(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. is “deeply concerned by evidence that Russia has made plans for significant aggressive moves against Ukraine,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday.
In the most urgent warning yet, Blinken said the U.S. and its NATO allies would impose a steep cost on Moscow if it attacked its neighbor.
But that cost would be economic and political, with the top U.S. diplomat threatening “a range of high-impact economic measures that we’ve refrained from using in the past.” But he and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stopped short of mentioning the use of force to defend Ukraine, which is not a member of the military alliance.
“We don’t know whether President Putin has made the decision to invade. We do know he’s putting in place the capacity to do so in short order,” Blinken said — the clearest statement to date of Western worries of an invasion, as Russia masses approximately 100,000 troops, along with heavy equipment, near Ukraine’s border.
Blinken will meet his Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, on the sidelines of a summit on European security Thursday, as well as Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba.
It will be the latest high-level engagement between the U.S. and Russia amid heightened concern about Russia threatening Ukraine. President Joe Biden deployed his CIA Director Bill Burns to Moscow last month to convey U.S. concerns in person, Blinken said, declining to specify whether he would lay out precisely what those “high-impact” sanctions would be with Lavrov.
Russia has denied it is mounting any attack on Ukraine and instead accused Ukraine, the U.S. and NATO of menacing forces near its borders. Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday his government is seeking guarantees from the West that it not move troops or weapons systems “in close vicinity to the Russian territory,” while Lavrov called the presence of Ukrainian troops “alarming.”
Blinken literally laughed off that latter comment, telling reporters after a two-day NATO summit in Latvia that it was “perplexing,” “profoundly wrong” and “misguided.”
“The idea that Ukraine represents a threat to Russia would be a bad joke if things weren’t so serious,” he added, warning that Russia may “claim provocation for something that they were planning to do all along.”
To that end, Blinken said, Russia has not only massed combat forces, it’s also “intensified disinformation to paint Ukraine as the aggressor” — increasing anti-Ukrainian propaganda by more than tenfold to levels not seen since its 2014 invasion.
Russia’s “plans include efforts to destabilize Ukraine from within, as well as large-scale military operations,” he added — the former, a possible reference to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s claim that Russia is behind a potential coup attempt to overthrow his government. The top U.S. diplomat for Europe said last Friday that the U.S. was in touch with Ukrainian authorities “to obtain additional information” and verify Zelenskiy’s statement.
(NEW YORK) — Scientists are continuing to discover ways in which climate change is already affecting animal species around the world — including how it’s changing the phenology, or timing of biological events.
Grey seals are the latest species to see phenological shifts due to warming ocean waters, a new study published Tuesday in the Royal Society Journals has found.
Researchers who monitored grey seals in the U.K.’s Skomer Marine Conservation Zone for three decades found that climate change has caused older seal mothers to give birth to pups earlier, an observation that favors the hypothesis that climate affects phenology by altering the age profile of the population.
When the researchers first began surveying grey seals in 1992, the midpoint of the pupping season was the first week of October. By 2004, the pupping season had advanced three weeks earlier, to mid-September, according to the study.
Warmer years were also associated with an older average age of mothers, the scientists found. Grey seals typically start breeding around 5 years old and can continue for several decades after. But the older the seals got, the earlier they gave birth, the researchers said.
The changes were not isolated to the U.K. There have been observable changes in the timing of seal life throughout the Atlantic and the world, according to the study.
Climate change has also recently been linked to a rising divorce rate in albatross couples, which mate for life, and to the shrinking of dozens of species of Amazonian birds, which are evolving to have smaller bodies and longer wing spans.
The causes and consequences of phenological shifts across ecosystems and geographical regions as a result of climate change have become a major area of interest in recent years, according to the study.
These changes can have a domino effect. Since species do not live in isolation, phenological changes can cascade through biological communities through trophic, competitive and mutualistic interactions, according to the study. This can be especially apparent in “mismatches in seasonal events,” such as those between predator and prey populations or flowering plants and their pollinators.
Eventually, phenological shifts in life-history events, such as breeding and pupping, can decouple biological communities and lead to critical transitions in population structure and even the collapse of ecosystems, the scientists said.
