Anton Filatov, a Ukrainian film critic, was pulled into a theater he never expected to enter: the front lines of war, where he now writes of the scene in the trenches instead of what’s onscreen.

DOLIVKA, Ukraine — Before the war arrived at his doorstep, Anton Filatov, a Ukrainian film critic, said the most dangerous thing he ever carried was a fork.

“I had never touched a weapon,” he said. “I was against war. I ran as far as I could from it.”

But as with so many other Ukrainians, the fighting found him, and his life, has become a real-life war movie. He is serving on the front lines of Ukraine’s war with Russian invaders, in some of the most contested, blood-soaked territory, caught in a theater he never imagined for himself.

In late August, he was stationed in an abandoned house in the village of Rozdolivka, in the war-ravaged Donbas region. This used to be a place where the gardens had grape vines crawling up trellises and the houses had roofs. Then the shelling began.

During one barrage, Mr. Filatov, 34, ducked into a bomb shelter, still wearing his owlish glasses. He is extremely nearsighted, minus 7, one of the many reasons his wife was shocked he was drafted.

Even with the horrors he has to squint to see, and the daily grind of being a soldier, he hasn’t given up on his writing. The opposite. Ukraine’s war has become his new material, as he delves into the fear, sorrow, rage and anxiety he is experiencing and tries to find meaning in the smallest things around him, like the mice that scurry over him while he sleeps.

In a recent text message, he wrote:

Once, during one of the heavy attacks, I sat in a dugout and watched the earth tremble. Chopped pine roots stuck out from the wall of our shelter. The sap of the tree flowed out of them. It shined like mercury and resembled tears. A few months later, I don’t remember how many explosions there were that evening or what weapons had been fired. But I clearly remember one image: how the earth wept with heavy, cold tears.

War has always provoked remarkable writing, from the Iliad onward. Norman Mailer published “The Naked and the Dead” after serving in the Pacific in World War II as a young man just out of Harvard. Bao Ninh wrote perhaps the saddest, most agonizing account of the Vietnam War, in which he narrowly survived as a North Vietnamese foot soldier, in “The Sorrow of War.”

Mr. Filatov’s blog posts on Facebook are a 21st-century version of this, and they have gained him a growing audience.

“The war opens his gifts even more,” said Alexandr Gusev, a veteran Ukrainian film critic, who was an admirer of Mr. Filatov’s film writing before the fighting and has been following his wartime blogging since.

He writes in three languages — Ukrainian, Russian and English — and in the 2010s, when Ukraine’s film industry took off, so did Mr. Filatov’s career. He saw thousands of movies, wrote hundreds of reviews and traveled the world to sit on film festival juries.

Cinema, he said, helps him “understand people,” and film criticism lets him explore his love for the movies, his interest in stories — and his talent for evocative writing.

“From the start, Anton was really noticeable,” Mr. Gusev said. “He has this ability to use his own personal emotional condition, which brings him close to his audience. He became one of the top five or six film critics in our country.”

With the 2020 Covid pandemic, cinemas in the country shut down and so did many Ukrainian publications. His wife, Elena Filatova, is also a journalist, and to help support his family, he became a content editor for Nestlé, while still writing the occasional review.

Around 5:30 a.m. on Feb. 24, his young son Platon toddled up to a window in their apartment in the Kyiv suburbs and looked down at the street. Cars were fleeing, bomb blasts were shaking the city, and the little boy started crying. The Russians had invaded.

As required, Mr. Filatov reported for military duty, thinking he’d never be chosen, but a few weeks later, he boarded a train crowded with soldiers for Donbas, where the fighting has been the fiercest.

“It’s such a paradox that a calm, peaceful man like him is forced into a situation like that,” said Britt Sorensen, a Norwegian film critic who served on a film festival jury with Mr. Filatov. “The fact that he has to fight physically for his country instead of using his intellectual capacity for the best of his country is outrageous.”

As a simple soldier, Mr. Filatov’s first task on the front was digging a pit to sleep in. The rocklike soil was so hard he had to use an ax. It took an hour just to hack away a few inches. He didn’t like living in that hole: “It’s not so nice in middle of the night when some spiders try to come into your nose,” he said.

But he didn’t stay long.

At that stage of the fighting, he and his unit were being pushed back again and again, firsthand witnesses to the Ukrainian Army’s struggles in Donbas this spring and summer.

A voracious reader, Mr. Filatov often writes about the overlap between the books he carries and the war itself.

In one blog post, he compared the underworld of a Jo Nesbo thriller, “Phantom,” to the suspicion and treachery in Donbas, where many residents support the Russian military and have worked secretly to aid them in their fight.

The settlements here are full of traitors. They walk the streets like phantoms. Restless. Invisible. Dangerous.

One night in Donbas, he saw something very unusual in the starlit sky: glowing white embers, burning bright, floating gently down, almost like flowers. “It was very beautiful,” he said. “But horrible.”

It was white phosphorous, an especially dreaded munition that burns straight through anything. He started taking anti-anxiety drugs to be able to function.

While Ukrainian forces have been doing well in the south — having just liberated Kherson, a strategically important city — Mr. Filatov predicted the fighting in Donbas “will continue for a very long time.”

He mentioned an exchange in a Donbas town, where a drunk man told him he had taken an oath of allegiance to the U.S.S.R., so how could he switch that allegiance to Ukraine?

“I said, ‘how can you be obligated by a country that doesn’t exist?’” Mr. Filatov recalled. “But a conversation with a drunk man is something very special. I don’t think he heard me.”

During a missile attack in one Donbas town, his battalion’s bookkeeper was gravely wounded, and Mr. Filatov was asked to step in.

“What I really wanted was to work with drones and maps,” he said. “But nobody asked me.”

In his new job, he trots from house to house, where Ukrainian troops are often based, and sometimes even trench to trench, carrying his AK-47 in one hand and a battered, army-issued laptop in the other. He conducts interviews with soldiers, asking them about everything from emergency contacts to their shoe size, building a database of essential information for the entire battalion.

His life before the war now seems so far away. “Quite everything that I loved, that I wanted, that I was interested in, has changed,” he said.

He used to gravitate toward art-house films, but now says that one of his Top 10 favorites is Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood blockbuster, “Dunkirk,” about which he recently wrote:

The leitmotif of this film is the hypnotizing sound of a ticking stopwatch. Here, at the front line, shelling is so intense that after every explosion, hearing disappears for tens of seconds. When the shelling stops, the hearing gradually begins to return. In one of these cases, the first thing I heard was the ticking of a clock. Exactly like in this movie. And I thought: How many of these seconds are allotted for the rest of my life? How cool is it that I’m still alive?

With death surrounding him, he has turned from someone who never had any urge to participate in combat into a man who now thinks a lot about killing.

“When I see how my friends are killed and maimed in the war, when my wife writes to me that she sits with our 2-year-old son in the basement for several hours, when my relatives tell me that they cannot work due to power outages, because the Russians bombed the power plant, I feel great anger inside me,” he said. “At such moments, I want to run into an attack on the Russians, who are standing a few kilometers from me and shoot them all.”

He has not seen his wife or his son since May 12.

“It took me a month to get over the shock,” Ms. Filatova, his wife, said. “Then the next month was just fear.”

“I put myself in a jar,” she added. “Now, I’m just waiting for it to end.”

Winter is still a month away, but it’s already sweeping across Ukraine, the cold making everything harder. Mr. Filatov sleeps in a room with a temperature slightly higher than a refrigerator. More than half his unit, he said, was “injured, sick or dead.”

In a recent voice message, he spoke softly and slowly about his own mortality:

One morning I went to the post office to receive a shipment from my family of warm clothes. They came in a big plastic bag. Then I was busy all day and took this plastic bag everywhere I went. In the evening, unexpectedly, I was asked to help our medics load a plastic bag with a casualty from our battalion. This coincidence just struck me emotionally.

A plastic bag gives you life in the morning and in the evening a very similar plastic bag takes life away. Here at war everything is guided by coincidence or accident. No one knows how the missile will fly, how the shrapnel will go or where the bullet will land.

Are you going to carry the bag? Or are you going to be in the bag?

