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newstfionline · 1 year ago

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Wednesday, September 13, 2023

UN food agency warns of ‘doom loop’ for world’s hungriest as governments cut aid and needs increase (AP) The World Food Program warned Tuesday that humanitarian funding cuts by governments are forcing the U.N. agency to drastically cut food rations to the world’s hungriest people, with each 1% cut in aid risking to push 400,000 people toward starvation. The agency said the more than 60% funding shortfall this year was the highest in WFP’s 60-year history and marks the first time the Rome-based agency has seen contributions decline while needs rise. As a result, the WFP has been forced to cut rations in almost half its operations, including in hard-hit places like Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia and Haiti. In a statement, WFP warned that 24 million more people could slip into emergency hunger over the next year as a result. The WFP warned that if the trend continues, a “doom loop” will be triggered “where WFP is being forced to save only the starving, at the cost of the hungry,” the statement said.

Washington copes with surging violence (Washington Post) Stephanie Heishman, a Northwest Washington event planner, knows she may sound almost absurdly cautious as she describes how, after a regular Sunday dinner at a friend’s house five blocks away, she travels by car instead of walking home. She has her reasons. A year ago, she was awakened by gunfire outside her Adams Morgan apartment building and from her seventh-floor window saw a car speeding away. In August, after a night out with friends, her Uber driver couldn’t reach her building because police had blocked off a street where bullets had just killed two men and fatally wounded a third. “It’s so ridiculous,” Heishman, 44, said of the precautions she takes to feel safer. “On the other hand, I don’t want to randomly get shot.” Violent crime has long been a part of Washington life, the worst of it during the early 1990s when drug trafficking propelled the annual homicide toll to nearly 500 and D.C. earned an inglorious reputation as America’s “Murder Capital.” The volume of carnage these days is not nearly as high. Yet a sharp rise in crime over the past year—punctuated by reports of homicides, brazen shootings, and carjackings by armed teenagers—is rattling the city.

Extreme heat is forcing America’s farmers to go nocturnal (Washington Post) Mark Hines’s workday starts while the sun sets. His friends call him the “Night Farmer.” While others sleep, Hines roams his Derwood, Md., farm from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m., picking tomatoes, melons, pumpkins and lettuce by the light of a headlamp and well after the heat of the day. Rising temperatures in key agricultural regions across the United States are leading more farmers to harvest in the middle of the night to safeguard the quality of their crops. There isn’t much data on the pervasiveness of night harvesting, but agriculture experts and farmers said the practice is becoming an important part of the industry’s future. “Inevitably, it’s going to be hotter during the day, and that’s going to mean even more night farming where it’s feasible,” said Daniel Sumner, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of California at Davis. Hines started farming in 2020 and gradually shifted to evening hours to contend with the hotter Maryland summers. This year was even more brutal; scientists say it was the world’s hottest summer “by a large margin.”

A divided Chile marks 50 years since Pinochet’s bloody military coup (Reuters) Chile on Monday marked 50 years since a violent coup by Augusto Pinochet against socialist President Salvador Allende ushered in two decades of military rule that saw thousands killed and seeded the country’s market-led economic model. The coup on Sept. 11, 1973, marked the start of a series of U.S.-friendly, right-wing dictatorships that governed much of South America well into the 1980s and were characterized by mass arrests, torture and disappearances. But with half a century gone by, Chile is sharply polarized. Victims of military rule and their families have ramped up a push for justice and accountability, but there are growing fears over rising crime. While leftist President Gabriel Boric campaigned for a big event to remember the coup anniversary, he has faced pushback from some politicians and voters. A recent Pulso Ciudadano survey showed 60% of Chileans were not interested, while almost four in ten people said they mostly blamed Allende’s government for the coup. Allende’s administration, which lasted three years, attempted radical change that was sometimes chaotic, and some conservatives contrast that with the changes made under Pinochet, which they say began Chile on the path to its status as one of South America’s more stable, economically successful and safe countries.

