Hundreds of thousands protest in Germany alone, organisers say
‘No political party is doing close to enough’, Thunberg says
BRUSSELS, Sept 24 (Reuters) – Young people around the world took to the streets on Friday to demand urgent action to avert disastrous climate change, in their largest protest since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The strike takes place five weeks before the U.N. COP26 summit, which aims to secure more ambitious climate action from world leaders to drastically cut the greenhouse gas emissions heating the planet.
“The concentration of CO2 in the sky hasn’t been this high for at least 3 million years,” Swedish activist Greta Thunberg told a crowd of thousands of protesters in the German capital.
“It is clearer than ever that no political party is doing close to enough.”
Demonstrations were planned in more than 1,500 locations by youth movement Fridays for Future, kicking off in Asia with small-scale demonstrations in the Philippines and Bangladesh, and spreading throughout the day to European cities including Warsaw, Turin and Berlin.
“Everyone is talking about making promises, but nobody keeps their promise. We want more action,” said Farzana Faruk Jhumu, 22, a youth climate activist in Dhaka, Bangladesh. “We want the work, not just the promises.”
A landmark U.N. climate science report in August warned that human activity has already locked in climate disruptions for decades – but that rapid, large-scale action to reduce emissions could still stave off some of the most destructive impacts. read more
People take part in the Global Climate Strike of the movement Fridays for Future in Berlin, Germany, September 24, 2021. REUTERS/Christian Mang
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So far, governments do not plan to cut emissions anywhere near fast enough to do that.
The United Nations said last week that countries’ commitments would see global emissions increase to be 16% higher in 2030 than they were in 2010 – far off the 45% reduction by 2030 needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“We are here because we are saying a loud ‘no’ to what is happening in Poland,” said Dominika Lasota, 19, a youth activist at a protest in Warsaw, Poland. “Our government has for years been blocking any sort of climate politics and ignores our demands for a safe future.”
Friday’s strike marked the in-person return of the youth climate protests that in 2019 drew more than six million people onto the streets, before the COVID-19 pandemic largely halted the mass gatherings and pushed much of the action online.
Yusuf Baluch, 17, a youth activist in the Pakistani province of Balochistan, said the return to in-person events was vital to force leaders to tackle the planetary crisis.
“Last time it was digital and nobody was paying attention to us,” he said.
But with access to COVID-19 vaccines still highly uneven around the world, activists in some poorer countries said they would only hold symbolic actions with only a handful of people.
“In the global north, people are getting vaccinated so they might be out in huge quantities. But in the global south, we are still limited,” Baluch said.
Reporting by Kate Abnett, Additional reporting by Kacper Pempel and Andrea Januta, Editing by William Maclean
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
LA PALMA, Spain, Sept 22 (Reuters) – Lava poured from an erupting volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma for a fourth day on Wednesday, blanketing houses and fields, a day after people with homes on the path of the molten rock were allowed back briefly to recover belongings.
Towers of magma burst high into the air overnight, painting the night sky red and spraying fiery debris onto the flanks of the Cumbre Vieja volcano.
Drone footage earlier showed lava flowing westwards to the coast in three huge tongues, incinerating everything in their path, including a school.
During the night between Tuesday and Wednesday, the Canary Islands’ vulcanology institute said the amplitude of the volcano’s seismic activity intensified.
That seismic activity is “an indicator of the intensity of the strombolian explosive activity,” the institute said late on Tuesday. Strombolian is an adjective describing volcanic eruptions with violent explosions ejecting incandescent dust.
The report was issued as the lava pouring from the flanks of the volcano had spread to cover 154 hectares (0.59 square mile) in the towns of El Paso and Los Llanos de Aridane, according to Copernicus Emergency Management Service.
The unstoppable lava has been slowly burning and covering houses as well as fields since the Cumbre Vieja volcano has erupted on Sunday afternoon.
About 6,000 people of the 80,000 people living on the island have been evacuated since Sunday and those living on the path of the lava were allowed back into their homes for brief moments to recover belongings.
No fatalities or injuries have been reported, but drone footage captured two tongues of black lava cutting a devastating swathe through the landscape as they advanced down the volcano’s western flank towards the sea.
Experts say that if and when the lava reaches the sea, it could trigger more explosions and clouds of toxic gases. Marine authorities are keeping a two nautical mile area in the sea around the area closed as a precaution.
The lava flow was initially expected to reach the shore on Monday evening, but its speed has fallen.
Reporting by Borja Suarez, Marco Trujillo, Nacho Doce and Inti Landauro, Editing by William Maclean
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Sept 14 (Reuters) – The four would-be citizen astronauts poised to ride a SpaceX rocket ship around the globe as the first all-civilian crew launched into orbit said on Tuesday they were eager for liftoff on the eve of their flight, feeling only “the good kind” of jitters.
“I was just worried that this moment would never come in my life. Let’s get going, let’s do it,” said Sian Proctor, 51, a geoscience professor, artist and lifelong space enthusiast who was a 2009 finalist in NASA’s astronaut candidate program before she was cut.
Proctor also disclosed she and her flightmates received a telephone call from one of her personal heroes, former first lady Michelle Obama, wishing them well, an honor she said “would stay with me the rest of my life.”