New York Times – November 17, 2022

A group of scientists has found the malignant cells in colon tumors responsible for relapses, and propose a new treatment to eliminate them

Metastasis, the spread of a tumor to different parts of the body, is one of the biggest enemies of humanity: 90% of all cancer deaths are caused by this lethal dissemination of tumor cells. Now, an international team of scientists has found a possible weakness in the attacker: the group, led by Spanish biologist Eduard Batlle, spotted the malignant cells that are released from colon cancer, travel through the bloodstream and invade the liver. Colon cancer is the second deadliest tumor on the planet (only after lung cancer), with one million deaths per year. The finding was published recently in the journal Nature.

With traditional equipment, these malignant cells remained invisible until now, explains Batlle. His team developed a new method that is capable of capturing tiny metastases, of only three or four cells, in order to study them. “We are investigating whether this type of cell also exists in other tumors. In fact, these cells have genetic similarities with those of the most aggressive pancreatic cancer,” says Batlle, from the Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona.

The usual treatment for colorectal cancer consists of the removal of the affected area, followed by chemotherapy to prevent recurrence. However, approximately 35% of patients with an apparently localized tumor develop metastasis in the following years, with a mortality rate of over 85%. The cells that Batlle’s team identified and named High Relapse Cells remain hidden in other organs, like the liver or a lung, and produce these fatal secondary tumors. The biologist believes that their discovery has the potential to change the treatment of the disease.

Overall, cancer is no longer a death sentence. More than half of the patients survive. What’s more; in some types of tumors – leukaemias, lymphomas and myelomas – “miraculous” cures can be achieved in a few weeks thanks to the immunotherapy revolution, which uses the body’s own natural defenses to fight cancer cells. These treatments, however, do not usually work against colon cancer and its metastases, according to Batlle. The biologist’s studies in mice, on the other hand, do suggest that immunotherapy can be effective if applied at the right time.

In the colon, the primary tumor shields itself by forming a microenvironment with blood vessels and fibrous cellular material, which protects the cancer cells from the body’s defenses. “However, High Relapse Cells arrive naked in the liver or lungs. They still don’t have their tumor microenvironment. There is a window of opportunity for them to be noticed by the immune system,” says Batlle. In mice with localized tumors, the scientists injected standard immunotherapy to clean up residual detached cancer cells before removing the primary tumor. “These mice, after surgery, are cured. They never relapse, ever again,” celebrates the biologist. The effectiveness of this strategy in humans remains to be proven.

Independently, and without being aware of the existence of the High Relapse Cells, oncologist Myriam Chalabi started a clinical trial in 2017 to test early immunotherapy in people with colon tumors, at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. Her experiment uses a combination of drugs, including nivolumab, which releases the natural brakes on the body’s defenses, causing the immune system to unleash a ferocious attack on the tumor cells. Japanese researcher Tasuku Honjo, creator of nivolumab, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2018; at the award ceremony, he declared that by 2050 cancer could be a chronic disease that in most cases does not cause death.

Batlle is also optimistic. “Approximately half a million colon cancer patients a year could be suitable for treatment with a therapy that prevents relapse,” he estimates. His team has identified 99 genes that are activated in patients that have up to five times greater risk of relapse after the usual treatment of surgery and chemotherapy. Those 99 genes can be found in the High Relapse Cells, which live on the periphery of the primary tumor until they detach themselves and form small clusters that colonize the liver or the lung through the blood. The researchers believe that their finding could also serve to identify the patients with a higher risk of metastasis.

The scientists at the Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona, led by Batlle and biotechnologist Adrià Cañellas, worked with colleagues from Spain and other countries, such as the geneticist Simon Leedham, from the University of Oxford (United Kingdom) and the oncologist Sabine Tejpar, from the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium). And while Batlle’s team continues to investigate this promising line of research on its own, it is also watching closely for the results of the clinical trial in humans in the Netherlands. “We are expectant. We think that many patients are going to benefit from this,” says Batlle..

https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2022-11-09/cancer-could-metastasis-be-nipped-in-the-bud.html

This week’s assault hit at least 15 energy facilities — some for the fifth or sixth time — forcing controlled blackouts in every part of the country.

KYIV, Ukraine — Russia is turning winter into a weapon, even as its soldiers flail on the battlefield.

In a relentless and intensifying barrage of missiles fired from ships at sea, batteries on land and planes in the sky, Moscow is destroying Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, depriving millions of heat, light and clean water.

Keeping the lights on for the majority of the millions of people who live in cities and towns far from the front — and keeping those places functioning through the winter — is now one of the greatest challenges Ukraine faces.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said late Wednesday night, “If we survive this winter, and we will definitely survive it, we will definitely win this war.”

With at least 15 energy facilities hit on Tuesday — some for the fifth or sixth time — the waves of Russian assaults have left about 40 percent of Ukraine’s critical energy infrastructure damaged or destroyed.

On Tuesday alone, close to 100 missiles rained down on Ukrainian territory, part of a pattern that many Western officials and legal experts say is a war crime.

The attacks are also damaging water-supply systems that are essential to energy production as well as daily survival.

The latest assault compromised the connection of two nuclear plants to Ukraine’s national grid, forcing nuclear operators to dramatically scale back the amount of energy they produce. The national energy utility has now imposed sweeping but controlled blackouts that include every region of the country, leaving millions without power for six to twelve hours a day.

Yurii Levytskiy, the head of the repairs at a critical substation in central Ukraine, offered a glimpse at the magnitude of the challenges facing utility workers — and the nation — during a recent visit to the facility, which he described as the “zero front line for the energy sector.”

“You can see what one missile can do,” said Mr. Levytskiy, pointing to the burned out, hulking remains of the 200-ton transformer that converts high-voltage electricity to a lower wattage that is used in homes and businesses. Charred copper coils and electrical wires spilled out from the multimillion dollar transformer like the innards of a metal beast whose belly had been ripped open.

The missile exploded with such force that the blast shattered windows at a school a mile away, triggered a fire that burned for four days and knocked out power to more than half a million people.

“One missile,” Mr. Levytskiy repeated. Russia has fired more than 4,500 missiles across Ukraine over the course of the war, according to Ukrainian officials, and in the last six weeks, the vast majority have been aimed at civilian infrastructure.

“The situation is serious, the most serious in history,” said Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the head of Ukrenergo, the national electric utility on Wednesday. “Since the beginning of October, this is already the sixth massive attack on the country’s energy infrastructure, this time the largest.”

In an interview before the latest wave of attacks, Mr. Kudrytskyi said the Russian military was being guided by electrical engineers familiar with the country’s energy grid, since much of it was built when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. Mr. Levytskiy’s substation is a case in point, having been constructed in 1958.

To hit the transformer from hundreds of miles away, the Russians had to know exactly where to strike to do the most damage. Which is why even as Ukrainian air defenses improve — shooting down 75 of the 96 cruise-missiles fired at Ukraine on Tuesday — the Russian missiles that manage to get through continue to degrade the already battered grid.

The precision of the strikes on the infrastructure stands in contrast to the disarray that has characterized much of the Russian military effort. With each loss on the battlefield, Moscow has stepped up its campaign the subjugate Ukraine by targeting civilian infrastructure.

Through a combination of the dedicated efforts of utility workers, shared public sacrifice and sheer tenacity, Ukraine has managed to find a way so far to weather the relentless assaults.

There is no evidence of a mass exodus from the country, although Ukrainian officials have said one goal of the Kremlin is to send another flood of refugees to European countries.

Mr. Levytskiy said that the controlled blackouts — which have grown in scope after each successive attack — have allowed engineers to stabilize the grid. Crucially, despite temporary interruptions, Ukrainian utility workers have also managed to keep the water flowing.

In a country that is 70 percent urban, if the grid fails, the consequences can cascade quickly, especially if water infrastructure is compromised.

“People don’t really fully understand this, but water and energy are incredibly intertwined and interconnected,” said Dr. Peter Gleick, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and co-founder of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research group that addresses global water challenges.

“It takes a tremendous amount of energy to run any modern water system,” he said. “It also takes a lot of water to run our energy systems.”

