In The News
U.S. Air Raid In Syria, Argentina Fatal Cocaine, Bezos Yacht v. Dutch Bridge

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Teenage students stand in a queue to receive a dose of COVID-19 vaccine at a school-turned vaccination center, in India.
Welcome to Thursday, where a U.S. air raid in Syria kills civilians, tainted cocaine kills 20 in Argentina, and Jeff Bezos’ superyacht gets special treatment in Rotterdam. Thanks to Persian-language media Kayhan, we also look at the discontent brewing among Iranians vis-à-vis their country’s religious government.
[*Northern Sotho, South Africa]
Italy's low fertility rate and lack of support for young people have become a hot topic. But economic and social conditions are not what's stopping all Italian women from having children. Some simply want to do other things with their lives. Italian writer Simonetta Sciandivasci asks in Turin-based daily La Stampa: Does that make them selfish?
Simonetta Sciandivasci’s letter is addressed to ISTAT, Italy’s official statistics office, which explained Italy's low fertility rates as a reaction to economic or social conditions and the lack of support for young people and new parents. But Sciandivasci says the numbers don't tell her story. This article has been edited for length.
Dear ISTAT, I am writing to you because I don't fit into your numbers. From what I understand, I am part of the scant five percent. A thriving, and sometimes happy, small minority of women who don't have children because they don't want to. Not because we can't afford to or because we have no faith in the future. Not because we are dull, nihilistic, lonely, or cynical.
I'm afraid that you have a facile and sketchy idea of me and the minority in which I include myself. I would prefer to call us a bubble since I don't suffer discrimination (no one prevents me from enjoying my rights), but only socio-cultural stigmatization.
But I'm not talking about relatives and gynecologists asking me why I'm 36, have a job and good health but no one is calling me mamma. I am referring instead to the fact that I cannot adopt a child, because to do so in this country, I would have to be rich, married and never divorced, young, preferably chaste and a descendant of an ancient lineage of illustrious people.
I am aware of the fact that in this country there are many women who want to have a child and cannot because they lack the economic means or living conditions. I thank you, ISTAT, because it seems to me that you have recorded and described their reasons very well.
But describing a majority is easy. The same is not true for a minority, even at a time when we try, with some inevitable yet useful hypocrisy, to represent minorities more carefully. I doubt that the gap between those who don't have children because they can't and those who don't because they don't want to is as wide as you claim, but I'm basing my observations on what I see around me and yours are based on extensive surveys.
But there's an important caveat: pollsters are lied to. People lie in polls because not all answers fit within a yes, no or maybe. People also lie because they are ashamed, in a hurry, or don't feel like telling the truth.
I have lost count of the number of times I have heard some of my friends say around large dinner tables that they had no intention of having children because "where do I leave them? How do I feed them? Who will help me?" They were the same ones who — sitting at much smaller tables — I heard say: "Thank goodness I don't have a child."
Ninety percent of my female friends are happy not to have had a baby. They have no intention of having one, and they live with delightful and sometimes frightened men who would be happy to have a child but are happier to accept the wishes of the person they love. Am I lucky? Maybe. Do I hang out with a bubble of highbrow turbo-capitalists? No. My friends almost all started earning a decent income in their thirties, after working their way up through the ranks during difficult years that they even remember affectionately.
It is often repeated that people do not procreate here because Italy is not a country for young people.Those poor young people — so depressed, demotivated, abandoned, lonely and unproductive. We should help them to procreate, give them a bonus to do so or parental leave.
I don't want a child and yes, I can afford to have one. Am I being selfish? I have a lot of ideas about how a selfish society can stay on its feet and even progress, and some of them came to me while reading Ayn Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness.
Well, when I listen to sociologists, psychologists and columnists discussing the reasons why Italian women don't have children (males are not involved, they are an accessory), I realize that they all do the same: they speak for me, they identify themselves with me. And they lead me back to something I am not: an unhappy, unsatisfied woman, abandoned by her country.
