Asteroid Goddesses - the undistorted Natural/Divine Feminine

[Rad]

Hi All,

Here is the story of Kira Yarmysh's. This is a noon chart.

********

Kira Yarmysh's new novel, 'Harassment' Alexey Navalny's press secretary discusses books and personal responsibility in times of war and emigration

Source: Meduza

In the novel "Harassment," the protagonist navigates unwanted attention from her boss. The story's author, Kira Yarmysh (the longtime press secretary of imprisoned opposition leader Alexey Navalny), wrote most of the book in Moscow while under house arrest as a "restraining measure" for violating Russia's draconian pandemic lockdown restrictions. Last summer, Yarmysh left Russia; she now lives and works abroad. Meduza literary critic Galina Yuzefovich spoke with Yarmysh about her new book, Navalny's role in her literary career, and what she believes opponents of the Kremlin's policies should do now.

I started reading your novel on the first day of the war and realized sadly that I'd have come away with a completely different impression, if I'd picked it up literally one week earlier. Are you worried about the book's fate?

On February 24, everything changed so much that of course the attributes of our former lives seem totally irrelevant. But life goes on, no matter how it sounds. You can't just up and pretend that some aspects no longer exist. It's true that the novel's release didn't come at the most fortunate moment, but the book itself was written in a completely different time. That alone, I think, doesn't make it useless or uninteresting to everyone. Harassment hasn't gone anywhere — and it's not likely to go anywhere, so this book will still be important to some right now.

All violence is interconnected. Do you feel that when we're talking about one type, we're in fact talking about violence in general?

I have thought about this a lot, of course. It seems to me, in principle, that violence is a general concept for a certain type of evil, and that it's not particularly important to divide it into specific types and subtypes. With violence, there is no clear gradation, degree, or level. Any violence or illegitimate use of your power is always immoral and criminal. So, yes, the violence that I write about in my novel is private and narrow, but also a very representative example of violence as a global category.

In your novel, you deliberately avoid ethical certainty: there is not one situation in which the heroine finds herself, where we can say with a clear conscience that she is completely blameless, that she's just an unfortunate victim. Do you have any fear that some will think you're taking the position that "not everything is so clear" or even "both sides are to blame"?

No, not at all. I consciously tried to avoid situations which would produce in the reader an unambiguous relationship with the main characters. From the very beginning, I wanted to create a situation that was as realistic as possible and also as contradictory as possible, so that readers' sympathies would always rotate between different characters. In no way did I try to portray the heroine as a victim, some poor little lamb. So, I hope readers will understand me correctly.

It was much more interesting to me to show the contradiction, the complexity, and therefore also the danger of the entire process of harassment than to take one side firmly and dogmatically. Harassment is always a use of one's position and one's power against a weaker person who cannot answer in kind. That is unambiguously bad, but writing such obvious things openly seems trivial and useless to me. I'm really not writing agitprop or a feminist manifesto.

When and under what conditions was the idea for Harassment born?

I discussed the plot of the novel with Alexey [Navalny] on the way to Novosibirsk in August 2020. On that flight, we talked over the whole story and discussed details, but then after a few days the Novichok [poisoning] happened and everything, of course, changed completely. It wasn't until a month after that fateful flight — when it became clear that Alexey was coming out of the coma, and everything would be relatively okay — that I started to write the novel itself. At least then, imminent disaster had been averted.

The book was necessary for me; it helped me somehow to reconcile with what was happening, but there wasn't enough time for it. With my house arrest, I suddenly had all the time in the world. I was writing a lot then.

What was it like to write under house arrest? Did it feel like speaking into the void?

In that respect, the book was an excellent anchor. I wrote under house arrest precisely so it would be easier to survive what was happening. Obviously, I had a lot of free time. No Internet, no nothing — no one could visit, only a lawyer. So, you sit alone in your apartment for 24 hours a day. What do you do with yourself?

My colleagues offered to pass me a gaming console through my lawyer. Everyone was worried that I was bored and probably going nuts, climbing the walls. But I was writing, that whole time, so the first five months I didn't even understand where I would find the time to get bored. And that cured me of any suffering, any depression, and any fretting about the future. Because I was immersed in a world that I'd created. In that moment, nothing more existed for me. Who needs a gaming console!

You mentioned that you discussed your books with Alexey Navalny, and I remember that he actively supported your first novel when he was still free. What, generally, is Navalny's role in your writing career?

Huge, if I'm being honest. He's the person who made me believe in myself and in the fact that I could write at all. For many years, I told everyone that I wanted to write, but I worried that I lacked the perseverance, mainly. So, credit for my first novel is due, undoubtedly, to Alexey. He believed in me so much that he simply overwhelmed me with that belief, until I wrote the book.

Of course, I couldn't discuss the second novel with him because I was under house arrest, and he was in prison. So, except for that conversation on the plane, we discussed practically nothing more about the plot, its twists and turns, or its subtleties. I couldn't consult with him about whether what I was writing was realistic or not. But he became my first reader anyway, because I sent him the whole book, literally page by page, in letters over the course of several months. He read it and liked it. This naturally lifted my spirits and gave me confidence. So, like before, Alexey is actively involved in my writing life, he inspires me, and he supports me.

Do you ever get the feeling that Navalny's participation, his presence in your life in general, not only helps but also hinders your writing career? I remember very well the controversy around your first book, when many colleagues said it was of interest only because it was written by Alexey Navalny's press secretary.

I've thought about this a fair amount, and it would be strange to deny it. I'm certainly indebted to Alexey for the fact that Varya Gornostaeva [a senior editor at CORPUS, Kira Yarmysh's Russian publisher] even agreed to read my novel. But I was only hoping for an expert's assessment and maybe some advice — Varya herself offered to publish it. I honestly was not counting on that. It came as a huge shock and a great joy.

I'd like to believe that the book wouldn't have sustained three reprints in Russia if it were bad, if the only reason it appeared on the market was that I'm Navalny's press secretary. I'd like to believe it wouldn't have been translated into 10 languages.

On the whole, writing is very important to me. I view it as at least half of my work and self-actualization. I have politics and the work that's connected to it, and then I have my creativity. I really want to bear the proud name of a writer, to have the right to speak of myself that way. So, I plan to continue writing, and I hope that simply by releasing novels time and again that are interesting (or necessary) to people, I can win over even those who think my only secret to success (if I can put it that way) is that I'm someone's press secretary.

What was it like watching Navalny's new sentencing?

It was hard. It's difficult to answer this question because, on the one hand, no one had any illusions. It was pretty clear in advance that they'd sentence Alexey to some unthinkable term, probably at a maximum-security facility. That everything would be very long and very painful. You get used to this thought, you don't expect surprises. From the very beginning, it was clear to everybody that Alexey would not be released from the [prison] colony in [his original sentence of] two and a half years. This will happen only after sweeping changes in the country. When Putin dies.

You think you're ready for anything. But the moment when I heard "nine years, maximum security" (and I was live on the air then), everything suddenly turned out to be inadequate. All of my self-control skills went down the drain because I was filled with rage that had nowhere to go. Because, of course, Alexey shouldn't be in prison for one minute. Though the nine years in his sentence are just an abstract figure (he could be released later, or possibly much sooner), the injustice itself is such an outrage that it's like having a nuclear reactor inside me. And that reactor actually helps fuel my work, in fact.

For the foreseeable months or possibly years, it's clear that you'll not likely be able to return to Russia, meaning that you're now an émigré writer. Given this, do you worry that you'll become foreign to Russian readers, to the very people to whom your books are addressed?

I'd say no, and this "no" has both subjective and objective sides. The objective side is that the Internet exists, which makes an enormous difference for people today who've left Russia (compared to what first-wave emigrants experienced). So, of course, I'm much more in touch with Russian reality than my predecessors in emigration were.

And the subjective reason is that I just love Russia so much that I can't imagine that I would suddenly break away from it. Where I live is irrelevant — all my life goals and all my thoughts are concentrated there. I just don't feel any distance between myself and Russia. So, I think I'll continue to write about Russia, all the same, and I'll find themes and words that are important to people living there.

There is a lot of talk now about the "cancellation" of Russian culture. I wanted to ask, first, what you think about this, and how great is the danger of a ban on Russian authors? And second, do you have any sense that something similar could happen to you? Or does your status as an opponent of the Putin regime who is persecuted in your native land protect you?

I myself have felt nothing like this in any capacity. Neither as a regular person on the street, nor as a writer. I hope that will continue. I don't know whether the fact of my persecution plays a significant role here, but my activism is probably important. I don't hide my convictions, and I think everyone knows that they were formed long before it became necessary for me to leave Russia. And that I'm against Putin and that it's been this way with me for many years.

Concerning cancel culture generally, it's a really complex issue. With anything connected to the war, there are no longer simple questions. I believe that Russian culture is a great culture. Undoubtedly, one specific person and several of his closest accomplices bear responsibility for the war. It would be strange to cancel Pushkin because Putin started a war against Ukraine. So, I hope that global ties will remain intact. Many creative people do not support anything that is currently going on in Russia, they don't support Putin, they don't support the war. So, I hope this will outweigh [the bad], and Russian culture won't be cancelled on some large-scale, ultimatum scale without regard for who actually spoke out about what, who defends which interests, and so on.

When Alexey had the chance to speak out, he called on all Russians to protest the Putin regime openly. How does the Anti-Corruption Foundation view this now? And how do you personally see it?

Rallies were never the main point or some kind of magic button that you can push to collapse the Putin regime. None of us, including Alexey, ever thought that rallying was the silver bullet that would kill Putin. Rallies are undoubtedly an important form of protest, but protests can take any form, and any kind of protest is important.

I understand that far from everyone can join a picket line. It is really, really scary. Everyone decides only for themselves what to do here, and I can't force anyone (or condemn anyone, for that matter). If you're prepared to risk everything, go to a rally. If not, then at least try to talk to your neighbors. Share someone's post online. There's always something that you personally can do. If you grasp that what is happening is monstrous and criminal, you just have to use any means to find the chance to express your feelings, whether that's a rally, a picket, a leaflet, a conversation, or some other form of struggle.

And what do you think about emigration? Everyone is ashamed of each other, whether it's someone who stayed in Russia and now Ukrainians are being killed with his tax money, or it's someone who left and isn't fighting Putin.

I really don't get this. I absolutely do not believe that people who remain in Russia are more wrong than people who left. In all my life, that thought has never crossed my mind. Anyway, everyone pays taxes. It's very easy here to blame 146 million people for supporting the war in Ukraine. But in fact, again, it's important to understand clearly who has to answer for the fact — and that's Vladimir Putin. Some old woman in Siberia or a journalist in St. Petersburg is not at fault at all for what's happening — unless, of course, they actively support it.

So, of course, people who remain in Russia and continue to work there are uncommonly brave. And those who leave because they couldn't do otherwise are also brave. The decision to leave or to stay shouldn't be the criterion for evaluating people's political positions, much less for condemning or vindicating anyone.

********

Navalny's spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh sentenced to restricted freedom in the 'Sanitary Case'

Source: Meduza

In its latest "Sanitary Case" verdict, Moscow's Preobrazhensky District Court handed down a parole-like sentence to Alexey Navalny's press secretary Kira Yarmysh. On Monday, August 16, the court's press service told Meduza that Yarmysh was sentenced to one and a half years of "restrictions on freedom."

The court prohibited her from changing her place of residency without permission, attending mass gatherings, and traveling outside of Moscow and the Moscow region. Yarmysh is also obliged to report to a probation office once a month.

The Preobrazhensky Court has already handed down sentences in the "Sanitary Case" to opposition politician Lyubov Sobol, Navalny staffer Nikolai Lyaskin, and Navalny's brother Oleg. Sobol was sentenced to one and a half years of restrictions on freedom, Lyaskin was sentenced to one year of restrictions on freedom, and Oleg Navalny received a one year suspended sentence with a one-year probationary period.