“As a result, anything that directly affects the energy system directly affects our ability to provide the water that is essential for human survival,” he said.

While people can live in the dark, when the water stops flowing, the fabric of city life can unravel.

Without electricity, taps run dry, water purification becomes unreliable, and wastewater is either not collected or has to be disposed of untreated in rivers and lakes, which can lead to water-related disease outbreaks like cholera and ecological disaster.

Compounding the dangers for Ukraine, Russia is also attacking water infrastructure directly.

Dr. Gleick is currently working with colleagues in Ukraine and Europe on an investigative paper documenting the impact of over 60 explicit attacks on water-related infrastructure in Ukraine in just the first few months of the war.

Since then, Russia has targeted dams and many other critical water-related facilities, according to Ukrainian officials.

Dr. Gleick noted that such attacks are directly banned under the Geneva Convention protocols that prohibit attacks on civilian infrastructure, including “drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works.”

Dmytro Novytskyi, the president of the Water and Sewage Utilities Association of Ukraine, said that the attacks on energy infrastructure compounded the staggering challenges water utility workers are already confronting.

“It’s very difficult to get the spare parts now as all the logistic chains are broken,” he said, leading to difficulties at water purification and wastewater treatment facilities.

“Some of the plants stopped working because they are near the front line or in the occupied territories,” he said.

The chemical factory that produces the reagents needed to treat water drawn from the Dnipro and Dniester rivers — the main sources of freshwater in Ukraine — is in a southern city occupied by the Russians.

“Now it’s not working and we have to import those things at a double price,” he said.

The Ukrainian factory that produces chlorine, which is also essential in the process of ensuring clean water, is under constant threat of attack and had to be shut down.

“So we have to import chlorine as well,” he said.

Even as Russia steps up its direct assaults on critical infrastructure, Ukraine is still struggling to repair damage done over the course of nine months of war.

For instance, in Hostomel, where the first battle of the war took place, the Russian retreat came quickly but the damage was lasting.

“We were so happy to kick them out of here, but then we felt the horror of what we saw here,” Leonid Vintsevyeh, the deputy head of the Hostomel military administration. Hundreds of people were killed, thousands of apartments and houses were destroyed and the critical infrastructure was in ruins.

In a remarkable feat of engineering, water and other basic services were restored in a matter of weeks. But eight months later, crews are still working to repair the damage. That is also true in Bucha, Irpin, Sumy, Chernihiv and all the other places Russia suffered early defeats.

In parts of northeastern Ukraine where Russians were driven out in September, the work to restore basic services is just beginning.

In Kherson, which was retaken by Ukrainian forces in recent days, the authorities have to clear mines and make the city and surrounding region safe before they can even begin to properly assess the damage that has left people tens of thousands without heat, water and electricity.

At the power substation in central Ukraine, which cannot be identified because it is critical infrastructure, workers keep a bus ready to rush workers to an off-site bunker every time the air raid alarm wails, knowing they may be a target.

In the last missile attack, workers had 13 minutes to flee from the time the alarm sounded until the first missile hit. All escaped unharmed.

“We were mentally prepared, knowing it would happen sooner or later,” said Mr. Levytskiy, speaking as 330,000 volts of electricity coursed through the power lines above him, audibly buzzing.

He is braced for more attacks.

Putin is a monster, Mr. Levytskiy said, using more colorful language. But every time Russia strikes, he said, Ukraine will rebuild.

New York Times – November 17, 2022

Fresh research into the life of Jona Ostiglio, a hitherto unknown 17th-century Jewish artist, reveals a unique painter who lived outside set boundaries.

ROME — The life of Jews in 17th-century Florence was quite constrained. They were confined to a ghetto, a cramped area about the size of a football field that housed about 200 families.

They could work only in certain professions, like rag-picking, and were not allowed to join professional guilds or corporations, which would have opened the door to fields like architecture. Their interactions with Christians were strictly regulated.

This is why scholars are puzzling over the life of the Jewish painter Jona Ostiglio, a card-carrying member of a prestigious academy founded by the famed artist Giorgio Vasari. A painter at the Medici court, Ostiglio’s existence was practically unknown until now.

“It’s quite a discovery,” Eike Schmidt, the director of the Uffizi Gallery, said on Wednesday ahead of a lecture seeking to extract Ostiglio and his work from historical oblivion. Several pieces attributed to Ostiglio are in the Uffizi’s world-famous collection. “We knew practically nothing about this artist,” Mr. Schmidt added, “an artist without works. ”

Ostiglio, who is believed to have been born between 1620 and 1630 and to have died after 1695, was a professional painter working in Florence for some of the Italian city’s most powerful families at a time when Jews were not normally given such opportunities.

“Was he an exception to the rules or was it more commonplace at the time than we know — that’s this question that remains open,” said Piergabriele Mancuso, the director of the Jewish studies program of the Medici Archive Project, who presented his findings at the Uffizi on Wednesday.

Professor Mancuso came across Ostiglio while researching an exhibition on the Jewish ghetto of Florence that will be hosted by the Uffizi late next year. He cobbled together a profile of Ostiglio from literary and archival sources.

The artist began painting relatively late in life for that era, starting in his early 30s. Self-taught, he was so good at copying the great masters that one chronicler said it was impossible to tell his copies from the originals. He was associated with a bustling painting studio in Florence and caused some scandal because of a tormented love affair he had with a young and rich Christian widow that nearly cost him his life at the hands of a monk. (It’s a long story.)

“The idea we have is of a Jew that is unique, quite familiar with the Christian environment and unafraid to distance himself from rabbinical laws that would have him behave in a more orthodox manner,” Professor Mancuso said. “His behavior was outside Jewish and Christian society of the time.”

Comparing detailed descriptions of his works with paintings flagged by Maria Sframeli, an art historian and curator at the Uffizi, Professor Mancuso was able to track down eight works he believes Ostiglio painted. They include still lives of fish and several landscape paintings.

“I’m so pleased that this painter was able to emerge,” Ms. Sframeli said. “Now we have brought to light some of his works.”

Ostiglio also painted the huge family tree of Florence’s aristocratic Mannelli family that hangs in the reading room of the state archives in the city, confirmation that he was working for Florence’s noble clans, “and that he was appreciated,” Professor Mancuso said.

Scholars in Italy portrayed the research on Ostiglio as historically significant.

“Jews weren’t allowed to become goldsmiths or painters of be part of any guild, so it’s quite extraordinary,” said Andreina Contessa, director of the historical museum of the Miramare Castle and Park in Trieste and former chief curator of the Nahon Museum of Italian Jewish Art in Jerusalem

Silvana Greco, a professor of the sociology of Judaism at the Freie Universität Berlin and the co-curator of a 2019 exhibition on Jews and Renaissance art, said Ostiglio’s story underlined the interactions that existed between Jews and Christians and the importance of Jewish culture in various artistic forms, “including painting.”

“Even though the life of the Jewish and Catholic world was divided, there could be constructive exchanges,” she said.

Professor Mancuso said Ostiglio was not the only Jewish artist working in Italy at the time. But because of restrictions, Jews were relegated to more artisanal tasks. Ostiglio, on the other hand, was a professional painter and recognized as such.

“The rule was that they couldn’t enter guilds — not that they couldn’t work; they could, but they worked without signing their names,” said Ms. Contessa, citing the scribes who worked on illuminated manuscripts. (Guilds were professional associations for trades.)

Professor Mancuso cited Jewish sculptors working in both wood and marble. But they were considered artisans, not artists, he said.

Professor Mancuso said that as far as he knew, until the 20th century, Ostiglio remained the only Jewish member of the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts, founded by Vasari and sponsored by the Medici grand dukes.

“The academy represented the highest level of institutional art and of the Medici, so being a member was extremely important,” said Giulio Busi, a professor of Jewish studies at the University of Berlin.

New research will examine the archives of other Florentine families to see whether other works by the artist emerge. “It will take time, but it’s not impossible,” Professor Mancuso said.

“Perhaps someone has a painting by Jona Ostiglio at home,” Mr. Schmidt, of the Uffizi, joked.

