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Linguists are to focus on rhyming slang in new research for the Australian National Dictionary.  They want to add to an existing and impressive lexicon of Aussie slang. 

Barry Crocker is an Australian singer and actor.  In the world of rhyming slang, his name is synonymous with having a bad time. 

Every year, the Australian National Dictionary Centre looks for new contributions for the Australian National Dictionary.  This year’s focus is on rhyming slang for future editions of the dictionary and its database.

Mark Gwynn, an editor at the center, talked about rhyming slang with VOA. 

“I’ve got plenty of favorites.  I’ve always loved Noah – Noah’s Ark, shark.  That’s a good example of the Australian one,” Gwynn said. “If someone mentioned Noah, you’d be worried.  But one of my favorites are Barry Crocker – shocker.”  

Gwynn believes that this type of slang probably emerged in east London in the middle of the 1800s.  It found its way from Britain to colonial Australia very soon afterward, where it has developed a distinctive style of its own, although it does have its critics.  

“People have made the comment that it is a very masculine thing.  People have also made the comment that it’s a very Anglo-Celtic thing,” Gwynn said. “So, we’d be interested to know if other communities in other ethnic groups in Australia have picked it up.  This is the kind of information we’re interested in, but, like I said, I think its heyday has gone.  There are various other forms of slang these days.” 

Poetic colloquialisms in Australia are refusing to go away quietly, though.   Gwynn says that even the pandemic has yielded more rhyming slang.

“We’ve had ‘My Sharona’ for corona, for the coronavirus from that 1970s song and I know we’ve also heard, and I think our friends in the U.K. also share, ‘Miley Cyrus’ for virus,” Gwynn said. “So, clearly rhyming is still an aspect of slang that is going on here and elsewhere.”  

Australians might not be familiar with less familiar slang terms such as ‘Merv Hughes’ – shoes – or a ‘Dad ‘n Dave,’ shave, but many might know about doing ‘the Harold Holt.’  It means to bolt or leave without explanation.  It refers to a former Australian Prime Minister – Harold Holt – who disappeared while swimming at a beach in the state of Victoria in 1967.

Researchers hope that public submissions will help them identify the extent to which rhyming slang is still used in Australia and add new terms to its database.

Any new additions could be included in the Australian National Dictionary to build on the publication’s collection of Australian words and their origins.
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Editor’s note: The U.S. departure from Afghanistan marks another major turning point for the Taliban, the militant group with a long history in Afghanistan and a complex relationship with Pakistan. VOA reporters are looking back at the Taliban’s rise to power and the group’s previous tenure as Afghanistan’s rulers.  

In late September 1996, after four years of civil war in Afghanistan, the Taliban succeeded in capturing Kabul and then tortured and killed former President Mohammad Najibullah before hanging his body from a traffic post.

Shocking images of the executed president sent a signal to Afghans and the world that the Taliban had taken charge and would be imposing what they called a “complete Islamic system” for Afghanistan. Taliban flags began flying over government offices in Kabul, and their military rivals fled to their strongholds in the north.

I arrived in Kabul on October 29, the start of the Taliban’s second month in power in the war-torn city. The so-called “moral police” of the Taliban government agency known as the Promotion of Virtue and Elimination of Vice were the most feared squads in the capital. The armed guards in traditional Afghan dress had, in a single month, forced quick changes on urban Afghan women and men. Every man had to wear a cap or turban and sport a beard long enough to be grabbed by a fist. During prayer times, all businesses were required to close.

The old-fashioned burqa, a mostly blue shuttlecock-shaped covering, was imposed on women. They were beaten with batons in public by the Virtue and Vice squads, sometimes for unknown reasons. Later they would find out that their ankles had been visible to men, or that they had been seen talking to a stranger. The Taliban would beat a woman if she was not accompanied by a mahram, a male member of the family with whom marital relations are considered haram (forbidden). Seeing Taliban beating women on Kabul streets became the new normal.

Schools closed, televisions were smashed, ancient relics at the Kabul Museum went missing, pictures and portraits of humans and animals in official buildings were torn into pieces.

Music was banned, so the sounds of chirping birds replaced the traditional instrumental music of Afghan drums and rabab (a local variant of guitar). Local music was replaced by the Taliban’s jihadi taranas (anthems) and sermons, heard on Radio Sharia, the new name of Afghanistan’s national radio and television.

Imposing official

The Taliban intensified the public’s fear by appointing the radical madrassa graduate Mullah Qalamuddin as deputy minister of the Virtue and Vice ministry. A graduate of the Darul Uloom Haqqania madrassa in Akora Khatak, Pakistan, where many Taliban leaders studied, Mullah Qalamuddin was an imposing official who had a reputation for personally leading the group’s fear campaign. He was over 6 feet (1.8 meters) tall, and when I met him at his ministry’s building, he used a love seat as his office chair as he directed his subordinates. He had only contempt for those who expressed concerns over women rights, saying that a woman has two abodes: a home and a grave.

Kabul’s landmarks at the time bore signs of the Taliban’s harsh views. At the city’s multistory Intercontinental Hotel, staff told visiting journalists about Mullah Qalamuddin getting angry when he had seen a small statue of Buddha in one of the halls of the hotel. He used an ax to smash it to pieces.

At the Afghan national bank building in downtown Kabul, where many women had worked, the top floor had been converted into a child care facility. But the bank was now closed, and the women had all been banished once the Taliban took power, leaving a floor strewn with empty cradles, pacifiers and toddlers’ toys. The bank’s civilian guardians, during a Taliban-escorted visit to the building, said they had no plan in place to reopen. Many other businesses and nongovernment organizations ended up losing all their female staffers, who had been banned from working under the Taliban’s puritan Sharia.

At the time, the Taliban’s founding leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, was running Kabul remotely from his southern stronghold Kandahar, then an 18-hour drive away. There was not much of an administrative state. His six-member high council led by Mullah Mohammad Rabbani, a former leader from Kandahar, had little say in making decisions.

Broadcast messages

For locals trying to understand their new leaders’ rapid changes, the international Pashto-language broadcasters VOA and BBC and the Taliban’s Radio Sharia were the main sources of information.