(WASHINGTON) — Iran returned to negotiations over its nuclear program on Monday — meeting for the first time in over five months, with the country’s new hard-line government now in control.
Its chief negotiator emerged from closed doors bullish, as Tehran demands its concerns about continued U.S. sanctions be addressed first after former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal.
But the U.S. and the deal’s European signatories are warning that after months of stalling, Iran is facing its last opportunity to revive the 2015 deal that placed constraints on its nuclear program in exchange for international sanctions relief.
A top European Union diplomat who is coordinating the indirect talks between the U.S. and Iran expressed some guarded optimism afterward — and much urgency.
“There is clearly a will on all the delegations to listen to the Iranian positions brought by the new team, and there is clearly a will of the Iranian delegation to engage in serious work to bring JCPOA back to life,” said Enrique Mora, the senior EU diplomat, using an acronym for the nuclear deal’s formal name — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
“I feel positive that we can be doing important things for the next weeks to come,” Mora added after delegations from Iran, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France and Germany met in Vienna, Austria.
Whether or not the U.S. and its European allies are willing to wait weeks is an open question — especially since Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s new president who is a conservative cleric close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has delayed the resumption of talks since he won election in June.
“These talks are the last opportunity for the Iranians to come to the table and agree the JCPOA,” British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said Monday. “We will look at all options if that doesn’t happen.”
Patience is all but out in Israel, whose defense minister warned Monday that Iran is “dashing towards a nuclear weapon.”
Israeli officials shared intelligence with the U.S. and other allies showing that Iran is nearing a nuclear weapon, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz said.
Since Trump’s exit, Iran has increasingly taken steps in violation of the deal, including by enriching more uranium, enriching uranium to higher levels, using more advanced centrifuges and more of them, and enriching uranium metal. The United Nation’s nuclear watchdog — the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA — reported this month that Iran has enriched 39 pounds of uranium to 60%, which is a short technical step from weapons-grade 90%.
Under the nuclear deal, Iran’s enrichment was capped at 3.67% for 15 years.
The State Department declined to comment on reports that Iran may be moving toward 90% enrichment levels, but deputy spokesperson Jalina Porter told reporters that “obviously would be a provocative act, and I’ll just underscore that we’ve made clear that Iran’s continued nuclear escalations are unconstructive and they’re also inconsistent with what’s stated in the goal of returning to a mutual compliance with the JCPOA.”
But ahead of talks resuming, Iran has used sharper language rejecting the idea of “mutual compliance” — increasingly arguing that the U.S. must act first because it was Trump that first exited the deal back in 2018.
“The principle of ‘mutual compliance’ cannot form a proper base for negotiations since it was the U.S. government which unilaterally left the deal,” Iran’s chief negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, wrote in an editorial Sunday, calling for a “clear and transparent mechanism to ensure that sanctions will be removed” and U.S. “compensation for the violation of the deal, which includes the removal of all post-JCPOA sanctions.”
The Biden administration has said it will not lift sanctions first, and the idea of compensating Iran for U.S. sanctions is politically toxic in Washington.
It’s unclear if those demands are just Iran posturing before sitting down, or if those are red lines. Out of Monday’s meetings, Bagheri claimed a “considerable achievement” by saying the remaining parties to the deal agreed to address U.S. sanctions first. But that doesn’t mean they agreed those sanctions need to be lifted before Iran’s own non-compliance is addressed. The working-level discussions will address U.S. sanctions on Tuesday and Iran’s nuclear program Wednesday, according to Mora.
The State Department has not yet provided a readout from special envoy for Iran Rob Malley’s meetings in Vienna, where the previous six rounds of talks were held as well.
Beyond Mora’s optimism, Russia’s envoy Mikhail Ulyanov said the talks “started quite successfully” and reached agreement on “further immediate steps,” without specifying what they were.
Any optimism has run face first into dire warnings from Israel, whose Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has vocally opposed the restoration of the nuclear deal.