China May Ban Clothes That Hurt People’s Feelings (NYT) In the 1980s, people in China could land themselves in trouble with the government for their fashion choices. Flared pants and blue jeans were considered “weird attire.” Some government buildings barred men with long hair and women wearing makeup and jewelry. Patrols organized by factories and schools cut flared pants and long hair with scissors. It was the early days of China’s era of reform and opening up. The Communist Party was loosening its tight control over society little by little, and the public was pushing the limits of self-expression and individualism. Now the government is proposing amendments to a law that could result in detention and fines for “wearing clothing or bearing symbols in public that are detrimental to the spirit of the Chinese people and hurt the feelings of Chinese people.” What could be construed as an offense wasn’t specified. The plan has been widely criticized, with Chinese legal scholars, journalists and businesspeople voicing their concerns over the past week. If it goes into effect, they argue, it could give the authorities the power to police anything they dislike. It would also be a big step backward in the public’s relationship with the government. “In Chinese history, the times when clothing and hairstyles were given significant attention often corresponded to ‘bad moments in history,’” a user wrote on WeChat. The article was widely circulated before being purged by censors.

North Korea’s Kim vows full support for Russia’s ‘sacred fight’ (AP) North Korean leader Kim Jong Un offered Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday his country’s “full and unconditional support” for Russia’s “sacred fight” to defend its security interests, in an apparent reference to the war in Ukraine, and said Pyongyang will always stand with Moscow on the “anti-imperialist” front. Kim also called North Korea’s relations with Russia “the first priority.” The leaders met at a remote Siberian rocket launch facility for a summit that underscores how their interests are aligning in the face of their countries’ separate, intensifying confrontations with the United States.

American Cave Expert Is Rescued in Turkey (NYT) An American cave expert who became ill while he was more than 3,000 feet underground in a cave in Turkey, prompting an international rescue effort, was pulled safely from the cave soon after midnight Tuesday morning local time and immediately brought to a medical tent. While he was deep underground, the caver, Mark Dickey, 40, who is himself an expert cave rescuer, suffered gastrointestinal bleeding and lost three liters of blood. He was part of an expedition that was exploring the Morca cave, which he entered on Aug. 30. After he became ill, a member of his party made the harrowing, hourslong climb to the surface and alerted authorities on Sept. 2. That brought more than 180 people from eight countries to help rescue him. The rescue teams installed communications systems, blasted open narrow areas so they could move Mr. Dickey through on a stretcher and used lines set up inside the cave to carry the stretcher out.

Fractured Israel (NYT) When Ana Lavi neared the gates of her village in southern Israel late one night in July, a small group of men appeared in the road, surrounded her car and blocked its path. The men had gathered half in celebration, half in vengeance. Hours earlier, Israel’s ultranationalist and religiously conservative governing coalition had passed the first part of its deeply contentious effort to weaken the Supreme Court. To mark the moment, some of the government’s supporters had rushed to what they saw as the nearest symbol of Israel’s opposition: Ms. Lavi’s village, Kibbutz Hatzerim, one of the collective farms that has long been associated with the country’s secular and left-leaning elite. Ms. Lavi phoned for help. The kibbutz security guard hurried to the scene, accompanied by other residents. A scuffle broke out, and the guard drew his pistol. Ms. Lavi jumped from her car. “What have we come to?” she shouted, in a scene captured on video. Then the gun went off. The immediate trigger for the altercation was the far-right government’s effort to reduce judicial power. But the judicial crisis has become a proxy for an even broader battle among Israelis about the future of their country.

Aid Trickles In to Moroccans Stranded by Quake, but Desperation Mounts (NYT) Government rescue workers began to reach some devastated mountain villages in Morocco on Monday, but many more settlements were waiting desperately for help, three days after the country was hit by the strongest earthquake in the area in more than a century. Some roads in the Atlas Mountains near the ancient southern city of Marrakesh remained blocked by landslides caused by Friday’s earthquake, which killed at least 2,862 people and injured at least 2,562. Many survivors were without power and phone service, fueling criticism on social media about the government’s response. In some villages where homes are made of mud bricks, as many as half of the houses were flattened. With official aid slow to arrive, many Moroccan citizens have stepped in themselves to fill in the gaps.