If the day after tomorrow Prime Minister Mario Draghi brought me a million euros in cash and told me to use it to support a child, I would decline the offer. I would tell him there are other ways I can contribute to society. This includes trying to get it out of our heads that if the system isn't working because retired people outnumber the younger generation and that the only way to help is to have children.
And I don't rule out that 20 years from now, when not having children isn't an identity or generational issue, when it isn't associated with public mental health, that my friends' daughters and sons won't have a great desire to become parents. But for now that's not the case. Let's accept that and try telling each other the truth.
— Simonetta Sciandivasci / La Stampa
• Civilians killed in U.S. raid in Syria: U.S. special forces have carried out a large-scale counterterrorism raid targeting top al-Qaeda operatives in northwestern Syria. The operation, which the Pentagon called “successful,” killed at least 13 people. But reports on the ground by the White Helmets rescue service, a volunteer organization formed during the Syrian Civil War, said among the dead were six children and four women.
• Biden deploys 3,000 troops to Eastern Europe: The U.S. will send some 3,000 additional troops to Poland, Germany and Romania to bolster the defense of NATO countries in Eastern Europe, which are facing the threat of possible Russia’s military moves in Ukraine. These troops are in addition to the 8,500 U.S. troops deployed last week on heightened alert, the Pentagon said, without “ruling out the possibility that there will be more” troop movement in the coming days. Meanwhile, Turkey’s president Tayyip Erdogan is visiting Ukraine to act as a mediator in the crisis.
• COVID border openings: New Zealand has announced a phased reopening of its borders which have been shut for nearly two years due the coronavirus pandemic, as the country will start to ease some of the world’s toughest border policies at the end of February. Meanwhile, Bali has welcomed its first direct flight carrying foreign tourists in nearly two years, as the government of the Indonesian island plans a full reopening this year to restart its struggling tourism industry.
• Refugees found frozen to death on Turkey-Greece border: The partially clothed bodies of 12 refugees believed to have frozen to death were found in Turkey close to the border with Greece, sparking a row between the two countries. Turkey’s interior minister has accused Greek guards of deliberately pushing the refugees back across the border after stripping them of clothes.
• Poisoned cocaine kills 20 in Argentina: At least 20 people have died and 74 hospitalized in serious condition around the Buenos Aires region, after they ingested cocaine which was either laced with a kind of poison or “cut” with a toxic substance.
• Facebook is losing users for the first time in its history: The social media giant has seen its daily active users drop by about half a million in the last three months of 2021, to reach a total of 1.929 billion, a first in Facebook’s 18-year history. Shares of its parent company Meta plunged over 20% after it also reported growing losses of more than $10 billion in 2021 for its Reality Labs division.
• Rotterdam to dismantle historic bridge for Jeff Bezos’ superyacht: The Dutch city of Rotterdam has confirmed it will temporarily dismantle parts of the historic steel Koningshaven Bridge to make way for Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ 40-meter-high superyacht. The vessel, which will be the largest of its kind in the world, is currently being built by a Dutch firm and has to sail through Rotterdam to reach the sea.
Argentine daily Página/12 reports on the “white death” of at least 20 people in Argentina who ingested cocaine suspected of containing a poisonous substance. Dozens are also being hospitalized in serious conditions. Experts are still analyzing the drug to determine what caused the deaths, but authorities suspect that it may have been deliberately adulterated as part of ongoing clashes between rival drug traffickers.
An increase in public protests has sounded the alarm bell for Iranian officials and clerics. But public discontent runs much deeper than discontent over wages and water. There are also signs of nostalgia for the monarchy that ruled the country before the 1979 revolution, reports Persian-language media Kayhan-London.
🕌 Recently quoted by Iran's government news agency, IRNA, Taghi Rostamvandi, the country's deputy interior minister, addressed a subject that had long gone unspoken: "People are moving in a direction where the religious government is no longer addressing their problems." He said they may seek the solution to these in a "secular or non-religious system." Rostamvandi told a Tehran seminar on social problems on Jan. 16 that people's interest in secular models of governance should be taken as "sounding the alarm" for the Islamic Republic.
