the city of Ambikapur, in the state of Chhattisgarh, has given several hundred waste pickers ID cards, so they can collect garbage from people’s homes — where it’s been presorted.

Later, the dry waste will be separated into a whopping 156 different items.

In Dharavi, an informal settlement in Mumbai, India, men separate plastic and metal components for reycling.

Credit:

Justin Nisly/The World 

Ritesh Saini, based within the city government, is the local officer for the country’s Clean India mission, Swachh Bharat. Saini explained that they divide their dry waste so carefully because “the more we segregate, the more revenue we can earn.”

As an example, he cited an average water bottle.

“The cap is separated, the plastic wrapper is separated, and the bottle body is separated,” and by selling each piece to a different vendor, Saini said, the city generates a lot more income.

Raju Rajput (left) and his colleagues take a break from recycling plastic car bumpers in his shop.

Credit:

Justin Nisly/The World 

Back in Dharavi, Mohammad said that business is booming for recyclers like him, as Indians throw away more trash than ever. In fact, the Indian government predicts that the country’s plastic use will more than triple in the next decade.

It’s a big reason why waste pickers are asking for more protection and recognition for their role in waste management.

“We work for cleanliness of the surrounding living spaces as well as protecting the environment,” Sable said. “Slowly, the world is recognizing us and our role.”

Listen to the other stories in the four-part Waste Pickers series on The World:

Trash sorters in Ghana face health and safety risks

‘We were treated as disposable beings’: Waste pickers in Colombia fought for their rights after 11 murder

Tokyo’s trash-collecting samurai takes a fun, zany approach to cleanup

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Abdul Bais hung a leather briefcase over his shoulder, as he got ready to board a speedboat in Necocli, a town near Colombia’s border with Panama. It stood out among the other migrants around him, who mostly carried worn-out backpacks.

Inside the neatly arranged briefcase, he kept diplomatic passports and letters that showed he came from Afghanistan, and had worked as a diplomat for the government that was removed by the Taliban in 2021.

Bais hoped that the documents could help him to show immigration officers in the United States that he was running away from the Taliban regime, had a credible fear of returning to his country, and could qualify for asylum.

Abdul Bais, a former diplomat for Afghanistan, leads a group of migrant families. As he gets ready to board a speedboat in Necocli, Colombia, he carries his documents in a leather briefcase.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

 But to get to the southern border, he still had to cross all of Central America and Mexico, and before that, trek through the Darien Gap — a dense and roadless swath of jungle that stands between Colombia and Panama.

“In this world, no one has helped us,” said Bais, who traveled with his wife, three children and two other Afghan families fleeing the Taliban regime.

None of them had ever been in a rainforest before, or gone on a trek that can last several days. But, Bais said, they had run out of options.

“We are trying our best to reach somewhere that is safe, especially for our families.”

“We are trying our best to reach somewhere that is safe, especially for our families.”

Thousands of people from South America, Africa and Asia are making their way to the US border, following the expiration of Title 42, a public health policy that was used to block hundreds of thousands of asylum requests during the pandemic.

According to Panamanian authorities, more than 3,000 refugees from Afghanistan have crossed the Darien Gap since the Taliban regime took over in 2021. These refugees have been unable to get visas that will enable them to fly to the US.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

The journey across countries like Colombia, Panama and Mexico is difficult for Afghans, especially because they don’t speak Spanish and are unfamiliar with local customs.

Many of them saved up thousands of dollars to make the trip — having been doctors, NGO workers, politicians or media workers back home.

But their connections and relatively high income levels have now also turned them into targets for criminal groups in Latin America, according to Rafael Velasquez, the Mexico country director for the International Rescue Committee.

“We know of at least a dozen cases of Afghan people being detained by organized crime [in Mexico] and money being asked for ransom,” he said. “Unfortunately, their profile has become of interest for organized crime.”

He added that Afghans are also targeted by corrupt police officers, who seek bribes to let them continue on their journeys.

Stripped of diplomatic status

Bais worked for Afghanistan’s Embassy in Iran in 2021 when the Taliban came into power, and it wasn’t possible for him to return to the capital, Kabul. 

So, along with most of the Embassy staff, he stayed in Iran and continued to work there, representing Afghanistan’s toppled democratic government. 

But in February, Iran handed the Afghan Embassy in Tehran over to the Taliban regime. Bais was stripped of his diplomatic status, and his visa was canceled, even though it was still supposed to be valid for several more months. 