Morocco’s reluctance to accept quake aid baffles foreign governments (Washington Post) Governments far and wide have offered aid to Morocco following a 6.8-magnitude earthquake that has left more than 2,800 people dead and thousands injured and displaced. But, to the bafflement of officials abroad, Morocco has been slow to accept support. Countries including France, Germany, Italy and the United States, along with the United Nations, said they were waiting to provide any help they could after Friday’s devastating earthquake in the High Atlas Mountains. The Moroccan Interior Ministry said in a statement Sunday that it would initially accept search-and-rescue teams only from Britain, Qatar, Spain and the United Arab Emirates—which it called “friendly countries”—after taking into account the “needs of the field.” Meanwhile, a 50-person team from Germany’s Technical Relief Agency that assembled at Cologne Bonn Airport over the weekend was sent home from the airport on Sunday after its offer for help was not taken up. Reluctance to allow a broad range of aid could stem from unwillingness to permit scrutiny or lose control of the narrative about the conditions in communities hit by the quake, amid a potential public relations nightmare. An influx of foreign aid workers could be “a source of anxiety for the Moroccan state, as perhaps it would shed light on issues that many of us have been trying to signal [are] not tenable, and lives are at stake.”

Catastrophic floods devastated Libya (NYT/Foreign Policy) The authorities in Libya estimated that at least 5,000 people have died, and thousands more are believed to be missing, after heavy rain submerged the coastal city of Derna, destroyed roads and swept entire neighborhoods into the sea. The storm caused two dams to burst, destroying much of Derna, on Libya’s northeast coast. Citizens who escaped the city left “as if they were born today, with nothing,” one army official said. The flooding buckled buildings and blocked roads, impeding access to the most stricken areas, and the death toll is likely to rise in the coming days. One local official said today that a third dam, located between Derna and the larger city of Benghazi, was also on the brink of collapse. The catastrophic nature of Libya’s flooding is largely due to its history of poor, underinvested infrastructure. “Ten years since Qaddafi’s death, Libya lacks a constitution, a state with a monopoly on force, and economic institutions able to rationally order the economy,” Libya expert Jason Pack wrote in Foreign Policy in 2021. To sort out this mess, “there is more of a need for global governance than ever before—and ironically less effective global governance than at any time in modern history.”

#headlines #news

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daggerzine · 5 years ago

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Early DC hardcore gent Rob Moss tells us what it was like then....and now.

When I became friends with a Rob Moss on Facebook a year or so back I knew the name sounded familiar. Then, I’d heard he was a musician (as well as an author) and releasing a new record under the name Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin. Hmm….very interesting band name. I then began digging a little deeper and found out it was the same Rob Moss who had been in the Washington, DC-area pre-Marginal Man band called Artificial Peace and had later played in Government Issue for a time.

Apparently Rob hadn’t played music since those old hardcore days, but was now back in the saddle and living in Portland, Oregon (where he’s lived for several years). With Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin he put together an interesting concept, a different guest guitarist for each song. Some of the names you will definitely recognize from the punk rock days and beyond. It’s certainly a unique sounding record (and I reviewed it here on the site a few weeks back).

I wanted to ask Rob about the old days and have him bring us up to the present and everything in between. He was more than happy to oblige.

You’re on Flex Your Head and were in two iconic Washington, D.C. hardcore bands, were you born and raised there?

We moved from Boston to Wheaton, Maryland in 1966 – I was three – and to Bethesda a year later. The Bethesda I grew up in had a downtown of mostly old two- and three-story buildings, and there were cows in the field across from Walter Johnson High when I went there. I’ve not lived in the D.C. area since the fall of 1983.

Do you remember your earliest exposure to music?

My first memories are my dad playing records, like Edvard Grieg’s Hall of the Mountain King and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. I think he chose them because that kind of music’s so visual. In the mid 1970s I discovered WPGC, a Top-40 station. I had a Radio Shack cassette deck that I’d put up against the radio to record stuff like The Night Chicago Died (Paper Lace) and Blockbuster (Sweet).

How and when did the punk rock bug hit you?

The how and who was Marc Alberstadt (original drummer in Government Issue). We’ve been friends since kindergarten and went to Hebrew school together. We used to hang out at his house and listen to his older brother’s records. Like Can’t Stand the Rezillos, the first Generation X album and the Sex Pistols. The when was 1978 or ’79.