The “Inspiration4” quartet are due for liftoff as early as 8 p.m. on Wednesday (0000 GMT) from launch complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, for an orbital flight expected to last about three days before splashdown.
Proctor and her crewmates – billionaire e-commerce executive and jet pilot Jared Isaacman, 38, physician assistant Hayley Arceneaux, 29, and aerospace data engineer Chris Sembroski, 42 – took reporters’ questions at a pre-launch briefing inside a SpaceX hangar a little more than 24 hours before launch time.
Behind them, visible in the distance through the hangar’s open doors, stood the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule designed to carry them to a targeted orbital altitude of 360 miles (575 km) over the Earth – higher than the International Space Station.
The Inspiration4 crew of Chris Sembroski, Sian Proctor, Jared Isaacman and Hayley Arceneaux poses while suited up for a launch rehearsal in Cape Canaveral, Florida September 12, 2021. Picture taken September 12, 2021. Inspiration4/John Kraus/Handout via REUTERS
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That is far beyond the inaugural astro-tourism flights made this summer by SpaceX rivals Virgin Galactic (SPCE.N) and Blue Origin, which carried their respective billionaire founders – Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos – along for the ride.
Those two suborbital trips, while high enough for their crews to experience a few moments of microgravity, were over in a matter of minutes.
The high-orbital flight planned for Inspiration4 carries greater risks, including more exposure to radiation in space. But the crew members professed the utmost confidence in SpaceX, the private California-based rocket company founded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Isaacman, founder and chief executive of electronic financial services company Shift4 Payments Inc (FOUR.N), is the mission’s originator and benefactor, having paid Musk an undisclosed but presumably enormous sum to fly all four crew members into orbit.
Musk joined in on a pre-flight “check-in” call on Tuesday, “and did give us his assurances that the entire leadership is solely focused on this mission,” Isaacman told reporters when asked about pre-launch nerves. “No jitters, just excited to get going.”
Arceneaux, a childhood bone cancer survivor who now works with young lymphoma and leukemia patients at St. Jude Children’s Research Center in Memphis, Tennessee, which the Inspiration4 mission was designed largely to promote, said she was “just so excited.”
“Any jitters are the good kind,” she added. “I’m just waiting for tomorrow to get here.”
Joining Tuesday’s event was at least one retired NASA astronaut, Catherine “Cady” Coleman, 60, a veteran of two space shuttle missions who spoke up to wish the Inspiration4 crew well, telling them: “We want to welcome you to the family.”
Reporting by Julio-Cesar Chavez in Cape Canaveral, Fla.; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Peter Cooney
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
All-female orchestra was a symbol of change in Afghanistan
Members fled or went into hiding after Taliban victory
Some broke up instruments, burned documents
Taliban have said women will have rights, no vendettas
But movement’s past actions mean people remain fearful
Sept 3 (Reuters) – Negin Khpalwak was sitting at her home in Kabul when she got word that the Taliban had reached the outskirts of the capital.
The 24-year old conductor, once the face of Afghanistan’s renowned all-female orchestra, immediately began to panic.
The last time the Islamist militants were in power, they banned music and women were not allowed to work. In the final months of their insurgency, they carried out targeted attacks on those they said had betrayed their vision of Islamic rule.
Dashing around the room, Khpalwak grabbed a robe to cover her bare arms and hid away a small set of decorative drums. Then she gathered up photographs and press clippings of her famed musical performances, put them in a pile and burnt them.
“I felt so awful, it felt like that whole memory of my life was turned into ashes,” said Khpalwak, who fled to the United States – one of tens of thousands who escaped abroad after the Taliban’s lightning conquest of Afghanistan.
The story of the orchestra in the days following the Taliban’s victory, which Reuters has pieced together through interviews with members of Khpalwak’s music school, encapsulates the sense of shock felt by young Afghans like Khpalwak, particularly women.
The orchestra, called Zohra after the Persian goddess of music, was mainly made up of girls and women from a Kabul orphanage aged between 13 and 20.
Formed in 2014, it became a global symbol of the freedom many Afghans began to enjoy in the 20 years since the Taliban last ruled, despite the hostility and threats it continued to face from some in the deeply conservative Muslim country.
Wearing bright red hijabs, and playing a mix of traditional Afghan music and Western classics with local instruments like the guitar-like rabab, the group entertained audiences from the Sydney Opera House to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Today, armed Taliban guard the shuttered Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) where the group once practised, while in some parts of the country the movement has ordered radio stations to stop playing music.
“We never expected that Afghanistan will be returning to the stone age,” said ANIM’s founder Ahmad Sarmast, adding that Zohra orchestra represented freedom and female empowerment in Afghanistan and its members served as “cultural diplomats”.
Sarmast, who was speaking from Australia, told Reuters the Taliban had barred staff from entering the institute.
“The girls of Zohra orchestra, and other orchestras and ensembles of the school, are fearful about their life and they are in hiding,” he said.
A Taliban spokesman did not immediately respond to questions about the status of the institute.
Since returning to power as the final Western soldiers withdrew from the country, the Taliban have sought to reassure Afghans and the outside world about the rights they would allow.