“Iran deserves no rewards, no bargain deals, and no sanctions relief in return for their brutality. I call upon our allies around the world: Do not give in to Iran’s nuclear blackmail,” Bennett said Monday.
Malley told NPR last week the U.S. and Israel don’t agree on the deal, but do agree on the need to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon: “We’re not going to wait and see them get so close,” he said, but the U.S. hopes “that this could be resolved diplomatically, and it should be.”
Amid warnings that Iran could stall by prolonging these talks, Malley added the U.S. will not “sit idly by” if the country moves toward a nuclear bomb.
But the U.S. and European allies have pulled their punches at the IAEA, declining again last week to censure Iran for not just its violations of the deal but its growing obstruction of the IAEA’s work.
Iran has barred inspectors from accessing certain sites, harassed inspectors with invasive security searches and failed to explain still the detected presence of uranium at three undeclared locations, IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi told the U.N. body last Wednesday.
Grossi visited Tehran last week — his first trip under the Raisi government — but he did not reach a deal to address these issues, he told reporters Wednesday. A previous ad-hoc arrangement with Iran to keep international eyes at its declared nuclear sites is coming apart, he warned. Iran agreed to keep IAEA cameras and other monitoring equipment in place and turn the tapes over to the agency when a deal was reached. That equipment needs servicing to “guarantee continuity of knowledge,” Grossi said, but Iran has blocked IAEA inspectors so far.
“Such a long period of time without us getting access, knowing whether there are operational activities ongoing, is something in itself that would prevent me from continuing to say I have an idea of what’s going on,” he said at a press conference. “We must reach an agreement. We must do it.”
(LONDON) — A British inn and pub officially bid “fond farewell” to 61 guests Monday after a blizzard stranded them for days inside.
Located 270 miles north of London, Tan Hill Inn in Yorkshire, England, had arranged an event for an Oasis tribute band on Friday. Later that night, however, the region was hit hard by a late autumn storm which blocked local roads with heavy snow.
“The last time we had our costumers locked in was four or five years ago, but that was just for one night. This time it was a very different experience with four days,” Nicola Townsend, the pub manager, told ABC News.
The staff and guests came up with spontaneous ideas “to kill the boredom,” Townsend said. They organized a movie event, a quiz night and karaoke.
“Customers started to develop bonds from the second day on by hanging out, making friends and exchanging numbers. And they were so cooperative in running the affairs. Like they felt home indeed,” she said, adding, “Our staff are exhausted, but very happy that our guests had fun. Some of them said they had so much fun that they did not want to go back home when the roads were cleared.”
Now the group has agreed to a reunion next year.
The storm, named “Arwen,” also left thousands in Scotland without power for several nights.
(JOQUICINGO, Mexico) — At least 19 people are dead and dozens more injured after a bus crash in central Mexico Friday.
The accident occurred on a highway in Joquicingo, a township in the State of Mexico that’s approximately 45 miles southwest of Mexico City.
A tour bus heading to a religious site in the State of Mexico crashed into a building after the brakes went out, the State of Mexico’s Ministry of Health said in a statement.
Officials said 19 people were reported dead and 32 injured following the crash.
Six people, including two minors, were flown to a hospital in Toluca, while others were transported to several hospitals in the region, officials said. Those injured included multiple women and children, with injuries ranging from broken bones to head trauma, according to the Ministry of Health.
Multiple agencies responded to the site of the crash, including the Red Cross and the Emergency Service of the State of Mexico.
Alfredo Del Mazo, the governor of the State of Mexico, said in a statement on Twitter that he has instructed the heads of the Civil Protection, Security, Rescue and Health agencies to support the impacted families.
Officials said the bus was with the tourism company Turismo Tejeda and was heading from the municipality of Sahuayo, Michoacán, and bound for the Santuario del Señor de Chalma, a place of worship that is a Christian pilgrimage site.
(BERLIN) — Germany passed a grim milestone on Thursday: 100,000 deaths from COVID-19. In recent weeks, the situation has spiraled out of control as cases have spiked and intensive care beds have become scarce in some regions.
The country has one of the lowest rates vaccination rates in western Europe — only 68% of the population has been vaccinated, according to recent health statistics.