The remaining defendants in the case are Navalny staffer Oleg Stepanov, Doctors' Alliance director Anastasia Vasilieva, Pussy Riot activist Maria Alyokhina, and municipal deputies Dmitry Baranovsky and Lyusya Shtein (the latter is also a member of Pussy Riot). They have yet to receive their sentences.

State investigators launched the "Sanitary Case" in January 2021, accusing ten of Alexey Navalny's associates of inciting violations of pandemic restrictions in connection with a pro-Navalny rally that took place in Moscow on January 23. According to the investigation, the defendants in the case called for people to attend rally, thereby provoking violations of sanitary and epidemiological rules.

In June, the Russian Investigative Committee dropped the "Sanitary Case" charges against municipal deputy Konstantin Yankauskas; this came shortly after the politician announced that he wouldn't be running in the upcoming State Duma elections.

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kira_Yarmysh

***********

Her natal Lilith is 00.14 Sagittarius, N.Node 6 Sagittarius, S.Node 18 Cancer. Her natal Amazon is 13 Sagittarius, N.Node 6 Gemini, and the S.Node 14 Scorpio.

Goddess Bless, Rad

[Darja]

HI All,

Here is the story of Taraneh Alidoosti. This is a noon chart.


*********

Prominent Iranian actor removes mandatory headscarf in defiant protest

Agence France-Presse
Wed 9 Nov 2022 22.07 GMT

One of Iran's most prominent actors posted an image of herself on social media on Wednesday without the headscarf mandatory for women in the Islamic republic.

Taraneh Alidoosti's apparent act of defiance comes as weeks of protests have rocked the country since the death of Mahsa Amini. The 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman died in mid-September after being arrested by the morality police in Tehran for allegedly flouting the country's strict dress rules for women.

Alidoosti, one of the best-known actors remaining in Iran, who has publicly backed the protest movement, posted the image of herself with her head uncovered on her official Instagram account.

She held a Kurdish-language slogan of the protest movement reading "Jin. Jiyan. Azadi." (Woman. Life. Freedom.)

Alidoosti is a regular star in films by award-winning director Asghar Farhadi, including The Salesman, which took the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2017.

Days ago on Instagram, the actor vowed to remain in her homeland at "any price", saying she planned to stop working and instead support the families of those killed or arrested in the protest crackdown.

"I am the one who stays here and I have no intention of leaving," said the 38-year-old, denying having any foreign passport or residence.

This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'.

"I will stay, I will halt working. I will stand by the families of prisoners and those killed. I will be their advocate," she said.

"I will fight for my home. I will pay any price to stand up for my rights, and most importantly, I believe in what we are building together today," she added.

Alidoosti has been a prominent presence on the Iranian cinema scene since her teens, and also starred in the recent movie by acclaimed director Saeed Roustayi, Leila's Brothers, which was shown at this year's Cannes festival.

She is known as a forthright defender of women's rights and wider human rights in Iran.

Iranian cinema figures were under pressure even before the start of the protest movement sparked by Amini's death. The award-winning directors Mohammad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi remain in detention after they were arrested earlier this year.

When major protests rocked the country in November 2019, Alidoosti declared that Iranians were "millions of captives" rather than citizens.

************

'We are captives': Iranian actor criticises Tehran government

Taraneh Alidoosti criticises government in Instagram post as anti-regime protests continue

One of Iran's most popular female actors has bluntly criticised the government in Tehran in a post on Instagram, telling her almost 6 million followers that "we are not citizens" but "captives".

Taraneh Alidoosti – who has appeared in an Oscar-nominated film and acclaimed TV dramas – made her comments on Sunday, as Iranians took to the streets in a series of anti-regime protests.

"I fought this dream for a long time and didn't want to accept it. We are not citizens. We never were. We are captives," she wrote.

Alidoosti said that she had replaced her profile picture with the colour black in mourning for demonstrators shot dead by security forces last November. The colour had nothing to do with official "mourning" following the assassination on 3 January of Iran's top general Qassem Suleimani by a US drone, she added.

The actor's intervention comes amid reports that Iranian authorities have fired live ammunition to disperse protesters in Tehran, wounding several people. The protests broke out after the government admitted on Friday its military had accidentally shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing 176 people.

Alidoosti has previously spoken out against Donald Trump's decision to impose visa bans on Iranians. In 2017 she boycotted the Oscar awards ceremony after The Salesman in which she starred was nominated in the best foreign language film category. The blanket ban was racist, she said.

She played the lead role in the film, directed by Asghar Farhadi. It is about a couple whose relationship is thrown into disarray after an intruder surprises her in the shower. Hardliners criticised Alidoosti after she returned from promoting the film at the Cannes film festival with a feminist tattoo on her arm.

Alidoosti also starred in a popular Iranian online TV series set in the 1950s, which has echoes in politics today. Shahrzad, the most expensive production of its kind in Iran, brought Iranian lifestyle under the late Shah to the screen, depicting snooker clubs, women and men partying together, cabarets and drinking alcohol.

She describes herself on her Twitter profile as an "actor, feminist, translator, mom".

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taraneh_Alidoosti

*********

Her natal Lilith is 6 Libra, N.Node 28 Sagittarius, S.Node 0 Gemini. Her natal Amazon is 6 Capricorn, N.Node 4 Taurus, and the S.Node is 4 Sagittarius.

Goddess Bless, Rad

[Rad]

HI All,

Here is the story of Camille Herron world best distance runner. This is a noon chart.

***********


Camille Herron: the Queen of Ultrarunning who ran 270km in a single day

Camille Herron has truly made her mark in the world of endurance sports. In the latest episode of How to be Superhuman, the ultrarunner shares her remarkable story of training, tacos and triumph.

Written by Gershon Portnoi

Picture the scene. It's 2am. You've been running for 18 hours, and covered a distance of around 217km, when you start to feel a little peckish, but you still have six hours to run. What do you do?

While most of us couldn't run for that long – or far – those that can probably wouldn't choose to eat tacos while they did it. But that's exactly what Camille Herron did when she was breaking all manner of records in the Desert Solstice 24-hour run in Phoenix, Arizona in 2018. And that's because the Oklahoma-born ultrarunner is not like the rest of us. In fact, she's not like anyone at all.

Describing how she started to up her training mileage to Rob Pope in the latest episode of the How to be Superhuman podcast, Camille says: "Once I got over 100 miles [160km] per week, it started to come alive. I was born for it. The more I ran, the more I felt like myself."

Eventually, she was covering 225km each week (for context, that's more than the average weekly load of Eliud Kipchoge or Mo Farah), highlighting her body's incredible ability to endure.

Overcoming adversity

Like so many of the very best athletes, Camille's thirst for running was born out of adversity when, aged 17, her family home in Oklahoma was destroyed by a tornado in 1999. After the alert came through, Camille and her family had 15 minutes to pack up their most prized possessions in a crate, before escaping to her grandparents' house.

Apart from her running shoes, Camille also packed her favourite book Lore of Running, a bible of inspirational stories about runners, focusing on ultrarunners. "My first running heroes were ultrarunners," she says. "It was hard for me to imagine running that far – what do they eat, how do they keep running?"

    I started running long to celebrate my life and the talents that I was born with
    Camille Herron

They certainly weren't eating tacos, but all that was to come. Camille's running journey had started at school: "When I went to cross country in the eighth grade and all the other girls looked like me, I knew I'd found my sport."

But it was after the devastating twister that she began to run longer on weekends – although at that stage 'long' meant six miles [10km]. "I just felt so grateful for my life and this running ability," she reflects. "I started running long on Sundays to celebrate my life and the talents that I was born with."

Unfortunately, she suffered seven stress fractures while she was at university, forcing her to stop running, although she was unaware of the severity of her injuries, saying: "I didn't know my bones were broken. I didn't think the pain was that bad."

The enforced absence from her sport saw her take up the French horn and led her to a jazz festival where she met her future husband Conor Holt, an elite runner. After the couple moved to Boulder, Colorado, it was always Camille who was running longer than Conor, despite him being the athlete, so he began coaching her.

    I felt like Billy Elliot doing ballet for the first time. It was an amazing feeling – the longer I went, the better I felt
    Camille Herron

But, at that stage, Camille was only focusing on marathons. In 2011, she finished ninth in the Pan American Games, then, just 13 days later, she came home as the third American and 18th overall in the New York City marathon. Noting the incredible back-to-back performances, the New York race co-ordinator remarked that Camille should try ultra-running – she never looked back.

After taking on her first 100km race, she knew she'd found her niche. "I felt like Billy Elliot doing ballet for the first time. It was an amazing feeling, the longer I went, the better I felt."

Not that Camille didn't experience pain from running those distances. The problem for her competitors, was that she loved it: "I'm the type of person who likes to push my limits," she says. "I just had to go longer to find out 'this is hard, and I love it'."

Throwing punches

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Camille was that she was now winning races outright, even defeating the male runners. "It was strange for me to catch the men, I was like 'what's going on here?'"

    In my mind, I'm Rocky Balboa going into this race, and I'm ready to throw 12 rounds of punches at these people
    Camille Herron

And so to Phoenix and The Desert Solstice, where Camille made ultrarunning history. Unlike a normal ultramarathon with its predetermined distance, the race requires participants to run for 24 hours around a 400m track, which Camille describes as: "mind boggling, super mental, like death by a thousand paper cuts."

Pre-race, not a great deal was expected from her, with a Facebook group predicting she might place fifth. But that merely served to motivate her even more: "If you want to light a fire under me, start doubting me," she says. "In my mind, I'm Rocky Balboa going into this race, and I'm ready to throw 12 rounds of punches at these people."

Held in December, the days are reasonably warm, but the nights bring a serious desert chill, which is roughly when Camille became hungry. "I hit about 135 miles [217km] and I was wanting a taco," she recalls. "I had a crew of three, and one of them drove to Taco Bell and got me tacos!"

    My body went into this rigor mortis state. I died a death out there
    Camille Herron

Dying on the track

Once she'd finished, her pace slowed down and, without any serious competitors as she'd already taken care of her rivals, she found it hard to keep going. "My body went into this rigor mortis state. I died a death out there. Once the competition had gone, I didn't have as much motivation and my legs just felt like lead weights. 'Ok, brain, tell my legs to keep moving!'"

With a world record on the line, Camille knew that even with her slower pace, she was still on track, so she ground out painful lap-after-lap, keeping her eyes on the clock as it eventually ticked to 24 hours.

Not only did she complete 262.16km in that time, but she also ran her first 160km (100 miles) in 13 hours and 25 minutes, another world best.

"It really felt like my legs were like rocks," she remembers, and such was the state of her body, she had to leave the track in a wheelchair.

Of course, like every superhuman, that wasn't enough. A year later, Camille went to France to compete in the 24-hour World Championships where she obliterated her own world record in the process, running 270km, although she did throw up twice during the race. Clearly, with no Taco Bells in France, she had to do it the hard way.

**********

She ran a 100-mile world record. A course error means it won't count

Distance runner Camille Herron said she questions the finding. This is not the first time a racecourse measurement error has voided records.

By Kelyn Soong
Updated November 17, 2022

Imagine running for 100 miles, setting a world record, and then finding out it doesn't count.

That is the situation professional ultrarunner Camille Herron faces. Herron, known as one of the most accomplished ultrarunners in the world, won the Jackpot Ultra Running Festival 100-miler in Henderson, Nev., in February in what was believed to be a world-record-setting time.

The 40-year-old finished the race in 12 hours 41 minutes 11 seconds — a 7:37-per-mile pace — and beat the second-place finisher and first male athlete, Arlen Glick, by nearly 30 minutes. The race served as the USA Track & Field 100 Mile Road Championships, and Herron garnered international acclaim for her world record victory.