New York Times – November 16, 2022

Canada is looking to its Indigenous communities to help manage its boreal forests, the world’s largest intact forest ecosystem and one of its biggest stores of carbon.

Deep, soft, moss carpeting the floor of the old-growth Boreal forest in Eeyou Istchee territory, Quebec, creates a soft landing for fallen trees, which take much longer to decompose than in forests further south. Here, trees grow far enough apart for people or animals to easily walk between them, providing the vital landscape for practicing the traditional Cree way of life.Credit…

BROADBACK FOREST, Quebec — At a bend in the Broadback River, Don Saganash, 60, listened to the steady, familiar sound of the rapids that to his ears were the “heartbeat of the Broadback.’’ He took in the surrounding forest, the spruce and pine trees rising from a floor of rainbow-colored moss so soft that he had always imagined “walking on air.’’

Nothing had changed in this corner of the Broadback Forest since he was a boy, or since he was picked by his father to become the tallyman of his extended family’s trapline, or ancestral hunting grounds. A respected figure among the Crees, his Indigenous community, the tallyman made sure there were enough animals and other resources in the trapline for current and future generations.

“Now,’’ his father told him, “it’s up to you to protect our trapline.’’

Mr. Saganash began fighting against threats from industrial logging in the Broadback — a still untouched boreal forest in northern Quebec, reachable only through unmapped roads and boat rides along its river and lakes — two decades ago. But in recent years, his fight became part of a global contest against climate change.

Saving the Broadback and other boreal forests would keep intact their vast stores of carbon that, if disturbed, would release carbon dioxide and contribute to global warming.

Forests like the 3.2 million-acre Broadback are at the center of a growing battle to save the world’s largest carbon sinks, from the rainforests in the Amazon to the peatlands of Indonesia and Central Africa to Canada’s 1.4 billion acres of boreal forests.

Canada’s boreal forests, representing the world’s largest intact forest ecosystem and storing at least 208 billion metric tons of carbon, is considered one of the world’s largest terrestrial carbon vaults.

In part to meet its climate goals, in part to further reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous communities, the Canadian government has been turning to them more and more to help manage boreal forests by ceding more of the forest land to Indigenous groups. Last year, the federal government set aside $340 million to support areas protected by Indigenous groups and networks of Indigenous experts.

Under this program, more than 50 Indigenous communities across the country have received financing to establish and oversee areas for conservation, turning them into stakeholders entrusted to not only resist deforestation, but also to safeguard their carbon sinks. The program will also support Indigenous people who will oversee these areas.

For Indigenous leaders, the support was a belated acknowledgment of their historical and intimate knowledge of the boreal forest zone — home to 70 percent of the country’s Indigenous communities.

“Within the past five years, I have seen a shift and an openness, particularly at the federal level, where I think they’re starting to understand that traditional knowledge acquired over sometimes millennia is as valid as Western science,’’ said Mandy Gull-Masty, the grand chief of the Cree National Government, which represents the Cree communities in Quebec.

Over the years, the Crees have pushed for greater protection of their traditional territory in northern Quebec, which are mostly on provincial lands. In 2020, the provincial government agreed to increase the percentage of protected land in traditional Cree territory from 12 percent to 23 percent — a surface equal to the size of Switzerland.

The federal government is financially backing the Crees’ efforts to create a network of hydrologically connected protected areas with habitats for endangered animals like the woodland caribou.

“They did information sessions, they did mapping exercises,’’ said Ms. Gull-Masty, referring to tallymen and other local experts from the Cree communities in the north. These protected areas will help mitigate climate change by protecting forests and waterways, reduce the risks of forests fires and conserve wildlife, she added.

Marcel Darveau, a forestry expert at Laval University in Quebec City, said Indigenous groups have both an “ancient and actual knowledge’’ of boreal forests.

“They keep watch over the territory and are its guardians,’’ he said.

Mr. Saganash, the tallyman who has long fought against logging, belongs to the Crees centered in Waswanipi, a town eight hours north by car from Montreal.

Today, even as protected areas have increased overall, logging has expanded throughout his region and has reached the edges of the Broadback Forest. Of the 62 traditional hunting grounds in the Waswanipi region, only a handful are untouched by logging.

“They’re coming fast,’’ Mr. Saganash said, worried that loggers or miners will eventually advance into the Broadback’s unprotected area.

A decade ago, the Cree council of Waswanipi proposed the creation of a 1.2 million-acre protected area called Mishigamish, or large body of water, which would have included a stretch of the Broadback River, lakes and parts of the forest.

The area accounts for about a tenth of the total territory of the Waswanipi Crees — which is roughly the size of Belgium and has been logged significantly over the decades — and represents its last intact patch.

About 70 percent of the proposed area has now been protected, but the fate of the remaining section worries Mr. Saganash and others. A logging company has built two roads heading straight to the Broadback’s southernmost limit, under a logging plan approved by the Quebec government.

The Waswanipi Crees’ allies, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, say that the Quebec government has not fulfilled an earlier pledge to discuss expanding protection of the Broadback. Officials at Quebec’s ministries of forests and of the environment declined interview requests.

Tallymen have played a central role in maintaining sustainability in Cree territory through their “ability to make sense of a very complex landscape,’’said Gail Whiteman, a professor of sustainability at the University of Exeter who spent 18 months among Cree tallymen in the 1990s.

Over a recent three-day visit to this area, Mr. Saganash and his nephew, Stanley Saganash, 50, stayed at the camp of another relative, Roderick Happyjack, 40. Across a lake, along the Broadback River and into the moss-blanketed primary forest, in a region hours away from the nearest cellphone tower, there was no trace or sign of another human being.

But the three knew every beach along the lake, every bend along the river and every hill in the forest. Every corner of the unmarked territory seemed to hold a personal or family memory: the first moose killed, an unusually large birch tree cherished by a mother, the first log cabin built by a grandfather.

At night, in bed with the lights turned off, Mr. Saganash entertained the younger men with stories from the Broadback, including the time someone called a moose and it showed up right outside a cabin.

“Our elders used to say that their home was here first and that their second home was in the reserve,’’ said Mr. Saganash, a retired ambulance driver who is now a member of the Cree council in Waswanipi.

Mr. Happyjack built his cabin after his grandfather died nine years ago, powering it with a generator that provided what Mr. Saganash described as “tradition with a modern twist.’’ He transported a refrigerator, a stove, a freezer and other bulky items in winter, navigating the frozen waterways on a snowmobile.

His grandfather — the tallyman of Mr. Happyjack’s trapline — had taught him to hunt and love the Broadback. In his will, his grandfather gave him permission to set up his own camp and invite friends, though only two at a time, to prevent overhunting.

“I feel closer to my grandfather when I’m around here,’’ Mr. Happyjack said. “Sometimes he visits me in my dreams.’’

Two years ago, alone in the Broadback, he dreamed that after answering a knock at his door, he looked at the shore and saw his grandfather wearing his familiar red-and-black checkered coat.

“He turned around and looked at me,’’ Mr. Happyjack recalled, adding that his grandfather then pointed silently at the log cabin he had built long ago. “What is my grandfather telling me? I wondered. I figured he was telling me to take care of his cabin. He worked hard and now I had to work hard to take care of it.’’

The sense of responsibility was transmitted through traplines and generations.

Stanley Saganash recalled one of the most important lessons he learned from his father while hunting.

“I used to kill a lot and my father told me, ‘Whoa, don’t shoot everything. Save some for the next generation,’’ he said, adding that he had applied that lesson this hunting season. “I got one moose and my nephew got one moose. But I saw two more moose, and I didn’t shoot them.’’

In each trapline, the tallyman was responsible for making sure that its members were using the land and its resources so that the trapline would keep providing for future generations.

“We’re thinking three generations ahead,’’ Don Saganash said.

The Canadian government had not always valued the role of Indigenous communities in conservation, Ms. Whiteman said.

“Now the global discourse is about protecting these carbon sinks — soil is almost the new sexy,’’ Ms. Whiteman said. “But the tallymen always said this land is valuable to human survival.’’

New York Times – November 16, 2022

A little knowledge of botany can be helpful, even if you’re an amateur gardener. Here are a few things you should know about what happens in the fall.

