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Ancestral Shade

Ancestral Shade

Fellow travelers from our organized tour were catching some rest in the shade of the tongkonan, the ancestral houses of the Toraja people in southern Sulawesi (the Indonesian island formerly know as Celebes).

This was one of the first package holiday tours we went on, after having started to experiment with this form of group travel in the late 1980s, when it began to feel like we’d exhausted many of the places we could reach by car (and sometimes ferry): Europe, North Africa, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon. But just as important, flights were also getting considerably cheaper.

Our very first package trip we can also credit to my grandson. Being teachers, we were used to traveling every year during Easter holidays, but stubborn little Bertrand decided to be born in April — leading us to travel earlier in the year. I looked around for places where the weather was nice in February and discovered, to my surprise, that we could afford an organized tour ... to Florida!

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FOCUS: Russia-Ukraine War

Nuclear Weapons In Belarus — Why It May Have Been Xi Jinping's Idea

To trace Moscow's decision to transfer nuclear weapons to Belarus, we may need to look to Beijing — and the recent summit of Xi Jinping-Vladimir Putin

Image of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin standing next to each other during a ceremony at the Moscow Kremlin.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin during a ceremony at the Moscow Kremlin.

Oleksandr Demchenko

-Analysis-

Vladimir Putin has decided to raise the nuclear stakes even further — to violate the Non-Proliferation Treaty by announcing his intention to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus.

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