Back then, Kenny, Marc’s brother, would sneak us in to see bands at the Psyche Delly and at the University of Maryland. There were no underage shows then. We saw the Slickee Boys, the Bad Brains, Tina Peel, Sorrows – bands like that.

But as far as really getting bit by the bug, it was when I saw how much fun the Slickee Boys had on stage. I had to start my own band, even though at that point I didn’t play a guitar or anything. This was before the Teen Idles, Dischord, or any of that.

When did you first pick up an instrument?

Marc was already playing drums, and Brian Gay played guitar. They convinced me to get a bass. Brian and I started getting together at his mom’s place in 1979 to write songs. They were pretty crude, we were taking our cues from the :30 Over D.C. compilation album.

How did you meet the Artificial Peace guys?

Let’s go back further. I was away for two weeks in the summer of 1980. And during that time, Government Issue had formed with Brian on bass and Marc on drums.

Brian and I already had a bunch of songs, and he still wanted to play guitar. So we formed another band – he played in both. We knew Mike Manos from school and learned that his brother had a drum set. Mike didn’t really know how to play. Marc gave him some tips, the rest was on-the-job training.

But we still needed a singer. This new wave-looking girl, named Sandra something-or-other, appeared in our school. She’d just moved from New York. None of the other girls at school looked like her. We asked her to sing. We called ourselves The Indians – it was supposed to be ironic.

Our first show was at American University with the GIs, S.O.A. and Youth Brigade. But it got cancelled at the last minute. So everyone met up at Roy Rogers. Fifty, maybe seventy-five, punks walked into the place within a few minutes of each other. The manager came out from behind the counter, he thought we were up to no good. But all we wanted was something to eat and to come up with a plan-B.

We ended up playing that night in the basement of a house in D.C. It was the first time we actually got to hear Sandra sing, because she’d kept pulling a no-show to our practices. John Stabb said she sounded like a dying parakeet.

After that we replaced her with Steve Polcari, who we’d known since junior high school, and changed our name to Assault and Battery. We played some shows like the infamous Pow Wow House gig, which I had set up, and recorded a demo a few months later.

But at the end of the summer of 1981, Brian went to art school in Chicago and I started at the University of Maryland. That meant the GIs needed a new bass player and we needed a new guitarist. Minor Threat had just broken up for the first time, and Brian Baker joined the GIs on bass, he later moved to guitar. Red-C had also just disbanded, so we welcomed Pete Murray to join us.

Artificial Peace was the name of one of our songs. I don’t know if we’d played it with Brian, I may have written it after he left. But we felt like we needed a new band name. We became Artificial Peace.

What were some of Artificial Peace’s most memorable shows?

Opening for the Bad Brains at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City. H.R. called the number he had for me, which was the pay phone down the hall from my dorm room in College Park. We drove up the day of the show, unloaded our gear and discovered H.R. gave me the wrong date. It was the next day. The show itself was terrible! The soundman screwed us. There was nothing in the monitors, we couldn’t hear a thing.

We played another show in NYC at the A7. The first band went on at midnight, we went on around five in the morning. Cheetah Chrome played that night, all I remember was that he was pretty messed up.

We also opened for Black Flag in Baltimore on their Damaged tour. We played well, but the power went out twice during Black Flag’s set. Henry recreated the Damaged album cover and punched out one of the mirror tiles that edged the stage. Lots of blood. How punk rock (laughing)!

As far as D.C., we played some shows at the Wilson Center, which were probably our best. We also played a talent show at the high school that Mike, Steve and I went to. We’d graduated the year before – I don’t recall how we got on the bill. A lot of punks showed up, it was pretty funny.

Only known color photo to exist of Artificial Peace. Wilson Center, 1982. Photo by Davis White.

How did the band end?

Pete called me on the phone, telling me that he and the guys didn’t want to play anymore. It was a surprise. He gave no reason. A few weeks later I heard about Marginal Man. I guess they couldn’t be straight with me.

Was G.I. next? How did that happen? Stabb was my first D.C. hero that I ever met (1985 in Trenton).

Before I joined the GIs, I got together a few times with Kenny Alberstadt, who’s a fantastic guitarist, as well as a female guitarist, whose name escapes me. She looked like Joan Jett and played great! But it didn’t go anywhere.