Radio Sharia taught them how to tailor themselves under the new Islamist laws of Taliban. The mullahs, graduates from Pakistani madrassas, were offering a menu of punishments in their sermons during primetime evening broadcasts.

Some of the messages warned people of the new social restrictions: “Satan urinates on the head of a woman who is not covering her head.” “God will pour hot lead into the ears of those who listen to music.” “Walking or driving on the left side of the road is un-Islamic.” “A man looking at a woman or vice versa is the fornication of eyes.”

Kabul was more tense at night. In the evenings, new warnings were broadcast via Radio Sharia, and Taliban fighters enforced a daily dusk-to-dawn curfew, patrolling the streets in pickup trucks. These nighttime patrols led to rumors of mass arrests or Taliban troop movements for northern battle lines. Some Kabul locals thought the Taliban were bringing in Pakistani fighters under the cover of night. At the start of the Taliban’s reign in Afghanistan, people in Kabul were already angry with Islamabad, believing that Pakistan’s support for the Taliban was undermining Afghans.

Pakistani officials at the time encouraged this perception. In Pakistan, the then interior minister and former army general, Naseerullah Babar, was not shy of being called the “architect of Taliban” in Afghanistan. He would take credit for helping to create the Afghan Taliban throughout his retired life.

Pakistan’s perceived role

I left Kabul for Kandahar, along with a Western journalist, on November 5, 1996. At the time, the drive was rough and around 480 kilometers long, and the needle on the speedometer rarely crossed 30 kilometers per hour. On the way, a radio bulletin brought news from Pakistan, saying the president had dismissed Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and dissolved her elected government over corruption allegations. That marked the second time that her government had been dismissed by a sitting president in Pakistan.

Bhutto’s first term ended over a costly military miscalculation in Afghanistan. In early 1989, her government directed pro-Pakistan Afghan fighters to try to take over Afghanistan’s eastern city of Jalalabad from the country’s Soviet-backed government. The operation was a debacle, and the plot was exposed, becoming a political liability for her government and contributing to the perception that Pakistan backs militants in Afghanistan as part of its foreign policy strategy.

Pakistan’s next government, that of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, solidified that perception in 1997 by becoming the first to officially recognize the Afghan Taliban government. Twenty-four years later, despite years of denials from Islamabad, most Afghans still see the Taliban as an arm of the Pakistani state.
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The United States will not reconsider the type of training it provides to foreign military members despite finding that seven of the 25 individuals arrested in the assassination of Haiti’s president were at one time trained by the U.S.

As VOA first reported, U.S. defense officials last week said that the seven received U.S. military training, both in the U.S. and in Colombia, between 2001 and 2015, when they were part of the Colombian military.

But Pentagon press secretary John Kirby said Thursday there was nothing to tie that training to the alleged participation in the plot that killed Haitian President Jovenel Moise earlier this month.

“We know that these seven individuals got nothing certainly related, at all, or that one could extrapolate, as leading to or encouraging of what happened in Haiti,” Kirby told reporters during a press gaggle.

“I know of no plans right now as a result of what happened in Haiti for us to reconsider or to change this very valuable, ethical leadership training that we continue to provide to partners in the Western Hemisphere and to partners around the world,” he added.

While some of the training took place in Colombia, Pentagon officials say some of the Colombian nationals were trained at seminars in Washington. Some also took courses at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), based at Fort Benning in the southern U.S. state of Georgia.

WHINSEC, established in January 2001, replaced the School of the Americas, which came under heavy criticism in the early to mid-1990s after its graduates were implicated in human rights violations, including murders and disappearances, in El Salvador, Colombia, Peru, Honduras and Panama.

In an interview with VOA in April, WHINSEC Commandant Colonel John Dee Suggs said the new school was designed with a focus on human rights and ethics.

“There is a pretty rigorous review of people and their human rights history,” Suggs told VOA. “We will only train people who have the same human rights values that we have, who have the same democratic values that we have.”

“We’re not shooting anybody. We’re not teaching anybody to … go into a house and take these folks down,” he added.

Pentagon officials told VOA this week that the Colombians who trained at WHINSEC took courses in cadet leadership, professional development, counter-drug operations and small unit leader training.

“All WHINSEC courses include human rights and ethics training,” one official added.

Pentagon and State Department officials have previously said they are continuing to review their records to determine whether any other suspects received training from the U.S.

Haitian President Moise was shot and killed in the predawn hours of July 7 at his private residence in a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince.

Earlier this week, Haiti sworn in a new prime minister, Ariel Henry, as part of an attempt to stabilize the country following Moise’s death.

Haitian authorities say they are continuing to investigate Moise’s assassination.

Officials have accused Christian Emmanuel Sanon, a Haitian doctor with ties to Florida, as being the plot’s mastermind.

Some information from AFP was used in this report.

 
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A measure that would have allowed the United States Senate to begin debating a $1 trillion package of spending on roads, public transit, broadband, and more was defeated on a party line vote Wednesday afternoon, adding another link to the yearslong chain of failed attempts to rebuild the country’s critical infrastructure. 

But the measure’s defeat masks the real possibility that Democrats and Republicans may yet be able to come together and pass the legislation. A number of Republicans who voted against beginning debate promised that they will support the measure early next week, saying that they were reluctant to begin debate on the measure because the legislative language hasn’t been finished yet, and analysis of its impact on the federal budget is still not available. 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the vote — which was widely expected to fail — for a number of reasons. One of those was to appease a restless core of left-leaning Democrats who believe the monthslong effort to find a bill that both sides of the political aisle can agree on is the result of delaying tactics by Republicans who do not plan to support it regardless of what the final package looks like. 

Frustrating delays 

If Americans are skeptical about Congress actually reaching a deal, they have good reason. The seeming inability of the U.S. government to act on the widely acknowledged need to update the country’s critical infrastructure has become a grim joke in Washington. 

The signs of infrastructure decay have been painfully obvious for years, from the widely publicized contamination of Flint, Michigan’s drinking water with lead, to the tens of thousands of bridges rated “structurally deficient,” to faulty water mains that leak an estimated 6 billion gallons of treated water each day. 