😡 State officials and clerics know of the discontent brewing among Iranians. This awareness is the reason for the ruthless suppression of protests, which happened recently in Isfahan, central Iran, as well as the considerable sums of money being spent on propaganda against protesters and all secularizing or liberal opinions. Another cleric teaching in Qom, Mohammadtaqi Fazel-Meibodi, recently said "people take a poor view" and "blame the clergy" for their difficulties. He also pointed out that when theology students (tollab in Persian) "go to the market to shop for something... [they] try not to wear their clerical garb, as people will mock or insult them."
💥 A good many, if not all, of the protests in recent years began around specific issues like fuel prices, wages or water shortages, and quickly grew into vociferous, anti-regime demonstrations. The authorities often blame this mutation and oft-recurring slogans like "Death to the Dictator" on infiltrators. Perhaps the worst of it for them is the enduring memory of a monarchy the regime was confident it had consigned to history's trash bin.
➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com
Online fundraising platform Gofundme has paused and put on review the more than 10 million Canadian dollars ($7.9m) raised by a group of Canada-based truckers on the page "Freedom Convoy 2022" initially created to to sustain protest against vaccine mandates in Ottawa. So far, about C$1m have been released to organizers. As a number of officials have suggested legal action against Gofundme, to prevent the release of more funds, the platform is at risk of being suspended altogether amid the involvment of an organiser who has espoused white supremacist views.
“Beijing will try once again to create an illusion to the world that all is good.”
— In an interview with Al Jazeera, the exiled Chinese political cartoonist and artist Badiucao compared the current Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics status quo to the 2008 Summer Games in the capital, when China promised to become “a more open and democratic society.” He denounced the “slave labor treatment” of Uighurs and the “draconian” COVID-19 lockdowns measures enforced by the government. Badiucao has released “Beijing 2022 collection,” a series of NFT artworks and videos depicting the Chinese government’s human rights abuses.
Students in Bhopal, India wait to get the coronavirus vaccine in a school turned vaccination center. More than 45 million teenagers aged between 15 and 18 have received at least a first dose since India started vaccinating young people on Jan. 3. — Photo: Sanjeev Gupta/SOPA Images/ZUMA
✍️ Newsletter by Jane Herbelin and Anne-Sophie Goninet
Taking inspiration from events in the United States over the past four years, rejection of election results and established state institutions is on the rise in Latin America.
Bolsonaro supporters dressed in national colours with flags in a demonstration in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, on November 4, 2022.
-Analysis-
BUENOS AIRES — South Africa's Nelson Mandela used to say it was "so easy to break down and destroy. The heroes are those who make peace and build."
Intolerance toward those who think differently, even inside the same political space, is corroding the bases of representative democracy, which is the only system we know that allows us to live and grow in freedom, in spite of its flaws.
Recent events in South America and elsewhere are precisely alerting us to that danger. The most explosive example was in Brazil, where a crowd of thousands managed to storm key institutional premises like the presidential palace, parliament and the Supreme Court.
In Peru, the country's Marxist (now former) president, Pedro Castillo, sought to use the armed and security forces to shut down parliament and halt the Supreme Court and state prosecutors from investigating corruption allegations against him.
Parliament sacked him, legitimately, and his equally Marxist vice-president, Dina Boluarte, is now using force to suppress her own, former supporters. The crisis is still on-going in both countries.
In the United States, the Republican Party is divided between moderates and radicals. They needed several rounds of voting to choose a speaker for the House of Representatives, because they have yet to resolve in their minds the presidential elections of two years ago, the assault on the Capitol, and ongoing investigations into the incident.
What does the government want with a parliamentary spectacle that cannot prosper?