“Sadly, the coronavirus still hasn’t been beaten. Every day we see new records as far as the number of infections are concerned,” newly elected German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said at a press conference on Wednesday.
As of Friday morning, the country’s disease control agency, the RKI, said a record 76,414 cases had been reported in the past 24 hours.
With winter around the corner, Europe has once again become the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis. Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported deaths due to COVID-19 had reached 4,200 a day, double the death rate at the end of September. The organization warned that a further 700,000 people in the European region could die by March given the current trend.
The rise in cases is mainly do to the more contagious Delta variant and the fact that more people are staying indoors as winter begins. The number of people who remain unvaccinated is around 54%, according to WHO Executive Director Robb Butler.
“Let me be absolutely clear, the majority of people in ICU, in intensive care units and ICU today, are the unvaccinated” Butler said in an interview with Sky News.
Germany, like many countries around Europe, has moved ahead with stricter measures to cope, some of which apply to the entire country. Most blanket rules affect the unvaccinated population, which now need to show proof of vaccination, recent recovery or a negative COVID-19 test to enter public transport. Germany already had rules in place requiring similar proof when entering indoor spaces like bars, restaurants and entertainment facilities.
Yet each of Germany’s 16 states can also choose to implement their own measures. In Bavaria and Saxony where vaccination rates are low and hospitalization rates are rising to worrying levels, stricter lockdowns have been put in place. The seasonally popular Christmas markets were canceled for the second year in a row.
In Bavaria, a region with 13 million residents, politicians face grave crises in dealing with the growing number of cases.
“The situation is overwhelming and just keeps escalating,” the region’s leader, Markus Söder, told reporters. News agency DPA reported that a military plane will fly seriously ill patients from the Bavarian town of Memmingen to the state of North Rhine-Westphalia on Friday afternoon.
Söder is a proponent of making vaccinations mandatory.
“Compulsory vaccination does not violate the right to freedom — far more, it is a precondition for us to win back our freedom,” he wrote in an op-ed with politician Winfried Kretschmann of German region Baden-Württemberg in Tuesday’s newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Germany is mulling compulsory vaccination after Austria became the first European country to announce a vaccine mandate. It will go into effect February 2022. The announcement brought tens of thousands of people out to protest on the streets of Vienna last weekend.
On Monday, the country went into its fourth national lockdown, set to last for 10 days and likely to be extended to 20 days. Although less strict than previous lockdowns of 2020, citizens may only leave their houses for specific purposes, such as buying groceries, exercising or going to the doctor. Only 66% of the country of 8.9 million people have been vaccinated.
With the rise in COVID cases, particularly in northern Europe, and the introduction of new measures restricting access of unvaccinated people from public life, tensions seem to be flaring up in certain populations. Belgium and the Netherlands saw violent protests against lockdown measures last weekend.
Complicating matters is a worrying new virus variant B.1.1.529 which been discovered in southern Africa. As of Friday morning, a number of countries have implemented travel bans, including Germany, Italy and the U.K.
(NEW YORK) — Honduras teeters on the edge of democracy.
In one of the most consequential elections in the Western Hemisphere, in one of Central America’s poorest countries, Hondurans head to the polls Sunday to choose a new president, new lawmakers, new mayors and new city council members.
“The elections this Sunday, November 28th, definitely present our golden opportunity, the only one, to rescue democracy in this country,” Clara López, a voter in the country’s capital Tegucigalpa, told ABC News. “It’s now or never.”
Honduras’ recent history of election-related violence has many on edge. Among them, President Joe Biden’s administration will be watching for a peaceful election outcome, a possible new partner to work with, and any effect on migration issues to the southern U.S. border.
The State Department also deployed a top U.S. diplomat to Honduras this week, who told ABC News the U.S. is prepared to act if there are any irregularities in the election.
There are 11 candidates in total for the presidency, but the race has really come down to two: Tegucigalpa’s mayor Nasry Asfura, who would extend the right-wing party’s hold on power, but faces allegations of corruption; and Xiomara Castro, a popular former first lady who has united a left-wing coalition and could become Honduras’s first female leader and Latin America’s only current female head of state.