Abdul Bais displays his diplomatic passport, as he gets ready to board a speedboat in Necocli Colombia. Bais worked for Afghanistan's embassy in Iran before the Taliban took over the government.

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Manuel Rueda/The World

“They took our passport and canceled our residency,” he said. “And they told us that in one week, we had to leave” Iran.

With little clarity of where he could go next, Bais sought help at numerous embassies, and was able to secure a humanitarian visa to fly to Brazil. 

But after getting there he decided to reach the United States, where he has relatives. 

“In Brazil there was no motivation” he said. “All we could do there was sleep at a shelter and eat.” 

Since the beginning of last year, Brazil has granted humanitarian visas to 9,000  refugees from Afghanistan who were stuck in Iran and other countries.

Afghans who arrive in the country on  humanitarian visas can apply for work permits, social security numbers and residency. But it’s a lengthy process, and many struggle with language barriers and red tape, said Miguel Couy, a volunteer for the Frente Afega, an organization that helps Afghans arriving at Sao Paulo’s airport.  He said that the vast majority of Afghans that his group has helped have decided to head to the United States after staying in Brazil for a few weeks.

“These are people that were linked to US affairs in Afghanistan,” Couy said. “And they have the conception that in America, they will rebuild their life more easily and quicker, because the US has more jobs and the jobs pay more.”

Crossing the Darien Gap

After arriving at Sao Paulo’s airport in March, Bais and his family made their way to Necocli the following month, where they started to make plans to cross the Darien Gap.

“We have rented horses,” Bais explained as he stood on the pier in Necocli. “They will carry our children and luggage while the rest of us walk.” 

Bais paid smugglers $1,000 to lead his family across the Darien Gap on a boat, horses and on foot, until they reached a migrant camp in Panama where buses were available to continue across Central America.

A speed boat gets ready to set out for Capurgana, near Colombia's border with Panama.

Credit:

Manuel Rueda/The World

He’s not the only Afghan undertaking this dangerous route.

According to Panama’s immigration authority, more than 3,000 refugees from Afghanistan have crossed the Darien jungle since the Taliban takeover in August 2021, trying to reach the United States.

But it’s a journey that is costly and is fraught with risks.

When Bais and his family arrived in Guatemala, the group was stopped by police, who took them to a station and said they couldn’t continue their journey without proper documentation.

Bais said the police officers took three cellphones from them and more than $1,000 in cash before allowing them to continue.

Abdul Bais said he is worried for his daughter's future: "Everyone knows that schools and unversities have closed [for women] in Afghanistan. I don't want my daughter to be uneducated."

Credit:

Manuel Rueda/The World

He then had to pay a smuggler to get a letter from Mexican immigration officials that would enable the group to reach the US border. Now the three Afghan families are in Mexico City, where they’re planning to catch a flight to Tijuana.

The journey has been costly and dangerous, but Bais said he will not desist from reaching the US where his family plans to turn themselves in to border patrol agents and test their luck with the new immigration policies.

“We don’t have any second option,” he said in a recent phone call. He added that his family has long passed the point of no return.

Related: 'I survived a green hell': More Venezuelans are crossing the dangerous Darién Gap

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What makes a hacker tick?

A 27-year-old hacker in Ukraine named Bassterlord helps to shed some light on the matter.

He’s been a member of some of the most infamous hacking crews of our time, and he explained, through an interpreter, how he worked his way up from spammer to initial access broker — breaking into networks and selling that access to other cybercriminals.

A mentor to other hackers and the author of two ransomware manuals, Bassterlord has made a name for himself since joining the cyber underworld in 2019.

Then, in March, he announced his “retirement,” a claim security researchers largely view as misleading. Researcher Jon DiMaggio of the threat intelligence firm Analyst1 is releasing a report about him this week, and he gave the "Click Here" podcast an exclusive first look, which helped inform the discussion.

"Click Here": What would you like us to call you?

Bassterlord: Let's just simply use the name Ivan. It's a pretty popular name, and I'm more used to it.

OK. So let me just try and understand. How do we describe you?

Let's put it this way: an extortionist, retired.

Retired extortionist. OK. You've worked for lots of different hacking groups. Can you give us a little list of the ones you've worked for?

