#Ukrainian girl tries British treats

[newstfionline]

Friday, May 7, 2021

60 years since 1st American in space: Tourists lining up (AP) Sixty years after Alan Shepard became the first American in space, everyday people are on the verge of following in his cosmic footsteps. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin used Wednesday’s anniversary to kick off an auction for a seat on the company’s first crew spaceflight—a short Shepard-like hop launched by a rocket named New Shepard. The Texas liftoff is targeted for July 20, the date of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic aims to kick off tourist flights next year. And Elon Musk’s SpaceX will launch a billionaire and his sweepstakes winners in September. That will be followed by a flight by three businessmen to the International Space Station in January.

The U.S. birthrate is falling; other countries have faced the same problem (Washington Post) With the U.S. birthrate declining for the sixth year in a row and undergoing its largest drop in nearly 50 years, according to provisional data released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States is facing a dilemma with which many wealthy nations in Europe and Asia have long grappled. Instead of trying to ramp up immigration, some governments have tried subsidizing fertility treatments, offering free day care and generous parental leave, and paying thousands of dollars in cash grants to parents. But there’s little evidence that these policies have been effective on a large scale. South Korea, for instance, spent roughly $120 billion between 2005 and 2018 to incentivize having children, but its birthrate continued to fall. Singapore began offering new child-care subsidies, more-generous maternity leave policies and grants for new parents that today amount to $7,330 per baby. But those interventions didn’t reverse the trend: Singapore currently has the world’s third-lowest fertility rate. And Japan, Russia, Estonia and other nations have similar problems.

Protest road blockades halt Colombian coffee exports, federation says (Reuters) Road blockades connected to anti-government protests in Colombia, which marked their eighth day on Wednesday, have halted shipments of top agricultural export coffee, the head of the grower’s federation said. The protests, originally called in opposition to a now-canceled tax reform plan, are now demanding the government take action to tackle poverty, police violence and inequalities in the health and education systems. Twenty-four people, mostly demonstrators, have died. “We are stopped completely, exports are stopped, there is no movement of coffee to ports nor internally,” federation head Roberto Velez said in a phone interview.

20 dead in Rio de Janeiro shootout (Reuters) At least 20 people, including a police officer, died on Thursday in a shootout during a police operation against drug traffickers in Rio de Janeiro’s Jacarezinho shanty town, O Globo newspaper reported on its website. Two passengers on a metro train were also wounded in the shooting in the northern Rio neighborhood, the newspaper said.

Gunboats and blockade threats as U.K., France clash over fishing (NBC News) The U.K. and France were engaged in a naval standoff on Thursday as a long-simmering dispute over post-Brexit fishing rights escalated in the English Channel. France deployed two maritime patrol boats to the waters off the British Channel island of Jersey, its navy said, after the British Navy dispatched two of its own vessels to the area late Wednesday. The dueling moves came as a flotilla of French fishing trawlers sailed to the Jersey port of St. Helier to protest over fishing rights. The French government has suggested it could cut power supplies to the island if its fishermen are not granted full access to U.K. fishing waters under post-Brexit trading terms. Clément Beaune, the French secretary of state for European affairs, told AFP on Thursday that Paris will “not be intimidated” by the British. On the other side of the Channel, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledged his "unwavering support" for the island after he spoke with Jersey officials about the prospect of a French blockade. Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands with a population of 108,000, is geographically closer to France than Britain. It sits just 14 miles off the French coast and receives most of its electricity from France via undersea cables.

Ukraine wants aid, NATO support from Blinken’s visit (AP) U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with his Ukrainian counterpart in Kyiv Thursday, telling him that he was there to “reaffirm strongly” Washington’s commitment to Ukraine’s “sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence.” Blinken also assured Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba that the U.S. was committed “to work with you and continue to strengthen your own democracy, building institutions, advancing your reforms against corruption.” By visiting so early in his tenure, before any trip to Russia, Blinken is signaling that Ukraine is a high foreign-policy priority for President Joe Biden’s administration. But what he can, or will, deliver in the meeting later with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is unclear.