In doing so, Herron also beat her own world record of 12:42:40, which she set in 2017, by more than a minute.

Or at least that's what she thought.

After the course was remeasured, in February and again in October, it was determined that the course had been slightly altered and was short by 716 feet. As a result, a USA Track & Field committee decided not to ratify the record.

Herron and her husband and coach, Conor Holt, have questioned the findings and expressed frustration at what they say has been a lack of transparency and communication from USATF. In a letter obtained by The Washington Post, the race director, Ken Rubeli, argued to a USATF official that the findings were "open to subjectivity" and questioned the accuracy of measurements made eight months after a race.

Herron said the situation has been "very stressful" for her. "I set a world record in that race, and now they're telling us that we don't know whether the course was 100 miles or not," she said. "So it's been very upsetting to me the past several months. I've had races since then, and this has weighed heavy on me and impacted my performances."

David Katz, chair of the USATF Road Running Technical Council, wrote in a statement to The Post that the measurements taken on the day of the Jackpot 100-mile race and after the event "produced a course less than the 100 miles."

A USATF council "decided not to ratify the record because the course was changed from what was certified," Katz wrote. In a phone interview, Katz said that the organization has been careful to gather all the facts and that the "ratification process takes a long time."

Katz said in his statement that the course was measured four times by two top A-level measurers — twice in February and twice in October — and it came up short. The Post obtained a measuring report that indicates the course was measured on Oct. 25 by Brandon Wilson, a World Athletics measurer with an A rating, the highest distinction for racecourse measurers. Wilson's report concluded that the 100-mile course's actual length was 99.864336 miles, or 716 feet short.

"Due to overwhelming documentation, photos, first-hand accounts, and live video coverage of the race this fact is not in dispute, no runners in any contest ran certified courses on race-day," Wilson said in the report.

Rubeli, who has since sold the Jackpot event, wrote in a three-page letter sent to Nancy Hobbs, the chair of the USATF Mountain, Ultra and Trail Sport Council, that he takes issue with the measurements and being excluded from the process.

"Trying to measure a course's shortest possible route 8 months after a race, is challenging at best and open to subjectivity, especially if the measurement individuals don't know the relevance of the green course paint marks relative to cone placement," Rubeli wrote. "Inches matter in a short loop course with over nearly 90 laps."

Rubeli states in the letter that he changed one turn on the course for safety reasons, "due to a near collision between a runner and a baby stroller," adding, "I compensated for this turn change with precise cone placements on the course."

In a phone interview, Rubeli said he made the change before the 2020 Jackpot Ultra race but that he did not know the altered course needed to be re-certified and USATF officials never brought it to his attention.

On Feb. 27, about a week after the race, Rubeli hired Paul Fritz, a World Athletics level B measurer, to measure the course, and Fritz came up with 100.00396 miles based on the shortest possible route on the altered course.

Herron said she believes that she ran 100 miles that day in February.

"I hope I get another opportunity at the record, but I may not — you don't know what the future holds," she said. "So this is highly impactful on me and my career. I mean, I'm 40 years old, you know. My time is now that I'm in the best shape of my life. And, I mean, these moments can be fleeting. I put my heart and soul into that performance, and it was such a big deal for the sport and the history of the sport that it needs to count."

Course errors have happened before

This is not the first time a racecourse error has voided records. Whenever a runner sets a record, whether it is a world record, American record or age group record, the course must be verified by an official measurer before the record can be ratified.

Although it's not common, runners have lost out on records in the past because of a course error, some occurring in high-profile events. And when a racecourse error occurs, it's not just the elites who are affected. Amateur runners who thought they had run a personal best in a race distance can no longer officially claim the time.

In 2019, the Cherry Blossom Ten Mile Run in D.C. was short by 240 feet — 0.04 of a mile — because of misplaced cones at a turnaround point, meaning that Stanley Kebenei's time of 46 minutes did not count as an American men's 10-mile road record and Rosemary Wanjiru's time of 50:42 also did not count as the official women's event record. All runners who finished the race have a note next to their results indicating that the course was short.

In early October, Scottish Olympic runner Eilish McColgan's European and British 10,000-meter road race record of 30:18 was wiped out because the course at the Great Scottish Run 10K in Glasgow was discovered to be 150 meters short. The Great Scottish Run half marathon was also roughly 150 meters short in 2016, meaning that Callum Hawkins's time of 1 hour 24 seconds did not count as a Scottish national record.

Discovering a flaw in the course

Herron's 100-mile record at the Jackpot race, which featured a 1.17-mile loop held on "95 percent asphalt and/or concrete surfaces" and 5 percent crushed gravel paths, was called into question after Wilson, the measurer, happened to attend the event because his wife was running in the 100-mile race.

Wilson downloaded the certified course map from the USATF website and noticed that the course being run was not the same as the one certified by USATF or World Athletics. Wilson then performed a measurement on the second day of the race, Feb. 19 and another measurement of the course a few days later, and found the course to be short. Eight months later, when the course was remeasured in October by Wilson and another top-level measurer, the results all came up short, Katz said.

Rubeli said his concern is that some of the measurements being considered by USATF were taken during the race, a chaotic time that he said would produce unreliable results. He asked Fritz, the level B measurer, to measure when the race was over, and Fritz found the course was above the 100-mile mark.

But Katz said only a level A measurer can verify a world record, according to USATF rules.

"The bottom line here is that the course was not certified before the race," Katz said. "Everything else after that, we did for the benefit of the athlete to try to save the record."

In September, Beyond Limits Running, which Rubeli co-founded, announced it had sold the Jackpot Running Festival to privately owned Aravaipa Running. On the current Jackpot race website, organizers tout the 100-mile course for its fast times. "The course is specifically designed to give runners a chance to set records, achieve optimal results, etc.," the website reads.

*********

Her natal Lilith is 1 Aquarius, N.Node 23 Sagittarius, S.Node 11 Gemini. Her natal Amazon is 27 Virgo, N.Node 7 Taurus, S.Node 1 Sagittarius.

*********

Goddess Bless, Rad

[Rad]

Hi All,

Here is the story of Cristina Scuccia. This is a noon chart.

***********

Nun who wowed The Voice of Italy becomes waitress in Spain


Cristina Scuccia, who stunned judges in 2014 contest, explains decision to leave nunhood on talkshow

Angela Giuffrida in Rome
Guardian

A nun who became a singing sensation after winning Italy's version of The Voice has stunned TV viewers again after announcing that she has kicked the habit and is now a waitress in Spain.

Sister Cristina Scuccia, from Sicily, shocked judges, including the late Raffaella Carrà, during her blind audition for the show in 2014, giving a rapturous performance of the Alicia Keys' hit song No One. After realising the incredible voice belonged to a nun, Carrà, who died last year, said: "I couldn't speak for several minutes."

Scuccia, who at the time was among the nuns at the Ursuline Sisters of the Holy Family convent in Milan, went on to win the show that summer with her performance of What a Feeling, the theme song from the film Flashdance. She later produced an album, which she gave to Pope Francis, that included a cover version of Madonna's Like a Virgin.

Her talent even attracted praise from some Italian cardinals, but eight years on Scuccia, 34, announced on an Italian talkshow on Sunday night that she has abandoned the nunhood.

Dressed in high heels and a red trouser suit, with a pierced nose and long dark hair flowing freely, she told the Verissimo programme: "I believe that you need to listen to your heart with courage. Change is a sign of evolution, but it is always scary because it is easier to anchor oneself to one's certainties rather than questioning oneself. Is there a right or wrong?"

Scuccia said that leaving the nunhood – a decision a psychologist helped her to process – did not mean she had renounced her faith, and that she was still chasing her dream of a career in music.

"I chose to follow my heart without thinking about what people would say about me," she added. "I took a leap of faith and was worried about ending up under a bridge, I always repeated this to my psychologist."

Scuccia said she now lived "with a smile" in Spain, where she works as a waitress.

A group of cheerleading nuns were backstage during Scuccia's audition for The Voice of Italy, and while her participation in the contest was supported by her mother superior, she faced harsh criticism from more traditional factions of the Italian Catholic church, especially when she released Like a Virgin, which was described by Italy's Religious Information Service as "a reckless and calculated commercial operation".

"Cristina reached such high levels of fame – she was getting calls from around the world – and also some criticism, which probably left her in a state of confusion," said a church source.

"Leaving was her own decision, after appearing on TV so much you perhaps lose the compass a little. She was young and under a lot of pressure.

**********

Singing nun Cristina Scuccia becomes internet star after The Voice audition

This article is more than 8 years old

Nun's performance on Italian version of The Voice has been viewed more than 3m times on YouTube

Lizzy Davies in Rome
Fri 21 Mar 2014

The singing nun is not a new phenomenon. The Belgian Jeanine Deckers, aka Soeur Sourire, shot to fame in 1963 with the tune Dominique, while Julie Andrews and Whoopi Goldberg have done their bit for fictional sisters with heavenly voices.

But in Italy this week there's only one nun worth tuning in for, and she thinks Pope Francis will be proud. Sister Cristina Scuccia, a 25-year-old Sicilian who appeared, habit-clad, on the Italian version of TV show The Voice on Wednesday, has become an instant star, with her audition racking up more than 3m views on YouTube.

Asked what she thought the Vatican would make of her punchy rendition of Alicia Keys' No One, the Ursuline sister said: "I don't know. I'm expecting a telephone call from Pope Francis, certainly. Because he exhorts us to go out, to evangelise, to say that God does not take from us but rather gives us more."

It did not appear that she had anything to worry about. In a post on Twitter, the Vatican's so-called culture minister, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, wrote: "Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others (1 Peter 4:10)".

The judges on the show praised Scuccia's "crazy energy" and "incredible" performance. Alessandro Aleotti, a rapper known as J-Ax, asked her if she sang in church on Sundays. Wearing flat black shoes, glasses and a simple crucifix round her neck, Scuccia was obliged to assure the judges that she had not come in fancy dress but was, in fact, "a very real nun".

This was not Scuccia's first time in the limelight. Last year she won a Christian music competition as part of the Good News Festival, in which she explained that she had found her vocation while playing a nun in a musical.

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristina_Scuccia

Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oyAuockfZQ

************

Her natal Lilith is 24 Virgo, N.Node 2 Sagittarius, S.Node 10 Cancer. Her natal Amazon is 12 Libra, N.Node 11 Gemini, S.Node 6 Scorpio.

Goddess bless, Rad

[Rad]

Hi All,

Here is the story of Stephanie Frappart. This is a noon chart.

************

Frenchwoman to become first female to referee men's World Cup football match

Agence France-Presse
December 01, 2022

Stephanie Frappart's appointment as match referee for Thursday's crunch World Cup clash between Germany and Costa Rica is a step forward for women in a "sexist sport", according to Costa Rica manager Luis Fernando Suarez.

Frenchwoman Frappart will make history as she leads the first all-female refereeing team at a men's World Cup in the Group E match which Germany must win to keep alive their hopes of progressing to the last 16.

Suarez said it "spoke volumes" for Frappart's commitment to reach the top level in a profession dominated by men.

"I am a great admirer of everything women have conquered and I like the fact they want to keep on conquering things," the 62-year-old Colombian told reporters.

"This is another step forward. This speaks volumes for this woman, of her commitment, especially in this sport which is a very sexist one. It's very difficult to reach the point that she has reached, I think it's good for football and a positive step for football, to show that it's opening up for everyone."

The 38-year-old Frappart will be joined by Brazil's Neuza Back and Mexico's Karen Diaz as she puts down another marker for female officials having also been the first woman to referee a men's World Cup qualifier in March.

Last week, she became the first female official at a men's World Cup when she was fourth official for the Poland v Mexico Group C tie, but on Thursday she will be more in the spotlight.