Since 2019, I worked for REvil, but I didn't have access to the panel. After the contest [Note: Bassterlord says he participated in a summer contest put on by LockBit, which sought research papers on all things cybercrime], somebody contacted me and offered [for me] to work for LockBit, but at the same time, I was working for Abaddon and I also worked for Ransom X.

And what do you think your specialty is?

I would describe myself as a searcher for access or access broker. My way of getting access is through exploits or brute-force attacks. My team is engaged in VPN and corporate server brute-force attacks.

How did you get into this work?

Since childhood, I took an interest in hacking. I was always curious and interested in the various forums, but never used them. At the beginning of 2019, I didn't know anything about ransomware, and I was just a regular human being. What really propelled me to move to the dark side of the internet was one case that happened with my mom. It's personal, but I'll still try to talk about it.

[Note: Bassterlord lives in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where fighters linked to Russia invaded in 2014.]

One night, a powerful shelling started. My mother had kidney stone disease and had an attack because of the nervous stress. Nobody could come to the rescue at that point. There was no chance to call 9-1-1 or anything like that. And only one thing helped. I saw the neighbor driving from around the corner. I simply came up, laid on the hood and said, "Help get us to the hospital. I will give you anything."

We brought my mother to the hospital and purchased medicine for credit. Obviously, I had no money at that time. So, [as] I was going home, I thought that this debt actually will have to be repaid. And at the same time, the Ukrainian jet fighters were flying overhead to bomb the neighboring town. I returned home, went to the forum and wrote my first ad on XSS [a Russian-language hacking forum]. I highlighted that I need money, and I'm not afraid of work in any country of the world.

What response did you get?

So, one man approached me through this. As it turned out, his nickname ended up being “National Hazard Agency.” He offered me work on spam. They paid, I think, $300 a month. This was just enough money to cover the expenses, or at least for some time. But as I found out later, this man happened to be one of the REvil founders. I understood the concept of what he was doing, and I asked him to teach me. He agreed, although he initially never planned it. At that particular moment, he was working on the Pulse Secure VPN. This actually was a topic of my [LockBit contest] article when I described the exploits of Pulse Secure, for which I'm being hated by many until this day.

Hated because you revealed how it worked?

Well, specifically revealed the principle of work because that was the principle utilized by many groups at that time.

And did you win money for that?

I had a consolation prize, and I actually had a proposition to get into a partnership problem with LockBit. Everybody got a consolation prize, approximately the amount of $1,000.

Did the $1,000 seem like a lot of money at the time, given that you didn't have a lot of money?

Clearly.

And I had heard that you were a graphic designer before you started doing that.

That's true. And that was my unofficial work. I was involved in drawing for clothes suppliers in the Russian Federation.

How did you get the idea for the ransomware manual?

The first part of the manual was the contest article. I simply wanted to make more money and win the contest, but I still didn't win it at that time. It took me literally two weeks to compose the text.

Why did you write a second one?

The second one I wrote for a person trying to purchase a new method of zero-days. So initially, he offered $200,000, but then he refused to pay, and I had to actually put the manual on the web for everyone to look at it. And also, I needed money at that point.

So, if I barely know how to code and have your manual, could I launch a ransomware attack just using the manual?

If you had both versions of the manual.

And there's a cybersecurity company called Prodaft. They got a copy of your manual. How did you hear about that?

I learned about it from somebody on the forum, from his message. He wrote that the manual was published by this company.

How do you think Prodaft got your manual?

I think one of the clients, one of the buyers, decided to return $10,000. They paid for it, and they sold it to the cybersecurity company.

[Note: Prodaft threat researcher Juan Ignacio Nicolossi denied this claim, saying, “We don’t give money to criminals.” Nicolossi said Prodaft “gained visibility into [Bassterlord’s] server and was able to extract [the manual].” In a follow-up email, the company said it does not use offensive tactics and insights are gathered from open-source intelligence and the work of security analysts.]

So, when you wrote these manuals, did you write them as a mentor to help the community grow or was it purely for money?

It was strictly for financial profit because, at that point, I already had my own team who I trained.

And some people say that what is different about you in this world is that you try to help people with their skills. Do you think that's accurate?

In some cases, yes. If the questions [other hackers ask] are composed correctly and they do not represent some stupid idea.

You like smart people who are trying to learn. So, you don’t like script kiddies?

Most of my team members are exactly that because they did not know anything about hacking when they came in. But I was the one who taught them.