But tensions have risen across Honduras, with a recent spate of election-related violence, including assassinations of candidates. Looming large over the elections, too, are last year’s back-to-back hurricanes and history’s shadow — a 2009 coup that forced Castro’s husband from power and the 2017 elections, riddled with irregularities, according to the Organization of American States, the region’s bloc.
Despite the OAS’ call for a new vote in 2017, presidential incumbent Juan Orlando Hernández was declared the winner, sparking protests that led to days of violent, deadly clashes.
Amid apparent concerns over the potential for more violence, the U.S. deployed the top diplomat for the Western Hemisphere, Assistant Secretary of State Brian Nichols, to Honduras for a three-day trip. But after his meetings, including with both Castro and Asfura, Nichols expressed optimism that the country can hold free and fair elections.
“We will call things as we see them. We believe this is going to be a free and fair process that reflects the will of the Honduran people. If we see something that deviates from that — well, then we’ll take the appropriate steps, but I’m confident that this is going to be a peaceful, free, fair election,” Nichols told ABC News in an exclusive interview.
To many Hondurans, however, recent years have chased away any confidence. Just 30% of Hondurans believe democracy is preferable to all other forms of government, according to Latinobarometro’s 2021 report — the lowest in all of Latin America — while four-fifths of Hondurans believe the country is on the wrong path.
.@MaggieRulli has an in-depth report on Honduras and “a presidential election that some say is the country’s last chance to prove democracy is still alive in one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere.” https://t.co/vAkidmdYRJpic.twitter.com/gebU3rYVFy
“The people are in a critical state,” Salvador Nasralla, Castro’s running mate and Hernández’s opponent in 2017, told ABC News. “I do not dismiss the possibility of a civil war in the country.”
In the 2017 elections, Nasralla was ahead in the polls and largely expected to win, making the Supreme Electoral Tribunal’s declaration that Hernández won after a delayed count that much more suspicious to many Hondurans. But the Trump administration backed Hernández’s claim to victory, dismissing concerns from the OAS and other international election observers about irregularities.
This time around, Nasralla, a popular former sportscaster, said he felt compelled to join Castro’s ticket to try to ensure a left-wing victory.
“It wouldn’t be winning if I subtracted votes from the opposition, and that would’ve made me a bad Honduran,” he told ABC News in his only interview with an English-language outlet.
Castro herself has become a force in Honduran politics, leading the movement against the 2009 coup where the military deposed her husband Manuel Zelaya after he pushed a referendum to change the constitution and abolish its one-term limit.
Backed by her new liberal party, she has been ahead in the polls in recent weeks, especially after Nasralla’s surprising endorsement.
But Asfura remains a potent opponent, boosted by his own party’s hold on government and promises “to create jobs and opportunities so that people can bring food to their homes, health, and education,” as he said in a recent rally.
Asfura’s popularity comes despite allegations against him in the recent Pandora Papers which revealed he used offshore tax loopholes, and local officials accused him of embezzling funds from the capital city’s municipal government.
They’re not the first charges against the ruling National Party’s leaders. Hernández was named by a U.S. federal court as a co-conspirator in a huge narcotics trafficking case that saw his brother, former congressman Tony Hernández, sentenced to life in prison. The president has denied wrongdoing and has not faced criminal charges.
Despite those allegations, the Biden administration has tried to work with Hernández and other Central American governments to stem migration from the region, which has surged during his presidency. Nearly 1.7 million migrants reached the southern U.S. border in fiscal year 2021, which covers October 2020 through September 2021, and one-fifth of them — 308,931 in total — were Honduran.
“Honduras doesn’t guarantee its citizens a dignified life within its territory, and it forces them to flee,” said López, the Tegucigalpa voter who is backing Castro’s campaign.
During his own 2020 U.S. presidential campaign, Biden pledged to invest $4 billion in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala — sometimes called the Northern Triangle countries — to improve the quality of life, including the rule of law and countering corruption, and give their citizens reasons to stay in their communities.
