Peace & Truth
George TrofimoffΒ (March 9, 1927 β September 19, 2014) was aΒ United States military intelligence officerΒ of Russian descent. He was convicted in a U.S. federal court of having spied for theΒ Soviet UnionΒ during the 1970s and 1980s. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on September 27, 2001.Β George TrofimoffΒ is the most senior officer in U.S. military history to have [β¦]
George trofimoff
This repatriation to the people of Italy is the fourth involving HSI agents since July, with this one being the most comprehensive, as it involves more than 20 different seizures from a dozen different HSI offices. The artifacts we repatriate today cover more than 2,500 years of your civilizationβs history β from a fragment of a fresco from the first century BCE to ancient coins made of gold that likely fell from someoneβs pocket 1,700 years ago, to a relatively modern 3-meter-tall painting that was mounted behind an altar.β
βFor nearly a quarter of a century now, the United States and Italy have worked together to combat illicit trafficking and theft of cultural property through the framework β¦ of the bilateral cultural property agreement,β said the U.S. Department Stateβs Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Assistant Secretary Lee Satterfield. βThe relationship weβve built through this agreement is a model of cooperation, and today is yet more proof that it is a model of success.β
One of the primary goals of the HSI Cultural Property, Art and Antiquities (CPAA) program is to protect and preserve the worldβs cultural heritage and knowledge of past civilizations. CPAA conducts training and outreach, supports cultural property investigations and enhances international relations by working with foreign governments and citizens to return their nationβs looted cultural heritage and stolen artwork.
While this is a significant number, a single artifact or object recovered and repatriated is a success in preserving cultural heritage. In addition to its work facilitating repatriations, CPAA continues to execute its mission to investigate leads, work alongside partners and pursue individuals and translational criminal networks engaged in the smuggling of cultural property, art and antiquities.
HSI is the principal investigative arm of DHS, responsible for investigating transnational crime and threats, specifically those criminal organizations that exploit the global infrastructure through which international trade, travel and finance move. HSIβs workforce of more than 8,700 employees consists of more than 6,000 special agents assigned to 237 cities throughout the United States, and 93 overseas locations in 56 countries. HSIβs international presence represents DHSβ largest investigative law enforcement presence abroad and one of the largest international footprints in U.S. law enforcement.
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It’s also one of several geographically specific public holidays that have helped Australia live up to its “Land of the Long Weekend” moniker.
With Recreation Day and the Melbourne Cup just around the corner, here’s a timely look at some of Australia’s most curious public holidays.
Embracing long weekends β and if need be, creating them out of thin air β is pretty much how the curiously named Recreation Day came to be.
Recreation Day is a holiday that arguably epitomises modern-day Australian values better than any other β a day with no cultural or religious significance on which you do whatever you choose.
“There’s a there’s a kind of parochialism in Tasmania. If one particular regional city gets a public holiday, other parts of the state feel aggrieved,” explains Richard Eccleston, a political scientist at the University of Tasmania.
“My understanding is that’s the origin of Recreation Day in northern Tasmania β as a kind of compensation for Hobart having Regatta Day in February.
With that in mind, perhaps the most surprising thing about Recreation Day is the fact it took until 1991 for the state to legislate it into being. Still, it’s difficult not to admire northern Tasmanians for their ability to manifest a day off into existence.
“At least they’re completely transparent,” Professor Eccleston says.
“You know, ‘we just want another public holiday so that there’s some kind of equity across the state’.”
There is some conjecture over how the Northern Territory came to mark the first Monday in August with this quaintly named day.
Picnic Day events in the Territory date back to the late 19th century; an annual Union Picnic Day was observed in the town of Adelaide River by employees working on the North Australia Railway, which started being built in the 1880s.
However, it was a Central Australian horse race β first run between pastoralists and local police in 1947 in the tiny town of Harts Range (Atitjere), 215 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs β that was responsible for the government gazetting the first Monday in August as Picnic Day.