Costa Rica's midfielder Celso Borges also welcomed her appointment for such a high-profile game.

"I think it's great and it's a huge achievement for women globally," Borges, who is playing in his third World Cup for the Costa Ricans, told reporters.

"If she is there it's because she has all the capabilities to perform on this stage. She has done it before in big matches so I don't see why tomorrow should be an exception.

"I just hope she has a good match and that we can help her make it an easy match."

Her appointment was also backed by Germany manager Hansi Flick who said he had "100% confidence" in Frappart.

"She deserves to be here based on her performance. I hope she is equally looking forward to the game just like we are, and I hope she can deliver a good performance," he said.

Germany defender Lukas Klostermann also welcomed the move, which he described as "the most normal thing in the game."

"I have never looked prior to the game if it is a man or a woman that will be with the whistle, and I hope it will remain a normality," he said.

(REUTERS)

More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%c3%a9phanie_Frappart

***********

Her natal Lilith is 1 Libra, N.Node 21 Sagittarius, S.Node 20 Gemini. Her natal Amazon is 25 Sagittarius, N.Node 10 Taurus, S.Node 29 Scorpio.

Goddess Bless, Rad

[Rad]

Hi All,

This Goddess thread is not being transferred to our new message board at: https://www.jwgaea.org/forum/evolutionary-astrology-q-a/asteroid-goddesses

Goddess Bless, Rad

[Rad]

Hi All,

Here is the story of Susanna Muhamad.  This is a noon chart.

*************

Colombia vows to put nature at the heart of global environmental negotiations

The environment minister Susana Muhamad says nature is a 'pillar' of fighting the climate crisis

Patrick Greenfield
Fri 23 Feb 2024 00.00 EST

The next round of global biodiversity negotiations will put nature at the heart of the international environment agenda, Colombia's environment minister has said, as the country prepares for the Cop16 summit.

Susana Muhamad, Colombia's environment minister, who is expected to be the Cop16 president, said the South American country would use the summit to ensure nature was a key part of the global environmental agenda in the year building up to the climate Cop30 in the Brazilian Amazon in 2025, where countries will present new plans on how they will meet the Paris agreement.

"Although the climate is affecting biodiversity, nature is an answer to the climate crisis. It is not the only answer but it is a very important pillar and we want to position it very strongly to build towards Cop30 in Brazil," Muhamad told the Guardian.

"We need to create the momentum and the role of Cop16 is to make nature a pillar of those discussions," she said. "I think sometimes we divide the international environmental agenda into many issues ... [but] we need to concentrate. For example, saving the Amazon is a practical and tangible action. The creation of multinational marine protected areas is a tangible action that has results for the climate and biodiversity."

Colombia's president, Gustavo Petro, has named Cali as the host city for Cop16 in October – the first biodiversity summit since a historic UN deal was made to halt the rampant loss of biodiversity, in Montreal, Canada at the end of 2022.

Governments heading to Cali, about 50 miles from Colombia's Pacific coast, are expected to present national-level plans to meet the biodiversity targets, which include commitments to protect 30% of land and sea for nature and restore 30% of the planet's degraded ecosystems.

Muhamad said will use the summit to try to negotiate stronger recognition and finance for megadiverse countries, which are home to a disproportionate amount of life on Earth.

The crisis in the natural world will feature heavily on the international stage in 2024: from Brazil's G20 presidency, which President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will use to focus on developing economic models to protect the Amazon, to the climate Cop29 in Azerbaijan.

Colombia has become a leading environmental voice on the global stage. At Cop28 in Dubai last year, the leftwing Petro announced that Colombia would back calls for a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty, becoming the first large fossil fuel producer to do so. Petro said his country's biodiversity would become the basis of its economic strength after the green transition.

David Cooper, the acting executive secretary for the UN convention on biological diversity, said Colombia would be an inspiring host for Cop16 and bring welcome leadership on the environment. He said Cop16 would be important for the implementation of this decade's biodiversity targets, but added that he was concerned about farmers' protests against environmental policies, and how they could affect countries' commitments in the future.

"Protecting biodiversity and ecosystems are so fundamental to food and agriculture, yet we're not managing to maintain a common interest," he said.

"We've got major challenges. Political leaders really need to step up."

*********

Susana Muhamad

Wikipedia 

María Susana Muhamad González (born November 4, 1976) is a Colombian political scientist, environmentalist and politician belonging to the Colombia Humana party. Since August 7, 2022, she has held the position of Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development of her country, in the government of Gustavo Petro.

Muhamad is a nationally and internationally recognized environmentalist and her work focuses on developing actions that allow Colombia to consolidate as a world power of life, through compliance with international agreements on climate change and loss of biodiversity, the protection of environmental defenders, and the fight against deforestation in the Amazon region.

Personal life

Muhamad is of Palestinian ancestry. She was born in and hails from Bogotá.

Muhamad has a degree in political science from the Universidad de los Andes, and a Master's in Management and Planning of Sustainable Development from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. She was a sustainable development consultant for Shell Global Solutions International in The Hague, the Netherlands and has supported through activism different environmental causes, as well as worked and collaborated with communities on the ground, non-governmental organizations and human rights movements.

Susana Muhamad was an active member and leader of AIESEC, having served as the President of AIESEC in Colombia and as one of the Directors of AIESEC International
Political career

Muhamad was secretary of the environment and general secretary of the Mayor's Office of Bogotá. In 2019 she was elected city councilor, a position she held until the first semester of 2022.

In 2021, Muhamad was elected as vice president of the national coordination board of the Colombia Humana party, after this political movement officially received its legal status.

Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development

On July 5, during the transition from the Duque government to the Petro government, the elected President Gustavo Petro announced the appointment of Muhamad as Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development.

Muhamad stressed that the environmental sector has been marginalized in past administrations, in addition to its purpose to work hand in hand with communities for the preservation of the environment, as Colombia is the second most biodiverse country in the world., she has shown herself as a defender of the escazu agreements, within her agenda as environment minister in conjunction with the president and the congress of congress for the legislation and subsequent implementation of the agreements.

Muhamad has been clear regarding her positions on three of the most important issues on her agenda as environment minister. One of them, which has also been one of the most questioned by the opposition, is fracking. The government seeks to eliminate fracking as a means of extracting oil, since this means of extraction creates irreparable damage to the environment as well as to the atmosphere and water reserves.

************

How Colombia's first Palestinian minister weaves her heritage into politics

In an interview with MEE, Colombia's environment minister, Susana Muhamad, opens up about the Palestinian roots that shape her life and politics

By Inigo Alexander in Bogota
Published date: 17 June 2023 12:16 BST

Since she was a little girl growing up in the Colombian capital of Bogota, Susana Muhamad knew she was not like other children around her. Her surname was a constant reminder of an inherited difference, something "weird".

Her full name is Maria Susana Muhamad Gonzalez, but her Arab surname is a rarity - one she couldn't quite wrap her head around as a child.

"You have a surname that you don't quite understand where it comes from or what its roots are, and it feels like something is missing. There was always a question," Muhamad tells Middle East Eye.

"Since I was five years old, I've had to spell out my name for people, I thought: 'This isn't from here, it's weird'."

Her name was passed onto her from her grandfather, a Palestinian Muslim who arrived in Colombia in 1925, as a wave of mass migration from the crumbling Ottoman Empire reached Latin American shores.

Muhamad recalls that her grandfather used to "talk funny" and consciously set aside his Palestinian origin to more easily integrate to his adopted country.

Her grandfather refrained from speaking Arabic to his children and did not pass down any religious traditions, keeping his Quran on his nightstand, in the hopes of facilitating his family's integration.

"What they (Palestinian migrants) did was completely cut off their religious and cultural connections in order to assimilate and survive."

Her grandfather passed away when Muhamad was just six years old, but he still helped shape the politics and personality of the Colombian politician and internationally recognised environmentalist.

Personal Palestinian pilgrimage

What once felt weird or out of place has instead become a source of pride for Muhamad. She is currently Colombia's environment minister, and the country's first-ever minister of Palestinian origin, a fact she confesses has been "significant" to her personally.

To better understand her family's origins, she travelled to Palestine in 2009 to visit her grandfather's hometown and "answer the questions" that she had about her family's past and the weight of her name.

"I just wanted to go and visit the place and get a better understanding, but when I arrived I found a whole family there. That was very surprising because it's intense," she says, tears welling in her eyes and her voice cracking as she recalls her trip.

"Meeting that family was like completing myself," she says. "Witnessing that family bond of so many decades, [having] that question and going to answer it was very significant for me. It answered a lot of personal questions."

Muhamad wears her Palestinian heritage on her sleeve, and she's woven her family's origins into her politics and personal growth. The pilgrimage to her family's ancestral homeland and meeting her distant relatives struck a chord with the minister, and the personal weight the trip holds is evident even 14 years later.

"I realised it wasn't just a surname, it's a product of a historic process. I'm involved in that historic process and it has a meaning, so I always have something that reminds me of those origins," she tells MEE.

She still wears a necklace a distant relative gifted her on her trip to Palestine, and occasionally holds it during the interview while recalling the visit and its impact. A box adorned with Arab calligraphy and full of local Arab sweets also adorns the table in her office.

Political influence

Muhamad is now a prominent figure in the cabinet of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, the first leftist leader in the country's history and an open defender of the Palestinian cause.

As minister, she has been tasked with spearheading an ambitious environmental agenda and is working on the government's energetic transition to steer Colombia towards renewable and sustainable energy.

Prior to being appointed minister, she also served as secretary of the environment as well as secretary general of the Bogota town hall, while Petro was serving as the capital's mayor between 2013 and 2016. In 2015, while Muhamad served the town hall, the Palestinian flag was raised in Bogota's central Bolívar Square to mirror the United Nations' gesture.

The minister was also recently included in Reuters' list of 25 most influential women leading the fight against climate change.

"I sometimes wonder if my grandfather would have imagined me to be in the position I am in today," she says, holding back tears.

Muhamad confesses that her Palestinian background has helped shape her politically and considers herself an active defender of the Palestinian cause.

However, she recognises that her position as a cabinet minister has restrained the level of advocacy she can make in favour of Palestine. "I am a defender of the Palestinian cause, but now as a public servant in the Colombian government, it is complex.

"I try to internally push this government – I cannot do so externally – to have a strong position in its international relations regarding the demands of the Palestinian nation and hopefully speak out against Israel's abuses," she explains.

    'I am a defender of the Palestinian cause'

    - Susana Muhamad, Colombia's environment minister

In April, she responded to a tweet by President Petro by saying "there is a lot we need to do for Palestine, starting by renegotiating [Colombia's] free trade agreement with Israel".

Last May, she celebrated the Bogota city council's decision to rename a street in the capital the State of Palestine Street.

During Petro's presidential inauguration last August, Muhamad also shared a photo of her alongside Palestine's foreign minister, Riyad al-Maliki, who had attended the ceremony in Bogota.

The caption accompanying the photo reads: "I always carry in my spirit the Palestinian roots from which I come, it was an honour to greet the foreign minister of Palestine and to talk about the future of our peoples."

Her surname is no longer a source of confusion yet more so a reminder of a family bond and a collective cause that has come to shape Muhamad.

Despite sitting in her office flanked by the Colombian flag, her heritage is clear, as is her personal and political connection to the Palestinian cause and the country her grandfather left behind almost a century ago.

*********

This is Susana Muhamad, the New Minister of the Environment of Colombia

Christopher Ramírez Hernández
July 8, 2022

The Current Member of the City Council of Bogotá was chosen by the President-elect, Gustavo Petro, to Carry the Environmental Flags of his Government, Focusing on Issues such as Fracking, Mining and Socio-environmental Conflicts in that Country.