With the need so apparent, why has an agreement on an infrastructure package been so elusive? As with many things in Washington, there is no single reason, but rather a constellation of policy and political factors that have intertwined to thwart progress. 

Lack of trust 

The relationship between the two parties in Washington has become so toxic in recent years that few members of Congress from either party are willing to take political gambles that require support from the other side of the aisle to be successful. 

Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, said that it was a lack of trust that kept many of his colleagues from voting to begin debate on the current infrastructure package without seeing the complete legislative language. “You can’t vote on a framework. There just isn’t the kind of trust around it right now that would allow that to happen,” he said. 

For their part, Democrats point to times when members of the GOP have participated in monthslong debates over legislation on health care and immigration reform, only to have the party’s leadership withhold its support when it came time for a final vote. 

Political calculation 

Even when the issue in question is something on which there is broad agreement in general, political calculations are never far from the surface in Washington, particularly when the margins of difference in the House of Representatives and the Senate are as slim as they are today. 

With their eyes on the 2022 elections, in which they hold a strong chance of winning back one or both houses of Congress, Republicans are going to be very judicious about when and how they give Biden a “win” on anything. 

However, in the case of this infrastructure bill, there seems to be a willingness on the part of a number of Senate Republicans — a total of 10 will be necessary to overcome the filibuster — to get a deal done. After the failed vote Wednesday, 11 GOP senators signed on to a letter to Schumer that said, in part, they are “optimistic that we will finalize, and be prepared to advance, this historic bipartisan proposal.” 

How will it be paid for? 

The largest sticking point in the ongoing negotiations is more concrete: how to pay for it. The proposal anticipates $1 trillion in spending, a little more than $400 billion of which would come from redirecting money that had been directed at other priorities. The remainder, nearly $600 billion, has to come from somewhere, and there is significant disagreement about where. 

Democrats had to shelve a plan to beef up the Internal Revenue Service’s enforcement arm, a measure that would have been expected to generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue from tax cheats, but Republicans balked at the plan, leaving a large hole in the funding element of the proposal. 

Negotiators are currently considering the repeal of a change to Medicare-related rules on payments for prescription drugs. Reversing the change, which would have cost the government money, would result in savings that could be applied to the infrastructure bill. 

Inflation worries 

One final concern that has some Republicans reluctant to support the measure is the fear of inflation. The federal government has spent an enormous amount of money — some $4 trillion so far — in efforts to help the country recover from the recession induced by the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, the Federal Reserve has flooded the economy with liquidity by keeping interest rates low and buying up mortgage-backed securities. 

That combination, some argue, leaves the U.S. open to a spiral of wage and price hikes that could force the Fed to sharply raise rates, triggering a recession in 2022. This has made some Republicans reluctant to sign off on still more spending. 

However, supporters of the infrastructure package say there is still considerable “slack” in the U.S. economy, and their position was backed up Wednesday when Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, released a 15-page analysis of the package in which he referred to the inflation concerns as “overdone.” 

Zandi argued that much of the infrastructure investment, which would stimulate long-term economic growth, would actually create downward pressure on inflation. 
 
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Almost 65 years after then-Canadian Prime Minister Lester Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize for initiating the first U.N. peacekeeping mission, his country – which long prided itself on its role in subsequent missions — has only a few dozen remaining peacekeepers deployed around the world.

That is down from a record 3,300 Canadian troops deployed in peacekeeping missions in the early 1990s, part of a wider trend that Canadian military experts attribute to the changing nature of conflict in a post-Cold War world.

U.N. peacekeeping is “falling out of fashion,” says Major Tim Dunne, a retired public affairs officer in the Canadian Armed Forces who deployed in numerous peacekeeping missions beginning in the 1970s and is currently a research fellow with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Dunne tells VOA, most global conflicts were driven by competition between the United States and the Soviet Union, creating the need for an impartial army to stand between them.

But, he says, most modern conflicts – whether in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda during the 1990s or in Syria and Iraq today — are too messy and chaotic for the old model of peacekeeping to work.

“The factors that allow for effective peacekeeping aren’t there anymore,” Dunne says. “You don’t have the same factions that allow for an easy creation of a cease-fire. You descend into other kinds of conflict.”

It is not only Canada that is having second thoughts about the value of U.N. peacekeeping, which currently supports just 13 missions, seven of them in Africa.

“Another case you may consider is the Sahel,” says Emily Estelle of the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute. She points to the lack of public support in Western nations for the costly and sometimes dangerous missions.

“France leads the counterterrorism mission in Mali but is working to reduce its involvement and end the mission, in part because of domestic pressure and an upcoming election,” Estelle says in a telephone interview. That, she says, is “in line with what we’ve seen in Canada and the U.S.”

Estelle points to the struggles of the African Union’s mission to Somalia as another example.

“All in all, waning support for peacekeeping in the West is rippling into sub-Saharan Africa,” she says. “Neither Malian nor Somali forces are capable of filling the gap left by peacekeepers and other foreign forces if and when they withdraw.”

Charlie Herbert, a former senior NATO adviser to the Afghan Ministry of the Interior and a former director at the Defense Academy of the United Kingdom, points to the success of military might in overthrowing rogue regimes like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya, and the struggles to stabilize those nations afterward.

“It’s hard to imagine any Western nation committing to discretionary ‘wars of choice’ over the next decade or two, and with a rising China and a resurgent Russia both challenging the rules-based international order, it is perhaps inevitable that NATO nations are once more looking at a more traditional model of deterrence and competition,” he says.

“Operations in the so called ‘gray zone’ and hybrid warfare have become the lexicon of the 2020s in the way that COIN [counterinsurgency] and CT [counterterrorism] dominated thinking in the earlier years of this century.”

Herbert was referring to unconventional warfare and conflicts that fall short of war.

In the case of Canada, the nation’s long-standing commitment to U.N. peacekeeping operations has largely been replaced by involvement in NATO missions such as its participation in the coalition that defeated the Islamic State extremist group in Iraq and Syria, and the NATO mission now winding down in Afghanistan.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s administration has promised to commit more troops and police to international peacekeeping, but the proposed numbers remain only in the hundreds.

