US Strikes On IS Targets In Nigeria May Only Fan The Flames Of Insurgent Violence

BY ONYEDIKACHI MADUEKE,

THE GUARDIAN

The response of Nigerians to the airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) targets in Sokoto state, north-western Nigeria are complicated. The rationale behind them has been widely opposed, but the strikes themselves have been welcomed.

The airstrikes were framed as a response to what have been described as genocidal attacks on Christians in the country. But the Nigerian authorities have consistently rejected this narrative, arguing that armed groups in the country do not discriminate based on religion, and that Christians and Muslims largely coexist peacefully. Ironically, it was Trump’s redesignation of Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” in November that deepened Muslim-Christian tensions. Many northerners, who are predominantly Muslim, blamed southern Nigerians for championing a narrative that ultimately resulted in US sanctions and international stigma.

The geographic and operational focus of the strikes has complicated the “Christian genocide” framing. Sokoto is the spiritual heartland of Islam in Nigeria, but armed violence in the area disproportionately affects Muslim communities. By contrast, attacks against Christian farmers are most prevalent in north-central states such as Benue and Plateau, where violence is often linked to armed Fulani herders rather than explicitly jihadist groups. The strikes targeted IS elements, not herder militias. While some reports suggest tactical collaboration between jihadist groups in the north-west and armed herders, the mismatch between the stated justification and the operational target raises questions about whether Washington fully understands the local drivers of violence it has labelled genocidal.

Despite there being opposition to – and confusion over – the rationale behind the strikes, they have been broadly welcomed, cutting across religious, ethnic and social divides. Earlier fears were shaped by the spectre of the prolonged US occupations in Libya, Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, cases frequently cited in Nigerian media. By contrast, the Sokoto operation was a limited, targeted precision strike. Moreover, there have so far been no credible reports of civilian casualties, alleviating a major concern in a country where Nigerian air force operations have, on several occasions, accidentally killed hundreds of civilians.

The strikes against IS came at a time of public fatigue with insecurity caused by insurgency, terrorism, banditry and communal violence. Nigerians were ready to accept almost any intervention that promised relief. As terrorist networks become increasingly interconnected across the Sahel and West Africa, Nigerian security forces have become overstretched. Persistent corruption, inadequate training and equipment shortages continue to undermine counterinsurgency efforts. In some theatres, groups such as Boko Haram and its splinter factions now wield more sophisticated weaponry than state forces.

The Nigerian authorities have confirmed that they endorsed the operation. The minister of foreign affairs, Yusuf Tuggar, acknowledged that Abuja provided intelligence that enabled the strikes and Nigerian officials remained in communication with US forces until minutes before execution. This joint counter-terrorism action, rather than a unilateral violation of Nigerian sovereignty, eased concerns about territorial integrity and external military overreach.

Despite the support, Nigeria’s insecurity will not be resolved through airpower alone. Airstrikes may yield short-term tactical gains, but they risk generating longer-term strategic setbacks. Framing the intervention as the defence of persecuted Christians may strengthen extremist narratives of foreign “crusader” aggression, potentially attracting more external funding and support for jihadist groups. Organisations such as Isis-Sahel and emerging groups such as Lakurawa thrive on such symbolism.

The durable solution lies in starving violence of its fuel by addressing its structural drivers: deep socioeconomic inequality (Sokoto has one of the highest numbers of out-of-schoolchildren in Nigeria), desertification and climate stress, weak state presence in rural areas, porous borders and fragile security institutions. Strengthening state capacity to manage grievances, regulate competition over land and resources, and counter extremism remains the only sustainable path to peace.

‘Well, No, You Don’t Have To Have Children’: What African Women Over The Age Of 60 Have Learned About Life

Sylvia Arthur recording the thoughts and recollections of Fatou Jabang and Awa Senghore, in Kartong, in the south of the Gambia. Photograph: Sarjo Baldeh/AWOHOWA/National Geographic Society

BY SYLVIA ARTHUR

Women across west Africa have a life expectancy of 59. In a rare project, Sylvia Arthur set out to give voice to those who have lived beyond expectation, whose experiences have been largely overlooked

Addra insists that his aunt, Anyessi Dossou, does not have a story to tell. “She’s just an old woman who’s never left the village,” he says, as he guides us along dirt tracks in fading light to her home in Avlo, Benin.