India hits another grim record as it scrambles for oxygen supply (AP) Infections in India hit another grim daily record on Thursday as demand for medical oxygen jumped seven-fold and the government denied reports that it was slow in distributing life-saving supplies from abroad. The number of new confirmed cases breached 400,000 for the second time since the devastating surge began last month. The 412,262 cases pushed India’s tally to more than 21 million. The Health Ministry also reported 3,980 deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing the total to 230,168. Experts believe both figures are an undercount. Eleven COVID-19 patients died as the pressure in the oxygen line dropped suddenly in a government medical college hospital in Chengalpet town in southern India on Wednesday night, possibly because of a faulty valve, The Times of India newspaper reported. Hospital authorities said they had repaired the pipeline last week, but the consumption of oxygen doubled since then, the daily said.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid gains chance to form government, oust Netanyahu (Washington Post) Yair Lapid, a former news anchor and leader of Israel’s centrist opposition, was picked to negotiate a new governing coalition Wednesday, opening the possibility of Israel getting its first government not led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in more than a decade. President Reuven Rivlin tapped Lapid to make the next attempt to form a government one day after Netanyahu failed to assemble a parliamentary majority after 28 days of effort. Under Israel’s system, Lapid also has four weeks to craft a power-sharing plan. If he falls short, the president could open to the process to any member of the Knesset or call for Israel’s fifth election since the spring of 2019. Lapid will face a stiff challenge in trying to find common ground among the range of anti-Netanyahu parties elected in March. As a bloc, they would control enough seats to secure a majority. But ideologically, they range from the far right to the far left of Israel’s political spectrum. They also include Israeli Arab parties that traditionally play no part in supporting governing coalitions but that may be needed this time.

Instagram fuels rise in black-market sales of maids into Persian Gulf servitude (Washington Post) The advent of Instagram in recent years has helped create an international black market for migrant workers, in particular women recruited in Africa and Asia who are sold into servitude as maids in Persian Gulf countries. Unlicensed agents have exploited the social media platform to place these women into jobs that often lack documentation or assurances of proper pay and working conditions. Several women who were marketed via Instagram described being treated essentially as captives and forced to work grueling hours for far less money than they had been promised. “They advertise us on social media, then the employer picks. Then we are delivered to their house. We are not told anything about the employers. You’re just told to take your stuff, and a driver takes you there,” said Vivian, 24, from Kenya. Domestic servants sold on the platform described encountering threats, exploitation and abuse. The agencies which marketed them, meanwhile, made thousands of dollars. In response to a request for comment last month, an Instagram spokesperson asked for the list of accounts identified by The Post so company officials could investigate. Instagram has since deleted these accounts.

Nonuplets: Woman From Mali Gives Birth To 9 Babies (NPR) A Malian woman has given birth to nine babies, in what could become a world record. Halima Cissé had been expecting to have seven newborns: ultrasound sessions had failed to spot two of her babies. "The newborns (five girls and four boys) and the mother are all doing well," Mali's health minister, Dr. Fanta Siby, said in an announcement about the births. Professor Youssef Alaoui, medical director of the private Ain Borja clinic in Casablanca where Cissé gave birth, said the babies were born at 30 weeks. The newborns weighed between 500 grams and 1 kilogram (about 1.1 to 2.2 pounds), he told journalists. The clinic has deployed a team of around 30 staff members to aid the mother's delivery and care for her nine children.

Nigeria reels from nationwide wave of deadly violence (The Guardian) Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari has come under mounting pressure from critics and allies alike as the country reels from multiple security crises that have claimed hundreds of lives in recent weeks. An alarming wave of violence has left millions in Africa’s most populous country in uproar at the collapse in security. Attacks by jihadist groups in the north-east have been compounded by a sharp rise in abductions targeting civilians in schools and at interstate links across Nigeria. Mass killings by bandit groups in rural towns, a reported rise in armed robberies in urban areas and increasingly daring attacks on security forces by pro-Biafran militants in the south-east have also all risen. In April alone, almost 600 civilians were killed across the country and at least 406 abducted by armed groups, according to analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations. The violence has left much of the country on edge and Buhari facing the fiercest criticism since he took office.