The group has said cultural activities as well as jobs and education for women would be permitted, within the confines of sharia and Afghanistan’s Islamic and cultural practices.
INSTRUMENTS LEFT BEHIND
While Khpalwak frantically burned her musical memories on Aug. 15, the day the Taliban marched into Kabul without a fight, some of her peers were attending a practice at ANIM, preparing for a big international tour in October.
At 10 a.m., the school’s security guards rushed into the rehearsal room to tell the musicians that the Taliban were closing in. In their haste to escape, many left behind instruments too heavy and conspicuous to carry on the streets of the capital, according to Sarmast.
Members of the Zohra orchestra, an ensemble of 35 women, practises during a session, at Afghanistan’s National Institute of Music, in Kabul, Afghanistan April 4, 2016. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood
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Sarmast, who was in Australia at the time, said he received many messages from students worried about their safety and asking for help. His staff told him not to return to the country because the Taliban were looking for him and his home had been raided several times.
The dangers facing performers in Afghanistan were brutally highlighted in 2014, when a suicide bomber blew himself up during a show at a French-run school in Kabul, wounding Sarmast who was in the audience.
At the time, Taliban insurgents claimed the attack and said the play, a condemnation of suicide bombings, was an insult to “Islamic values”.
Even during 20 years of a Western-backed government in Kabul, which tolerated greater civil liberties than the Taliban, there was resistance to the idea of an all-female orchestra.
Zohra orchestra members have previously spoken about having to hide their music from conservative families and being verbally abused and threatened with beatings. There were even objections among young Afghans.
Khpalwak recalled one incident in Kabul when a group of boys stood attentively watching one of their performances.
As she was packing up, she overheard them talking amongst themselves. “What a shame these girls are playing music”, “how have their families allowed them?”, “girls should be at home”, she recalled them saying.
‘TREMBLING IN FEAR’
Life under the Taliban could be much worse than whispered jibes, said Nazira Wali, a 21-year-old former Zohra cellist.
Wali, who was studying in the United States when the Taliban retook Kabul, said she was in touch with orchestra members back home who were so fearful of being found that they had smashed their instruments and were deleting social media profiles.
“My heart is trembling in fear for them, because now that the Taliban are there we can’t predict what will happen to them within the next moment,” she said.
“If things continue as they are, there will be no music in Afghanistan.”
Reuters reached out to several orchestra members left in Kabul for this story. None responded.
Khpalwak managed to escape from Kabul a few days after the Taliban arrived, boarding an evacuation flight alongside a group of female Afghan journalists.
Tens of thousands of people flocked to Kabul’s airport to try and flee the country, storming the runway and in some cases clutching on to the outside of departing planes. Several died in the chaos.
Khpalwak is too young to fully remember life under the Taliban’s previous rule, but arriving in the capital as a young girl to attend school sticks in her memory.
“All I saw was ruins, downed houses, holes in bullet-ridden walls. That’s what I remember. And that’s the image that comes to mind now when I hear the name of the Taliban,” she said.
In the music school she found solace, and among her Zohra orchestra bandmates “girls closer than family”.
“There wasn’t a single day that was a bad day there, because there was always music, it was full of colour and beautiful voices. But now there is silence. Nothing is happening there.”
Editing by Mike Collett-White
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
PHUKET, Thailand, July 3 (Reuters) – Newly arrived overseas tourists on Thailand’s island of Phuket were able to roam free without quarantine on Friday for the first time in more than a year, as Thailand launched a special programme for vaccinated visitors to the island.
Tourists swam in hotel pools and walked along Phuket’s postcard-perfect beaches after receiving a COVID-19 test result within 24 hours of arrival.
“This is the perfect place to just relax and clean our minds, our heads, after a long time,” said Sigal Baram, lying by the pool, who was visiting from Israel with her husband and friends. The group was among the first to arrive in the country.
The ‘Phuket Sandbox’ initiative allows free movement on the island for fully vaccinated tourists, with no quarantine required, although masks are required in most public places.
While five-star hotels and restaurants welcomed back tourists, local street vendors said they were not benefiting from the plan, because tourists frequent mostly large hotels.
The Kalmar family, tourists from Israel, enjoy in a pool as Phuket reopens to overseas tourists, allowing foreigners fully vaccinated against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) to visit the resort island without quarantine, in Phuket, Thailand July 2, 2021. REUTERS/Jorge Silva
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“There is no way street vendors will get the money from overseas tourists… it will go to hotels and restaurants instead,” said Yupin Papor, a massage therapist who lost her job during the pandemic and became a street vendor selling food on the beach.
Thailand lost about $50 billion in tourism revenue last year, when foreign arrivals plunged 83%.
Phuket was hit particularly hard by job losses and business closures.
“I see the shops closed. It’s a big difference to me from before,” said Omar Alraeesi from United Arab Emirates, who comes to Phuket every year.
Millions of people visited Phuket every year before the pandemic and the government and tourism industry hope the reopening will help save its battered economy.
Additional reporting by Jorge Silva and Artorn Pookasook, Editing by Rosalba O’Brien
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.