Britain, too, is showing some interest in a revival of U.N. peacekeeping, according to Herbert, who sees that as a reaction to the decision to pull NATO forces out of Afghanistan.

“The withdrawal from Afghanistan marks the end of an era, and for now the end of enduring stabilization operations in distant places,” Herbert says. “It provides an opportunity for all Western nations to reconsider the use of their military as an instrument of their foreign policy.

“In the UK, for example, it has been the catalyst to reinvest in high-end U.N. peacekeeping operations, after a hiatus throughout the Iraq and Afghan wars. The UK commitment to MINUSMA – the U.N. stabilization mission in Mali – is an interesting and positive example of a NATO member reinvesting in peacekeeping operations.”

Whether other Western nations will follow London’s lead remains to be seen.
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Colombian police said Wednesday that they had arrested 70 people following fresh anti-government protests that mobilized thousands countrywide the previous day and left dozens injured.

As Colombians returned to the streets after a weekslong hiatus, clashes with riot police occurred in the cities of Bogota, Medellin and Cali, according to the authorities.

The government has described the protests as largely peaceful.

Police said in a statement that they had “captured 70 people, 69 of them caught in the act, for crimes committed in several cities on July 20, and one more on a warrant for homicide.”

Charges included blocking public roads, damage to property, throwing dangerous objects or substances, and firearm possession.

The government contended that armed groups had infiltrated the protests.

Colombia’s human rights ombudsman reported 50 people were injured in Tuesday’s demonstrations — 24 civilians and 26 agents.

Weeks of protests broke out late April in opposition to a proposed tax hike, and the protests morphed into a mass movement against the right-wing administration of President Ivan Duque.

Police repression, poverty decried

The demonstrators demanded an end to police repression and more supportive public policies to alleviate the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with more than 40% of the country’s 50 million inhabitants now living in poverty.

The international community has condemned a security response that left more than 60 people dead.

A major group representing protesters — the National Strike Committee — said on June 16 that it would suspend the demonstrations, even though smaller groups continued and roadblocks remained.

The committee called fresh protests for Tuesday, Colombia’s independence day, as the government put a new tax proposal to parliament.

On Wednesday, the government presented to lawmakers a bill to reform the police, who are accused of abuses against civilian protesters. It proposes better training for officers and sanctions for those who do not identify themselves when carrying out arrests, or who refuse to be filmed while carrying out their duties.

But it does not suggest removing the police from the control of the defense ministry, as demanded by protesters.

“The national police must be part of the ministry of defense because of the conditions of threat and violence that still exist in Colombia,” police chief Diego Molano told AFP. The institution “has functions in the fight against drug trafficking, in citizen security … in the fight against smuggling that require coordination with the military forces.”

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has criticized Colombia’s “disproportionate” and “lethal” response to the protests and has also recommended a police separation from the military.
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President Joe Biden aimed to rev up support for his economic agenda with a visit to Cincinnati on Wednesday, where he visited a union training center ahead of a CNN town hall.

The trip comes as the fate of his infrastructure proposal remains unclear after Senate Republicans rejected a $1 trillion blueprint in a key test vote Wednesday. A bipartisan group of 22 senators said in a joint statement after the vote that they were close to coming to terms on a deal and requested a delay until Monday.

Biden expressed confidence in the outcome, telling reporters when asked if he would land a deal on infrastructure, “Yes, we will.”

While lawmakers wrangle over the details of that proposal on Capitol Hill, Biden was expected to use the town hall, in part, to talk about the broad strokes of his economic vision, making the case that his nearly $4 trillion package is needed to rebuild the middle class and sustain the economic growth the country has seen during the first six months of his presidency.

First, Biden toured the IBEW/NECA Electrical Training Center on the west side of Cincinnati. He got a chance to get an up-close look at trainees working their way through five-year apprenticeships to learn the ins-and-outs of the sort of skilled, well-paid union jobs that he says will be in higher demand if his plan comes to fruition.

“There’s a reason why union workers are the best trained,” said Biden, as he met with apprentices.

It’s his third trip to the state — one he lost by about 8 points in 2020, but one that remains pivotal to the Democratic Party’s political future and a key test of whether Biden’s economic proposals have the broad appeal the White House hopes.

The state faces a heated Senate election next year with the retirement of Republican Rob Portman, who helped negotiate the infrastructure plan that now faces an uncertain future in the evenly split Senate.

The president’s visit took him near the dangerously outdated Brent Spence Bridge — a chokepoint for trucks and emergency vehicles between Ohio and Kentucky that the past two presidents promised without success to replace. But Republicans are more focused on the increase in shootings and crime in Cincinnati, which they blame on Democrats, although there are a host of factors, including the coronavirus pandemic.

Biden is likely to take questions on many of those issues during his Wednesday night town hall on CNN, at Mount St. Joseph University, a private Catholic college in Delhi Township, a western suburb of Cincinnati. 
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Brisbane was picked Wednesday to host the 2032 Olympics, the inevitable winner of a one-city race steered by the IOC to avoid rival bids.

The Games will go back to Australia 32 years after the popular 2000 Sydney Olympics. Melbourne hosted in 1956.

“We know what it takes to deliver a successful Games in Australia,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison told International Olympic Committee voters in an 11-minute live video link from his office.

When the award was later confirmed, winning the vote 72-5, Morrison raised both arms in the air and gave two thumbs up.

The victory led to a fireworks display in Brisbane that was broadcast to IOC members in their five-star hotel in Tokyo.

Brisbane follows 2028 host Los Angeles in getting 11 years to prepare for hosting the Games. Paris will host in 2024.

The 2032 deal looked done months before the formal decision at the IOC meeting, which was held ahead of Friday’s opening ceremony of the Tokyo Games.

The IOC gave Brisbane exclusive negotiating rights in February. That decision left Olympic officials in Qatar, Hungary and Germany looking blindsided with their own stalled bidding plans.

Though the result was expected, a high-level Australian delegation went to Tokyo amid the COVID-19 pandemic to present speeches, films and promises on stage.

The city of Brisbane sent Mayor Adrian Schrinner, the state of Queensland sent Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and Australia’s federal government sent sports minister Richard Colbeck to woo Olympic voters.