[markoftheasphodel]

So, with it being the anniversary of the end of WWII in Europe, I have a Friendly Reminder!

The Third Reich abducted between 3 and 5.5 million people from Central and Eastern Europe to be used as slave labor during the war, many from Ukraine and Poland. They took girls as young as ten. They kidnapped my husband’s grandmother when she was out picking berries with her sister. They took her (future) best friend Asiya the month she was supposed to graduate from high school. These young people were shuttled through the Reich, starved, beaten, executed, and often raped. Ukrainian Grandma had jobs ranging from sweeping the streets to working in a munitions factory. Since she had a Russian last name (Reshatov) and spoke Russian better than Ukrainian, her fellow slaves from Ukraine and Belarus treated her like garbage. There was no solidarity among slaves. Meanwhile her friend Asiya was sent to western Austria near the Swiss border, where she could’ve walked right over but no one did because they would’ve been killed. The Swiss were not waiting to welcome escaped slaves. At her first “job” tending a farm, she rebelled against the abuse. Her fellow field worker sold her out because there was no solidarity among slaves, and she spent days in the town jail with no food.

Asiya didn’t care if she died because her brothers were in the Red Army, her parents were already dead thanks to Stalin’s genocidal famine, and her own uncle was a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator who’d let the Reich take his own niece. So she went to jail, was starved, got visited by a priest, and eventually got transferred to a different house to be a domestic servant to a family that wasn’t so terrible to her. She stood on their front porch and cheered on the American bombers as they flew by. She was about nineteen by then.

When the Allies declared victory, the ordeal wasn’t over for these workers. Grandma’s friend Asiya recalls the Ostarbeiter workers being rounded up, men separated from women, stripped of their money which was piled up in the train station, and put in boxcars to be sent back “home” to the USSR. Her cousin, also in that Austrian village, was sent back-- to a gulag, where she died of typhus. Asiya was lucky in that the big house she worked out of was taken by the local French commander and she got special treatment. She tried to save her cousin, throwing a jacket over the fence of the place the former slaves had been rounded up, but couldn’t-- even the French commander wouldn’t break his own curfew and the train filled with 'liberated’ slaves slipped away in the middle of the night. 

Grandma was luckier in that she was in the American sector, where General Eisenhower banned the use of force in “repatriating” the former slaves as early as October of ‘45. Workers in the French and British zones weren’t so lucky. She still spent more than a decade as a Displaced Person, living in barracks and camps, struggling to survive. She married a Circassian Muslim man from southern Russia who was facing a death sentence back home in the USSR because he’d helped young men from his village escape conscription into Stalin’s Red Army. They had a son in the camp. This little family finally managed to get accepted by the US as refugees thanks to the Tolstoy Foundation on the second-to-last boat of its kind. It was, I believe, 1956-- eleven years after the Allied Victory. Asiya managed to get to the US around the same time. They ultimately made it to Michigan, raised their families, became citizens.

They were the lucky few. The stories of the Ostarbeiter tragedies have not been told because most of their voices were silenced long ago. The remaining survivors, like Asiya, are in their late eighties or their nineties. In the vacuum left by these untold stories are lies-- lies from the right-wing about how the Reich wasn’t so bad, lies from the left-wing about how the USSR wasn’t so bad, romantic fantasies from the other Allies that don’t mention things like young people being stripped of their possessions, shoved in boxcars, and sent to prison camps. 

(And what, pray tell, does THAT sound like?)

In our house we praise General Eisenhower because he stopped the “repatriation” when no one else would and that’s the reason Grandma survived and my spouse, their father, their siblings, and now our two little nieces exist. 

They are the only surviving members of the Reshatov family.