Far Worse Than Imagined

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Hamed Esmaeilion with wife Parisa and 

daughter Reera on her ninth birthday. 

Courtesy Hamed Esmaeilion

Hamed Esmaeilion has to watch his back wherever he goes — unable to escape the oppressive and violent regime that rules his homeland of Iran, even when he’s in Canada.  When he first arrived in 2010 with his wife Parisa and daughter Reera, Esmaeilion thought he had come to the safest country in the world.  “But it’s not,” he says.

His wife and daughter were among 176 people killed, including 55 Canadian citizens, when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 on Jan. 8, 2020. That shattered any illusions the Ontario man had that his family would live happily ever after in Canada.  READ MORE...

Calls For a Humanitarian Pause

G7 foreign ministers on Wednesday called for humanitarian pauses in the Israel-Hamas conflict to allow in aid and help the release of hostages, and sought a return to a broader peace process.

Ending a two-day meeting in Tokyo as Israeli forces continued to pound the Gaza Strip, the Group of Seven wealthy nations said in a joint statement that Israel had the right to defend itself. But they also underscored the need to protect civilians and to comply with international humanitarian law.

G7 members are committed to preparing long-term solutions for Gaza and a return to a broader peace process in the Israel-Palestinian conflict “in line with the internationally agreed parameters,” the statement said.   READ MORE...

It's Fall Already

By now, your shorts and t-shrits are probably packed away in replace of knitted sweaters and jeans. Just as our wardrobe needs updating with seasonal changes, so does our home – out goes the patio furniture and in comes the warming blankets.

And what better way to get excited about your home update than with the latest decor trends that will help create an autumnal sanctuary at home.  READ MORE...

Ancient Black Death Mystery

Researchers believe they may have found ground zero for the deadliest plague in human history, the Black Death — pulling the veil off a mystery that has been shrouded for nearly 700 years.

A paper published in Nature on Wednesday details how a team of archaeologists and geneticists sequenced the genome of plague bacteria found in medieval corpses that predate the first plague outbreaks in Eurasia. The make-up of this ancient bacterial DNA has led researchers to believe it was the origin for almost all subsequent strains of bubonic plague.

Samples of this original Yersinia pestis bacteria, the pathogen that causes bubonic plague, were found in northern Kyrgyzstan, in villages that were along the old Silk Road trade route in Central Asia.

The study began several years ago when Philip Slavin, an economic and environmental historian for the University of Stirling, came across records that a pair of 14th-century cemeteries had a significant amount of tombstones dated from 1338 to 1339. Ten of these tombstones explicitly referenced pestilence.

This was unusual because, prior to this study, the earliest deaths associated with the plague were in 1346 in the Crimean Peninsula.

“When you have one or two years with excess mortality, it means something funny is going on there,” Slavin said at a news conference.  READ MORE...

Russia Ready to FIRE

Provided by Global News...

A senior Russian military official said on Monday that Russia was ready to open fire on foreign ships and submarines that illegally enter its territorial waters, the Interfax news agency reported.

Any such decision would, however, be taken only at the “highest level,”, Stanislav Gadzhimagomedov, deputy head of the main operational department of the General Staff, was quoted as saying.

The comment came two days after Moscow said a Russian naval vessel had chased away a U.S. submarine in Russian waters in the Pacific. The United States denied it had carried out military operations in Russian territorial waters.

Tensions between the two countries are running high, with Washington warning that Russia could attack Ukraine at any time. Moscow denies any such intention, despite massing more than 100,000 troops near Ukraine’s borders, and has accused Western governments of hysteria.

NATO Wants Ukraine

Russia‘s foreign minister claims that NATO wants to pull Ukraine into the alliance, amid escalating tensions over NATO expansion and fears that Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine.

In comments on state television Sunday, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also challenged NATO’s claim to be a purely defensive structure.

Russia’s massing of an estimated 100,000 troops near the border with Ukraine has brought increasingly strong warnings from the West that Moscow intends to invade. Russia in turn demands that NATO promise never to allow Ukraine to join the alliance, and to stop the deployment of NATO weapons near Russian borders and roll back its forces from Eastern Europe.

The head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, on Sunday rejected Western warnings about a planned invasion.

“At this time, they’re saying that Russia threatens Ukraine – that’s completely ridiculous,” he was quoted as saying by state news agency Tass. “We don’t want war and we don’t need it at all.”

Russia-Ukraine standoff: Lukashenko, Kyiv residents speculate about possibility of war'

Russia has long resented NATO’s granting membership to countries that were once part of the Soviet Union or were in its sphere of influence as members of the Warsaw Pact.  READ MORE...

Our Melting Antartic Glacier

As icebergs drifted by his Antarctica-bound ship, David Holland spoke this week of how the melting glacier he’s cruising towards may contain warning signals for the coasts of far-off Canada.

The atmospheric and ocean scientist from Newfoundland is part of an expedition to one of the world’s most frigid and remote spots – the Thwaites glacier in the western portion of the continent – where he’ll measure water temperatures in an undersea channel the size of Manhattan.

“The question of whether sea level will change can only be answered by looking at the planet where it matters, and that is at Thwaites,” said Holland, director of the environmental fluid dynamics laboratory at New York University, during a satellite phone interview from aboard the South Korean icebreaker Araon.

It’s over 16,000 kilometres from Holland’s hometown in Brigus, N.L., on Conception Bay, to the site about 100 kilometres inland from the “grounding zone” where the Thwaites’ glacier leaves the continent and extends over the Pacific.

The team’s 20,000 tonnes of drilling gear will be assembled to measure the temperatures, salinity and turbulence of the Pacific waters that have crept underneath and are lapping away at the guts of the glacier.

“If it (the water) is above freezing, and in salt water this means above -2 centigrade, that’s not sustainable. A glacier can’t survive that,” said Holland.

Since 2018, more than 60 scientists from the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration group have been exploring the ocean and marine sediments, measuring warming currents flowing toward the deep ice, and examining the stretching, bending, and grinding of the glacier over the landscape below.

The Florida-sized Thwaites glacier faces the Amundsen Sea, and researchers have suggested in journal articles over the past decade it may eventually lose large amounts of ice because of deep, warm water driven into the area as the planet warms. Some media have dubbed Thwaites the “doomsday glacier” due to estimates that it could add about 65 centimetres to global sea level rise.  READ MORE...