PHOTO: The president of the National Electoral Council of Honduras, Kevin Izaguirre (R), and the Chief of the Armed Forces of that country, Tito Livio Moreno, carry a box with electoral material for the elections in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Nov. 23, 2021.
Gustavo Amador/EPA via ShutterstockGustavo Amador/EPA via Shutterstock
The president of the National Electoral Council of Honduras, Kevin Izaguirre (R), and the…
While that money has started to flow, corrupt and increasingly power-grabbing political leaders in all three countries have made it difficult for the U.S. to find partners to work with.
Free and fair elections, a peaceful transfer of power and a new leadership partner in Honduras are important to Biden’s agenda, particularly because if the situation deteriorates, even more Hondurans could flee in search of a better life to the north.
“Everything is at stake here. For the first time, you have a very clearly differentiated path that is being put forward by the proposals of both parties,” said Sergio Bahr, a Honduran sociologist. “This election will define the direction in which the country goes in the next 10 to 20 years.”
That’s why the State Department deployed its top diplomat for the region to Honduras. Nichols, the assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, met with Honduras’ national electoral council, its chief of defense, and its attorney general, among others, saying he was assured they’re taking “all measures necessary” to secure the election and prevent violence like 2017.
“We certainly will be looking to Honduran electoral authorities to carry out their responsibilities professionally and transparently, and they’ve assured their own people as well as the international community of the same,” he told ABC News.
For voters like Ela Rubio, that’s all that they want, she said.
“We want democracy. We want transparent elections,” said Rubio, an Asfura supporter.” We don’t want to regress. We want to move forward. We want to keep going, and to show the world that not everything in Honduras is bad.”
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. government is warning American citizens in Ethiopia even more starkly to leave the country now, as the conflict there continues to deteriorate.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed is heading to the front lines to lead the federal government’s forces, he announced, urging his fellow citizens to join him and “lead the country with a sacrifice.”
On the other side, forces from Ethiopia’s Tigray region, now aligned with other ethnic-based groups, are marching toward the capital Addis Ababa, pledging to end Abiy’s blockade of their region one year after fighting there burst open decades-old wounds.
Now the conflict in Africa’s second-most populous nation is increasingly existential for both sides, potentially “ripping the country apart and spilling over into other countries in the region,” as Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned in recent days.
The U.S. special envoy for the region said he still had hope for a ceasefire and a negotiated resolution after some “nascent progress,” but he warned the fast-moving conflict threatened to swiftly sweep away international diplomatic efforts and cause “a bloodbath situation or chaos.”
That fear has driven fresh warnings from foreign countries, including France and Turkey, urging their citizens to depart the country immediately while commercial flights remain. The United Nations announced it was evacuating its staff’s dependents on Tuesday, too.
Since Nov. 5, the U.S. embassy in Addis has been on ordered departure, evacuating non-emergency staff and diplomats’ families and leaving a smaller team behind. While the mission remains open and continues to provide services like passports and repatriation loans, the U.S. military is maintaining a “state of readiness,” according to U.S. Africa Command, in case there are issues “related to the safety of our diplomats where the security environment has deteriorated.”
But after the unprecedented, chaotic evacuation effort from Afghanistan, the State Department has gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure U.S. citizens in Ethiopia know military flights like those out of Kabul will not be coming to rescue them.
“There should be absolutely no expectation of the military becoming involved,” a senior State Department official said Monday. For months now, the agency has issued travel warnings, urging Americans to leave now while Addis’s international airport continues commercial flights.
This week, their warnings have employed even stronger language: “We just want to make sure that we don’t get into a situation where U.S. citizens are waiting for something that’s never going to happen,” the senior State Department official added. “We need them to remember what the norm is, and the norm is leaving via commercial while that’s available.”
The official and others have declined to speak to any plans to close the embassy or evacuate American diplomats, except to say that they’re “engaged in contingency planning for hypotheticals” with the Pentagon.
The Pentagon declined to comment on any troop movements to ABC News after a report that the U.S. had put Navy ships in the region on “standby” and deployed a small number of Army Rangers to the neighboring country Djibouti. The Pentagon’s East African Response Force — a team trained to move within 24 hours to assist U.S. embassies in the region with additional security or an evacuation — is based in the small African country.