When Dossou, in her early 80s, emerges from her room in the compound house she shares with generations of her extended family, the conversation begins hesitantly. “I told you,” Addra says.

Then the levees break. Asked about her husband, Dossou recounts the impact of being widowed at a young age and raising five children. She speaks of small joys and triumphs, and of the intense heartbreak of losing a son. She describes her life now as an older woman and the loneliness she feels in her bones. Dossou clearly has a story. “I’ve never heard her talk like that,” Addra concedes.

At 59, life expectancy of women in west Africa is the lowest of any female population in the world. In 2023, I started to chronicle a history of the region through the experiences of older women, largely overlooked in official narratives.

In 100 interviews with women over the age of 60 in villages and towns on the coasts of Benin, Togo, Sierra Leone and the Gambia, covering how they live, love, survive and thrive, there were many stories. The commonality was in almost all having defied stereotypes, not just in terms of age but in breaking social and cultural barriers.

These are women who are farmers and traders, teachers and seamstresses, businesswomen, mothers, trade unionists and community leaders.

Marie-Thérèse Fakambi, 70, Benin: a midwife

As one of eight siblings from her father’s four wives, Marie-Thérèse Fakambi was her mother’s only child. She enjoyed a bucolic childhood in a large polygamous household in western Benin. Under her mother’s guidance, she left for the commercial capital, Cotonou, to study midwifery, and graduated three years later.

“When I started, on 25 January 1980, the place where I was assigned had no electricity. We worked using a small oil lamp called a luciole during deliveries and even to stitch women up when there were tears.”

Although she has never married or had any children of her own, Fakambi sees herself as a mother to the 5,000 children she delivered throughout her 18-year career, many of whom she still knows and who now have children of their own.

Of her own mother, she says: “She cried all the time until she died. The fact that she didn’t have any more children, and that I didn’t have any, hurt her.”

Fakambi saw things differently. “At one point, I told myself, ‘Well, no, you don’t have to have children.’ My sister has children, my brother has children, and they treat me well. So what’s the problem?”

Now retired, Fakambi is able to indulge her other passion: organising traditional marriage ceremonies, known as dots. She takes pride in bringing together young couples embarking on marital life. “I love it!” she says. “Since I started, I’ve done about 18. It brings me great joy.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, two of her brothers died in quick succession, Fakambi was appointed head of her extended family, a position traditionally held by men. “People have developed a certain trust in me, which allows me to lead them, but men are difficult, and it’s not easy.

“Everyone has their gift,” she says. “This is mine.”

Méwounèsso Tchetike, 74, Togo: a woman who broke the cycle of child marriage

As a child in Koumaye, Togo, Méwounèsso Tchetike had her life mapped out for her. Born into a farming family, as the fourth of five children, she would help on the land as soon as she could walk, assist her mother in selling the produce at market, and be initiated into womanhood at about 13 before being married off and having her own children, repeating the cycle of generations of women before her.

Despite a significant decline in child marriages over the past 30 years, one in four girls in Togo become wives before the age of 18. Kara, Tchetike’s home region, has the second-highest rate of child marriage in the tiny country.

Tchetike’s father betrothed her to the son of a neighbour before she was born. The price was a dowry of grains to be paid annually until Tchetike was ready to be given over to her husband’s family. When that time came, although Tchetike had reservations, she could not go against her father’s will.

“It would bring shame on my family,” Tchetike says. “Everyone in the village would ostracise us and accuse us of stealing our neighbour’s grain over the years.”

Six decades later, and now living in the capital, Lomé, Tchetike is still married to the man she was pledged to; his “senior wife”. But now about 74 (she does not know her exact age) and a mother to five, including two girls, she will not be repeating the patterns of the past.

When asked if she would ever arrange a marriage for her daughters, Tchetike breaks into a throaty laugh. “Never! Never, never, never! They wouldn’t stand for it, and I’d never do it.

“Let them choose their own husbands,” she adds. “I don’t want any trouble.”

Isatou Jarju, early 80s, and Isatou Madeline Jarju, 69, the Gambia: women who rule the river

“Around this creek, from where we are standing to the other end,” Isatou Jarju says, pointing across the Hallahin River, “there is no one who can beat me when it comes to oyster farming.”

She does not know her exact age – Jarju says she was “crawling when the Burma war started”, which would put her in her early 80s – but she knows: “Around this creek, there is no one who can swim better than me.”