"The doctor from Antioquia, Carolina Corcho, will be Minister of Health; the current councilor of Bogotá, a native of Barranquilla, Susana Muhamad, will be minister of the environment and the economist from Barranquilla Cecilia López Montaño will be minister of agriculture", is the message with which the elected president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, announced the inclusion of three new names to his ministerial cabinet in the portfolios of Health, Environment and Agriculture; all of them with extensive experience in administrative positions.

However, in the midst of the situation that Colombia is currently experiencing in environmental terms, with issues such as fracking, mining and oil extraction on the order of the day, it is important to pay close attention to Susana Muhamad, who will be in charge of dealing with the debates and controversies around these three important activities that impact the Colombian natural territory.

Who is Susanna Muhammad?

Muhamad is an environmentalist and political scientist graduated from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, and also has a master's degree in Sustainable Development Management and Planning from the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa).

According to the official page of the Alternative Indigenous and Social Movement (MAIS), Muhamad has put his knowledge at the service of Colombian communities, being part of "base, community and rural organizations." In addition, she has worked on issues of "Research on Human Rights and Corporate Social Responsibility in countries such as Colombia, South Africa and Denmark."

However, beyond her academic career, it should be remembered that this will not be the first time she has assumed public office in Colombia, nor will it be the first opportunity she has in executive spaces in that country.

Thanks to her work with social and environmental groups, Muhamad had the opportunity to work in the past with Gustavo Petro, assuming the role of Secretary of the Environment of Bogotá, during the Mayor's Office of the current president-elect between 2012 and 2015, under the flags of the Bogota Humana.

In this position, which she held twice (between 2012 and 2013 and then between 2014 and 2015), she made great strides in the transition to much more planet-friendly transportation, according to Muhamad's profile on the Bogotá Council's website. She worked on the policy focused on the development of the "Climate Change Plan of the city, the introduction of hybrid buses, the tender to replace Transmilenio buses with electric buses, the introduction of the electric taxi pilot, the deepening of the Policy for the protection of wetlands, the creation of the Climate Change and Risk Management Fund and the Climate Change and Risk Management Institute", among other relevant projects for the environment of the Colombian capital.

She was also General Secretary of the Mayor's Office (between 2013 and 2014), a position in which she was able to collaborate in the defense campaign of Gustavo Petro, who at that time had been removed from his position as the first president of Bogota by the former Procurador General Alejandro Ordonez.

After the end of Petro's administration in 2015, Muhamad decided to focus on slightly more proselytizing activities within Colombia Humana, where she held the position of vice president of the National Coordination Board of said community. In addition, she participated in social projects such as Paz a la Calle and the Alianza Colombia Libre de Fracking.

Her last position before arriving at the Ministry of the Environment, where she will take office as head of this portfolio on August 7, was that of Bogotá councilor, which she held since January 1, 2020 after being elected with the endorsement of Colombia Humana in the 2019 regional elections.

You can also read: Francia Márquez: what is expected of an ecofeminist vice president?

What to expect from Susana Muhammad?

Since her inclusion in Petro's ministerial cabinet was announced, Muhamad has been clear that her banner at the head of the Ministry of the Environment will be to review which are the extractive processes that are making a stumbling block in Colombia's ecosystems.

"My cause is how we transition from an economy and culture dependent on oil to an economy and culture that reconnects again to the cycles of nature to adapt and manage to reduce the effects of the climate crisis, generating quality of life for all", said the future Environmental Ministry.

For this reason, it has always been clear that, in order to move from an energy dependent on the extraction of natural resources from Colombian soil to a much cleaner one, the first thing to do is not continue with practices typical of this reality, such as fracking . "Yes, we seek the closure of fracking. We believe that going to look for the last remnants of gas generates more harm than good," Muhamad explained in conversation with the Blu Radio station, also adding the importance of gradually moving away from other activities that are harmful to the Colombian environment, such as mining exploration and gas extraction.

Regarding mining, she stated that during the government of Gustavo Petro, activities of this caliber will not be carried out in the country's moors: " the moor ecosystem is what generates 75 percent of the country's drinking water. What we need is to work with the peasants who are in the moors, who also arrived there displaced by the historical violence in this country. We need to work on the processes of restoration of hydrographic basins and work in depth on the maintenance of the moor ecosystem. I know that in Santurbán there are artisanal miners, you have to look at that very carefully, but opening mines in moors is absolutely inconsistent with a climate crisis logic."

Finally, she indicated that he will pay special attention to the socio-environmental conflicts present in the country, since it is these realities that "put the lives of environmental defenders in Colombia at risk."

************

Susana Muhamad: 'Emissions reduction should be the central issue, but it is not'

Colombia's environment minister talks to Diálogo Chino on COP27 doubts and plans to combat deforestation by focusing on large corporations and mafias 

Laila Abu Shihab Vergara

November 15, 2022

"The science has spoken: the climate crisis is humanity's biggest problem. It can end – and has the potential to end – life on the planet and the existence of the human species. Political leadership from the first COP to date has failed to stop the cause of the climate crisis."

This was the apocalyptic tone struck by Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, in his address to the COP27 climate summit in Egypt.

Petro used his speech to present a "decalogue" of actions to confront the climate crisis, offered to the world following, as he described it, the enormous amount of time that has been wasted on "war and the geopolitics of the domination of humanity".

The Colombian president travelled to the conference in Sharm el-Sheikh with Susana Muhamad, a noted environmentalist who has served as the country's environment minister since Petro took office earlier this year.

A political scientist by profession, Muhamad, 45, became known for her fierce defence of a nature reserve that a former mayor of Bogotá wanted to develop. Years later, she was one of the founders of the Fracking-Free Colombia Alliance, and went on to serve as secretary of environment for Bogotá.

Ahead of her trip to COP27, Diálogo Chino interviewed Muhamad at her office in Bogotá, where she told us of her plans to counter deforestation and protect environmental defenders, and of Colombia's energy transition and the prospects for the Egypt summit.

Diálogo Chino: Among your priorities as environment minister, is the first to fight against deforestation?

Susana Muhamad: That's right, and the other side to the coin is the generation of economic alternatives for the communities that live in these strategic ecosystems – alternatives that really fulfil the vocation of the land, which is forestry, which is biodiversity.

This is extremely important because the social and economic inclusion of this population helps us with three objectives: to halt deforestation – which is, in short, to remove the basis of the work of illegal economies; to consolidate the social state and the rule of law; and to advance in the consolidation of peace. Currently, deforestation is closely associated with illicit economies, such as drug trafficking, illegal mining and massive land grabbing.

DC: Previous ministers promised major actions to curb deforestation and nothing has changed. How can we believe that this time this problem will be tackled?

SM: We are now considering this as an integral state policy, not just as a problem that is only the responsibility of the environmental sector. The consequences are environmental, of course, but we need a very serious economic and social policy in these territories, and that goes far beyond the Ministry of Environment.

We must generate a new biodiversity economy, so that each deforestation hub becomes a hub for the forestry economy and ecological restoration. This implies that we have to offer campesinos credit and legal stability in terms of land ownership... and this is a joint effort by the entire state.

The other differentiating factor is the "Total Peace" policy of President Petro's government. There is also the tool of criminal investigation. We have told the Attorney General's office that what we are interested in are investigations into the financial flows and those who determine deforestation with political power – not the campesinos on the ground who are carrying out the operation, who cut down the tree.

We have been dealing with this issue in the same way as with coca leaf cultivation, criminalising the last link in the chain – the weakest – but that does not stop the problem. We need a comprehensive intervention and for farmers and communities to regain confidence in the state.

President Petro made a proposal to swap foreign debt in exchange for preserving the Amazon. Has there been progress on this?

Yes, it is still in place, and we are structuring it. But in addition to that, there are international mechanisms, such as a fund that the president announced at the UN General Assembly. Swaps for nature are important because in our difficult fiscal situation they help us to make a commitment on public policy.

We are going to establish synergies on all international cooperation. When I arrived at the ministry I realised that we have a lot of money coming from outside and it is scattered, fragmented, not linked to a public policy outcome. That is why one of the first things I did was to sit down with all the international donors to explain to them what our policy will be and where we need them to help the government, because we cannot continue with each one doing isolated projects without there being clarity on the environmental results, and without this being connected to a public policy.
Susana Muhamad with a microphone in her hand, sitting among a group of people.

After Mexico, Colombia is the country in with the highest number of murders of environmental defenders. When you arrived at the ministry, what strategies did you find in place to protect them?

I am going to tell you very directly: there was no strategy. Basically, for the Ministry of the Environment, this was seen as a problem for the National Protection Unit, to provide them with bodyguards, and for the Ministry of the Interior. During the transition from the previous government there were even officials who asked me what an "environmental leader" was, because they included them in a very broad category of "social leaders". In the government's internal protocols, the category of environmental defender did not even exist. That can't be the case.

But we must also think about prevention, and prevention means helping to legitimise environmental defenders in their territories, recognising them as a legitimate voice that has the right to participate.

There is a stigma that was very common in my time as an environmental activist, and that I have continued to feel from the institutional level: branding environmental leaders as opponents of development and society. This isolates them and makes them more vulnerable, especially in the most violent regions of the country, which is why threats often end in assassinations. One way of prevention is for the Ministry of Environment to support these leaders, even in their right to disagree with government projects. For this we have formed a team of 35 people who will be in the territory, generating a permanent dialogue with them.

We have heard you speak several times about "environmental democracy". What does that mean?

That the voice of the citizenry has a real weight in environmental decisions. For example, today, if a licence is going to be granted for a project, the business carries out an environmental impact study, presents it to the authorities and that is what is evaluated, but what is presented by the communities that are going to be affected is not evaluated with the same weight. It is the possibility of real participation and that includes the democratisation of information, to give more power to the people.

    We are not talking enough about the vulnerabilities of the population, the risks they face, where we are going to accommodate them

The energy transition is one of President Petro's flagship initiative. However, the government itself has sent contradictory messages on this issue...

We need to stop talking so much and draw up a roadmap for the energy transition, planned for 15 years. This should be built by the Ministry of Mines and Energy, in collaboration with all of us. What we are proposing is a planned, responsible transition, not something improvised, because the enemies of the process have wanted to caricature the issue and sell the idea that tomorrow we are going to do away with fossil fuels, and that is not the case. Colombia is one of the countries with the greatest potential for energy diversification.

Do we need to get to the point where Colombia lives and develops without hydrocarbons?

Not only Colombia – the world must do it.

And do you think this is feasible?

The world should reduce its emissions by 45% by 2030. The problem is that, even if we were to meet the voluntary commitments of the Paris Agreement, we would have 14% more emissions [to deal with]. If we believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the temperature is going to rise by more than two degrees by the end of the century, and if that happens, no one can model the consequences. That's the gigantic risk we create by maintaining a civilisation dependent on fossil fuels.

Is this issue central to the discussion at COP27 in Egypt?

Emissions reduction should be the central issue, but it is not. More and more, it seems to me that this is not what the COP is about. There are countries like Russia, Iran, Iraq and all the OPEC countries that do not accept the IPCC reports. I feel that we are not talking enough about the vulnerabilities of the population, the risks they face, where we are going to accommodate them and how we are going to join global efforts on this issue. And nobody is exempt from the climate disaster that we are not prepared for. Not even the United States.

The problem is that there is no logic of multilateral cooperation, and the COP ends up being a meeting to mobilise financial resources. In the meantime, the population is increasingly vulnerable, food insecurity is increasing, pests are on the rise. I am quite pessimistic about this political reality, I think that what we have to do, responsibly, is to do everything we can at the micro level. To work in very practical ways with our communities in the territories.

Brazil is looking at the possibility of offshore wind power generation. Has the government of Gustavo Petro proposed promoting this form of energy generation?

Colombia has potential in many types of energy that should be developed simultaneously, and we have to think about energy sovereignty – that they are sources of the country, for the country and that we do not depend on the international market, on oil. So, the principles of energy transition are: diversification, sovereignty, energy security and democratisation of energy production.