Despite the increasingly grim developments on the battlefield, the State Department made clear it has not yet given up on a diplomatic resolution.
“There is some nascent progress in trying to get the parties to move from a military confrontation to a negotiating process, but what concerns us is this fragile progress risks being outpaced by the alarming developments on the ground… by the military escalation on the two sides,” Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman, special envoy for the Horn of Africa, told reporters Tuesday.
In particular, Tigrayan forces said this week they are now some 130 miles northeast of Addis, while Abiy declared Monday that he would go to the front lines to lead troops directly.
“Unfortunately, each side is trying to achieve its goals by military force and believe they are on the cusp of winning,” Feltman said Tuesday, back in Washington after days of meetings in Addis. He met not just Abiy and Tigrayan leaders, but also the African Union’s special envoy for the conflict, former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo.
From those meetings, Feltman said he sensed a “greater willingness to brainstorm with us about how you could put together the pieces of a deescalation and negotiated ceasefire process” — instead of an outright refusal to even consider any other means but force.
What the two sides say they want can be achieved at the same time, too, Feltman added: Abiy wants to return Tigrayan forces to Tigray region, and Tigrayan forces want Abiy’s de facto blockade of the region to end.
“The tragedy is, the sadness is that both sides have in mind the same type of elements. … They just need to muster the political will in order to pivot from the military to the negotiations, and we’re not the only ones encouraging them to do so, but we can’t force them to the table,” Feltman said.
As of now, U.S. and international pressure, Obasanjo’s mediation and the humanitarian suffering of the Ethiopian people have not yet been enough for leaders to come to the table. Feltman said Abiy also told him in their meeting Sunday that he had “confidence” he could achieve his goals militarily — and the seasoned U.S. diplomat warned the incitement of ethnic-based violence is spiraling out of control.
That means there’s “no sign” that direct negotiations are “on the horizon,” but perhaps some back-channel diplomacy is possible — and Feltman and Obasanjo will continue to pursue that, according to the U.S. diplomat.
“Right now, both sides are still pursuing military options, but they are also engaged on other ways to pursue their objectives… And that’s what I find marginally encouraging, but again, I don’t want to overstate the case,” Feltman said.
(LUXOR, Egypt) — After more than seven decades of stop-start attempts to excavate a nearly 2-mile ancient walkway in the southern city of Luxor, Egypt will finally open the 3,000-year-old Avenue of Sphinxes to the public Thursday in a glitzy ceremony.
The full stretches of the 1.7 mile long and about 250 feet wide avenue, which connects Karnak Temple with Luxor Temple, have been uncovered in the ancient city of Thebes, with its distinctive sphinxes and ram-headed statues lined up on both flanks.
In recent years, Egypt has stepped up its efforts to promote its archeological discoveries as it strives to revive its ailing tourism industry, which took a fresh battering during the COVID-19 pandemic.
One element of this approach has been recreating ancient settings in flamboyant ceremonies, which were first introduced when Egypt held what was dubbed a “royal procession” to parade 22 mummies through the streets of Cairo as they were being conveyed to a newly inaugurated museum last April.
Construction of the Avenue of Sphinxes began during the New Kingdom era and was completed during the reign of 30th Dynasty ruler Nectanebo I (380-362 B.C.), but the road was buried under layers of sand over the centuries.
“The amount of rubble that was removed over the decades was up to 8 meters high. Every layer of sand tells us a story about that avenue,” Mostafa el-Sagheer, the head of Karnak’s Antiquities Department who oversaw the project to excavate the last stretch of the avenue, told ABC News.
The first trace of the avenue was found in 1949 when Egyptian archeologist Mohammed Zakaria Ghoneim discovered eight statues near the Luxor Temple, el-Sagheer said, with 17 more statues uncovered from 1958 to 1961 and 55 unearthed from 1961 to 1964 — all within a perimeter of 250 meters.
From 1984 to 2000, the entire route of the walkway was finally determined, leaving it to excavators to uncover the road. It was never a walk in the park, however.