The Harts Range Races is still an annual event that attracts a couple of thousand visitors to the tiny community, but Picnic Day is observed throughout the NT and is celebrated by Territorians in much the same spirit as Recreation Day is by northern Tasmanians.
In many ways, it’s difficult to prosecute the argument that the Melbourne Cup is still the Race That Stops the Nation, with concerns about problem gambling and animal welfare threatening to overshadow the race itself in recent years.
At the height of Victoria’s COVID social restrictions in 2020, the Cup went ahead without spectators and the following year, crowds were capped at 10,000.
Last year, fewer than 74,000 spectators turned up at Flemington and Channel Ten’s ratings slumped to a record low of just over a million metropolitan viewers last year β a far cry from the more than 2.7 million city viewers who tuned in a decade prior.
But the apparent waning interest for the Cup itself has done little to dampen enthusiasm for the public holiday, which was expanded to include all Victorian regional council areas in 2008.
It’s probably no surprise that the self-proclaimed sporting capital of Australia also has a day off to mark the AFL Grand Final. But that’s not to suggest Daniel Andrews’ move to make the day before the grand final a statewide public holiday in 2015 didn’t ruffle some feathers.
Some Melburnians have been calling for the reinstatement of the Royal Melbourne Show holiday ever since it was revoked by Jeff Kennett’s government in 1994.
Some regional Victorians are also still smarting over the Brumby government’s 2008 decision to remove public holidays for agricultural shows and country racing cup meetings and instead impose the Melbourne Cup holiday for the whole state.
The Victorian Employers’ Chamber of Commerce also claimed an AFL Grand Final eve holiday would cost businesses up to $600 million, and then-state opposition leader Matthew Guy declared in 2015 that the holiday would be scrapped if the Coalition won the next state poll.
But, as Professor Ecclestone says, “once they’re established, governments and politicians are loath to get rid of them”.
By the time Mr Guy had hit the hustings in 2018, he didn’t want the now-entrenched day off to be used as a political football, declaring: “I don’t think Victorians want public holidays to be politicised so we will leave the Grand Final holiday as it is”.
It seems the future of AFL Grand Final eve β like many of Australia’s other weird and wonderful public holidays β is safe.
As Professor Eccleston succinctly puts it: “Never stand between an Australian and a public holiday.”
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Japan’s Ambassador to Australia has taken a relatively low-key approach since he arrived to Canberra in May β at least when compared with his famously exuberant predecessor, Shingo Yamagami.
But the quietly spoken envoy has a powerful family story that runs like a thread through Japan’s modern history: its ruinous embrace of militarism and empire in the 1930s and World War II, the colossal brutality and loss of life during the final spasms of that war in the Pacific, and its remarkable economic and strategic transformation in the following decades.
And now that Ambassador Suzuki has found his feet in Australia, he’s decided to tell this story, believing it illuminates something essential about the relationship between Australia and Japan.
It’s also a story about how quickly and profoundly things can change in the space of a single generation.
The ambassador’s father, Harunobu Suzuki, came of age in Imperial Japan. He attended the Imperial Army Academy, before training as a kamikaze pilot as World War II ground towards its terrible conclusion.
Their duty was a grim one. After Allied forces slowed Japan’s advance and then began pushing it back, kamikaze pilots β some still teenagers β were tasked with a suicide mission.
They hurtled their bomb-laden planes down through the sky, before crashing them into US and British ships in a desperate attempt to sink them.
Harunobu was set to join those ranks, another young life lost among countless dead.
“He was going to carry out his service, to carry out a kamikaze attack on the allied forces off the coast of Okinawa,” Mr Suzuki told the ABC, during an interview at the Japanese Embassy in Canberra.
“In the course of training, he had a very severe accident β¦ a big fire in the airplane. Half of his body was burned,” the ambassador said.
“So, he was hospitalised. He was supposed to be dead.”
That terrible accident likely saved his life.
The young man lay unconscious for a long time, before beginning a slow convalescence. As he recovered, the war finally came to an end on August 15 after the US dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Like everyone else in Japan, Harunobu started to build a new life in the wreckage of the war. And one of the things he did was start a family.