And for these purposes, can China be an ally in environmental issues?

China is an ally in terms of technology and large infrastructure projects, but the truth is that today our relationship with China on environmental issues does not exist. In these three months as minister, I have met with more ambassadors than with members of the communities, because international cooperation in the environmental sector is impressive – but I have not yet met with China.

***********

Her natal Lilith is 10 Sagittarius, N.Node 11 Sagittarius, S.Node 15 Cancer
Her natal Ceres is 17 Virgo, N.Node 8 Cancer, S.Node 10 Sagittarius
Her natal Amazon is 28 Libra, N.Node 27 Taurus, S.Node 20 Scorpio

Goddess Bless, Rad

[Rad]

Hi All,

Here is the story of Arwa Damon.  This is a noon chart.

*********

Former CNN reporter Arwa Damon on the war in Ukraine one year later and the need for aid in Turkey and Syria

By Ryan Bergeron
February 22, 2023

Arwa Damon is an award-winning journalist and CNN's former Senior International Correspondent. After 18 years reporting from the world's hotspots, she left the network last year to focus on the non-profit she founded: International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance (INARA). Her group helps people suffering from wars and disasters. Recently, Arwa spoke to CNN from the INARA office in Turkey as the organization provides help in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake. She discussed the things she saw while reporting on the war in Ukraine, the aid that is still needed one year later, why she founded INARA and what she is currently seeing (and not seeing) in the global response to the earthquake in Turkey and Syria.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The war in Ukraine is about to hit the one-year mark. Can you tell us about what you saw and experienced while reporting there?

"I was on the Ukraine-Poland border. I think what struck me most, I remember standing there very distinctly, watching these Ukrainian families coming across the border. It was a scene that I'd seen so many times before, exhausted mothers dragging along children who are barely able to put one step in front of the other. The constant click, click, click of the wheel spinning around on the little suitcases that they're carrying. Then these faces with these almost blank expressions of just shock and exhaustion. As I was watching this in real time, my mind just superimposed on top of it all the other images I'd seen from other war zones, from Syria and from Iraq, and it was the same exact image. And then I was struck by the difference though, because when those Ukrainian families got across the border, there were piles of clothes waiting for them. There were warm cups of tea, there were buses lined up to take them somewhere. There were volunteers with signs offering rides, and part of me was so heartened and warm to see this outpouring of support and part of me was so devastated that same outpouring of support was not afforded to other populations."

"The way people responded to Ukraine is the way that we should be responding to people in crisis. That should be our standard. That should be the norm."
Six year old Victoria has cerebral palsy and is unable to sit. Her mother carried her for three days as they fled their home near Kharkiv.

Terminally ill children flee war-torn Kharkiv on makeshift medical train

What kind of support has INARA provided to those who have been impacted by the war in Ukraine within the last year?

"We focused a lot on mental health. One of the first projects that we did was kind of recognizing that with all of these volunteers on the ground, with all of these frontline individuals that existed out there - there's a bit of sensitivity when it comes to dealing with people that have just been through the trauma of war, especially children. There are certain basic do's and don'ts that aren't necessarily obvious. We have a wealth of experience dealing with pediatric trauma unfortunately. So one of the first things we did was tried to get information out to those frontline workers who were offering training or distributing brochures in different languages just to make sure that they were aware of the basics needed, in terms of dealing with children that have been greatly traumatized. Also –and this is pretty important– differentiating between what is a normal traumatic response and what are some key indicators that there is going to be a potentially deeper underlying longer lasting problem."

"INARA's main kind of baseline for these types of interventions is, 'what are the gaps?' We know, from our own experience, that the main gap we end up filling is not at the beginning of the crisis or the war. We know that those gaps, that we end up filling, emerge when the media spotlight moves away when the funding has dried up and when the NGOs are not present on the ground."

The gross hypocrisy of the West's refugee response

"We're building a safe space in partnership with an organization from Mariupol. They specifically highlighted a problem where a lot of those families that have fled from Mariupol, they were female-led households. The men had stayed behind; they were either fighting or volunteering or had had been killed. And the mothers needed a safe place to be able to leave their children so that they could go find work. What we've done, and what we're still doing is building these safe spaces that both act as areas where the children can get social support, mental health support, but also where the parents can just leave their kids for a longer duration of time."

As the war closes in on the one-year mark, has INARA's work increased?

"The work itself has picked up, but again, what we know is that our work, specifically as INARA, is going to pick up even more down the line. We're still going to be there when everybody else leaves. That's just the way that we operate. That's who we are. That's our DNA. We stay. We'll keep filling in the gaps."

"Definitely our work is going to pick up in Ukraine."

For ways to provide humanitarian aid to Ukraine, you can contribute to Impact Your World's campaign here.

What's INARA's overall focus and mission?

"The whole concept and premise for INARA is very much based on my own personal experience reporting for CNN from the war zones for well over a decade and a half. Constantly coming across children who needed medical treatment, but they were unable to access it. That is, generally speaking, for one of two reasons: One is that the parents don't know that certain organizations are actually providing the treatment that their child needs. The other is because no organization is providing what the child needs. INARA was specifically built to fill in those gaps and create that network for the families so that we end up connecting the donors, whether it's individual or larger donors, to the family - to the treatment. We do this through our caseworkers, and we do this through the whole program that we've built."

The impact of a little boy named Youssif

"It started out with the story of this little boy named Youssif that I covered for CNN and back in 2006 and 2007. Gunmen poured gasoline on his head when he was standing outside of his house playing and then set him on fire. To date, no one really knows why. Youssif's father had gone door to door, NGO to NGO, ministry to ministry trying to find someone who could treat his little boy and then he, by chance, ended up at CNN's doorstep. I remember the first time he brought Youssif into our office. He was eating rice. But his face was such a hardened mask of rivers of scar tissue that he couldn't open his mouth and so he would eat by taking a few grains of rice and just pushing them through his lips. He was very angry. He was very sullen. And we were all very deeply impacted by this little child."

"The story went out and CNN's phones began blowing up. My email was blowing up. I mean, the support was coming in from around the world. It transcended boundaries and nationality and religion and everything. Long story very short, one of the best moments of my career was when I was able to call Youssif's family and say, 'Your little boy's going to get help. You're all going to America.' His case was picked up by the Children's Burn Foundation, and then CNN viewers were donating to cover the cost of his medical treatment."

Arwa on how INARA got started

"Fast forward to 2012 and I'm covering Syria and it's very depressing and it feels as if no matter what we do, no matter how many people die, we're not really shifting the needle at all in terms of this horrendous trajectory. We can all see the country going down. It just became this 'I need to do more, I need to do something.' I was remembering all these other stories and I was remembering all these other times when we couldn't always report the story of the child that was injured, but we would just figure it out amongst ourselves. It became, 'Well, why not create a charity?' We're just going to figure it out for these families because we can figure it out."

"There's absolutely no logical reason in my mind why a child who has been injured by war or conflict or anything to do with that should not get the medical treatment that they deserve. And so INARA was born. Now we do medical treatment. We have this whole holistic treatment plan where we also have in-house mental health professionals. So, the child comes in, they get assessed for medical, they get assessed for mental health, we build up their treatment plan simultaneously. We also have family therapy sessions."

How has INARA been affected by the earthquake in Turkey and Syria?

"I'm talking to you from Turkey right now. INARA's Turkey office is located in Gaziantep, which is very close to the epicenter of the earthquake. Our staff all live in Gaziantep. Our offices and that whole area was impacted by the earthquake. That's where all of our beneficiaries live. That's where all the children who we treat live. That's where all their families live. We also had a number of staff who are over in Antakya, which was very badly hit. Luckily, thankfully, all of the staff are physically okay. But many of them are deeply, deeply traumatized."

"You also have to remember and recognize that our staff in Turkey are all Syrian refugees themselves, barring one or two. So, it's this very deep, intense, compound trauma."

"When it comes to our Rapid Response Program, we don't just focus on children. It's that same concept of, 'Where are the gaps? How do we find them, and how do we fill them?' So specific to our response for Turkey and Syria, it's really looking and trying to find the populations that other organizations are unable to reach and then we're doing very specific targeted distributions of aid. We don't have the generic basket that goes out. It's very much needs-based."

"We also need to talk about what's happening in Syria, or not happening in Syria, because mainly you see this outpouring of support for Turkey and it's incredible and all of these international rescue teams are coming in and all of this aid is coming in by land and sea and air. And just across the border, like the shortest distance away, people died because there weren't enough diggers and if there weren't diggers, there wasn't enough fuel to run the diggers and the aid wasn't coming in and the hospitals were destroyed."

"We're partnering with organizations that work in Syria. The need there is so big for everything that we're just doing basic humanitarian assistance and partnership with organizations that are already there."

How different has it been for you going from reporting on wars and disasters full-time, to now, running this foundation and helping full-time?

"It's very, very different. Yes, I am running INARA right now, but it's still a pure volunteer thing. I'm still storytelling. I'm still doing journalism, just in a different way. But yes, being here as an aid worker versus a journalist is a very different dynamic."

"The one thing I do like about doing the aid thing is that it gives me more time to just sit with people. When we're here as reporters, we're out there and yes, we're being respectful to people's pain and sorrow, but ultimately, our job is to show the world what that is. So we want to get in, we want to get what we need to get and we want to file it and get it on air. Being here on the aid side of things allows me more time to just sit and talk to people."

"Now my brain has this different level of intensity it's trying to deal with because we're not just trying to plan for tomorrow. We're trying to plan, 'What are we going to do in six months? What's our long-term game plan here?' because we're here to stay."

"We're like the little NGO that just gets it done. Give us a problem, we're gonna figure out how to solve it. You need help, we're gonna figure out how to get it to you."

***********

Arwa Damon
Wikipadia

Arwa Damon (born September 19, 1977) is an American journalist who was most recently a senior international correspondent for CNN, based in Istanbul. From 2003, she covered the Middle East as a freelance journalist, before joining CNN in 2006. She is also president and founder of INARA,[ a humanitarian organization that provides medical treatment to refugee children from Syria.

Early life and education

Born in Boston on September 19, 1977, to an American father and Syrian mother, Damon spent her early childhood years in Wayland, Massachusetts. Damon is the granddaughter of Muhsin al-Barazi, the former Prime Minister of Syria, who was executed in the August 1949 Syrian coup d'état.

At the age of six, Damon and her family moved to Morocco, followed by Istanbul, Turkey three years later, where her father was a teacher and middle school director at Robert College. He went from there to Işıkkent School in İzmir, and was then headmaster of the American Community School at Beirut from 2003 until his retirement in 2013.

Damon skipped sixth grade and graduated with honors from Robert College at the age of 16. She then spent a gap year with her aunt and uncle in Morocco, learning show jumping, before moving to the U.S. to attend Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. She graduated with honors in 1999 with a double major in French and biology and a minor in international affairs. She is fluent in Arabic, French, Turkish, and English, having grown up speaking all four languages.

Before becoming a reporter, Damon worked for a New York–based Turkish textile company.

Career

Damon decided to become a journalist after 9/11, and moved to Baghdad prior to the beginning of the Iraq War. She began her career at CameraPlanet, a supplier of media content for television newscasts, working to get correspondent Peter Arnett's team into pre-war Iraq. For three years, she covered the Middle East as a freelance producer working with CNN, CNN International, PBS, Fox News and others, before joining CNN in February 2006.

CNN/CNN International

Damon also covered the Iraqi elections of January 2005, the constitutional referendum vote in October 2005, and the Iraqi election of December 2005. She also reported on the trials and executions of Saddam Hussein, Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti and Awad Hamed al-Bandar in January 2007.

During the Syrian civil war, Damon travelled multiple times to Syria and to refugee camps for Syrians.[8] After the 2012 Benghazi attack, she was one of the first journalists to arrive at the scene; she recovered slain Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens' personal diary.

In 2013, Damon followed an anti-poaching park ranger unit through Odzala National Park in the Republic of the Congo. The feature was called Arwa Damon Investigates: Ivory War.[9][8]

In April 2014, after the Chibok schoolgirls kidnapping, she travelled to West Africa and the islands of Lake Chad to follow the hunt for the terrorists.

Damon covered the International military intervention against ISIL on numerous occasions, dating to the beginning of the conflict.

Damon returned to Iraq in the second half of 2016 and covered the Battle of Mosul. Riding with a convoy consisting of press and Iraqi soldiers, she came under heavy fire by IS troops and was trapped. After 28 hours of entrenched fighting, reinforcements from the Iraqi military rescued them.

Damon travelled to Thailand to cover the Tham Luang cave rescue.

Damon often shows interest in reporting on nature, environmental protection and similar themes. In 2018 she accompanied a Greenpeace group to Antarctica and made a feature of it.

In 2019 Damon travelled to Kathmandu in Nepal to report on a spike in fatalities amongst Mount Everest climbers.

2019 she traveled again with Greenpeace, this time to the Arctic. She reported about the significant loss of ice at the poles and their importance for the whole ecosystem of the earth.

She announced her departure from CNN in June 2022, after an 18-year reporting career with the network.

INARA

INARA (the International Network for Aid, Relief and Assistance) is a humanitarian aid, 501(c), non-profit organization that was co-founded by Arwa Damon in 2015 in Beirut, Lebanon. INARA provides medical services for children who have been wounded in war zones. It also provides rehabilitation treatment for its beneficiaries.

The organization focuses on refugee children from Syria. As of August 2018, INARA has managed to provide treatment to over 150 refugee children. Awards and honors

Damon won an Investigative Reporters and Editors' IRE Award for her reporting of the Consulate attack in Benghazi, along with fellow photojournalist Sarmad Qaseera.

Damon was part of the CNN team who won the 2012 Emmy Award for Outstanding Live Coverage of a Current News Story – Long Form (Revolution in Egypt: President Mubarak Steps Down). In 2014, she was awarded the Courage in Journalism Award given by the International Women's Media Foundation (IWMF).

Legal history

Damon and CNN were sued by two employees of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad claiming that on July 19, 2014, an intoxicated Damon bit them. Damon acknowledged the incident and apologized.

***********

Journalist Arwa Damon on conflict reporting: 'You will leave a part of yourself behind'

By Holly Dagres   

Arwa Damon is a renowned Syrian-American journalist known for her work covering conflict in the Middle East. The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks galvanized Damon to enter the field of journalism, where she worked for several years as a freelance producer covering the region before joining CNN in 2006. Damon worked with the cable news network for sixteen years as a Middle East correspondent, reporting on the 2011 Arab Spring, the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), and mass migration from the region. Damon's important work garnered numerous accolades, including five Emmy Awards and a George Foster Peabody Award.

Inspired by her experience reporting on conflict in the Middle East, Damon founded the International Network for Aid, Relief, and Assistance (INARA), a nonprofit organization that focuses on building a network of logistical support and medical care to help children who need lifesaving or life-altering medical treatment in war-torn nations. Since 2015, Damon has acted as president of the organization, leading INARA in its mission to fill in the gaps in access to health services for children in communities worldwide. In 2022, she joined the Atlantic Council as a nonresident senior fellow.

Our MENASource editor, Holly Dagres, had the pleasure of chatting with the journalist on March 2 to discuss her recent projects, mental health in journalism, and the importance of effective storytelling.

MENASOURCE: Tell us your origin story. There is always a moment in life that sets you on the trajectory that gets you to where you are today. What led you to journalism?

ARWA DAMON: So, I have a degree in biology and French and a minor in international relations—so really glad I went to college for nothing to do with anything. I ended up in New York working for a Turkish textile company, which is basically a fancy way of saying, "I sold bathrobes and towels." I had no experience in business whatsoever.

But I was in New York when September 11, 2001 happened. Obviously, the city was paralyzed and horrified, and a lot of realities came crashing down that day. I saw the dehumanization that happened afterward, and I remember burning inside, hearing the rhetoric that was being leveled toward Muslims and Arabs. I was very cognizant of the fact that I was spared a lot of what my more Middle Eastern-looking friends were because I'm blonde and I have green eyes. That, for me, was really it.

I had also realized in my years in the United States that because I grew up mostly in Morocco and Turkey, when I would speak about the Middle East, people would listen, people who were not necessarily interested. But here was someone who looked like them and spoke like them, and had a bit of their same mannerisms speaking about this place that was over there, the big, mysterious Middle East. It was the realization that when I spoke to people about this, they related to me because I look like them, and so that somehow made them relate more to the "other."

MENASOURCE: I would like to hear about the advantages that have supported you as a woman journalist, in addition to the potential challenges you've faced because of your background.

ARWA DAMON: Well, what is very interesting about being female is that you have access to both spaces. You have access to the male space, and you have access to the female space. There have been numerous situations where I can tackle subjects that a male colleague would not be able to just because women are more comfortable talking to each other about these things, especially when it comes to sexual violence and that sort of thing. I have personally found it to be an advantage to be a woman in the areas where I have worked because, for a lot of the men, you are a woman but you are also a journalist. So, they accept you into their midst to a certain degree, and you have access to all of that. And then, when the women are in the back room and a safe house, the male reporters cannot go in there and talk to them. But I could scurry in and just chitchat, then I could try to incorporate their story and their experience into the reporting. And I do think that gives us the advantage of more nuanced reporting and storytelling.

In terms of challenges, the hardest thing about being a woman in the field is finding a place to pee. Hands down. No joking. It is epic. If you are a guy, you can go almost anywhere. If you are not a guy, you are going to run into a lot of problems, and it is insanely uncomfortable.

MENASOURCE: What are you working on these days?

ARWA DAMON: I parted ways with CNN because I really wanted to start exploring different methods of storytelling, and I had an opportunity to film a documentary that I really felt could transcend a lot of perhaps the apathy that exists around the story of survivors of war and refugees, which was also an opportunity to bring that story to a much more diverse audience. What Seize the Summit does is follow this epic weeklong adventure up to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, with all of the questions of who is going to make it and who is not when the team is running out of oxygen and it is becoming harder to breathe.

I do a lot of mountains, and I have found that they will push you to a physical and psychological space that you did not even know that you could exist in, and in many ways, they force you to look inward and can be very healing. And the four climbers, who we take up and are all showcased in this documentary, are all survivors of war from Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Syria, and one of them is in a wheelchair.

And of course, I have my charity INARA, which is on a purely volunteer basis. But it eats up a lot of time, especially because crises in the areas where we work just keep coming.

MENASOURCE: You have me thinking about mental health in the world of journalism, especially conflict reporting. Do you think media outlets are doing enough in that realm?

ARWA DAMON: I can only speak to my experience at CNN. We always knew that the network would make resources available to us with no questions asked. I think there is a condition among a lot of people, but prevalent among journalists, to want to tough it out.

It is part of the whole "Keep going. Keep moving forward. I can get through this kind of thing" mentality, and we do not necessarily give ourselves the space to acknowledge the impact on us.

From my own personal experience, I was exactly that way. When you leave these extraordinarily intense situations, or when you leave behind people who have been through unimaginable horror and hardship, you carry their story with you, and you leave a part of yourself with them. And you also carry a lot of guilt. It is the guilt of leaving and having the privilege to leave. It is the constant questioning of "Did I do their story justice?" "Did I portray their pain in a way to move the world to take action?" And sadly, most of the time, the answer to that last question is that we do not see the sort of mass global movements to alleviate people's pain.

Whether that is reporting on protests, people demanding equal rights, or the horrors and atrocities of a war zone, I think oftentimes for journalists the impact that we really hope our journalism would make is not necessarily there. And for me, that led to a lot of self-doubt and questioning. If I were to ever write a book about my life, it would be called Not Good Enough.

But you try to tough it out, and for myself, I would default to anger. It took me a while to be able to recognize that I was poisoning myself. I was becoming very toxic to myself and then trying to find the tools to work through that, which is not just that I have it all figured out.

The whole process is like a roller coaster. You are at the bottom of this cesspool trying to claw your way out, and the minute you make it to the edge of the cliff and you are hanging on, you say, "Okay, I'm fine again," and then you just allow yourself to fall back down. And at the end of the day, you do not end up doing yourself, or the people suffering, any favors.

MENASOURCE: What have been your coping mechanisms?

ARWA DAMON: So again, just speaking from my own personal experience, I have, on two occasions, gone to see a normal psychologist. For me, that did not work. I think it was because their frame of reference was so different to what my frame of reference was for things, and I did not necessarily find that to be very beneficial. What worked for me personally very well was EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing). That could have also been because who I was doing it with was actually a former journalist himself. All I had to do was go in and sit in front of him, and in our first session, I said, "I have spent seven years reporting out of Iraq," and he just got it like that. He knew where I was coming from, and that, for me, was very beneficial.

I have also found that less conventional techniques have worked better for me, like breathing and looking inward...There are a lot of different kinds of breathing techniques, but it is not really meditation.

So, for me, if I lose my passion and my fire and my anger, I'm going to lose my drive. And this whole notion of needing to be better and the anger that I have at myself, that is my driver. But what I realized with EMDR and the work I was doing is that I still had the passion and the drive. Everything is still there. It is just not emotionally quicksanding me.

MENASOURCE: You brought up not being good enough. I certainly suffer from imposter syndrome, and I think a lot of women in our field, whether it is journalism or foreign policy, suffer from that. Do you get a sense that, as a trailblazing Syrian-American journalist, there was a lot of pressure on you to do well in your career because you are an Arab-American woman living in a post-9/11 world?

ARWA DAMON: First of all, the not good enough notion, I do not think is necessarily imposter syndrome for me. It is just this idea that comes from the notion that, if it had been done well enough, then surely change would have occurred. And because change is not occurring to the scope that one goes into journalism thinking that they are going to be able to generate, that turns into "Obviously, it must be my fault because the reporting was not good enough. If it had been good enough, if it had been powerful enough, something would have to change."

I do not think I'm hard on myself; I think I'm honest with myself, but everyone around me will tell me that I'm abnormally hard on myself. I think that I put an extraordinary amount of pressure on myself. 

I do not think that any of the sort of pressure points that I felt have necessarily been because of imposter syndrome. I'm part of this fortunate cadre of women who already had the glass ceiling broken for them. We had the generation of Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Lyse Doucet, Liz Sly, and a whole host of women who broke that glass ceiling for us. And if you look back to the core Baghdad (Iraq War) years, the press corps was split pretty fifty-fifty.

I think the pressure I put on myself comes from the fact that I'm perhaps uniquely positioned because I'm Arab-American. I did grow up in a household that was very cross-cultural. It was a fully bilingual household. I like to say breakfast was labneh with za'atar and blueberry pancakes. And I look so American, I sound so American, so I really hoped that I could be something of a bridge between cultures and peoples because my heart, my soul, my essence is so blended.

MENASOURCE: If there was anything you could tell your younger self, what would you tell her?

ARWA DAMON: I think about that question a lot. I believe we are a product of our mistakes and the times that we stumble and fall. So, if I were to turn to my younger self and tell her anything, she would not have made all the mistakes that she did, and she would not have stumbled and fallen all of the times that she did, and she would not be where she is today. So, in some ways, I do not think I would tell her anything because no matter how hard it gets sometimes, I do not regret where I'm right now or what I'm able to do right now, even though I do have this desire to do more and do better. I think I would be too nervous that she would veer off the path that led me here to want to say anything to her.

********

Arwa Damon

Nonresident Senior Fellow
Rafik Hariri Center & Middle East programs

Arwa Damon is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East and president and founder of the International Network for Aid, Relief, and Assistance (INARA), a nonprofit organization that focuses on building a network of logistical support and medical care to help children who need lifesaving or life-altering medical treatment in war-torn nations.

Until June 2022, Damon, an award-winning journalist covering the Middle East, was a senior international correspondent based in CNN's Istanbul bureau. During her sixteen years at CNN, she reported from across the region, including extensive coverage of Iraq and Syria. In 2018, she was awarded the George Foster Peabody Award for her reporting on the fall of ISIS in Iraq and Syria, in addition to winning three Emmys for that coverage, including an Emmy for Outstanding News Special for Return to Mosul. At the height of Europe's refugee crisis in 2015, Damon followed and reported on refugees from Syria and Iraq as they traveled across the continent by foot, boat, and train, resulting in coverage that earned her both an Emmy Award and Gracie Award in 2016.

Before joining CNN, Damon spent three years covering Iraq and the Middle East as a freelance producer for various news organizations including Feature Story News, PBS, and CNN.

Inspired by her experience reporting from war zones and war-torn nations, Damon launched INARA in 2015. INARA's impact has been recognized by several awards, including the 2017 James W. Foley Humanitarian Award; the World of Children's 2017 Crisis Award; the Syrian-American Medical Society's Humanitarian Award; and Time Warner's 2016 Richard Parsons Community Impact Award and Excellence in Service Award.

Damon graduated with honors from Skidmore College in New York with a double major in French and biology and a minor in international affairs. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts but spent most of her childhood in Morocco and Turkey. She is fluent in Arabic, French, and Turkish.

***********

Facing the Truth: CNN's Arwa Damon

Arwa Damon's fearless reporting from the Middle East has made her a star at CNN. What she uncovered in Libya sparked a national furor.

By Heidi Mitchell
November 19, 2012

Arwa Damon's fearless reporting from the Middle East has made her a star at CNN. What she uncovered in Libya sparked a national furor.

The Manhattan apartment CNN's Arwa Damon has been camping out in this past week is a disaster zone. Among the flock of pashminas and well-worn jeans are all the trappings of a Boy Scout: fingerless gloves; bottles of DEET; dry shampoo; a bandanna that, with a pen, can be jury-rigged into a tourniquet; LED headlamps; small black nylon hoods ("because here's the deal: We're using night-vision cameras with bright screens, and we don't want to be seen," she says); size 8 combat boots; three cell phones (�American, Libyan, Lebanese); a heap of dark clothing. "I buy colors, but I don't wear them," says the diminutive blonde, her hair tucked into a paperboy cap. "Black is easier." She throws it all into a suitcase, forming a pile twice its height, and points to a backpack in the corner. "When I'm on assignment, everything I need has to be carried on my back." She climbs on top of the suitcase and zips it closed.

In the weeks since Damon discovered the personal diary of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in the burned-out American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, this 35-year-old television reporter has been at the center of a developing story—never a comfortable position for someone whose job is to break the news, not create it. She and a cameraman arrived at the consulate three days after the terrorist attack on September 11, and, with no U.S. officials or security on the scene, they went right in—cameras rolling, lights blazing. "It was a grim sight," Damon says. Smashed furniture was everywhere; tile shards littered the floor. "There were smeared partial handprints. The safe room was completely burned from the inside." In an ash-shrouded bedroom, Damon found the ambassador's hardbound diary, set in plain view on the floor between the bed and an upholstered side chair. The seven pages of handwritten scrawl inside revealed a man who had begun to fear for his safety in a country only recently emerging from revolution.

Damon's network broadcast her footage and reported on concerns raised in the diary, sparking a now-roiling debate over security conditions in Benghazi. Why was the consulate so lightly defended? Why were news crews seemingly the only ones with eyes and ears on the ground after the attack? The State Department weighed in harshly, calling CNN "disgusting" for its use of the ambassador's diary as a source (CNN says the Stevens family was contacted within hours of the discovery and the diary's newsworthy content was independently corroborated).

Damon doesn't revel in the reporting that initiated a national outrage. Nor does she waste a minute worrying about what Hillary Clinton's team thinks of her. "Honestly, it's a blip," she says, piling her final pieces of gear into the backpack. "You never want to be part of the news. But doing what I do, you're used to curveballs. You deal with it because you deal with everything."

She has had that attitude for nearly a decade, since she arrived in Iraq as a 25-year-old novice freelancer just days before the start of the war. A quick study, she raced up the ladder in Baghdad, going from fixer to translator (she's fluent in Arabic, Turkish, and French) to reporter, eventually joining CNN and earning her stripes with coverage of big events—the battle for Fallujah, the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein—as well as less well known tragedies, like the medieval conditions inside Baghdad's Khamiya women's prison. Carrying herself with an infectious mix of confidence, resourcefulness, and pluck—you can't help wanting to share a finger of scotch with her—Damon has dodged bullets, crawled through hidden tunnels, and sweet-talked security guards to get her stories. Her months-long coverage of Arab Spring uprisings on the streets of Libya and Egypt helped win CNN an Emmy in 2012.

"She looks like this California hippie with the jewelry and bangles and scarves and everything else," says Tony Maddox, executive vice president and managing director of CNN International, who was instrumental in hiring Damon. "But she can seamlessly integrate. I always tell people, if you want to know how to dress in a war zone, just check out Arwa." Beyond her low-key, up-for-anything style, of course, is a dogged determination to go everywhere, to blend in, to shed light on the human toll of war. She's done big interviews for her network and been known to rattle some chains—most notably when she fought to remain in Baba Amr in Homs, Syria, a neighborhood where veteran war reporter Marie Colvin, a hero and housemate of Damon's, would later return and be killed. And in 2007, Damon pushed to do a segment on a five-year-old Iraqi boy who had been badly burned in a raid. It was a small story, but the piece led to an enormous outpouring of support from viewers. Ultimately, CNN allowed Damon to find the boy medical care in the States, and then to follow the story for four years. Permitting such a level of engagement between a reporter, a subject, and her audience was something of a first for the network, and it made Damon a popular figure, both inside CNN headquarters and out.

Born in Boston to an American-academic father and a Syrian mother (whose father was the former Syrian prime minister Muhsin al-Barazi, assassinated in a military coup in 1949), Damon and little sister Mawadda grew up in a bilingual household, speaking English and Arabic, moving to Morocco when Arwa was six and then, three years later, to Istanbul, where her dad landed a job running the middle school at Robert College. "I was this quiet kid," Damon recalls, "the headmaster's daughter. It took a while to fit in." The family lived on the sprawling school campus, surrounded by a large green space in Istanbul; eventually Damon began to enjoy a carefree, tomboyish suburban life, climbing trees, riding horses, racing her bike. "Or I was bossing the boys around," she jokes.

A precocious bookworm, Damon skipped sixth grade and graduated from high school at the age of sixteen. During her gap year, she moved in with her aunt and uncle in Morocco and spent her days show-jumping Thoroughbreds. "But going pro meant giving up college, and that wasn't an option," she remembers. Still, she chose a school—Skidmore College, in upstate New York—that had a riding program and was close to her U.S. relatives. With a double major in French and biology, she thought she'd become a vet "and save all the world's animals," but after graduation, she was no longer sure and drifted, wondering what to do with her life.

She took a variety of temp jobs and eventually a position at a New York–based Turkish textile company, where she could use her languages and where one of her tasks—truly—was to sell bathrobes for dogs. But after 9/11, everything changed.

"In college, I had a lot of friends who didn't know anything about the Middle East, who had never met anyone from there," she explains. "And when 9/11 happened, I saw this East-West divide become even greater, and I got this idea in my head that I was going to be a bridge, to help create cross-cultural understanding through journalism." Her friends thought she was off her rocker. "They said I should start in a small town, build my way up in the industry. I said no, I'm going to Iraq."[#image: /photos/5891eacfb4a4bd466012a6d7]|||Arwa Damon|||

Damon is an impatient girl. From New York, she used her language skills to charm the Iraqi Ministry of Information into granting her a visa, and arrived in Baghdad just before the war broke out. "My mom always said that foreign languages would open doors," she says with a sly smile. Those early years covering the war in Iraq were improvisational—when a freelance contract ran out, she took a job with a Lebanese portable-toilet supplier to get back to the front line—and very dangerous. In 2005, embedded with the U.S. military, she was in a Humvee hit by an IED. "There was a flash of orange light," she recalls. "And then the dust came down like snowflakes." (No one was seriously hurt.) More recent experiences have been even scarier. "Syria is like no other war zone I have been in. There is no safe space. Every day is a game of Russian roulette." She sighs. "My poor mom."

"I feel terrible about her work," confirms her mother, Joumana Barazi-Damon, speaking from her home in Beirut, where she and Arwa's father settled in 2003. "As much as I am incredibly proud of Arwa and her conviction, I would like her to live her youth." Of course, in some ways, Arwa is still living her youth, having rented an apartment just a few hundred yards from her parents' house on Beirut's corniche. After an assignment, her first stop is their kitchen, where she fills Tupperware with her mother's Mediterranean cooking. ("My second stop is my hairdresser to get highlights, then my manicurist," she admits.) Damon also favors the same perfume she wore in high school (Acqua di Gío) as well as the same drugstore-bought Olay moisturizer. Joumana waters her plants when Arwa is out of town. "It's easy to feel torn by anxieties and fears for her safety," she says, "but because Arwa is so dedicated and so passionate about what she does, you can't help but think, Good for her."

"Can I get a coffee now—and later?" the caffeine-addicted Damon asks, sitting down to lunch at a midtown Manhattan Turkish restaurant. As always, she blends right in. She talks to the waiters in Turkish; she fiddles with her favorite scarf and shows off her red Singha tank top, picked up in Thailand, where she covered the Red Shirt Revolution in 2010. "See, I wear color!" she says. She mentions that she spent her thirty-fifth birthday in Benghazi, and that the hotel delivered dragon flowers to her room. She also admits to missing out on the typical life events of a woman her age: She couldn't attend some close friends' weddings; she has yet to furnish her apartment; she's barely ridden her new black Vespa, which awaits her in Beirut; she doesn't have time to date. On the other hand, she has great stories to share over dirty Belvedere martinis with friends at one of her favorite Beirut bars: living on bread and Laughing Cow cheese during the Libyan revolution; sharing a house with a bunch of male reporters for months on end ("You don't notice the stench until you've left the room"); learning how to zigzag across an open battlefield and take a nap whenever possible—helmet as pillow, flak jacket as blanket, helicopter landing field as bed.

"Arwa has seen some dicey times, but she is remarkably cool in the face of danger," says Anderson Cooper, who covered Cairo with Damon during the Arab Spring. "We were together during the revolution in Egypt, broadcasting in secret, and there were some real threats, but Arwa was able to communicate comfortably in stressful situations." He adds, "She has a very human quality—a sensitive side to her that is able to relate to people in a human way, not in a hard-bitten war-correspondent way."

It's a commitment to finding the meaningful stories in the fog of war that overshadows many aspects of her life—the complaint in Damon's last employee review was that she didn't take enough vacation time—but she doesn't long for a picket fence and a two-car garage in the suburbs. "I really don't see myself doing anything else with my life," she says as another Turkish coffee arrives. "The next stories, the big ones, they'll be in the Middle East, and I will be there."

***********

Link:
https://inara.org/

***********

Her natal Lilith is 0/29 Aquarius, N.Node 3 Sagittarius, S.Node 16 Cancer
Her natal Ceres is 3 Scorpio, N.Node 11 Cancer, S.Node 1 Sagittarius
Her natal Amazon is 15 Scorpio,, N.Node 11 Gemini, S.Node 10 Scorpio

Goddess Bless, Rad