Urban development meant hundreds of homes, as well as mosques and a 115-year-old Evangelical church, had to be demolished to make way for the road.
The political turmoil that followed the 2011 uprising in Egypt further complicated efforts to complete the restoration project, stalling it for several years before it was resumed in 2017.
“From 2017 to 2021, the final 20 or 25% of the road was excavated,” el-Sagheer said.
Most of the original 1,057 statues in the avenue have been recovered. They are divided into three shapes, the first being a body of a lion with ram’s head that was erected over a nearly 1,000-foot area between the Karnak Temple and the Precinct of Mut during the reign of New Kingdom ruler Tutankhamen, famously known as King Tut.
The second shape is a full ram statue, built in a remote area during the reign of the 18th dynasty’s Amenhotep III before being later moved to the Temple of Khonsu in the Karnak complex.
The third shape, which comprises the biggest chunk of the statues, is one of a sphinx (a lion’s body and a human’s head), with the statues stretching over a mile from the Precinct of Mut to the Luxor Temple. They were erected during the tenure of Nectanebo I.
El-Sagheer said the ancient Opet festival would be also relived during Thursday’s celebrations.
The festival primarily involved a procession in which shrines of the “triad of deities” — supreme god Amun-Re, his consort Mut and their son Khonsu — were paraded by priests on wooden barques from Karnak to Luxor in a symbolic recreation of their marriage.
“During this journey, people of Thebes would line up on both sides, with military marches and music playing, dancers performing and oblations offered,” el-Sagheer said.
(LONDON) — A rare manuscript by Albert Einstein that changed the course of modern science was just sold for over 13.3 million euros (over $15 million), including fees, beating all predictions.
The 54-page, handwritten document outlines calculations that led to his theory of relativity. One of two existing copies went on sale at Christie’s auction house in Paris on Tuesday evening. It was expected to fetch $2.4 million to $3.5 million. The manuscript was being sold as part of a judicial sale, and had to be handled by a special judicial commissioner. It was bought over the phone by an anonymous buyer.
“This is without a doubt the most valuable Einstein manuscript ever to come to auction,” Christie’s said in a statement ahead of the sale.
The iconic German physicist co-wrote the manuscript with a lifelong friend, the Swiss engineer Michele Besso, in Zurich from June 1913 into early 1914, according to Christie’s, which is hosting the sale on behalf of Aguttes auction house.
Although this copy isn’t the final draft, the Einstein-Besso manuscript shows the trial and error that went into the calculations. When equations about the relativity of rotational movements proved correct, Einstein excitedly wrote in the margins of one of the pages, “Stimmt!” That’s German for, “It works!”
While the document contains mistakes, it ultimately led to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which states that gravity is not a force happening between objects in space but rather a deformation of space and time geometry. The final theory was published in 1915, about a year after the Einstein-Besso manuscript.
The manuscript consists of 26 pages of Einstein’s handwriting, 25 pages of Besso’s and thjree pages that appear to have been written together. Some portions are crossed or torn out, and pages have rust stains, according to Christie’s, which described the document as depicting “a crucial stage in the development of the general theory of relativity.”
“Even today, in 2021, when we study cosmology, or even when we study fusions of black holes, gravitational waves, pulsars, we still use Einstein’s equations,” French astrophysicist Etienne Klein explained in a video on the Einstein-Besso manuscript, released by Christie’s ahead of the sale. “Over a century after being laid down on paper by Einstein, they are still the right equations for describing any gravitational phenomenon.”
Einstein and Besso met at a concert while both students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, where Einstein studied physics and Besso engineering. Friends for life, Besso described their collaboration as one between an eagle (Einstein) and a sparrow (Besso), saying the sparrow could fly higher under the eagle’s wing, according to Carl Seelig’s 1956 biography of Einstein.
Einstein, who won the Nobel Prize in physics for 1921, was known for destroying most of his work. But Besso preserved the manuscript for posterity.
“A good scientist is someone who makes mistakes, discovers and corrects them,” Klein said in Christie’s catalogue of the sale.