As the ambassador puts it, rather plainly: “He couldn’t die. And that’s how I was born, later.”
But the war still haunted his father, as did the brute fact of his unlikely survival.
“Many of his friends did that [kamikaze] job, and then died. But he was the survivor,” Mr Suzuki says.
“So, after the war he felt very shameful, that he couldn’t die, like his friends. That was all the time β¦ a kind of a trauma for him. And it took a long time, I think, for him to overcome it.”
Compounding that guilt was his family’s grief. Harunobu was the youngest of four boys in his family, and his two eldest brothers also died in the war; one fighting in the Philippines, the other in Burma.
In the wake of the war, he threw himself into his new career as a lawyer. But even then, the war loomed over the family in a different way.
“He was very conscious of his guilt and kind of, in a way, sacrificed our family. He wanted to contribute to society by some other means,” Mr Suzuki says.
“He became β¦ a pro bono lawyer. He didn’t receive money, and when he received money, it was very small amounts. So, our family was kind of pretty much a poor family.”
The ambassador remembers being taunted relentlessly by wealthier children at school, because he didn’t have his own study room, and because his family’s house was so rundown.
Eventually, the boy’s patience snapped. He remembers exploding at his father one day, crying helplessly and accusing him of failing to provide for his family.
His father, he says, was stunned. He changed his career path, moved into conveyancing and real estate law, and built his son and family a new house.
Japan, meanwhile, built itself once again into an economic powerhouse, enjoying decades of booming prosperity which many in the country β after 30 years of recent anaemic growth β must look back at wistfully.
Of course, Japan’s strategic outlook has also utterly transformed since World War II, and its former enemies are now close allies or friends.
But he lived long enough to see his son take on a senior diplomatic job in his 30s with chief responsibility for the US-Japan military alliance β a strange irony for a man who spent months preparing to kill as many American sailors as possible on a suicide mission.
And now his son is ambassador to Australia, another former World War II foe, and a country that still retains lingering and painful memories of Japanese wartime atrocities and cruelties in the Pacific and South-East Asia.
The picture now could not be more different. Tokyo and Canberra have long enjoyed close economic links, but are now busy rapidly building up strategic and military ties, with one eye on an increasingly belligerent China.
The two countries have signed a series of key security agreements and have pledged to embark on ever more sophisticated joint exercises with an expanding array of friends and allies.
Just in August, two Japanese F-35 fighter jets arrived in Australia for training β the first time Japan has ever deployed the aircraft overseas.
The ambassador says his father was delighted to see him working with the US, and he’s confident he would be just as pleased to see him in Canberra now.
“My father was very, very proud of it, and he was very happy about it. So I’m sure that me being ambassador here, also, I’m sure that he is very proud of it,” he said.
“Once we [were] foes, we are the enemy, but now we are good friends, and trying to preserve the peace.
“And I think that’s what he really wanted to see between β¦ the former Allied countries and Japan.”
That might also explain why the ambassador made the decision to speak about his family’s own personal history β not a decision, he suggests, which came easily or naturally to him.
He first told the story in public at a Japan Self Defence Forces Day reception at the Japanese Embassy in Canberra last month, drawing audible gasps from parts of the crowd.
In the lead up to the event, he realised that it would be the perfect moment to take the plunge.
“If I didn’t do that then, probably I would not be able to do it forever,” he said, wryly.
But, he said, the story is an important one to tell.
“I also think and hope that my family’s story β¦ will indicate to the people how important it is to overcome these difficulties, and to seek a reconciliation,” the ambassador said.
“Japan [and] Australia, have now a tremendously excellent relationship. But that is resting on our reconciliation from the war in the Pacific.
“And this great reconciliation is … really the bedrock of our friendship.
“War leaves scars to those who are involved, on both sides. And it takes time to heal.”