Then Mitch Parker left Government Issue in the spring of 1983, and I got a call asking if I wanted to join. I played on the GIs summer tour. Our first show was at CBGBs. We had John’s dad’s Buick and a U-Haul trailer full of gear. Just us, no roadies. Tom and I did nearly all the driving. John never got a license. We’d let Marc drive only if Tom and I needed a break. We’d crash at people’s houses after the shows. Some nights it was at nice place and we got to do laundry. Other times, it was more like a squat. Tours were grueling then.

Marc Alberstadt, Tom Lyle, Rob Moss, Tuffy. Outside Shamus O'Brien's, South El Monte (Los Angeles), 1983. Photo by Jordan Schwartz.

John Stabb and Rob Moss, Sun Valley Sportsman's Hall (Los Angeles), 1983. Photo by Ted Ziegler.

How did your tenure in G.I. end? Did you stop making music?

Around the end of the tour I heard that my transfer to Boston University got accepted. I told the guys. Tom, understandably, was not happy. Once I moved, I stopped playing. And by that time, I felt the scene wasn’t fun anymore.

How did Rob Moss and Skin-Tight Skin come about? Had the idea been brewing for a while?

I’d always wanted to do something more in music. About three years ago I picked up a guitar, started writing songs and posted a few on Facebook. Dwight Reid asked if I wanted to record them at his home studio. He’d play bass and we’d find a drummer. That’s how it happened.

Why did you get a different lead guitarist for each song?

I can get by playing rhythm guitar and singing, but not leads. And I wasn’t ready to commit to forming a touring band. Under those circumstances it would’ve been too big an ask to interest a great lead guitarist to get involved.

But what if, instead, I asked a different guy to play on each song? So I called up old friends and friends of friends, and nearly everyone agreed to help.

What made it such an incredible experience for me is how many musicians I’ve long admired said yes. In your question earlier, about when the punk rock bug hit me, I told you about seeing the Slickee Boys when I was 16 and hearing the first Generation X album. To have guys from those bands – Marshall Keith and Bob ‘Derwood’ Andrews – play on my new album is tremendous. I feel the same about Nels Cline, Don Fleming, Franz Stahl, Stuart Casson, Billy Loosigian, Dave Lizmi, Saul Koll, Chris Rudolf, Marion Monterosso, Spit Stix and everyone else who took part.

How’s the response to the record? Are you happy with it?

Many people comment on the song quality. That even after hearing the album once, they find themselves humming the songs. The earworm thing. To me that’s the best compliment.

What’s also made me happy is hearing from the guys who played on it. That they really like the album as a whole, not just their work on it.

Did you consider recording a hardcore album?

Listening to proto-punk and pub rock made me happy as a kid. And when I speak with friends who were there, many say the same thing. That’s why I make that type of music now, not hardcore.

With all that’s going on, isn’t hardcore still important?

As protest music? I suppose but it seems like preaching to the converted. Bob Dylan’s entire career is protest music, but he grew as an artist to express himself and reach more people. When he went electric in 1966, the folkies booed, they called him a traitor. They expected him to play the same Woody Guthrie songbook forever.

It's the same with hardcore. It had its place. I’m glad to have been part of it. But I no longer want to play it. Still, plenty of my new songs contain the kind of messages I wrote when I was in Artificial Peace. There’s also humor, like Ugly Chair and A Maltese Falcon. Or humor and tragedy, like Got My Ass Stuck in a Tree. Some are about getting older (Tony Alva’s Pictures) or being a kid (Life at 33 1/3 RPM).

How do you discover new music?

Recommendations from friends, mostly. But when I lived in Manhattan in the mid-‘80s to early ‘90s, I had a neighbor in the music business. He’d set down stacks of albums, mostly promo copies, by the trash. I saved what I liked and traded the rest.

That’s how I discovered a band I missed growing up. Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band. They were incredible, should’ve been huge! The intro to Rock & Roll ’78 still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

Years later I met the guitarist from that band, Billy Loosigian, through Facebook. And now he’s played on one of my songs. Experiences like that really made the album special to me. I hope it does for everyone else.

What’s next? More music in the future?

Anything’s possible.

https://skin-tight-rock.bandcamp.com/

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