How did you choose them?

Most of them I knew. Every one of those people I know in person and I completely trust them.

Does your crew have a name?

National Hazard Agency. This is to honor my teacher, Lalartu.

Do you consider him a friend?

The last thing I know about him is that he has some real business in Russia and he completely stepped away from his business.

I wanted to talk to you about stepping away, too. You announced that you're retiring. How does your crew feel about that?

They completely mastered my part of it. And they were actually not against it, as my psychological condition substantially deteriorated lately.

Tell me more about that.

After REvil got arrested by FSB [Russia’s Federal Security Service], I received a call from a high-ranking FSB official who requested that I show up for interrogation. That, to some extent, caused some panic in me, but as it turned out, that summons was regarding something totally different. People from Luhansk [in Ukraine] had [committed] a terror act in Russia. And they thought people from the community knew about it. So, they started summoning people from the community.

And when they called you, did you worry that they realized that you were hacking?

Correct. That's exactly what I was afraid of. I had to cover the tracks and leave the forum, making an official announcement to that effect.

You must have been relieved.

Well, my nervous stress was at capacity. After what happened with REvil, I started receiving various threats to my life and that started taking its toll on me, and I started having panic attacks.

Threats from other hackers?

I do not know from whom, but it looks like in the community many people started confusing me with “BorisElcin” from XSS. I don't know what evil he did to them, but this confusion started taking a toll on me.

But the final accord to this was the following situation. At the time of the end of my career, I made enough money not to worry about anything and not to worry about ransomware at all. I needed to put the money that I earned into cash, and I was doing this in small amounts. It was just a regular trip to the bank, and nothing was signaling any trouble. I withdrew some amount of money [and was] on the way out of the bank. [A man] was approaching me, which happened right in view of the bank cameras. He said something like, 'Well, did you take all the money or is [there] something left?'

Was he a bank manager or an employee? Or was it a stranger?

No, it was a man from the street. I got afraid that it might be some company that got upset with me. Or worse yet — gangsters, the mob.

Was it a lot of money you took from the bank? Was there any reason why he would know that you had this cash?

It was several million rubles [about $86,000 as of April 2023], and this is what caused the fear. Because nobody could know about this, as it turned out, it was simply a drunkard who tried to panhandle or approach me in front of the bank. Right after that, I started receiving threats from various cyber community members, and that made me exit and destroy all the tools of my virtual machine. It was piling up as a snowball, and at that point, I was actually being treated with medical remedies for panic attacks. So, in order to successfully complete this, I needed to wrap this whole thing up.

Where is your mom now? Does she know what you were doing?

She knows my whole story, and she lives in the next building block from me.

And is she feeling better?

Yeah, absolutely. At this point, the money that I made is absolutely sufficient to have a comfortable life here for my entire family.

Do you feel guilty about it?

No, not really. For the companies that were paying me, what I'm making is just pennies for them.

Because it was companies, and not people, you think it’s not as bad.

I think more yes than no. I think these companies have enough money to pay all their expenses, and I think people who work for them do not really suffer a lot.

Are you giving this up forever?

Well, at this point, my business is continued by eight people. One of them is in charge of XSS, and the other person is responsible for cooperation with LockBit and the panel. We have an agreement that I receive 20% and not participate in it, for the fact that I gave them the opportunity to do what they do.

So, you’re more like a manager now.

Let's put it this way: I completely distanced myself from this business, and I'm making a passive percentage.

And are you going back to graphic design?

Um, no. I have other hobbies, But I'm not going to divulge them since I can deanonymize myself by doing this.

I understand. You're living in the Russian-controlled part of Ukraine. Do you feel safe?

No. Several days ago, three HIMARS rockets hit the center of my town.

So, why are you not leaving with your mom?

We planned on doing this, but a little later, we had some document issues.

Where do you see yourself five years from now?

I'd like to create a family, and right now, my immediate plans are to construct a house in Russia.

I guess my last question is why are you talking to us?

Number one, before this, I gave an expanded interview to Jon [Dimaggio, of Analyst1], who basically got us together. I also think it's a good idea, because this will proliferate information about my leaving.

Anything else?

This chat will eventually be removed, and there won't be any materials. If you need to save anything from the materials, save it right now.

OK.

Have a good day.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

An earlier version of this story appeared on the "Click Here" podcast from Recorded Future News. Additional reporting by Sean Powers and Will Jarvis.

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This story was produced with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Thirty-six-year-old Johnson Doe has worked as a waste picker in the sprawling Kpone Landfill in Accra, Ghana, for 20 years. 

It’s not the type of job he imagined for himself as a young man, but it’s how he supports his wife, two children and his parents.

”I wanted to be a military pilot but, you know, life happens,” he said.

Waste pickers are the largest workforce in the recycling chain responsible for collecting and recovering up to 60% of all plastics. 

 

Credit:

Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

Doe — and about a thousand other waste pickers there — collects items such as plastic bottles, aluminum cans and scrap metal, which he sells to recycling companies that buy them by weight. The money it brings in depends on market demand, Doe said, but typically, he makes $13 a day.

Doe is among the more than 20 million waste pickers around the world — the largest workforce in the recycling chain — who recover up to 60% of all plastics globally. Additionally, their work helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And yet, in Ghana and elsewhere, waste pickers like Doe say they are rarely valued for what they do — they barely make a living, and are vulnerable to exploitation and exposure to pollution and toxic chemicals.

“Many people think the mentally ill people are those who work at the dumpsite,” Doe said. “So, that’s how they see us, like we are illiterate. Some people even call us criminals.”

Everyday hazards at the landfill

At the Kpone Landfill, all sorts of insects, including maggots, and other pests can be found on decaying garbage, feasting on scraps of food and nesting in rotting material. 

Then, there’s the medical waste scattered throughout — syringes, blood, pins, needles and other equipment.

Waste pickers collect items such as plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and scrap metal and then sell them to recycling companies who buy them by weight. The prices they get for the materials depend on the market demand.

 

Credit:

Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

It puts waste pickers at risk of infectious diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis B and C, Doe said.

Still, many of his colleagues sift through the garbage with their bare hands or worn-out gloves; some don’t have any protective gear at all. 

Doe said he remembers a woman who, while sorting, punctured a plastic bag containing a toxic substance. The acid splashed on her body and burned her clothes.

“Now, she’s bedridden at home and looks completely deformed,” he said.

Johnson Doe has been working at the Kpone Landfill in Accra, Ghana, for about 20 years now. He says it is his best option for making a living to take care of his wife, two children and his parents.

 

Credit:

Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

Emergencies happen a lot at the landfill, Doe said — with people collapsing from exhaustion, or getting dehydrated, or experiencing difficulty breathing. 

But they face stigma when seeking medical help, he said, as health workers often describe them as dirty and refuse to attend to them.

Additionally, waste pickers at the landfill do not have access to clean water, handwashing facilities or sanitation facilities.

Another waste picker, Grace Avemegah, said the situation can be especially problematic for women. 

“There are no washrooms here to change your sanitary towel during that time of the month,” she said. “This means you have to keep your pad on from morning until evening, which is not good for our health. When you become so pressed, you are compelled to do it in the open.”

Challenges of managing medical waste

Solomon Noi, the head of waste management at the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, said that a lot of industries channel harmful substances to the landfill.

Waste picker Grace Avemegah says it’s difficult to practice good hygiene and for women to meet their menstrual needs due to absence of sanitation facilities at the Kpone Landfill in Accra, Ghana.

 

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Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World

As a result, the air is heavily polluted, which can “choke your respiratory system, and therefore, we cannot rule out upper respiratory tract infections,” he said. 

Waste pickers inhale harmful gas and their skin is “exposed to certain corrosive and carcinogenic elements within the wastes that they are scavenging on.”

Also, plastics leach hazardous chemicals into the environment, including endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), which are linked to reduced fertility, pregnancy loss and irregular menstrual cycles, and other conditions, according to a 2020 report by the Endocrine Society and IPEN (International Pollutants Elimination Network).

Noi said that the health risks faced by waste pickers are rife across the developing world, particularly in Brazil, India, Colombia, Mexico and the Philippines where the amount of waste being generated is rising rapidly, but the technological and financial tools to manage it don't exist.

“That’s why all these countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa record huge cases of waterborne diseases and infections like hepatitis, cholera and the rest,” he said. “So, it is a global problem that should be tackled at the global level through concerted efforts.”

Noi said he would like to see universal health care — but also policy changes in Ghana.

Waste pickers, who collect and sort recyclable materials from garbage, face widespread social stigma that often prevents them from accessing basic services including health care.

 

Credit:

Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman/The World