What’s going on out there — and why? Some version of that is the perennial question on any inquisitive gardener’s mind.

Fall provides plenty of dramatic subject matter along those lines, beyond the changing leaves. What is it exactly that gives the foliage of deciduous trees the signal to let go (except in the case of contrarians like certain oaks and beeches)?

Although we call them evergreens, the inner needles of many conifers show us otherwise each autumn. Why do they turn noticeably yellow and brown, in preparation for shedding?

And as the deep, cold of a Northern winter approaches, what gardener does not wonder how dormant buds and other tender-looking parts of plants survive intact?

A hunger to explain such phenomena led me to a beginning botany course and its accompanying textbook. In the decades since, I have revisited those lessons time and again.

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Apparently, I am not alone in my search for answers. The textbook used in that course, Brian Capon’s “Botany for Gardeners: An Introduction to the Science of Plants,” has sold more than 260,000 copies since it was published in 1990. In August, the fourth edition was released.

And the course itself, Introduction to Plant Science, is now given year-round at the New York Botanical Garden, virtually and in person, with up to 12 sessions a year and as many as 20 students in each. It is one of more than 700 annual offerings in subjects as diverse as botanical illustration, landscape design, psychedelic mushrooms and paleobotany — all part of the nation’s largest plant-focused adult continuing-education program. (The fall-winter catalog can be viewed in pdf format here.)

Perhaps my biggest takeaway from the classes I attended: Putting some botany into our horticulture can help improve results in the garden. But best of all, it deepens our appreciation of how plants live their hard-working lives.

Batten Down the Hatches: Dormancy

Dormancy is a “virtual metabolic standstill,” wrote Dr. Capon, who died last year but was a professor of botany at California State University, Los Angeles, for decades.

In the temperate zone, “it’s an ecological adaptation for living in a cold environment, to survive the cold,” said Regina Alvarez, an assistant professor of biology at Dominican University New York, in Rockland County, and one of New York Botanical Garden’s botany instructors. “Depending on the life cycle and the form of the plant, they do it in different ways.”

Herbaceous plants have two choices: They can complete their life cycles and leave only their seeds behind for the following year (annuals), or their aboveground portions can die back, leaving the roots and storage organs like rhizomes, bulbs and corms to carry on when favorable conditions resume (biennials and perennials).

But woody plants can’t completely tuck in like that. Even those that drop their leaves as part of their overall defense have parts that remain exposed. Those include organs as small and seemingly vulnerable as the buds of next year’s leaves and flowers, or the growing tips of twigs and branches where elongation will resume again come spring.

In preparation, the undeveloped flowers, leaves or shoots may become encased in overlapping bud scales every autumn. Some species may also coat the covered buds in “a thick resin to protect them from the cold and wind,” said Leslie Day, the author of urban-focused natural history guides, including “Field Guide to the Street Trees of New York City,” and a plant-science instructor at the botanical garden.

It’s not just the buds that benefit from the waterproof sealant. Some insects do, too. Honey bees, for instance, mix the resin they scrape from bud scales and other plant parts with their saliva to produce propolis, which they use as a glue to seal cracks in their hives, Dr. Day said.

Another unexpected application for the antimicrobial sealant: “To embalm large intruders like mice and wasps that are too heavy to carry out after they sting them to death,” she said.

Noted: Nature provides — and it wastes nothing.

The Coloring Up, and the Letting Go

We watched the recent show, as shorter days and cooler weather triggered the breakdown of chlorophyll, the predominant pigment in most leaves. What was unmasked are known as the accessory pigments, Dr. Alvarez said, including yellow and orange carotenoids that were there all along, in a supporting role. Although hidden during the growing season, they were helping with photosynthesis.

The anthocyanin pigments that we perceive as red and purple in dogwoods, sumacs or red oaks, however, weren’t hiding. They are produced in fall, products of a chemical change involving an increased concentration of sugars in the leaves.

Then — no matter the color, but all too soon for our liking — the foliage on most deciduous trees takes flight. The big event’s timing is determined by changing chemistry in the tiny abscission zone, a narrow band of cells at the base of each petiole, or leaf stalk, where it attaches to the stem or branch.

“None of this would happen without the plant hormones,” Dr. Day said.

Which hormone is at work in leaf drop? Not abscisic acid, the one that “abscission zone” would seem to imply. That hormone tells the plant to form the bud scales, to stop certain aspects of growth ahead of dormancy and even to keep the seed dormant until the time is right for germination, Dr. Day said.

It is now understood instead that ethylene — better known for its role in ripening fruits — is the catalyst. (Fruit and flowers, with their own specialized abscission zones and timing, are likewise influenced by ethylene on when to drop.)

“It starts to break down the cell membranes and form this zone where the leaf eventually can just fall,” Dr. Day said, “sealing itself off and leaving a scar on woody plants.” A thin cork layer forms to prevent water loss and fungal invasions.

The outline of each scar forms a shape like an oval or a heart, Dr. Alvarez said. Dots inside that outline mark where the plant’s vascular tissues, the xylem and phloem, were connected, and conducted fluids between stem and leaf.

These scars can be very distinctive. How have I never looked at them?

Plenty of garden downtime lies ahead for such exploration. The scars are a useful tool for winter tree identification, said Dr. Alvarez, who admits that she and Dr. Day “get obsessive over leaf-scar photos.”

Dr. Day explained: “You learn to look at the scars and say, ‘Oh, that’s an Ailanthus’ or ‘That’s a horse chestnut.’”

The horse chestnut (Aesculus hippocastanum), for example, with its big compound foliage, “leaves behind what looks like a little horseshoe or smiley-face scar,” she said.

When Leaves Don’t Fall (at Least Not Right Away)

How can so much be governed by such a microscopic piece of real estate?

“The restriction of ethylene’s destructive effects only to cells in the abscission zone illustrates the precise control plants exercise over their hormone systems,” Dr. Capon wrote.

Nowhere is this engineering prowess more astounding than in the deciduous trees and shrubs that hold onto their dead leaves all winter, only to release them in spring. To accomplish that, they must manage to keep just that attachment point up and running — the junction of a dead leaf and a dormant twig. Preposterous.

The trait, called marcescence, is common to some witch-hazels (Hamamelis) and certain hornbeams (Carpinus), beech (Fagus) and oaks (Quercus), especially in the lower branches and in younger trees.

Scientists hypothesize that the persistent leaves may have developed long ago, as an adaptation against browsing by large animals the plants evolved alongside. A mouthful of dead leaf is a less-tasty target than a bare twig and tender buds, something today’s deer also seem to understand.

A bonus design tip for gardeners: A row of marcescent trees, although not technically evergreen, makes for an effective, nearly year-round screen.

Those Yellow and Brown Inner Conifer Needles

For something evergreen, we often turn to conifers — although they aren’t technically evergreen. Their often narrow foliage is winter-adapted: less vulnerable to the effects of ice, snow and wind than broader leaves, and coated in a waxy substance that guards against the elements.

“They’re always green,” Dr. Alvarez said, “but that doesn’t mean it’s always the same needles.”

When she worked for the Central Park Conservancy, Dr. Alvarez heard the question regularly starting in the early fall, when the inner foliage of many conifers turned yellow and brown. “What’s wrong with the trees?” visitors wanted to know.

As part of their life cycle, conifers undergo leaf drop, too. But it’s a sequential one — not an annual process like that of deciduous trees, and not to be confused with discolored foliage throughout the tree or at the branch tips at other times, which may indicate disease or injury.

Each year, the oldest foliage fades and prepares to fall. How long each needle holds on before that is particular to the species, ranging from two years to four or more.

Admittedly, the process can look alarming.

There’s no need to panic, though. Nothing’s wrong — provided you know a little about how to read the tree leaves.

New York Times – November 16, 2022

In southern Ukraine, the city of Kherson has been liberated, but in the east, close to the Russian border, fighting still rages and casualties mount. In a trauma centre under daily Russian shelling, a dedicated team of medics – many of whom volunteered for service at the start of the war – are saving lives. The BBC spent almost a week with them.