We should see these as alarm calls. When the adversary becomes an enemy, democracy begins to shake and irrational violence replaces ideological debates.
Here in Argentina, the refusal to obey a Supreme Court recommendation and the government's bid to sack some of its magistrates are also alarming signs of intolerance and a refusal to abide by the rules. What does the government want with a parliamentary spectacle that cannot prosper?
One of the main attackers on the government side is Leopoldo Moreau, a radical supporter of the vice-president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. He has accused Supreme Court judges of acting as instruments of the conservative opposition.
The government's parliamentary group will clearly fail to garner enough support to bring charges against the magistrates, as it did before in other spats with the Court. But is this the start of a bid to reject the results of the general elections, due in October, and pave the way for preventing the winner from taking office in December?
Peruvian citizens demonstrated in the streets of Lima against President Dina Boluarte in Lima, Peru, on January 25, 2023.
Hector Adolfo Quintanar Perez/ZUMA
The signs are that an opponent of Kirchner and her supporters will become president later this year. No governing party can expect to win elections when the vast majority of voters are seeing runaway inflation destroy their stable revenues. The Economy Minister Sergio Massa is using all the means at his disposal to halt runaway inflation and even build the base for later investments and renewed revenues. The efforts are enormous, but with limited results.
There is no drama or tragedy in ceding power in a democracy.
Neither President Alberto Fernández nor Vice-President Kirchner believe in Massa's path. He is being tolerated for now, which can only undermine his success and thus of his possible presidential candidacy.
Millions of Argentines will likely vote "against" rather than "for" something or someone in October, though the rise of outside candidates like the libertarian Javier Milei may further disperse the parliamentary vote. Whoever becomes president will in any case likely face a legislature controlled by opponents. This makes a democratic pact necessary to ensure that political forces can work together, over and above ideological divisions.
There is no drama or tragedy in ceding power in a democracy. Temporarily, some people lose and others win, but accepting that transition ensures stability and avoids violence on the street. Turning political cracks into an abyss is certainly no answer.
*Ruckauf is a former vice president and foreign minister of Argentina.
Taking inspiration from events in the United States over the past four years, rejection of election results and established state institutions is on the rise in Latin America.
By putting the economy on a war footing, Putin risks returning Russia to the days of Stalinist totalitarianism, where there will be no oligarchs or businesses left, only loyal administrators.
Central to the tragic absurdity of this war is the question of language. Vladimir Putin has repeated that protecting ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking populations of Ukraine was a driving motivation for his invasion.
Yet one month on, a quick look at the map shows that many of the worst-hit cities are those where Russian is the predominant language: Kharkiv, Odesa, Kherson.
Then there is Mariupol, under siege and symbol of Putin’s cruelty. In the largest city on the Azov Sea, with a population of half a million people, Ukrainians make up slightly less than half of the city's population, and Mariupol's second-largest national ethnicity is Russians. As of 2001, when the last census was conducted, 89.5% of the city's population identified Russian as their mother tongue.
Between 2018 and 2019, I spent several months in Mariupol. It is a rugged but beautiful city dotted with Soviet-era architecture, featuring wide avenues and hillside parks, and an extensive industrial zone stretching along the shoreline. There was a vibrant youth culture and art scene, with students developing projects to turn their city into a regional cultural center with an international photography festival.
There were also many offices of international NGOs and human rights organizations, a consequence of the fact that Mariupol was the last major city before entering the occupied zone of Donbas. Many natives of the contested regions of Luhansk and Donetsk had moved there, taking jobs in restaurants and hospitals. I had fond memories of the welcoming from locals who were quicker to smile than in some other parts of Ukraine. All of this is gone.
Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
According to the latest data from the local authorities, 80% of the port city has been destroyed by Russian bombs, artillery fire and missile attacks, with particularly egregious targeting of civilians, including a maternity hospital, a theater where more than 1,000 people had taken shelter and a school where some 400 others were hiding.