They were joined by long-time Australian Olympic official John Coates, now an IOC vice president who shaped the fast-track selection process two years ago.

The first-time format, designed to cut campaign costs, gives the IOC more control and removes the risk of vote-buying.

The project will see events staged across Queensland, including in Gold Coast, which hosted the 2018 Commonwealth Games.

Brisbane’s renowned cricket stadium, known as the Gabba, will be upgraded and may host the sport at the Games. Cricket was played once at the Olympics, at the 1900 Paris Games.

The next three Summer Games hosts — starting with Paris in 2024 — are now secured in wealthy and traditional Olympic host nations without any of the trio facing a contested vote.

The IOC and its hands-on president, Thomas Bach, have torn up the template of traditional bidding campaigns and hosting votes to lock down preferred cities with the minimum risk.

The future hosts offer stability for the IOC, which was stung by the two previous Summer Games contests being tainted by allegations of vote-buying when multiple cities were on the ballot.

The 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics and the postponed 2020 Tokyo Olympics are still under investigation by French prosecutors. They have implicated officials who then lost their place in the IOC family as active or honorary members.

A low-risk future beckons for the IOC following the often-troubled Tokyo Olympics and the 2022 Beijing Winter Games in February, which will throw scrutiny on China’s human rights record. 

Key partners have also been secured through 2032. The IOC’s signature broadcasting deal with NBC and top-tier sponsors Coca-Cola, Visa and Omega are tied down for the decade ahead.
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A study suggests Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot COVID-19 vaccine may be less effective against the emerging variants of the coronavirus.

Researchers at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine reached the conclusion after conducting laboratory testing of blood samples from volunteers.

Nathaniel Landau, the lead researcher, said the Johnson & Johnson vaccine does not provide the same protection against the variants as either the two-dose Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, which were developed differently, using the messenger RNA method.

The study, posted online Tuesday, has not been peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific journal, and does not reflect the real-world effects of the vaccine. But the findings are similar to other studies that show single-dose vaccines such as Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca do not produce enough antibodies to fight the delta and lambda coronavirus variants.

The delta variant, which was first detected in India, reportedly spreads more easily than other iterations of the virus. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said delta now accounts for 83% of new cases in the nation.

Johnson & Johnson recently published a study that shows a single dose of its vaccine is effective against the delta variant for up to eight months.

But Landau says the results of the NYU study bolster the growing theory that a follow-up shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is necessary.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been plagued with problems since it was approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The vaccine has been linked to a rare but serious blood-clotting disorder, plus a rare neurological condition. Millions of doses were ruined earlier this year when a Baltimore-based manufacturing plant mixed the Johnson & Johnson vaccine with ingredients from the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported that there are 191.4 million total confirmed COVID-19 infections in the world, including 4.1 million global fatalities as of Wednesday.

South Korean health officials reported a new single-day record of 1,784 new COVID-19 infections Wednesday as the country struggles to contain a wave of infections linked to the delta variant, with more than 1,000 new cases recorded each day for the past two weeks.

The surge has been centered mainly in the capital, Seoul, which has been put under a variety of restrictions and more cases have been reported outside the city.

South Korea has recorded 182,265 total coronavirus cases, including 2,060 deaths.  Only 32% of the country’s 52 million people have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, with 6.6 million fully vaccinated.

Health officials are also dealing with an outbreak on a naval warship that has been patrolling the waters off the coast of Africa that has sickened at least 270 crewmen.

(Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.)
 
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Belarus opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya pushed Tuesday for the United States to apply pressure to the government of President Alexander Lukashenko, including through the use of sanctions. 

“Sanctions is not silver bullet, but they can help to stop violence in Belarus and to make representatives of the regime to start dialogue with civil society,” Tsikhanouskaya told VOA. 

She spoke outside the White House after talks with U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan, one of a series of meetings this week with officials from the Biden administration and the U.S. Congress. 

“I asked the U.S. to be the guarantors of our independence, that they will stand for our independence if it is under the threat. Because our independence is the highest value for Belarusians,” Tsikhanouskaya told VOA. 

She said she asked that the United States provide more support for civil society groups in Belarus, and that it is up to democratic countries to “support those who are fighting now.” 

Tsikhanouskaya was the main challenger to Lukashenko in an August 2020 election that the opposition and many Western governments considered rigged. Lukashenko denies the allegation. She fled the country after the election as Lukashenko’s government cracked down on protests. 

“The United States, together with partners and allies, will continue to hold the Lukashenka regime accountable for its actions, including through the imposition of sanctions,” U.S. National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne said in a statement about Tuesday’s meeting.

State Department spokesman Ned Price, speaking to reporters at a Tuesday briefing, said sanctions are “a powerful tool,” and that the United States supports the aspirations of the people of Belarus “for a democratic, free and prosperous future.” 

“We are committed to close coordination with likeminded allies and partners on next steps, just as we have been in demonstrating our response to the crackdown, to the outrageous actions in recent weeks of the Lukashenko regime,” Price said. “We support international efforts to independently look into Belarus’s flawed election, its human rights abuses surrounding the election, and the crackdown that followed.” 

VOA Russian service’s Mykhailo Komadovsky contributed to the report.  
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Ecologists in a vast region of wetlands and forest in remote Oregon have spent the past decade thinning young trees and using planned fires to try to restore the thick stands of ponderosa to a less fire-prone state. 

This week, the nation’s biggest burning wildfire provided them with an unexpected, real-world experiment. As the massive inferno half the size of Rhode Island roared into the Sycan Marsh Preserve, firefighters said the flames jumped less from treetop to treetop and instead returned to the ground, where they were easier to fight, moved more slowly and did less damage to the overall forest. 

The initial assessment suggests that the many years of forest treatments worked, said Pete Caligiuri, Oregon forest program director for The Nature Conservancy, which runs the research at the preserve. 

“Generally speaking, what firefighters were reporting on the ground is that when the fire came into those areas that had been thinned … it had significantly less impact.” 