Blood, iron, sweat and dirt are soaked into the walls and floors of the Ukrainian field hospital. No matter how hard the Ukrainian army medical staff scrub, a metallic smell haunts the place. It clings to the doctors’ clothes and in the ambulances its presence is overpowering.

“Even when you wash away the blood, and sprinkle with peroxide, there is always this smell. You never forget it,” says Valeria, 21, an anaesthetist’s assistant.

The trauma centre has been set up in an abandoned building, where more than a dozen doctors and nurses work and live together under fire. The roar of outgoing artillery fire is constant. In the five days I spend with them, Russian bombs fall around their clinic almost daily, while Ukrainian dead and injured arrive at their door.

The Brigade – its full name can’t be revealed for reasons of operational security – has already lost two medical stabilisation points to Russian fire, and five of their medics.

Before the war, Valeria worked in a hospital north of Kyiv. She is used to trauma, there is nothing harder than resuscitating a child who has died, she explained. Without a word to her family, she volunteered for military service, and has been saving lives in some of the most dangerous fronts since.

“I have the most amazing job in the world. I defend heroes,” she says. “They defend us and I’m here to defend them – and not to let them die.” As part of the anaesthetic team, she says she’s there to ease the pain of those who are wounded.

Valeria is petite with a wide, ready smile. Over her scrubs she wears a leopard-print fleeced hooded top. Her sleeping bag is in the corner of one room. On the bare wooden floor, a cartoon panda mat, and Baby Yoda doll are at her bedside. An adopted kitten, Maryssia, keeps her company while she sleeps.

This article contains some upsetting descriptions

While every day is unpredictable, it begins with the same routine. At 09:00, the radio plays the Last Post and the Ukrainian national anthem. The team stops what they are doing and stands for a moment of remembrance for those lost in this war.

Valeria and the team spring to work when a badly injured soldier is carried into their emergency room. He groans in pain and cries out, “My arm, my arm.” But his injuries are far more severe. He is semi-conscious but in a critical condition.

With his grey beard, he looks in his late 50s. His face is peppered with shrapnel, his right eye gone. At least one finger is missing from his right hand and there is heavy bleeding from the back of his head. As they begin to cut off his uniform, his marble white skin is exposed.

His name is Sasha, and I watch from the doorway as the medics speak to him, perhaps explaining his injuries. He cries out as another wound is found and treated. Work begins on stitching his face. One of the surgeons, Dima, 39, packs the bloody eye socket, his fingers going deep inside the man’s skull. The soldier is sedated, but even so, his left hand reaches out, and grasping one by one, he counts the four fingers remaining on his right hand.

The medical team have removed his clothes and placed on his feet a pair of hand-knitted green woolen socks to keep him warm; they receive them by the box load from Ukrainian civilians.

To one side, in body armour and uniform caked with mud from the trenches, stands the stout man who found him. He says the soldier could have been hit by a cluster bomb or mortar fire, but he wasn’t sure.

The chief medic, Ruslan, 39, is tall and bald with a thick red beard. We first met in the summer when I was here last. He is a commanding presence and barely needs to say a word as his medics work to keep the man alive. His team understands each other with just half a glance. Their immediate job is to stabilise that casualty and get him to the main hospital where he can undergo surgery.

To the side, Olia, a pharmacist who joined the army when the war started, goes through the man’s clothes, and bags up his personal possessions.

For Ruslan, a career soldier, this war started in 2014 when Russia invaded and illegally annexed Crimea. But he says the Ukrainian army used the time well, its battlefield treatment has improved greatly and is now at Western standards.

But they lack something that Western military views as essential – medevac helicopters. Instead, the man is put into an old UK ambulance, which the unit bought for $7500 (£6,378). They installed a new engine and began using it to transport their patients to the nearest main hospital 25km (16 miles) away. Getting the wounded there in time is the hardest part of the job, says Ruslan.

He and Olia accompany the injured soldier in the ambulance, Olia cradling his head as the vehicle bumps over unlit and potholed country roads, while flashes of artillery landed in the distance. Ruslan holds the man’s hand, pressing for responses while he watches his vital signs.

Roman is behind the wheel. Earlier in the day the ambulance driver been hunting pheasant for the dinner table – the birds’ numbers have multiplied since people fled the area. He says he has lost count of the number of times he has made the run to the main hospital. “Every trip is dangerous,” he explains. “We don’t know where the Russian occupiers will be firing. Our work is such that it must be done. Doesn’t matter if they are firing or not.”

On the dark road ahead, a building can be seen burning – a burst of fierce orange flame is the only light for miles.

The drive is slow, but the roads improve as we near town. Roman accelerates, the ambulance’s blue light speeding through checkpoints. Just over an hour after the injured soldier was brought into the field clinic, he is delivered to the main hospital. He survives.

Back at their base, a pause, a time to take stock. Equipment is replaced, blood and flesh cleaned up. Ruslan smokes, while Valeria washes blood from her arm and retires to her corner to watch cartoons on a laptop. Roman cleans out his ambulance.

The team often refer to themselves as a machine, links in a chain, or as Ruslan puts it, “a spinning mechanism”. But their work doesn’t seem purely mechanical to me – there is compassion and tenderness, too, when they treat their patients.

On the same front line, but on the opposite side, thousands of Russian conscripts have arrived. With little training, they are being thrown at Ukrainian positions and experiencing heavy losses. There are reports that the Russians even lack basics, such as tourniquets, for treating injured soldiers.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv have revealed full casualty figures, but the US military, using satellite footage and other sources, estimates that both sides have sustained more than 100,000 killed or wounded since Russia invaded.

The arrival of those Russian recruits has brought a change too, the doctors and nurses now find they are treating more bullet wounds, the result of close quarter fighting. During the five days I spend with the team, I hear more sustained gunfire than I’ve heard during my time at the front in Ukraine’s war.

Olia, the former civilian pharmacist, is the quietest of the group. In a crowd of big personalities, she is the most self-contained, a slim fit woman usually swaddled in a puffer jacket, hat and large glasses.

What does she feel about the man whose life she had help save, I ask.

“I treat every patient with warmth, and I can pass at least a little piece of it on to him,” she replies. “A little piece of my warmth, of my soul, so he would be not so worried. To ease his condition a little.”

She goes running most mornings, along the muddy roads, as tanks and armoured vehicles pass her on their way to the front line. For her, the exercise is an escape, she says. “I always think of peaceful times. I know that this war will come to its end soon, and we will all return to our lives, to our families, to our jobs. I don’t want to focus on war.”

The team have been together the entire war. To see them around the table is to watch a family, and yet no-one knew each other before the fighting started.

They’ve endured a roll-call of atrocity, serving together in Bucha, Irpin, Bakhmut and now here. Olia and Valeria recall carrying dead or injured soldiers through the woods and fields for treatment or burial in the early chaotic days of the war,

“To get used to it is probably impossible,” says Olia. “It is very hard to see injured fighters, badly injured, there were a lot of them [in places like] Bucha and Irpin – destroyed cities, destroyed towns. It’s impossible to describe with words.”

The team come together for dinner, to mark the return from leave of Yuryi, the unit’s other surgeon. There is hardly room around the table, or on it. They eat pheasant cooked in butter with lemon, grilled liver and mashed potatoes. There is pumpkin cake for afters.

I first met silver haired Yuryi, 42, in the summer. Then, he would wear only grey camouflage shorts, and spent his downtime scouring the fields with a metal detector “hunting for treasure” – his haul included some old coins and a silver ring.

One of the defining aspects of this war has been Ukraine’s willingness to fight. Yuryi, unlike Ruslan, is not a career soldier. This is his first war, but he, like many others I’ve met, sees it as only natural that he would leave civilian life behind to fight for his country – and to protect his family.

“Someone has to fight, and someone has to live,” he tells me. “Because if everything becomes total war then we will become, if I may say, numb, hardened, emotionless.”

He describes going home to visit his boys aged 12 and 14. “Those days were so short,” he sighs.

The war, he says, is his generation’s responsibility, so that his children can live in peace. “I’m satisfied that my wife and kids do not experience all the emotional turmoil that we experience here. We are like a gasket that blocks all the hard times that the war brings,” he says.