The official civilian death toll of Mariupol is estimated at more than 3,000. There are no language or ethnic-based statistics of the victims, but it’s likely the majority were Russian speakers.
So let’s be clear, Putin is bombing the very people he has claimed to want to rescue.
Putin’s Public Enemy No. 1, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, is a mother-tongue Russian speaker who’d made a successful acting and comedy career in Russian-language broadcasting, having extensively toured Russian cities for years.
Rescuers carry a person injured during a shelling by Russian troops of Kharkiv, northeastern Ukraine.
Yes, the official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, and a 2019 law aimed to ensure that it is used in public discourse, but no one has ever sought to abolish the Russian language in everyday life. In none of the cities that are now being bombed by the Russian army to supposedly liberate them has the Russian language been suppressed or have the Russian-speaking population been discriminated against.
Sociologist Mikhail Mishchenko explains that studies have found that the vast majority of Ukrainians don’t consider language a political issue. For reasons of history, culture and the similarities of the two languages, Ukraine is effectively a bilingual nation.
"The overwhelming majority of the population speaks both languages, Russian and Ukrainian,” Mishchenko explains. “Those who say they understand Russian poorly and have difficulty communicating in it are just over 4% percent. Approximately the same number of people say the same about Ukrainian.”
In general, there is no problem of communication and understanding. Often there will be conversations where one person speaks Ukrainian, and the other responds in Russian. Geographically, the Russian language is more dominant in the eastern and central parts of Ukraine, and Ukrainian in the west.
Like most central Ukrainians I am perfectly bilingual: for me, Ukrainian and Russian are both native languages that I have used since childhood in Kyiv. My generation grew up on Russian rock, post-Soviet cinema, and translations of foreign literature into Russian. I communicate in Russian with my sister, and with my mother and daughter in Ukrainian. I write professionally in three languages: Ukrainian, Russian and English, and can also speak Polish, French, and a bit Japanese. My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
At the same time, I am not Russian — nor British or Polish. I am Ukrainian. Ours is a nation with a long history and culture of its own, which has always included a multi-ethnic population: Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans, Crimean Tatars, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Greeks. We all, they all, have found our place on Ukrainian soil. We speak different languages, pray in different churches, we have different traditions, clothes, and cuisine.
My mother taught me that the more languages I know the more human I am.
Like in other countries, these differences have been the source of conflict in our past. But it is who we are and will always be, and real progress has been made over the past three decades to embrace our multitudes. Our Jewish, Russian-speaking president is the most visible proof of that — and is in fact part of what our soldiers are fighting for.
Many in Moscow were convinced that Russian troops would be welcomed in Ukraine as liberating heroes by Russian speakers. Instead, young soldiers are forced to shoot at people who scream in their native language.
Starving people ina street of Kharkiv in 1933, during the famine
Diocesan Archive of Vienna (Diözesanarchiv Wien)/BA Innitzer
Putin has tried to rally the troops by warning that in Ukraine a “genocide” of ethnic Russians is being carried out by a government that must be “de-nazified.”
These are, of course, words with specific definitions that carry the full weight of history. The Ukrainian people know what genocide is not from books. In my hometown of Kyiv, German soldiers massacred Jews en masse. My grandfather survived the Buchenwald concentration camp, liberated by the U.S. army. My great-grandmother, who died at the age of 95, survived the 1932-33 famine when the Red Army carried out the genocide of the Ukrainian middle class, and her sister disappeared in the camps of Siberia, convicted for defying rationing to try to feed her children during the famine.
On Tuesday, came a notable report of one of the latest civilian deaths in the besieged Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv: a 96-year-old had been killed when shelling hit his apartment building. The victim’s name was Boris Romanchenko; he had survived Buchenwald and two other Nazi concentration camps during World War II. As President Zelensky noted: Hitler didn’t manage to kill him, but Putin did.
Genocide has returned to Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Kherson to Mariupol, as Vladimir Putin had warned. But it is his own genocide against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine.