PARIS — France is banning all indoor public gatherings of more than 5,000 people to slow the spread of coronavirus cases and recommending that people no longer greet each other with kisses.
The cancellation of large gatherings in confined spaces was announced by Health Minister Olivier Veran after special government meetings Saturday that focused on responses to the epidemic.
Having previously recommended that people avoid shaking hands, the minister said they should also cut back on “la bise,” the custom in France and elsewhere in Europe of giving greetings with kisses, or air kisses, on the cheeks.
The tightened restrictions on public gatherings had an immediate impact. A major four-day trade show in Cannes for property investors was postponed from March to June.
A half-marathon that was scheduled for Sunday in Paris also was cancelled, as was a carnival in the Alpine town of Annecy, Veran announced.
He said other outdoor events and gatherings that might lead to a mixing of people from infected areas could also be canceled.
Public gatherings are being banned completely in the Oise region north of Paris that has seen a cluster of cases, and in a town in the foothills of the Alps that has also seen infections, he said.
As of Saturday, France had registered a total of 73 people infected with the coronavirus, up from 57 on Friday. Of those, 59 people remain hospitalized, two have died and 12 have recovered, the minister said.
ANKARA, Turkey — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Saturday that his country’s borders with Europe were open, as thousands of refugees gathered at the frontier with Greece.
Migrants played a cat-and-mouse game with Greek border patrols throughout the night and into Saturday, with some cutting holes in the fence only to be turned back by tear gas and stun grenades. Greek authorities also fired tear gas to repulse attempts by the crowd to push through the border.
The move by Turkey to open its border, first announced Thursday, was seen in Greece as a deliberate attempt to pressure European countries. It comes as tensions ratcheted up between Turkey and Syria. More than 55 Turkish troops have been killed since Turkey began sending further reinforcements into areas of northwest Syria under the control of rebels, which are backed by Turkey.
“We will not close the gates to refugees,” Erdogan said in a speech in Istanbul. “The European Union has to keep its promises.”
If Erdogan really has opened the border, it would be a dramatic departure from Turkey’s current policy. Under a 2016 deal, Turkey agreed to stem the tide of refugees to Europe in return for financial aid. It has since protested that the EU has failed to honor the agreement.
Erdogan was speaking for the first time since 33 Turkish soldiers were killed in air strikes in northwest Syria on Thursday, the largest single loss of life for Turkish forces since their country became involved in Syria in 2016.
The Turkish troop deaths led officials to declare Turkey would not impede refugees seeking to enter Europe.
Turkey currently hosts more than 3.5 million Syrian refugees, and many fleeing war and poverty in Asia, Africa and the Middle East use it as a staging post and transit point to reach Europe, usually through neighboring Greece.
On Saturday, small groups managed to get across into Greece clandestinely. The vast majority were from Afghanistan, and most were men, although there were also some families with young children. They took shelter during the night in abandoned buildings or small chapels in the Greek countryside before starting to walk towards northern Greek.
Erdogan has frequently threatened to “open the gates” and allow refugees and migrants to head to Europe unless more international support was provided, particularly at times of tension with European countries.
Thursday’s deaths were the most serious escalation between Turkish and Russian-backed Syrian forces. The development has raised the prospect of an all-out war with millions of Syrian civilians trapped in the middle.
Syrian government forces have been on a weekslong offensive into Idlib province, the country’s last rebel stronghold, which borders Turkey. Thousands of Turkish soldiers are deployed inside rebel-controlled areas of Idlib province, which is dominated by al-Qaida-linked militants.
The Idlib offensive has pushed nearly 950,000 displaced civilians toward the Syrian-Turkish border amid cold winter weather.
“We learnt the border was open and we headed there. But we saw it was closed, and we found a hole in the fence and went through it,” said Ali Nikad, a 17-year-old Iranian who made it into Greece overnight with a group of friends.
Nikad said he had spent two months in Turkey but couldn’t make ends meet, and was hoping to find his uncle who was already in Greece.
Many of those who made it across the land border were seen being arrested and driven away in white vans.
A police officer told The Associated Press there was pressure along the 200-kilometer (125-mile) land border from migrants trying to force their way through overnight, and groups were being constantly repulsed. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak on the record.
Others were making their way to Greek islands in dinghies from the nearby Turkish coast.
Greece and Bulgaria increased security at their borders with Turkey. In Athens, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis convened an emergency meeting of top cabinet, military and coast guard officials Saturday morning on the issue.
In Syria, Turkey’s Defense Ministry said one of its soldiers was killed and two were injured by Syrian government shelling, the latest fatality after the deadly airstrike that killed 33 earlier this week.
The announcement late Friday also said Turkish forces hit Syrian government targets and a number of Syrian troops were “neutralized.”
It remained unclear whether Syrian or Russian jets carried out the airstrike, but Russia denied its aircraft were responsible.
Erdogan had given the Syrian government until the end of the month to pull back from areas captured in Idlib, threatening large-scale military action if they didn’t. But any large scale Turkish military action risks more loss of life among Turkish soldiers. He had kept unusually silent since the 33 deaths.
NATO envoys held emergency talks Friday at the request of Turkey, a NATO member. While urging deescalation in Idlib, NATO offered no further assistance.
Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke by telephone Friday and discussed implementing agreements in Idlib, the Kremlin said. Fahrettin Altun, Erdogan’s director of communications, said they had agreed to meet “as soon as possible.”
Erdogan also spoke with other world leaders, including President Donald Trump and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an immediate cease-fire in Idlib. He warned that “without urgent action, the risk of even greater escalation grows by the hour, and as always, civilians are paying the gravest price.”
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Kantouris reported from Kastanies, Greece. Elena Becatoros in Athens contributed to this report.
DOHA, Qatar — The United States signed a peace agreement with Taliban militants on Saturday aimed at bringing an end to 18 years of bloodshed in Afghanistan and allowing U.S. troops to return home from America’s longest war.
Under the agreement, the U.S. would draw its forces down to 8,600 from 13,000 in the next 3-4 months, with the remaining U.S. forces withdrawing in 14 months. The complete pullout, however, would depend on the Taliban meeting their commitments to prevent terrorism.
President George W. Bush ordered the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Some U.S. troops currently serving there had not yet been born when the World Trade Center collapsed on that crisp, sunny morning that changed how Americans see the world.
It only took a few months to topple the Taliban and send Osama bin Laden and top al-Qaida militants scrambling across the border into Pakistan, but the war dragged on for years as the United States tried establish a stable, functioning state in one of the least developed countries in the world. The Taliban regrouped, and currently hold sway over half the country.
The U.S. spent more than $750 billion, and on all sides the war cost tens of thousands of lives lost, permanently scarred and indelibly interrupted. But the conflict was also frequently ignored by U.S. politicians and the American public.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo attended the ceremony in Qatar, where the Taliban have a political office, but did not sign the agreement. Instead, it was signed by U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar.
The Taliban harbored bin Laden and his al-Qaida network as they plotted, and then celebrated, the hijackings of four airliners that were crashed into lower Manhattan, the Pentagon and a field in western Pennsylvania, killing almost 3,000 people.
Addressing reporters after the signing ceremony, Pompeo said the U.S. is “realistic” about the peace deal it signed, but is “seizing the best opportunity for peace in a generation.”
He said he was still angry about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and that the U.S. will not ”squander” what its soldiers “have won through blood, sweat and tears.” He said the U.S. will do whatever is necessary for its security if the Taliban do not comply with the agreement.
Pompeo had privately told a conference of U.S. ambassadors at the State Department this week that he was going only because President Donald Trump had insisted on his participation, according to two people present.
Dozens of Taliban members had earlier held a small victory march in Qatar in which they waved the militant group’s white flags, according to a video shared on Taliban websites. “Today is the day of victory, which has come with the help of Allah,” said Abbas Stanikzai, one of the Taliban’s lead negotiators, who joined the march.
Trump has repeatedly promised to get the U.S. out of its “endless wars” in the Middle East, and the withdrawal of troops could provide a boost as he seeks re-election in a nation weary of involvement in distant conflicts.
Trump has approached the Taliban agreement cautiously, steering clear of the crowing surrounding other major foreign policy actions, such as his talks with North Korea.
Last September, on short notice, he called off what was to be a signing ceremony with the Taliban at Camp David after a series of new Taliban attacks. But he has since been supportive of the talks led by his special envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad.
Under the agreement, the Taliban promise not to let extremists use the country as a staging ground for attacking the U.S. or its allies. But U.S. officials are loath to trust the Taliban to fulfill their obligations.
The prospects for Afghanistan’s future are uncertain. The agreement sets the stage for peace talks involving Afghan factions, which are likely to be complicated. Under the agreement, 5,000 Taliban are to be released from Afghan-run jails, but it’s not known if the Afghan government will do that. There are also questions about whether Taliban fighters loyal to various warlords will be willing to disarm.
U.S. officials say the eventual withdrawal of all American and allied troops from Afghanistan is not contingent on any specific outcome in talks among the Taliban and other Afghan factions about the country’s future. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the agreement.
It’s not clear what will become of gains made in women’s rights since the toppling of the Taliban, which had repressed women and girls under a strict brand of Sharia law. Women’s rights in Afghanistan had been a top concern of both the Bush and Obama administration, but it remains a deeply conservative country, with women still struggling for basic rights.
There are currently more than 16,500 soldiers serving under the NATO banner, of which 8,000 are American. Germany has the next largest contingent, with 1,300 troops, followed by Britain with 1,100.
In all, 38 NATO countries are contributing forces to Afghanistan. The alliance officially concluded its combat mission in 2014 and now provides training and support to Afghan forces.
The U.S. has a separate contingent of 5,000 troops deployed to carry out counter-terrorism missions and provide air and ground support to Afghan forces when requested.
Since the start of negotiations with the Taliban, the U.S. has stepped up its air assaults on the Taliban as well as a local Islamic State affiliate. Last year the U.S. air force dropped more bombs on Afghanistan than in any year since 2013.
Seven days ago, the Taliban began a seven-day “reduction of violence” period, a prerequisite to the peace deal signing.
“We have seen a significant reduction in violence in Afghanistan over the last days, and therefore we are also very close to the signing of an agreement between the United States and the Taliban,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said Friday in Brussels.
He was in Kabul on Saturday for a separate signing ceremony with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and U.S. Defence Secretary Mark Esper. That signing was intended to show continuing NATO and U.S. support for Afghanistan.
“The road to peace will be long and hard and there will be setbacks, and there is a risk always for spoilers,” Stoltenberg said. “But the thing is, we are committed, the Afghan people are committed to peace, and we will continue to provide support.”
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Gannon reported from Kabul, Afghanistan. Associated Press writers Rahim Faiez and Tameem Akhgar in Kabul, Lorne Cook in Brussels and Joseph Krauss in Jerusalem contributed.
Because it’s India, home to roughly 18 percent of the world’s population. But more than that, India was supposed to be a symbol—for emerging markets making the transition to advanced industrial status, and as a pluralistic society in which hundreds of millions of people belonging to different faiths could coexist peacefully. Both those storylines are falling to the wayside.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi—vegetarian, yogi, hugger—first came to national power in 2014 as an economic reformer who promised to shake up India’s sclerotic bureaucracy. Though he had made a name for himself as the chief minister of Gujarat (one who often turned a blind eye to violence against Muslims), by the time Modi was approaching the premiership, he had refashioned his image to present himself as a competent, pro-business technocrat. That was a compelling message for millions of Indians who hadn’t seen many of those before in national politics, and he convincingly won election. Modi quickly set about enacting both economic and social reforms.
Not all those reforms were successful, but they were ambitious. Eventually though the reforms India’s government championed started yielding less and less political returns for Modi. As Modi geared up for his reelection campaign with a slowing economy, he began to stoke the flames of Hindu nationalism, which made sense from a political numbers perspective given that 80 percent of the country is Hindu (though the country is also home to 170 million Muslims). And while that Hindu nationalism (and the accompanying anti-Muslim sentiment it entails) helped him secure reelection, he hasn’t let up—in December, his government introduced and passed the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which fast-tracks citizenship for persecuted religious minorities from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh as long as they met certain criteria, chief among them that they are not Muslims. The act is widely seen as anti-Muslim despite the government’s protestations to the contrary.
Unsurprisingly, the citizenship announcement—along with plans to build detention centers to house (primarily Muslim) people that don’t have the proper documentation to prove their legal-status in the country—have inflamed passions in the country’s Muslim community, who have been protesting on and off for the last few months. Matters reached a fever pitch this week in Delhi when Kapil Mishra, a member of Modi’s BJP party addressed a rally against a group of protestors (mainly women and Muslim) over their closure of a road in protest of the citizenship law. Mishra issued an ultimatum to the police, saying they either remove the demonstrators, or his supporters will. They made good on that threat. As of last count, more than 300 people had been hurt and more than 40 killed, the worst violence Delhi has seen since the 1984 riots that targeted Sikhs following the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi.
What Happens Next:
Not that you would know much about the religious strife gripping India based off U.S. Donald Trump’s comments during the trip. Given the opportunity to comment, Trump not only passed at the offer but actually commended Modi on the religious freedom being enjoyed throughout India.
Trump’s decision not to engage on the religious violence may well have been the highlight of the trip for Modi, who has been furiously trying to rehabilitate his international standing; had Trump commented, Modi would have been forced to talk about the issue as well, a fact that he has so far avoided doing (he eventually tweeted out a simple call for “peace and brotherhood” a couple of days later). Trump’s silence on the issue allowed for a quick and successful foreign visit, even as the long-shot goal of the trip—a trade deal between the U.S. and India—failed to materialize. A new deal to sell military arms to India did get inked.
The reality is that Modi is now attempting to lead two separate India’s—one for the world to see, where foreign leaders visit and he visits foreign leaders, and the second India which is just bubbling beneath the surface. Increasingly though, the two are bleeding into one another—this is the second time a planned trip by a foreign leader was punctuated by public violence since the new citizenship law was announced (Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was forced to skip his December trip to India due to violence in Assam).
The violence is only likely to only get worse from here—to date, the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protestors have been peaceful when protesting, but the events of this week may change their calculus. Modi, meanwhile, no longer has to play host to a foreign dignitary, giving him and his BJP party more room to crack down. What’s more, Modi’s demonstrated comfort pivoting from economic reformer to Hindu nationalist has already begun unnerving foreign investors; the violence of this week will unnerve them even more, hitting India’s economy and likely forcing Modi to rely even more on Hindu nationalism as a political crutch going forward. And that’s before coronavirus…
The Key Number That Explains It:
N/A—usually, polling of a leader’s favorability gives good insight into their thought process. Unfortunately, India doesn’t really do polling given the complexity and scale required for good numbers.
That is both good and bad for Modi: good because he doesn’t have to worry about public opinion in real-time, bad because he can afford to ignore public opinion until it is too late for him to do anything to fix it.
You can’t understand India today without understanding the man who leads it, and will continue to do so for what’s shaping up to be a consequential next few years.
The One Major Misconception:
That the hard part for Modi is now over since Trump left the country. Maybe more than other world leader (Israel’s Bibi Netanyahu has an election next week, so he doesn’t count), Modi has genuine affection and thrown in his lot with Donald Trump, and he has been rewarded with a U.S. president who has kept silent on Modi’s most controversial policies. If Trump fails to win reelection, there will be plenty of world leaders that will be over the moon—Modi won’t be one of them. And if Modi thinks he has problems on his hands now, imagine how he’ll feel if he also has to face a U.S. president focused on holding Modi to account when it comes to human and religious rights. Even if Trump does win again, progressive members of Congress will look to take punitive measures against India for its human rights violations.
(LONDON) — Prince Harry joined Jon Bon Jovi at Abbey Road Studios in London on Friday as the singer recorded a charity single to support the foundation that oversees the Invictus Games — a multinational sports event for sick and injured servicemen.
The prince and the popstar greeted each other at the studio where the Beatles recorded a string of iconic albums.
Bon Jovi was re-recording his 2019 single “Unbroken’’ in aid of the foundation that oversees the sporting event founded by Harry. The song was created to shine a spotlight on veterans living with post-traumatic stress disorder.
The pair were seen in a recording booth wearing headphones. Bon Jovi had a guitar. “We’ve been gargling next door, so we’re ready to go,” Harry told an engineer.
The event is one of the last official engagements being undertaken by Prince Harry, who has announced he is stepping back from royal duties next month.
As Queen Sono tries to eavesdrop on the suspicious conversation between two men sitting near her at a stylish Zanzibar rooftop bar, her grandmother calls her, asking in isiZulu when she’s going to come to church. Minutes later, Queen has set aside her personal life and is fully embroiled in her mission, fending off two attackers in a busy indoor marketplace as onlookers watch the action unfold amid the fruit, vegetables and spice packets. When we think of the spy genre, the icons that come to mind first are often the white, male masters of espionage, the James Bonds and Jason Bournes. But the new Netflix seriesQueen Sono, out Feb. 28,offers its own take on the genre in the platform’s first fully produced African original series.
Assuming various aliases, lead character Queen (Pearl Thusi, best known for her roles in U.S. television seriesQuanticoand the Netflix filmCatching Feelings) is a spy searching for the truth behind her mother’s assassination while undertaking a dangerous assignment requiring her to traverse the African continent. In developing the narrative, creator Kagiso Lediga sought to blend the history of South Africa with its present-day politics, all set against the backdrop ofa femicide crisisandincreasing violence against women. “I thought, how cool would it be to have a woman that embodies something different, the idea that women can fight back,” he tells TIME.
The series was shot in 37 different locations with an all-African cast and crew, following Queen on missions in Kenya’s hub of Nairobi to an elite bar in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, as well as her base in Johannesburg. A variety of languages are interspersed with English throughout the six episodes, including Afrikaans, isiXhosa and Swahili. Lediga wanted to counter the way in which perceptions of Africa tend to get flattened by those unfamiliar with its multifaceted reality, and to offer an alternative to perceptions that focus on the hardships faced by people on the continent. “It’s not just about flies on babies suffering from malnutrition,” he says. “There’s a vastness of cultures. It’s the second biggest continent, with some 1.3 billion people, and I’m hoping people will get to appreciate that.”
NetflixQueen Sono
Lediga also aimed to override stereotypes of Africa and its peoples in a distinctly tongue-in-cheek manner, inherited from his experience creating and directingLate Nite News, a satirical South African TV show. “What we tried to do withLate Nite Newswas speak truth to power in a funny way, and to try and create a kind of release for the public,” says Lediga, who has a background in stand-up comedy. The show has since garnered two International Emmy nominations and two of the writers have gone on to work onTrevor Noah’sThe Daily Show.
InQueen Sono, that sense of humor takes its references from the headlines. “Where are we now, some f-cking sh-thole in Western Africa?” says one character in indignation during crisis talks with the South African president. It’sa deliberate echo ofremarks U.S. President Donald Trump made in 2018, referring to Haiti, El Salvador and several African countries. But from Lediga’s perspective, there’s another subtext to that sentiment, one of xenophobia and condescension toward others on the continent. “For South Africans, there was a lot of isolation because of apartheid, so this idea of ‘Africa’ is always vague,” says Lediga. “South Africans, both black and white, almost have this European or western notion of Africa. It was important for me to say that we are all on this continent together.”
The legacy of apartheid is also depicted through the disparities in South Africa’s living standards; the country has one of thehighest inequality ratesin the world owing to the legacy of apartheid. Queen’s late mother is remembered as a revolutionary freedom fighter; that struggle outlives her as terrorism and conflict exacerbate the divide between rich and poor. A confrontation between two characters sees Queen whisper to her colleague that “the white Europeans are fighting over what’s best for Africa,” and the name of Superior Solutions, the company headed by the series’ main antagonist, sardonically invokes a history of white supremacism. “It’s important to show the contemporariness of the African narrative,” Lediga says. “Telling a story like this makes it urgent, makes it present.”
NetflixOn the set of ‘Queen Sono’
The series arrives as American audiences — and platforms like Netflix — are paying greater attention to international storytellers, who are in turn are receiving long overdue critical and commercial recognition outside of their home countries. “It’s totally heartening,” says Lediga of the current moment for international filmmakers. “Obviously there’s been American cultural hegemony. Americans have been very successful in selling their culture and distributing their content abroad, and I think now, they’ve saturated their own markets.”
Earlier this month, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’sParasitebecame the first foreign language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars in its 92 year history. Last year,Atlanticsby Senegal’s Mati Diop andLionheartfrom Nigeria’s Genevieve Nnanji were released by Netflix to international acclaim.Atlanticswas selected to compete for the prestigious Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival in 2019 (an honor that eventually went toParasite), andLionheartwas initially chosen as Nigeria’s first-ever Oscar submission for best international feature film, though it waslater disqualifiedin a controversial decision relating to the amount of English dialogue in the movie. This week, Netflix announced itsfirst Nigerian original six-part series, which will be set in Lagos.
“The big message we want to communicate to talent is you don’t have to leave home to get big audiences, and you don’t have to choose Hollywood versus your own country,” said Erik Barmack, Netflix’s vice president of international originals,in 2018, according toVariety. He added that shows with multinational casts would soon become the norm. That message of democratizing the industry has resonated with Lediga, whose debut feature filmCatching Feelingswas released on the platform that same year. The dark romantic comedy was originally intended as a “humble story,” aimed at the festival circuit and getting Lediga noticed as a filmmaker, but he says the reaction when it was picked up by Netflix led him to new opportunities, likeQueen Sono.
The challenge of creatingQueen Sono, then, brought greater expectations and more pressure to translate a story rooted in South Africa for not just the continent but also global audiences. Netflix is no doubt looking to woo audiences in Africa, itself a vast continent of 54 countries. But the platform is now available in 190 countries, and by the end of 2019 hadsurpassed 100 million paid membershipsoutside of the U.S. ForQueen Sono, Lediga’s writing team built on the story ofSouth Africa’s past under apartheid, told through the life of a relatable and flawed contemporary protagonist. “You don’t want it to be this insular story that only makes sense to people in Johannesburg or people in the southern African region,” says Lediga. But it also does a creator no favors to play so hard to the universal that the story loses what makes it compelling in the first place. “The more specific you are, the more authentic a story is,” says Lediga. “The rest is trying to make it clearly understandable.”
On September 26, 1996, the Taliban captured Kabul. I was a junior staffer at the Afghan Ministry of Defense. My job was mainly liaising with foreign and local media, international aid organizations and the small diplomatic community in the country then. I fled with the retreating forces to my hometown in the northern Panjshir Valley, and followed the news with close attention, curious to see how the Taliban would deal with Afghanistan’s urban population in the capital city.
The headlines revealed nothing but horror. The Taliban’s entry into Kabul was much like how Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge stormed the Cambodian capital. The Talibs hunted down former Afghan President Mohammad Najibullah, who had governed Afghanistan with Soviet backing from 1985-1992, seizing him and his brother from a UN compound where he’d sought refuge four years earlier. They brutally and publicly tortured both men, hanging their bloodied bodies from a lamp post near the presidential palace.
A few days later, horror hit closer to home. The Taliban were hunting me, as I had fought them for years. They found my elder sister, Mariam, then in her fifties, and beat and tortured her, trying to force her to reveal my location. She refused. Later, the Taliban returned to her neighborhood to demand she turn over her daughters to be married off to their fighters. She was able to escape with them, fleeing the city altogether. My sister struggled with that memory until she died in 2016.
I share the story of my sister to explain the more personal reasons behind my resistance to making peace with the Taliban. The Taliban claim that they provide protection to women in accord with the Islamic teachings and Afghan customs. But beating a frail woman to find her brother does not follow Islamic law nor Afghan custom. This was just one story of the physical and psychological abuse Kabulis and people throughout Afghanistan endured during Taliban rule.
My view of the Taliban changed forever because of what happened in 1996, and I haven’t seen or heard anything to make me believe they have truly changed their ways. Resisting their brutal rule is a noble fight, not a conquest for power but in defense of humanity. For me, the fight has been justified on grounds of societal, cultural, political and historical values, not just abstract intellectual reasoning.
The Taliban’s invasion of Kabul in the late nineties turned a cosmopolitan city into a ghost town, filled with Taliban fighters, Pakistani jihadists and Al-Qaeda fighters. The population shrank to nearly half a million and people fled to the neighboring countries. Afghans quickly became the largest refugee community in the world. The Taliban’s medieval behavior with the urban Afghans was one of the key reasons why the militants couldn’t hold the capital for more than few weeks, when U.S. forces invaded in 2001. The Taliban lost the entire country in less than six weeks’ time.
Today there are seven million people in Kabul, many fearing a repeat of the Taliban’s medieval rule. The Taliban have staged a military comeback, but our intelligence agency, which I once led, has found nothing to indicate they’ve changed their original goals. They claim that they fight the foreign forces led by the U.S. Wrong. They fight to impose an alien medieval ideology in the name of religion.
Their main advocate in this fight continues to be Pakistan, which I believe wants to turn Afghanistan into a wasteland with no owner – a virtual client state – as a way to expand its writ across Central Asia, and gain the upper hand over its enemy India. Back in the 1980s, Pakistan sided with the U.S., backing Afghan jihadists to expel the Soviet Red Army from Afghanistan. When the U.S. withdrew support for the jihadists, Pakistan stepped in, exercising outsized influence on its proxies, who became today’s Taliban. Pakistan’s economy is struggling, but it has a basket of extremist groups on its payroll, including the Taliban, and a list of likely misdeeds from meddling with its neighbor to blackmailing foreign powers. We are tired of being caught in the middle of this proxy war, but unbroken. We haven’t traded away our pride and sense of honor, nor retreated into docility despite pressure from our neighbors or outside powers. Good or bad, this is who we are.
I fought the Taliban under the legendary Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Masood, who was assassinated on 9 September, 2011, two days before the attacks on World Trade Center in New York. Al Qaeda feared his alliance with the West, and thus they removed him first, knowing he would fight them fiercely when the Americans came for them.
More recently, associates of the Taliban tried to kill me. On July 29th, 2019, on the first day of my campaign as vice president, my office was stormed by a squad of suicide attackers affiliated with the Haqqanis—the fighters commanded by Sirajuddin Haqqani who just penned an opinion piece in The New York Times, claiming his side is ready for peace. His gunmen killed some 30 people, mostly young staffers of mine, including two of my nephews. I only survived because they sacrificed their lives to buy enough time to enact a long-planned escape plan, enabling me to reach another building via the rooftop. I remember their loss every day.
Now, as the Vice President Elect of Afghanistan, I have a very active role in the peace process. I am not seeking revenge. No, and never. This has been a fight to defend human dignity, our pluralistic society and pan-Afghanism. I am following in the footsteps of Commander Masood, who was a strong believer in pluralistic society and stood for elections as the only legitimate way to achieve national power. Two decades after his death, his legacy lives on in the aspirations of young Afghans and world powers who echo him saying the time for tyrannical rule is over. The will of people must be respected.
In that spirit, I am ready to make peace with the Taliban on the battlefield, and fight them in a very different arena: at the ballot box. President Ashraf Ghani and I come from very different backgrounds, but we have zero differences on what our legacy should be: a unified, pluralistic Afghanistan at peace with itself and with the world. We are calling upon the Taliban to lay down their arms and join the battle of ideas, waged in our Parliament and decided upon by our voters. If Taliban think they have a popular base in the country, then they should join the electoral process and seek to win.
The cost and pain of war has never been an abstract for me. I served as Afghanistan’s intelligence chief from 2004 to 2010, so I know the Taliban. I’ve dealt with them in talks before 9/11 in Switzerland, Tashkent, and Ashgabat and also inside Afghanistan. They know me, too. I am a victim and survivor, a politician, an intelligence officer, and an anti-Taliban fighter. My enemies say I am as guilty as they are in perpetuating this war. All that is true. But today we have a choice to choose new titles for ourselves. Let’s change the past and make ourselves peace builders. The choice is ours – together. Let’s do it.
(SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic) — A cruise ship heading to the Dominican Republic to disembark hundreds of passengers after a 14-day tour was searching for a new port on Friday after being turned away by officials worried that eight of those aboard showed signs of possible coronavirus infection, officials announced.
A joint statement by the Public Health Ministry and Port Authority said the captain of the Braemar reported four Filipinos, two British citizens and two U.S. citizens were under medical observation after displaying COVID-19 illness symptoms such as fever, coughing, or breathing difficulty.
Fred. Olsen Cruise Lines said in an emailed statement that it had reported “a small number of influenza-like cases on board. Our medical team has now advised that they are all feeling better. No guests or crew are, or have been, displaying symptoms that are considered to be consistent with those of coronavirus.”
Officials said the ship was carrying 1,128 passengers and 384 crew members. The cruise line said it was “awaiting advice on the next steps” and “liaising with a number of airlines to secure onward travel for guests.”
“It is our opinion that this is an overreaction by the Dominican Republic,” Fred. Olsen said in a written statement.
The cruise line’s website shows the ship had been due to pick up another load of passengers and set off on a new cruise Thursday night.
The company said Friday that “we are in discussion with the relevant authorities on nearby Caribbean islands, as well as a number of airlines, to enable our guests to disembark and secure onward travel for them to return home.”
The Dominican Republic’s public health minister, Rafael Sánchez Cárdenas, said the ship already had been barred by another port, which he did not specify.
López Obrador said Mexico had to act with “humanity” after the ship was refused authorization by the two other nations due to virus fears.
But Alejandra Aguirre, the health secretary of the coastal state of Quintana Roo, said two people had been detected with acute respiratory infections not believed to be the new coronavirus and that other passengers wouldn’t be allowed off until tests on those two came back later Thursday.
The two were identified as a 27-year-old male crew member from the Philippines and a 30-year-old female passenger from France.
MSC said in a statement that the two passengers were now symptom-free and the ship would remain in Cozumel. Assuming clearance to disembark is given, passengers would be free to tour Cozumel through the end of Friday.
The cruise line had expressed frustration with the rejections, which came after it reported the crew member was sick with common seasonal flu.
“The ship is being allowed to dock and the passengers, those who are aboard the cruise ship, can disembark,” López Obrador said, adding that health inspections will be carried out.
“We cannot act with discrimination,” he said. “Imagine if a ship arrived and it wasn’t even allowed to dock, and they were told, ‘Keep going on your way, see where you can dock.’ That is inhuman.”
He added “we cannot close our ports, nor can we close our airports.”
The case of the Meraviglia illustrated the crisis of nerves over the COVID-19 virus. MSC Cruises had said the crew member had only common seasonal flu, had been placed in isolation and had “nearly recovered.”
Local media showed a small knot of Cozumel residents near the cruise ship dock demanding that passengers not be allowed to disembark, citing fears about potential contagion or effects on the tourism-dependent economy.
Passenger Eder OrtÃz told Hechos Meridiano Quintana Roo, a local newscast affiliated with national broadcaster TV Azteca, that inside the boat people were protesting to demand they be let out. OrtÃz, who was traveling with his wife to celebrate their second anniversary, said no illness was circulating despite the fact that passengers were co-mingling in pools, dining areas and dance spaces.
“Nobody is infected,” OrtÃz said.
Just minutes after López Obrador spoke Thursday, the governor of the Quintana Roo state, where Cozumel is located, confirmed the ship had docked, but said “no authorization has been given” yet for passengers to disembark.
Gov. Carlos Joaquin wrote that health inspections would have to be carried out first.
On March 2, Israeli voters will head to the polls for an unprecedented third election in less than a year. It comes after Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, failed to agree on a governing coalition after two previous elections last April and September.
With candidates and campaign slogans largely unchanged, ideological sticking points entrenched, and voting patterns expected to remain consistent, there is no guarantee a third election will break the deadlock. Even before voting commences, the possibility of a fourth looms large.
In Israel, it’s been met with a collective shrug.Coronavirus Fears Are the Most Exciting Thing About Israel’s Boring Third Election, ran a Feb. 26 headline in the country’sHaaretznewspaper.
Still, the quagmire has serious implications. “There are major issues to deal with: war and peace, the economy, setting the budget,” says Yossi Meckelberg, an Israeli politics expert atRegent’s University in London. “When you have a Knesset that is not functioning since December 2018, the first time elections were called, there is a democratic deficit.”
It is playing out against the backdrop of the Trump Administration’s so-called Middle East Peace Plan, which was unveiled on Jan 28. The Palestinian leadership, along with much of the international community has dismissed the blueprint as a sop to Israel’s annexationist right.
The country’s latest leadership contest also comes only two weeks ahead of the date Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial is expected to begin.Here’s what else to know:
Why is Israel having another election?
Because the winners of the two previous polls failed to garner enough parliamentary support to form a government.
In two successive elections, both Netanyahu, who leads the right-wing Likud party, and his principal opponent Benny Gantz, who heads the centrist Blue and White party, fell well short of the 61 seats required for an outright majority in Israel’s 120 seat Knesset.
In Israel’s parliamentary system, forming a government almost always depends on election winners forging coalitions with smaller parties. Traditionally those parties have coalesced around either a religious right-wing bloc or a centrist and center-left bloc.
Netanyahu’s attempt to form a government after April elections fell apart over divisions with ultra-nationalist party leader Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu’s former defense minister. In September,Gantz was handed the mandate after Netanyahu again failed to form a government.
The Blue and White party leader resolved to cobble together a “government of national unity” butthat prospect also crumbled: Gantz refused to sit with Netanyahu, citing the prime minister’s corruption cases, while Likud refused to jettison its long-time leader. Parliament dissolved, setting the stage for round three.
Artur Widak—NurPhoto/Getty ImagesBenny Gantz, leader of Blue and White party, during an election campaign event in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv on February 25, 2020.
His chief opponent, Gantz, is a tall but soft-spoken former Israel Defence Force (IDF) chief of staff. Gantz’s military chops make him a viable inheritor of Netanyahu’s “Mr. Security” image. He has promised to heal rifts in Israeli society and railed against the vitriol and incitement that have characterized Netanyahu’s tenure.
Nominally centrist, Gantz’s Blue and White party incorporates hawkish right-wingers among more moderate elements. Three of its four most senior figures are former IDF generals. Like Netanyahu, Gantz attended the White House unveiling of the “Middle East peace plan,” met with President Trump, and gave the blueprint his qualified endorsement.
That’s a problem for Israelis on the left, says Regency’s Mekelberg. Gantz “doesn’t capture the imagination of anyone. Not in terms of leadership, and not in terms of proposing an alternative policy”he tells TIME. “Voters look at him and ask themselves, what’s the fuss?”
Who’s likely to win?
Neither candidate, conclusively. In April, Likud and Blue and White each took 35 seats. In September, Gantz shaded Netanyahu, with Blue and White winning 33 seats to Likud’s 32. Until recently, opinion polls showed Gantz maintaining a marginal lead. But the latest surveys show Blue and White’s numbers dipping below Likud’s, with more of the public also saying they perceive Netanyahu as the best candidate for Prime Minister.
What are the biggest issues?
Last year, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro told TIME that Israel’s leadership contest pit “indispensable Netanyahu,” in his self-declared role as the state’s protector, against “Bibi fatigue.”The fatigue may have grown, but the March 2 election remains yet another referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership.
Otherwise Trump’s Middle East blueprint is expected to be high on voters’ minds. Gantz’s qualified endorsement of the proposal was unsurprising, given its domestic popularity. But there are crucial differences in how the two candidates are expected to implement it.
Netanyahu is itching to make good on his promise to extend Israel’s sovereignty in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley, after the plan laid out a proposal for Israel to lay claim to about 30% of the occupied West Bank.
Gantz has said that he would only annex the portions of the conceptual map the White House plan slates for Israel with the approval of the international community and in coordination with regional actors. Given the responses the deal has elicited, that approval appears a long way off.
“Gantz would be more likely to treat the plan as a mechanism through which to attempt to gain Palestinian Authority and Jordanian buy-in,” says Michael Koplow, policy director at the U.S.-based Israel Policy Forum, which supports a two-state solution to the conflict. “Whereas Netanyahu has not displayed such concerns and views it more as a mechanism for immediate annexation.”
Israel’s Supreme Court has ruled thata transitional parliament cannot introduce major initiatives, make significant changes to laws, or pass a new budget until a new government is formed. Theoretically at least, that should take annexation off the table in the event of a continued deadlock.
An additional, unexpected, issue is Coronavirus-related panic. On Feb 26, Israel’s election committee warned people to be wary of fake news connected to the outbreak amid fears it might affect voter turnout. Israel has set up isolated booths to enable those in quarantine—currently more than 1,500—to cast a vote. On Feb. 27 an Israeli man who recently returned from Italy became the first in the country to be diagnosed outside of quarantine conditions.
How could the allegations against Benjamin Netanyahu affect the election?
Corruption allegations have plagued Netanyahu as far back as 2018. But his legal woes have grown since Israelis last headed to the polls. In November, Israel’s Attorney General indicted the prime minister on three corruption charges. His legal trial is set to commence on March 17.
These largely anticipated developments are unlikely to change the calculus of Israelis at polling booths, pollsters say, but they may impact coalition negotiations. If Netanyahu isnot able to flip enough seats to give his right-wing bloc a narrow majority,attempting to prolong the deadlock would appear to be his next best strategy.
Remaining transitional prime minister would give Netanyahu “critical leverage should he decide to strike a plea bargain. It also gives him a bully pulpit and potential leverage during any appeals process,” says Israel Policy Forum’s Koplow. It even “preserves the possibility of passing Knesset legislation down the road that bars criminal proceedings for sitting prime ministers.”
How could the election results impact Israel’s relations with the U.S.?
Netanyahu and Trump have together made Israel an increasingly partisan issue in the United States, straining the complex and sometimes fraught relationship between Israelis and American Jews. Many American Jews lean Democrat, with progressives particularly disturbed by Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian Territories.
For American Jews, a Netanyahu victory would “reconfirm their belief that Israel has simply become a society whose values they’re not comfortable with,” says Daniel Gordis, author ofDivided We Stand: the Rift Between American Jews and Israel. Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders recently described Israel’s largest lobbying organization AIPAC, as a platform to “express bigotry”—a barely veiled dig at Netanyahu. Trump, meanwhile, has controversially claimed that American Jews who vote Democrat show “great disloyalty.”
But Gordis says a Gantz victory would unlikely to heal the rift scored by Netanyahu and Trump. “There will be a momentary sense that Israel has been liberated from the grip of Bibi,” he tells TIME. “But what they’re going to discover very quickly is that the policies are not going to change.”
As coronavirus continues to spread across the world, a simple solution has been repeated by some leaders: Warm summer temperatures will stop the outbreak in its tracks.
U.S. President Donald Trump floated the idea that by April the coronavirus problem would solve itself. He told a crowd at a Feb. 10 rally in New Hampshire: “You know, in theory when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away, that’s true.”
In Southeast Asia, officials in Indonesia have offered the warm climate as the reason that no cases have been diagnosed there. “Indonesia’s air is not like the air in China that is subtropical,” said Achmad Yurianto, a senior official in Indonesia’s health ministry, in response to a study suggesting there are likely to be undetected cases in the country.
However, infectious disease experts say while the factors that cause other viruses to retreat during the summer months could affect this coronavirus, called COVID-19, in a similar way, there’s no way to be sure. And, even if the virus’ spread does slow as temperatures rise, that doesn’t mean it will be gone for good.
Why cold and flu decrease in the summer
There’s precedent for the idea that the COVID-19 outbreak will collapse with the onset of summer.
The common cold is most prevalent in the winter and spring, and influenza is most common during the fall and winter in the U.S., with flu activity peaking between December and February, according to the CDC.
It appears that COVID-19 is transmitted in the same fashion as the flu and common cold: by close contact with infected people and from respiratory droplets when an infected person sneezes or coughs.
There’s a variety of reasons that influenza and cold infections plummet in the summer, but a major one is that that warm, humid weather can make it harder for respiratory droplets to spread viruses.
“The droplets that carry viruses do not stay suspended in humid air as long, and the warmer temperatures lead to more rapid virus degradation,” says Elizabeth McGraw, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Pennsylvania State University.
Human activity also changes in summer months, says Thomas Bollyky, the director of the Global Health Program at the Washington D.C.-based Council on Foreign Relations. People spend less time indoors—where they tend to be in closer contact with each other, making it easier for the virus to spread—in the summer.
‘Premature’ to assume heat will stop COVID-19
But health experts aren’t so sure that COVID-19, which has infected more than 83,000 people since officials first discovered the disease in December, can be stopped by the onset of summer.
Dr. Nancy Messionnier of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned against assuming the number of cases will slow as the weather warms. “I think it’s premature to assume that,” she said during a call with reporters on Feb. 12. “We haven’t been through even a single year with this pathogen.”
Other health experts that TIME spoke to agree that it’s too early to say if warmer weather will impact the virus’s spread. McGraw, of Penn State University, says there will likely be many factors that determine when and how the outbreak ends. “Rate of virus spread, effectiveness of infection control practices, weather and human immunity will likely all play a role in determining its future,” she says.
Additionally, because COVID-19 is so new, “there is no natural immunity in the population and thus all bets are off,” says Nicholls of the University of Hong Kong.
Looking at two other deadly members of the coronavirus family, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), could, Bollyky says, help us understand how COVID-19 may act in the summer heat. “Past coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS, haven’t really exhibited clear evidence of being seasonal,” Bollyky says.”The SARS outbreak did end in July, but it is not clear that weather. MERS does not show any sign of being seasonal.”
It isn’t summer everywhere at once
Though the largest clusters of the coronavirus are in locations above the equator—mainland China, South Korea, Italy, Japan and Iran—the virus has now spread to all continents except Antarctica. This includes countries like Brazil and Australia in the southern hemisphere.
Experts caution that even if the seasonal change in the northern hemisphere brings a reprieve in the number of cases, it may mean that other places become more susceptible to its spread.
“The southern hemisphere will begin their winter season within the next few months, potentially leading to a global reversal in transmission hotspots,” says Melissa Nolan, a professor of epidemiology at the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health.
Even if COVID-19 wanes in summer, it might come back
And experts warn that even if COVID-19 becomes less active in the summer, it could return if public health officials do not gain control of the outbreak first.
“If we continue to see sustained transmission in multiple countries, it will be very difficult to eradicate the virus,” says Charles Chiu, a professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “There is a risk that it may end up becoming a seasonal virus without global concerted public health interventions to prevent spread.”
He points to the 2009 outbreak of the H1N1 virus, otherwise known as swine flu, which began in April of that year. He says that as it adapted to the human population, it adopted a seasonal pattern, with most infections now occurring during the winter months.
Others agree that officials must not be complacent as the summer months approach.
“Policymakers and health officials should not rely on warmer temperatures to save us from COVID-19,” Bollyky, of the Council on Foreign Relations, says. “The only things that can do that are public health preparedness and level-headed policies to reduce the number of people infected, protect healthcare workers, and improve the diagnosis and treatment of those who do get ill.”
For a woman to embark on a walking expedition is to do more than simply place one foot ahead of another. When women tie up their laces and head out into the wilderness, they reclaim terrains that for centuries, have been deemed unsafe and unfit for women.
Historically, men have had the opportunity to explore the earth’s many wild places while women have been constrained to the home. The idea that rugged geographies can only be conquered and tamed by men persists today. On top of this, to undertake a solo journey while female is to take on risk; it is to brave a space that has claimed the lives of others who have tried.
And yet, the history of exploration is also women’s history.
For decades, women around the world have traversed solo through rocky rivers and dusty deserts, looking beyond the prejudice and risks that face them. From carving out their own routes to taking on trails reserved for men, these 7 women are just a few of those who have helped reclaim women’s place in nature, one step at a time.
Bettmann ArchiveJunko Tabei (L), then 35, the first woman ever to conquer the world’s highest peak, stands against the background of the southern wall of Mt. Everest.
“I can’t understand why men make all this fuss about Everest,” Junko Tabei, the first woman to have summited mount Everest once said of the world’s highest peak. “It’s only a mountain.”
Tabei was a pioneering Japanese mountaineer, who reached Everest in 1975 despite her camp being buried by an avalanche. At only 4-ft.-9-in. tall, Tabei shattered stereotypes about what mountaineers were supposed to look like. She climbed the tallest mountains in more than 70 countries and became the first woman to reach the “seven summits,” the highest peaks on all continents.
“Most Japanese men of my generation would expect the woman to stay at home and clean the house,” she once said in an interview.
Tabei, who died in 2016, encouraged other women to become mountaineers, and founded the first women’s climbing club in Japan in 1969 during a time when most climbing clubs banned women. In Honouring High Places, a memoir that celebrates Tabei’s life, her friend Setsuko Kitamura writes that Tabei “continued opening the door to nature for all.”
In 1977, 26 year-old Robyn Davidson embarked on a 1700-mile journey through the Western Australian desert, with three camels and a dog named Diggity. Starting in Alice Springs, Davidson journeyed through parts of the Australian outback unknown to most, ultimately walking her way to the Indian Ocean.
In her memoir, Tracks, Davidson speaks of the liberation she found alone in the desert, where she was free of “prettiness and attractiveness.” She describes walking naked under the blazing Australian sun, as menstrual blood drips down her leg. “I hope that I will always see the obsession with social graces and female modesty for the perverted crippling insanity it really is,” she writes. Her reflections were in part sparked by her encounters with Australia’s aboriginal communities, where, Davidson notes, women had more power before colonization changed the cultural fabric of these societies.
For Davidson, her journey through the desert taught her that “you are as powerful and strong as you allow yourself to be” and that to the project of freedom is “one of the few that count.”
Karen Darke
Getty Images—Christopher LeeKaren Darke of Great Britain in action in the WH3 Road race during the Road Race on Day 5 of the UCI Para-Cycling Road World Championship on Aug. 2, 2015 in Lucerne, Switzerland.
“I always thought I’d rather be dead than paralysed,” Karen Darke, a British explorer and Paralympian writes in her memoir, If you Fall. “One slip, one moment and everything changes.”
Within her first two decades of life, Darke had already carved out her place in the mountaineering world. In 1991, she climbed Mont Blanc and Matterhorn. The following year, she won the Swiss KIMM Mountain marathon.
But in 1993, Darke fell off a cliff, becoming paralyzed from the chest down. This injury, however, did not stop Darke from exploring the world’s wild places. Since her accident, Darke has handbiked her way through the Himalayas and the Chilean Patagonia, traversed the length of Japan, kayaked the inside passage from Vancouver to Juneau, Alaska, sit-skied across the Greenland icecap, circumnavigated Corsica by sea kayak, climbed El Capitan in Yosemite, and traveled from Canada to Mexico on the Pacific Coastal Trail. Darke was also a silver medalist in the London 2012 Paralympics and became a Paralympic Champion in the Rio 2016 games.
Through her explorations of land, sea and ice, Darke has shown that women of all ability levels belong in the outdoors. As she notes, “ability is a state of mind, not a state of body.”
Thinlas Chorol
Karen Baeur—GettyThinlas Chorol, founder of “Ladakhi Women’s Travel Organisation”, can be seen in front of a monastery in Leh, India.
Born in a Takmachik, a high-altitude village in the Indian Himalayas, Thinlas Chorol grew up traversing the dry, rocky terrain that surrounded her. During the holidays of her childhood, Chorol would trek through the mountains with her father to care for their herds. Chorol’s region, Ladakh, opened up for tourism in 1974, but it was men who reaped the benefits of this new industry, becoming trekking guides for wealthy foreigners. “They told me that local culture wouldn’t accept a woman going to the mountains with tourists,” Chorol has written.
Chorol, who was the first in her village to attend school, noticed a gap in this tourism market. Female travelers felt safer trekking with female guides and Ladakhi women—who had been systematically pushed out of the tourism economy—were looking for employment. In 2009, Chorol founded the Ladakhi Women’s Travel Company, the first female owned and operated trekking company in the Himalayas.
But carving out a place for women in the trekking industry is just one of Chorol’s many projects. She also co-founded Ladakhi Women’s Welfare Network after a woman was gang raped in a nearby area.
“I have learned that if a woman has the courage to do something in a male world, it will be hard work,” Chorol writes. “But success will be hers in time.”
Sarah Marquis
In 2010, Swiss explorer Sarah Marquis embarked on a 12,427 mile solo journey by foot from Siberia to Australia, crossing six countries over the course of three years.
On her journey, Marquis encountered wildly different ecosystems, from freezing fields to humid jungles. She also encountered sexism: Marquis disguised herself as a man in regions where being a woman was particularly unsafe. “There were so many nights when I fell asleep with danger prowling nearby,” she has written. A year after Marquis was named National Geographic‘s Adventurer of the Year in 2014, she embarked on a “surviving expedition” and was dropped by helicopter into the Australian outback, emerging three months later.
Marquis dedicated her memoir, Wild By Nature, “to all the women throughout the world who are still fighting for their freedom and to those who have gained it, but don’t use it.” She adds, “put on your shoes. We’re going walking.”
Rahawa Haile
“As a queer black woman, I’m among the last people anyone expects to see on a through-hike,” Rahawa Haile, an Eritrean-American has written. “But nature is a place I’ve always belonged.”
In the United States, the history of segregation — when many beaches and trails were reserved for whites only — can help inhibit many people of color from engaging with the great outdoors. Haile is challenging that through her steps and her words. Haile walked the Appalachian trail in 2016 and wrote about how her perspective as a queer black woman affected her experience.
After Jeff Sessions became Attorney General in 2017, Haile decided to follow the footsteps of civil rights marchers and walk from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. For Haile, the walk was about “reclaiming enough of an illusion of safety to survive the next four years in this country.”