On another day, a soldier arrives breathless at the field hospital. He holds up two fingers, two injured I wondered. But no, he needs two body bags. One for the corpse that lies next to an injured man inside the dark green army van and the other, I assume, for another casualty.

Ruslan and the others help in gently removing the stretcher with the body. There was a lull in the shelling, and birdsong – the days had been cold there, but that day felt almost like Spring.

I stand at a distance and look at the individual carnage. Half of the dead soldier’s body is gone, his chest and stomach is a mess of blood and bone. His vehicle had taken a direct hit from a Russian tank fire. Wordlessly, the medics around him carefully place his remains inside a thick black plastic body bag. The heavy-duty zip is pulled closed, and the van then leaves for the mortuary at the rear of the front lines. In the hand of one of the departing soldiers, four more neatly folded unused body bags.

The injuries the team treat are grisly, they show me on their phones, men with limbs blown away, strips of flesh hanging from bare bone, another with a cluster munition embedded in his stomach. In a video they recorded of one casualty, his leg is removed and placed in a black bag, still with his trousers and boot.

For Valeria, the worst part of the job is when a “construction set” arrives, soldiers’ body parts that must be matched and placed together for burial.

“When they bring parts of the person to you, I feel great pity,” she says. “Because when you tried [to save a casualty] and it didn’t work, that is one thing, but when you cannot do anything – to feel your own powerlessness. I think it’s the worst, and not only for me.”

And the youngest casualties are those she won’t forget. “When there is a date of birth of 2003, you realise that this person is 18 years old. This person saw very little in life, maybe never kissed and already sees death, sees, and endures such severe trials. It’s the young people I’m most sorry for. I remember the faces very much, the injuries.”

“I remember these boys who didn’t lose their fighting spirit, [who] lays down in front of you without a leg or an arm. He jokes with you. You can’t help admire the strength. Without weapons in their arms – such a powerful weapon they have in their heart.”

In war, courage becomes a matter of fact. Ruslan’s team have it in spades, and he only falters, he says, when he’s leaving home, and his two young daughters behind.

“I try to leave home quickly because the longer I take leaving the house, the more worried they will be,” he tells me. “So I always say, ‘Listen to mom, help her’ and I just leave, run away.”

I’m with him one evening, and even at the end of a long day, he still chops the wood and lights the fireplace. The rest of his team are on shift or have retired for the night. Ruslan is often the last to sleep. His wife, also a doctor, sends him pictures of bunk beds for him to choose for the girls.

Before I go, I ask him if he has any final thoughts.

“Only one message comes from here,” he says. “Peace. There is always a need for peace. Civilised society… and this is happening? Well, it means it is not civilised enough. I wish we’d learn that faster. All of us.”

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63619240

Human beings used fire to cook food hundreds of thousands of years earlier than previously thought, an Israeli-led group of researchers have suggested.

They found evidence in the 780,000-year-old remains of a huge carp-like fish discovered in northern Israel.

The scientists noted “the transition from eating raw food to eating cooked food had dramatic implications for human development and behaviour”.

The previous earliest evidence of cooking dated from about 170,000 BC.

The remains of the two-metre (6.5ft) fish were found at the Gesher Benot Yaaqob archaeological site which spans the River Jordan about 14km (8.5 miles) north of the Sea of Galilee .

Researchers led by Dr Irit Zohar of Tel Aviv University studied crystals from the enamel of the fish’s teeth, which were found in large quantities at the site. The way the crystals had expanded was a sign that they had not been exposed to direct fire, but cooked at a lower temperature.

“Gaining the skill required to cook food marks a significant evolutionary advance, as it provided an additional means for making optimal use of available food resources,” said Professor Naama Goren-Inbar from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who directed the excavation.

“It is even possible that cooking was not limited to fish, but also included various types of animals and plants.”

The scientists determined that the fish once populated the ancient Hula Lake which existed at the site until it was drained in the 1950s to try to eradicate malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Other archaeological evidence found at the site indicates it was inhabited by groups of hunter-gatherers for tens of thousands of years.

The team believe the location of such freshwater areas offers a clue to the route followed by early man on its migration out of Africa to the Levant and further afield.

The latest findings came from a joint study involving scientists from Israeli, British and German institutions.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63596141

The Vascones, an Iron Age tribe from whose language modern Basque is thought to descend, were previously viewed as largely illiterate

More than 2,000 years after it was probably hung from the door of a mud-brick house in northern Spain to bring luck, a flat, lifesize bronze hand engraved with dozens of strange symbols could help scholars trace the development of one of the world’s most mysterious languages.

Although the piece – known as the Hand of Irulegi – was discovered last year by archaeologists from the Aranzadi Science Society who have been digging near the city of Pamplona since 2017, its importance has only recently become clear.

Experts studying the hand and its inscriptions now believe it is both the oldest written example of Proto-Basque and a find that “upends” much of what was previously known about the Vascones, a late iron age tribe who inhabited the area before the arrival of the Romans, and from whose ancient language modern-day Basque, or euskera, is thought to descend.

Until now, scholars had understood that the Vascones had no written language – save for words found on coins – and only began writing after the Romans introduced the Latin alphabet. But the five words written in 40 characters identified as Vasconic, suggest otherwise.

The first – and only word – to be identified so far is sorioneku, a forerunner of the modern Basque word zorioneko, meaning good luck or good omen.

“This is the first document undoubtedly written in the Vasconic language and in characters that are also Vasconic,” said Javier Velaza, a professor of Latin philology at the University of Barcelona and one of the experts who deciphered the hand.

“The writing system used is odd – it’s a writing system derived from the Iberian system, although there have been some adaptations to represent some sounds and phonemes that don’t exist in Iberian characters, but which have been seen in coins minted in Vascones territory.”

As a result, added Velaza, the Hand of Irulegi proves the existence of a specifically Vasconic writing system in use at the time it was made.

His colleague Joaquín Gorrochategui, a professor of Indo-European Linguistics at the University of the Basque Country, said the hand’s secrets would change the way scholars looked at the Vascones.

“This piece upends how we’d thought about the Vascones and writing until now,” he said. “We were almost convinced that the ancient Vascones were illiterate and didn’t use writing except when it came to minting coins.

According to Mattin Aiestaran, the director of the Irulegi dig, the site owes its survival to the fact that the original village was burned and then abandoned during the Sertorian war between two rival Roman factions in the 1st century BC. The objects they left behind were buried in the ruins of their mud-brick houses.

“That’s a bit of luck for archeologists and it means we have a snapshot of the moment of the attack,” said Aiestaran. “That means we’ve been able to recover a lot of day-to-day material from people’s everyday lives. It’s an exceptional situation and one that has allowed us to find an exceptional piece.”

Not every recent Basque language discovery, however, has lived up to its billing. Two years ago, a Spanish archaeologist was found guilty of faking finds that included pieces of third-century pottery engraved with one of the first depictions of the crucified Christ, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Basque words that predated the earliest known written examples of the language by 600 years.

Although the archaeologist, Eliseo Gil, claimed the pieces would “rewrite the history books”, an expert committee examined them and found traces of modern glue as well as references to the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/15/hand-of-irulegi-ancient-spanish-artefact-rewrites-history-of-basque-language

An ancient form of Catholic worship is drawing in young traditionalists and conservatives. But it signals a divide within the church.

DETROIT — Eric Agustin’s eight children used to call the first day of the week “Party Sunday.” The family would wake up, attend a short morning Mass at a Catholic parish near their house, then head home for lunch and an afternoon of relaxing and watching football.

But this summer, the family made a “big switch,” one of his teenage sons said on a recent Sunday afternoon outside St. Joseph Shrine, the family’s new parish. At St. Joseph, the liturgy is ornate, precisely choreographed and conducted entirely in Latin. The family drives an hour round trip to attend a service that starts at 11 a.m. and can last almost two hours.

The traditional Latin Mass, an ancient form of Catholic worship that Pope Francis has tried to discourage, is instead experiencing a revival in the United States. It appeals to an overlapping mix of aesthetic traditionalists, young families, new converts and critics of Francis. And its resurgence, boosted by the pandemic years, is part of a rising right-wing strain within American Christianity as a whole.

The Mass has sparked a sprawling proxy battle in the American church over not just songs and prayers but also the future of Catholicism and its role in culture and politics.

Latin Mass adherents tend to be socially conservative and tradition-minded. Some, like the Augustin family, are attracted to the Mass’s beauty, symbolism and what they describe as a more reverent form of worship.

Others have also been drawn to the old form through a brand of new hard-right rhetoric and community they have found in some Catholic communities online. They see the pope’s attempt to curb the old Latin Mass as an example of the perils of a world becoming unmoored from Western religious values.

The traditional Latin Mass, also referred to as the “extraordinary form,” was celebrated for centuries until the transformations of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, which were intended in part to make the rite more accessible. After the Council, Mass could be celebrated in any language, contemporary music entered many parishes and priests turned to face people in the pews.

But the traditional Latin Mass, with all its formality and mystery, never fully disappeared. Though it represents a fraction of Masses performed at the 17,000 Catholic parishes in the United States, it is thriving.

The United States now appears to have at least 600 venues offering the traditional Mass, the most by far of any country. More than 400 venues offer it every Sunday, according to one online directory.

This growth is happening as Pope Francis has cracked down, issuing strict new limits on the rite last year. His immediate predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, had widened access to the old Mass, but Francis has characterized it as a source of division in the church and said that it is too often associated with a broader rejection of the aims of the Second Vatican Council.

On one level, the split over the old Mass represents a clash of priorities and power struggles in church leadership. In pews and parishes, it is more complicated. Many Catholics say they are attracted to the Mass for spiritual reasons, bolstered by aesthetic and liturgical preferences rather than by partisanship.

“There’s a reverence that’s next-level,” Mr. Agustin said of the Mass at St. Joseph Shrine.

Dozens of large, young families have flocked to St. Joseph Shrine since it began offering the traditional Latin Mass regularly in 2016. A historically German parish with a 19th-century building that once struggled to keep the lights on is now bustling with people, including many couples with five or more children.

High Mass on Sundays begins with holy water sprinkled up the aisle, and it features plumes of incense and the sounds of bells, a pipe organ and Gregorian chant. Men tend to wear suits and ties and most women wear skirts and lace mantillas on their heads, the latter a traditional sign of humility and femininity. Parking nearby is hard to find on Sundays.

“It’s nothing exceptional here,” demurred Rev. Canon J.B. Commins, 33, who lives in the brick rectory next door. “In other places where the traditional Mass is being celebrated, it’s exponential growth.”

Leaning into the demands of intense religious experience, many supporters of the Latin Mass seek a return not just to old rituals but to old social values and gender roles. Here, the arcane and rigorous are not barriers to accessibility but attractions that tie believers to a long history of spiritual clarity, which they see as sharply contrasting with the modern church.

The pandemic accelerated the divide, as mainstream parishes generally stayed closed longer, driving some Catholics to seek out new parishes. Many attendees say they discovered traditionalist podcasters and influencers who turned them onto the older Mass.

Although Catholics as a whole are a politically diverse cohort in the United States, frequent Mass attendees tend to be more conservative: 63 percent of Catholics who attend Mass at least monthly supported Donald J. Trump in the 2020 presidential election, compared with 53 percent of less-frequent attendees, according to the Pew Research Center. Informal surveys have found that Latin Mass attendees not only attend Mass more often but hold almost universally conservative views on topics like abortion and gay marriage.

Before the 11 a.m. Mass at St. Joseph one Sunday in early October, attended by some 300 people, Canon Commins read an announcement from Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit, urging Catholics to “take action” to defeat a ballot amendment that would enshrine a right to abortion in the state’s constitution. (Voters in the state later approved the measure.)

Political and theological conservatives see in Pope Francis’s restriction of the traditional Latin Mass a troubling disregard for orthodoxy more broadly.

Since Francis became pope in 2013, he has emphasized inclusivity, and attempted to soften the church’s approach to flashpoints like abortion and homosexuality. He has also issued a major encyclical on environmental stewardship, prayed for immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, and appointed women to historically significant roles in church operations.

Francis’s 2021 document “Traditionis Custodes,” comparable to an executive order, limited where and when the old Mass can be celebrated. And this summer, he outraged traditionalists further with a new document making clear that the tensions around the Mass are more than a question of taste. “I do not see how it is possible to say that one recognizes the validity of the Council — though it amazes me that a Catholic might presume not to do so — and at the same time not accept the liturgical reform,” he wrote.

The crackdown helped fuel what some call the “liturgy wars.”

“It’s a whole vision of the church and what it means to be a Christian and a Catholic that’s at stake here,” said John Baldovin, a priest and a professor at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry who has written often about liturgical issues. “You can’t say it’s just about a beautiful Mass.”

The conflict is particularly fierce in the United States, where conservatives dominate the bishops’ conference and high-profile critics and media outlets regularly challenge Francis’s leadership.

At a conference in Pittsburgh this fall, Catholic critics of Pope Francis laid out three “articles of resistance” against the Vatican and its current leadership. Their top objection was to “Traditionis Custodes,” which they called an act of “religious discrimination against Traditional Catholics.”

Some bishops, including those in Chicago and Washington, have drastically reduced the availability of the traditional Latin Mass this year.

“It’s something I couldn’t imagine, having to beg and plead for the traditional Latin Mass,” said Noah Peters, who organized a five-mile “pilgrimage” in September from a cathedral in Arlington, Va., to one in Washington in protest of the restrictions in both dioceses.

Mr. Peters was raised as a secular Jew and was drawn to Catholicism through the traditional Latin Mass “because it had this beauty, timelessness and reverence about it,” he said.

Like Mr. Peters, almost all Latin Mass devotees use a version of the word “reverent” unprompted, contrasting the tone of the Latin Mass with oft-cited if rare examples in modern parishes featuring nontraditional elements like puppets and balloons, a casual treatment of the Eucharist, or music and dance they consider disrespectful. The popular traditionalist podcaster Taylor Marshall often tells a story about feeling driven away from the Novus Ordo when he was served the Eucharist by a layperson wearing a Grover T-shirt.

In Detroit, Archbishop Allen Vigneron has allowed the Latin Mass to flourish basically unimpeded.

Alex Begin, a Detroit-area real estate executive, trains priests in the liturgy and helps parishes that want to start offering the Mass.

On a recent drive starting in downtown Detroit and winding through former working-class German and Polish neighborhoods, Mr. Begin pointed out churches that have begun offering the Latin Mass, and some that plan to start. Mr. Begin has a taste for the arcane: His hobbies include maximizing frequent flier rewards and collecting indulgences, which he refers to as “Heaven’s frequent flier program.”

Mr. Begin sees Pope Francis’s antagonism toward the Latin Mass as working against his goal of unity. “You’re going to drive people to breakaway groups,” he said.

At Old St. Mary’s, a 19th-century parish in the city’s touristy Greektown neighborhood, some 150 people gathered in October for the monthly Latin Mass service, complete with a Gregorian choir.

Congregants knelt, rose, crossed themselves and murmured prayers. Incense wafted through the vast, dimly lit room. When it was time to receive the Eucharist, they filed silently forward and knelt, their faces slightly upturned.

“Corpus Dómini nostri Jesu Christi custódiat ánimam tuam in vitam ætérnam. Amen,” the priests prayed as they placed a thin wafer on each tongue. May the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ preserve your soul unto life everlasting. Amen.

The Latin Mass “brings the true Catholics out,” said Kristin Kopy, 41, after the service.

Mrs. Kopy’s husband works for Church Militant, a hard-right multimedia site that rails against homosexuality, pandemic restrictions and Pope Francis.

Mrs. Kopy was holding her sleeping 2-week-old daughter, Philomena, as her older children played nearby. She and her husband have been attending the Latin Mass for the last six years. They felt something was missing in their experiences of the new Mass that they now have found in the old.

“I don’t speak Latin,” she said. “But it feels like you’re connecting more with God.”

New York Times – November 15, 2022