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Researchers from Morocco’s National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage presented new discoveries made this year at Chellah β a 3.15-square-kilometre UNESCO World Heritage Site with a footprint almost five times the size of Pompeii.
The archaeological site will offer insight into the lives of Roman settlers and Romanised Moroccans or Mauro-Romans in that era, lead archaeologist Abdelaziz El Hatyai said.
The Roman-era bath spans over 2,000 square metres (21,527 square feet) resembling imperial counterparts in Rome, he said.A view shows what Moroccan archeologists said is a Roman-era archeological site that they uncovered in Rabat, Morocco November 3, 2023(Reuters: Ahmed El Jechtimi)noneA cat walks along recently unearthed archaeological ruins, in Chellah necropolis in Rabat, Morocco,.(AP: Mosa’ab Elshamy)noneThe site of recently unearthed archaeological ruins, in Chellah necropolis, Rabat, Morocco.(AP: Mosa’ab Elshamy)noneA view shows what Moroccan archaeologists said is a Roman-era archaeological site that they uncovered in Rabat.(Reuters: Ahmed El Jechtimi )none
However, scholars believe the area was first settled by the Phoenicians and emerged as a key Roman empire outpost from the second to fifth century.
Findings have included bricks inscribed in neo-Punic, a language that predates the Romans’ arrival in Morocco.
The fortified necropolis and surrounding settlements were established near the Atlantic Ocean along the banks of the Bou Regreg river.
It is believed the Muslim Marinid dynasty had built the fortified necropolis in the 13th century.
Archaeologists and officials present the recently discovered statue.(AP: Mosa’ab Elshamy)none
At a news conference, Professor El Khayari and his team of archaeologists showed reporters a recently discovered statue of a woman β possibly a deity or empress β draped in cloth.
It was the first of such a statue discovered in Morocco since the 1960.
Professor Khayari believed the statue to be of a Roman deity, noting that it was a common practice to behead statues representing Roman gods when ancient Moroccans adopted Christianity around the fifth century.
The main excavation site has been closed for renovations since the pandemic.
Archaeologists have worked on expanding it since March, in an ongoing effort to find the port and other parts of what is believed to be one of the largest Roman towns in the country.
The footprint β including the extended site β is larger than that of Volubilis, widely visited ruins, 179 kilometres east of Rabat.
Mr Khayari, also a professor of pre-Islamic archaeology from Morocco’s National Institute of Archaeological Sciences and Heritage said the site’s significance stems from its location on the water.
This likely made it an important trading site, facilitating the exchange of materials including the import of Italian marble and export of African ivory.
He said that new excavations underscored the city’s wealth and hoped to find out more in the coming months and years.
“We still haven’t discovered the actual port,” he said.
A view shows what Moroccan archaeologists said is a Roman-era archaeological site that they uncovered in Rabat.(Reuters: Ahmed El Jechtimi )none
Mehdi Ben Said, Morocco’s Minister of Youth, Culture and Communication, said that he was confident the ruins’ location near the centre of Morocco’s capital would become a draw for tourists both from Morocco and abroad.
His department has invested close to 455,000 euros ($750,000) in the project since March, and plans to double that amount next year and each year following until excavation is complete.
“It’s something that can interest everyone,” Mr Ben Said said.
“Sites like Volubilis get 500,000 visitors per year. We are aiming for 1 million by developing this site, bringing it to life, setting up marketing, communications and everything.”
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The tree was cut up and removed by the National Trust last month.
Two men aged in their 30s have been arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and bailed. A boy, 16, and a man aged in his 60s were previously held.
Part of Hadrian’s Wall was also damaged when the tree came down, some time between the evening of 27 September and morning of 28 September.
The Sycamore Gap tree had been there for more than 100 years
On 12 October the tree, which was once 50ft (15m), was taken to an unnamed National Trust property to be stored.
National Trust manager Andrew Poad, who had worked around the tree for about 35 years, described it as being “like a funeral”.
The felling sparked an outpouring of emotion from millions of people, with many lamenting the loss of an emblem of north-east England.
The spot was made famous in the 1991 film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and became a popular place for walkers and photographers due to its unusual setting.
Kevin Reynolds, who directed the Hollywood film, described the events as “ugly”, “despicable” and “senseless”.
Meanwhile, the National Trust, which looks after the site with the Northumberland National Park Authority, said it felt like the team “had lost a family member”.
Det Ch Insp Rebecca Fenney-Menzies said Northumbria Police was “committed to getting justice”.
She urged anyone with information “no matter how small or insignificant you think it may be” to come forward.
Detectives described the case as “very difficult and complex” and urged people not speculate about the investigation.
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Hammam Essalhine; a Roman Bathhouse was built over 2,000 years ago and is still up and running – situated among the green pines, cedars, and lush oak forests of the AurΓ¨s Mountains lies El Hamma town in the Khenchela Province, Northern part of Algeria.
— Archaeo – Histories (@archeohistories) October 29, 2023
A mild, Mediterranean⦠pic.twitter.com/h6ND2a5DG9
But the final blow for many species may have unfolded in the following years, as the skies were darkened by clouds of debris and temperatures plunged.
Dust from pulverised rock ejected into the atmosphere from the impact site may have choked the atmosphere and blocked plants from harnessing sunlight for life-sustaining energy in a process called photosynthesis.
Researchers ran palaeoclimate simulations based on sediment unearthed at a North Dakota palaeontological site called Tanis that preserved evidence of the post-impact conditions, including the prodigious dust fallout.
The simulations showed this fine-grained dust could have blocked photosynthesis for up to two years by rendering the atmosphere opaque to sunlight and remained in the atmosphere for 15 years, said planetary scientist Cem Berk Senel of the Royal Observatory of Belgium and Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
Their study was published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
While prior research highlighted two other factors β sulphur released after the impact and soot from the wildfires β this study indicated dust played a larger role than previously known.
The dust, silicate particles measuring about 0.8β8.0 micrometres, formed a global cloud layer.
The particles were spawned from the granite and gneiss rock pulverised in the violent impact that gouged the Yucatan’s Chicxulub crater, 180 kilometres wide and 20 kilometres deep.
In the aftermath, Earth experienced a drop in surface temperatures of about 15 degrees Celsius.
“It was cold and dark for years,” Vrije Universiteit Brussel planetary scientist and study co-author Philippe Claeys said.
Earth descended into an “impact winter,” with global temperatures plummeting and primary productivity β the process land and aquatic plants and other organisms use to make food from inorganic sources β collapsing.
This caused a chain reaction of extinctions.
As plants died, herbivores starved. Carnivores were left without prey and perished. In marine realms, the demise of tiny phytoplankton caused food webs to crash.
“While the sulphur stayed about eight to nine years, soot and silicate dust resided in the atmosphere for about 15 years after the impact,” Royal Observatory of Belgium planetary scientist and study co-author ΓzgΓΌr Karatekin said.
“The complete recovery from the impact winter took even longer, with pre-impact temperature conditions returning only after about 20 years.”
The asteroid, estimated at 10β15km wide, brought a cataclysmic end to the Cretaceous Period.
The dinosaurs, aside from their bird descendants, were lost, as were the marine reptiles that dominated the seas and many other groups.
The big beneficiary were the mammals, who until then were bit players in the drama of life but were given the opportunity to become the main characters.
“Biotic groups that were not adapted to survive dark, cold and food-deprived conditions for almost two years would have experienced massive extinctions,” Dr Karatekin said.
“Fauna and flora that could enter a dormant phase, for example, through seeds, cysts or hibernation in burrows.
“(They) were able to adapt to a generalistic lifestyle, not dependent on one particular food source, generally survived better, like small mammals.”
Without this disaster, dinosaurs might still dominate today.
“Dinos dominated Earth and were doing just fine when the meteorite hit,” Dr Claeys said.
“Without the impact, my guess is that mammals, including us, had little chance to become the dominant organisms on this planet.”
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