The reports were bittersweet for researchers, who still saw nearly 51.7 square kilometers of the preserve burn, but the findings add to a growing body of research about how to make wildfires less explosive by thinning undergrowth and allowing forests to burn periodically — as they naturally would do — instead of snuffing out every flame. 

The Bootleg Fire, now 1,569 square kilometers in size, has ravaged southern Oregon and is the fourth-largest fire in the state’s modern history. It’s been expanding by up to 6 kilometers a day, pushed by gusting winds and critically dry weather that’s turned trees and undergrowth into a tinderbox. 

Fire crews have had to retreat from the flames for 10 consecutive days as fireballs jump from treetop to treetop, trees explode, embers fly ahead of the fire to start new blazes, and in some cases, the inferno’s heat creates its own weather of shifting winds and dry lightning. Monstrous clouds of smoke and ash have risen up to 9.6 kilometers into the sky and are visible for more than 185.2 kilometers. 

The fire in the Fremont-Winema National Forest merged with a smaller nearby blaze Tuesday, and it has repeatedly breached a perimeter of treeless dirt and fire retardant meant to stop its advance.  

More evacuations were ordered Monday night, and a red flag weather warning signifying dangerous fire conditions was in effect through Tuesday. The fire is 30% contained. 

“We’re in this for as long as it takes to safely confine this monster,” Incident Commander Rob Allen said Tuesday. 

At least 2,000 homes have been evacuated at some point during the fire and another 5,000 threatened. At least 70 homes and more than 100 outbuildings have gone up in flames. Thick smoke chokes the area where residents and wildlife alike have already been dealing with months of drought and extreme heat. No one has died. 

The Bootleg Fire was one of many fires burning in a dozen states, most of them in the West. Sixteen large uncontained fires burned in Oregon and Washington state alone on Monday. 

Historically, wildfires in Oregon and elsewhere in the U.S. West burned an area as big or bigger than the current blaze more frequently but much less explosively. Periodic, naturally occurring fire cleared out the undergrowth and smaller trees that cause today’s fires to burn so dangerously. 

Those fires have not been allowed to burn for the past 120 years, said James Johnston, a researcher with Oregon State University’s College of Forestry who studies historical wildfires. 

The area on the northeastern flank of the Bootleg Fire is in the ancestral homeland of the Klamath Tribes, which have used intentional, managed fire to keep the fuel load low and prevent such explosive blazes. Scientists at the Sycan Marsh research station now work with the tribe and draw on that knowledge. 

Climate change is the catalyst for the worsening wildfire seasons in the West, Johnston said, but poor forest management and a policy of decades of fire suppression have made a bad situation even worse. 

“My colleagues and I have been predicting a massive fire in that area for years. It’s an area that’s exceptionally prone to catastrophic fire,” said Johnston, who is not affiliated with Sycan Marsh. “It’s dry. It’s fire-prone and always has been. But what’s changed over the past 100 years is an extraordinary amount of fuel buildup.” 

Other fires

Elsewhere, fire crews were engaged in other daunting battles. 

In Northern California, authorities expanded evacuations for the Tamarack Fire in Alpine County in the Sierra Nevada to include the mountain town of Mesa Vista late Monday. That fire, which exploded over the weekend was 158 square kilometers with no containment. 

On the western side of the Sierra, the Dixie Fire has scorched 163 square kilometers, threatening tiny communities in the Feather River Valley region. 

Meteorologist Julia Ruthford told a briefing that a surge of monsoonal moisture from the Southwest increased atmospheric instability Sunday and Monday, creating plumes topping 9.6 kilometers — so big that the fire generated a thunderstorm over itself, hurling lightning bolts and whipping up gusty winds. 

For the past two days in Oregon, the fire has danced around Sycan Marsh, where researchers raced to protect buildings with sprinklers and fire lines. The 121.7 square kilometer habitat attracts migrating and nesting birds and offers a unique location to research forest and fire ecology. 

The nonprofit operates its own fire engines and maintains federal firefighting certification. It now has three of its own engines and seven firefighters on the blaze, and more people are arriving from North Carolina and Florida to try to save the preserve. 

“It’s an amazing place,” Caligiuri said. “It’s very hard to watch it all happening, and seeing all of that work being threatened by this fire is a lot to process.” 
 
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Canadian officials announced that fully vaccinated American citizens and permanent residents can enter Canada for what is being called “discretionary travel” beginning August 9. 

Those wanting to cross the 8,891-kilometer border by land or air into Canada will have to arrive asymptomatic and provide proof of full vaccination as well as a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours of arrival. 

The required documentation must be uploaded to the ArriveCAN app ahead of the trip, and travelers will need to have the paper version physically available. 

Canada’s easing of entry restrictions will extend to travelers from all other countries starting September 7, with identical requirements.   

The U.S.-Canada border has been closed to nonessential travel since March of last year. Canadians, however, have been able to fly into the United States with only a negative COVID-19 test. 

Laurie Trautman, director of the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University in Bellingham, is not surprised by Ottawa’s decision.  

“I think that is a natural next step to allow Americans coming from the United States to Canada who are fully vaccinated for any trip purpose to be exempt,” Trautman said.

“So I’m glad to see there’s a date. I’m glad to see there’s a plan.” 

For Goldy Hyder, president and CEO of the Business Council of Canada, the announcement is good for commerce — and people’s outlook on both sides of the border.   

“When you think about it, what we have been through as human beings over the last 16-17 months or so is not natural, and what’s natural for people is to interact with each other,” Hyder said.

“To celebrate events, to mourn events, to, you know, meet our customers, to take vacations — all of these things are part of being a human being. And those are the things that we sacrificed for the last 16-17 months.” 

Perrin Beatty, the president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, welcomes the reopening, particularly for the tourism sector and other businesses that rely on cross-border travel with the United States.

One concern he has going forward is potential delays at the border for checking health documents.   

“And the government is going to need to look for ways of speeding that up,” Beatty said. “Otherwise, we’ll have massive traffic jams with people trying to cross the border at peak times. And that’s why it’s so important for us to have digital secure vaccination certification.”   

Beatty also said the Canadian government should eliminate the requirement to have a negative COVID-19 test.  

In making the announcements at a virtual press conference, Canadian Minister of Public Safety Bill Blair said he talked with U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas about the changes.

Blair said the current restrictions that expire on the 21st of July are expected to continue for travelers going by land into the United States. 

“They are obviously considering additional measures and data,” Blair said. “But at the present time, they have not indicated a plan to make any changes in their current border restrictions that are in place.” 

Residents of the French islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon will also be allowed into Canada for nonessential travel on Aug. 9. 

Earlier, the Canadian government shortened the ban on cruise ships docking in the country to Nov. 1, four months earlier than it originally planned. 

The Canada Border Services Agency staffs 117 legal crossing points along the Canada-U.S. border and 13 international airports.  
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An official at Mali’s presidency said Tuesday that interim leader Assimi Goita was “safe and sound” after armed men attacked him during a religious ceremony in the capital Bamako.  

The official added that Goita had arrived at the military camp of Kati, outside Bamako, “where security has been reinforced”. 

Two armed men, including one who wielded a knife, attacked Goita in the great mosque in the capital Bamako, an AFP journalist saw.   

The attack took place during prayers for the Islamic festival of Eid al-Adha.  

Religious Affairs Minister Mamadou Kone told AFP that a man had “tried to kill the president with a knife” but was apprehended.  

Latus Toure, the director of the Great Mosque, said an attacker had lunged for the president but wounded someone else.  

AFP was not immediately able to confirm the accounts. 

Mali has been struggling to contain a jihadist insurgency that first emerged in the north of the country in 2012, and has since spread to Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.  

Thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes.  

The conflict has also been mirrored by political instability in the capital.  

Colonel Goita led a coup last August, ousting elected president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita after weeks of mass protests over corruption and the long-running jihadist conflict. 

In May, he ousted a transitional government that had been entrusted with the task of leading the country back to civilian rule in February 2022. 

He was then named transitional president, but has pledged to keep to the goal for returning to civilian government. 
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Bushra Shah, a 35-year-old Pakistani, says she is realizing a childhood dream by making the great pilgrimage to Mecca, and under new rules she’s doing it without a male guardian.

The hajj ministry has officially allowed women of all ages to make the pilgrimage without a male relative, known as a “mehrem,” on the condition that they go in a group.

The decision is part of social reforms rolled out by de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is trying to shake off the kingdom’s austere image and open its oi reliant economy.

Since his rise to power, women have been allowed to drive and to travel abroad without a male guardian, even against a backdrop of a relentless crackdown against critics of his rule, including women’s rights activists.

“It’s like a dream come true. My childhood dream was to make the hajj,” Shah told AFP, before setting off from her home in Jeddah, the major port city in western Saudi Arabia.

The hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam, is a must for able-bodied Muslims with the means to do so at least once in their lifetime.

For the young mother, making the pilgrimage with her husband and child would have been a distraction that would have prevented her from “concentrating completely on the rites.”

Shah is one of 60,000 pilgrims chosen to take part in this year’s hajj, which has been dramatically scaled down for the second year because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Only citizens and residents of Saudi Arabia, chosen in a lottery, are taking part. Officials have said that 40% of this year’s pilgrims are women.

“Many women will also come with me. I am very proud that we are now independent and do not need a guardian,” Shah said.

Her husband, Ali Murtada, said he “strongly encouraged” his wife to make the trip alone, after the government’s decision to ban children from participating in the hajj this year.
He will stay in Jeddah to look after their child.

“We decided that one of us should go. Maybe she will be pregnant next year or maybe the children will still not be allowed to participate,” the 38-year-old said.

It was unclear when the hajj ministry lifted the restriction, and some women have reported that travel agencies are still reluctant to accept women travelling without a male companion for the hajj.

Some even posted advertisements ruling out groups of unaccompanied women, in a sign of how the dizzying social changes are meeting some resistance in the deeply conservative kingdom.

Authorities previously required the presence of a male guardian for any woman pilgrim younger than 45, preventing many Muslim women around the world from making the hajj.

That was the case for Marwa Shaker, an Egyptian woman living in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.

“Hajj without a guardian is a miracle,” the 42-year-old, who works for a civil society organization, told AFP.

Now travelling to Mecca with three of her friends, the mother of three had tried several times to make the pilgrimage before the pandemic. But she was unable to because her husband had already been and was not permitted to go again so soon.

“I feel enormously joyful. God has called me despite all the obstacles,” she said.

For Sadaf Ghafoor, a British-Pakistani doctor, travelling without a male guardian was the “only option.”

“We couldn’t leave the children alone,” the 40-year-old said of her three youngsters.  

Her husband decided to stay behind, and Ghafoor headed to Mecca with a neighbor.

“It was not easy to take the decision to go alone … but we took this opportunity as a blessing,” she said.
…

Russia has asked the U.N. Security Council to vote Thursday on its proposal to abolish the post of international high representative for Bosnia and the office that goes with it by July 2022, diplomats told Agence France-Presse.    

The vote was requested for Thursday afternoon, said one of the diplomats on condition of anonymity.  

It is now up to France, which holds the presidency of the Security Council this month, to confirm the vote. 

The subject has been controversial for years and has come back on the radar in recent weeks. It pits Russia against the West, and in particular against Germany, which is due to have a former minister take up the post on August 1. 

Submitted to the Security Council last week, the Russian draft resolution, co-sponsored by China, “welcomes and agrees” to the designation of German politician Christian Schmidt as successor to current high representative Valentin Inzko of Austria.    

But the draft, obtained by AFP, goes on to say that it “supports the appointment of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina (…) until 31 July 2022 with closure of the Office of the High Representative.” 

According to Western diplomats, Moscow and Beijing may not garner the minimum nine out of 15 votes necessary to approve the resolution, without one of the five permanent members of the council resorting to their veto power to block it.    

The five permanent members are Russia, China, the United States, France and Britain. 

At the end of June, Russia said it “categorically refused” the appointment of Schmidt, a former German minister of agriculture.  

The United States replied that the appointment was a “closed matter” and that the U.N. had nothing to do with the appointment of the high representative, which is decided by the Peace Implementation Council of the 1995 Dayton agreement, which is made up of 55 countries.  

After 12 years as high representative, Inzko, who was rejected by Russia over what it saw as bias against the Bosnian Serbs, resigned from his post.  

The job has no term limits attached to it. According to a Western diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity, Russia’s draft resolution has no other objective than to “undermine the institution” represented by the Office of the High Representative.  

“It is absolutely crystal clear that this does not need any kind of endorsement by the Security Council,” the diplomat said. 
…

Ben & Jerry’s said Monday it was going to stop selling its ice cream in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and contested east Jerusalem, saying the sales in the territories sought by the Palestinians are “inconsistent with our values.”

The announcement was one of the strongest and highest-profile rebukes by a well-known company of Israel’s policy of settling its citizens on war-won lands. The settlements are widely seen by the international community as illegal and obstacles to peace.

The move by the Vermont-based ice cream company drew swift reproach from Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a former leader of the West Bank settlement movement who called it “an immoral decision, and I believe that it will turn out to be a business mistake, too.”

The company informed its longstanding licensee — responsible for manufacturing and distributing the ice cream in Israel — that it will not renew the license agreement when it expires at the end of next year, according to a statement posted on the Vermont-based company’s website.

The Ben & Jerry’s statement cited “the concerns shared with us by our fans and trusted partners.”

The company did not explicitly identify those concerns, but last month, a group called Vermonters for Justice in Palestine called on Ben & Jerry’s to “end complicity in Israel’s occupation and abuses of Palestinian human rights.”

“How much longer will Ben & Jerry’s permit its Israeli-manufactured ice cream to be sold in Jewish-only settlements while Palestinian land is being confiscated, Palestinian homes are being destroyed, and Palestinian families in neighborhoods like Sheik Jarrah are facing eviction to make way for Jewish settlers?” the group’s Ian Stokes said in a June 10 news release.

In a Monday statement, the group said Ben & Jerry’s actions did not go far enough.

“By maintaining a presence in Israel, Ben & Jerry’s continues to be complicit in the killing, imprisonment and dispossession of Palestinian people and the flaunting of international law,” said the Vermont group’s Kathy Shapiro.

The Israeli foreign ministry called Ben & Jerry’s decision “a surrender to ongoing and aggressive pressure from extreme anti-Israel groups” and said the company was cooperating with “economic terrorism.”

“The decision is immoral and discriminatory, as it singles out Israel, harms both Israelis and Palestinians and encourages extremist groups who use bullying tactics,” the ministry said in a statement. It called on Ben & Jerry’s to withdraw its decision.

While Ben & Jerry’s products will not be sold in the settlements, the company said it will stay in Israel through a different arrangement. But doing so will be difficult. Major Israeli supermarket chains, the primary distribution channel for the ice cream maker, all operate in the settlements.

Founded in Vermont in 1978 but currently owned by consumer goods conglomerate Unilever, Ben & Jerry’s has not shied away from social causes. While many businesses tread lightly in politics for fear of alienating customers, the ice cream maker has taken the opposite approach, often espousing progressive causes.

Ben & Jerry’s took a stand against what it called the Trump administration’s regressive policies by rebranding one of its flavors Pecan Resist in 2018, ahead of midterm elections.

The company said Pecan Resist celebrated activists who were resisting oppression, harmful environmental practices and injustice. As part of the campaign, Ben & Jerry’s said it was giving $25,000 each to four activist entities.

Aida Touma-Sliman, an Israeli lawmaker with the Joint List of Arab parties, wrote on Twitter that Ben & Jerry’s decision Monday was “appropriate and moral.” She added that the “occupied territories are not part of Israel” and that the move is an important step to help pressure the Israeli government to end the occupation.

The West Bank and east Jerusalem were captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war. Some 700,000 Israeli settlers now live in the two territories — roughly 500,000 in the occupied West Bank and 200,000 in east Jerusalem.

Israel treats the two areas separately, considering east Jerusalem as part of its capital.

Meanwhile, Israel considers the West Bank as disputed territory whose fate should be resolved in negotiations. However, the international community considers both areas to be occupied territory. The Palestinians seek the West Bank as part of a future independent state, with east Jerusalem as their capital.

Israel in recent years has become a partisan issue in Washington, with many Democrats — particularly of the party’s progressive wing — growing increasingly critical about a number of Israeli policies, including settlement construction, and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s close ties with former President Trump. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has been an outspoken critic of Israel.

The BDS movement — shorthand for a grassroots, Palestinian-led movement that advocates boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israeli institutions and businesses — applauded Ben & Jerry’s decision as “a decisive step towards ending the company’s complicity in Israel’s occupation and violations of Palestinian rights” but called upon the company to do more.

“We hope that Ben & Jerry’s has understood that, in harmony with its social justice commitments, there can be no business as usual with apartheid Israel,” a statement read.

The Israeli government says the BDS movement masks a deeper aim of delegitimizing or even destroying the entire country.

The Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing the roughly 500,000 Israelis living in West Bank settlements, said “there’s no need to buy products from companies that boycott hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens because of the place they choose to live.” It said Ben & Jerry’s decision “brought a bad spirit to such a sweet industry” and called on Israelis to buy locally produced ice cream this summer.

Ben & Jerry’s move on Monday may not be the final chapter in the saga. Airbnb announced in 2018 that it would stop advertising properties in Israeli settlements.

Several months later, after coming under harsh criticism from Israel and a federal lawsuit by Israeli Americans who owned property in the settlements, the company reversed its decision.
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STAMFORD, Conn. — Michael Phelps will be part of NBC’s Olympics coverage as a correspondent and swimming commentator, the network announced Monday. 

Phelps — who has won the most medals (28) and gold medals (23) in Olympic history — will call selected swimming events with Dan Hicks and Rowdy Gaines and contribute features as a correspondent during primetime coverage. Phelps, who swam in five Games from 2000-16, did some work for NBC during its coverage of last month’s U.S. swimming trials. 

“I know he’s going to offer some incredible insight on especially those races that he has won so many gold medals in,” Gaines said during a teleconference. 

A three-part retrospective on Phelps’ career is streaming on NBC’s Peacock platform. 
…