Fishing is traditionally done by men, but women run the physically demanding oyster trade in Kartong, in the Gambia’s south, from harvesting in mangroves to processing and selling.

Jarju has been exerting her authority for decades, training young people in how to navigate the river and teaching them methods that have been handed down over generations. “I educated my children from this creek. I had 12; one is a doctor. Each one has something to hold on to after graduating.”

Several years ago, Jarju delegated leadership to her younger sister, Isatou Madeline Jarju, president of the 200-member Women’s Oyster Association. “I didn’t go through formal education, but Isatou did. I told her, ‘You are going to be our clerk, and you will be our go-to person whenever we are in need of support.’”

Isatou Madeline Jarju has travelled across Africa and Europe, learning about and teaching oyster farming and securing funds to develop the village, including the installation of toilets.

A divorced mother of five, she fosters local children at risk of abandonment. “In my home, I’m the husband,” she says. “I do what a man should do. Nowadays, it’s difficult to feed the children, but I’m happy because I’m in nature and working with the women.”

“Don’t talk about men,” the older sister says when asked about the role men have played in Kartong’s development.

“Men are just a hindrance,” she says. “They are the definition of driving a vehicle backwards. When I stand here, they will all say that the owner of the creek is back. That is who I am.”

Yetunde Adwoa Sillah Beckley, 73, Sierra Leone: a woman rebuilding history

Yetunde Adwoa Sillah Beckley’s life is rooted in remembrance. Born in Ghana to a Nigerian mother and a Ghanaian father, whose ancestries can be traced back to Sierra Leone, she is a proud Creole, a descendant of freed enslaved people from the Americas who established the capital, Freetown, in 1792. “My people were pioneers,” Beckley says. “Everything I do is in their memory.”

Based in the village of Kent on the Freetown peninsula, in the house her great-great-great-grandparents built, Beckley felt compelled to expand on their legacy. Notable within the community for the well they dug on their land, which supplied the purest water in the area, it sustained generations of her family and many others.

During Sierra Leone’s civil war, which lasted from 1991 to 2002, the well was destroyed and Beckley fled to Freetown. But on her return she committed to rebuilding her ancestors’ well. “I wanted to do something that would last,” she says. “It took some time, but I’m happy I was able to do it.”

Beckley’s daughter, who is in her 40s, also lives on the family land with her own children. She helps her mother run the small community grocery shop at the front of the main house, which sells oil and fresh produce. She has plans to complete an outbuilding her grandparents started before she was born, which has fallen into disrepair.

Meanwhile, Beckley’s dream is to return to Ghana to reconnect with her relatives, whom she lost touch with during the war. “I’m west African,” she says. “My people are everywhere.”

Addra did not give his first name

This project was supported by the National Geographic Society. A Women’s Oral History of West Africa is a five-part podcast series that tells an alternative history of postcolonial west Africa through the lives of women over 60, in their own words. It is available on awomensoralhistory.africa

This article was amended on 4 August 2025. Méwounèsso Tchetike is about 74, not 70, as an earlier version said.

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Black Medal Of Honor Recipient Removed From US Department Of Defense Website

Maj Gen Charles C Rogers. Photograph: US Department of Defense via Internet Archive

BY MAYA YANG

The US defense department webpage celebrating an army general who served in the Vietnam war and was awarded the country’s highest military decoration has been removed and the letters “DEI” added to the site’s address.

On Saturday, US army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers’s Medal of Honor webpage led to a “404” error message. The URL was also changed, with the word “medal” changed to “deimedal”.

Rogers, who was awarded the Medal of Honor by then president Richard Nixon in 1970, served in the Vietnam war, where he was wounded three times while leading the defense of a base.

According to the West Virginia military hall of fame, Rogers was the highest-ranking African American to receive the medal. After his death in 1990, Rogers’s remains were buried at the Arlington national cemetery in Washington DC, and in 1999 a bridge in Fayette county, where Rogers was born, was renamed the Charles C Rogers Bridge.

As of Sunday afternoon, a “404 – Page Not Found” message appeared on the defense department’s webpage for Rogers, along with the message: “The page you are looking for might have been moved, renamed, or may be temporarily unavailable.”

A screenshot posted by the writer Brandon Friedman on Bluesky on Saturday evening showed the Google preview of an entry of Rogers’s profile on the defense department’s website.

Dated 1 November 2021, the entry’s Google preview reads: “Medal of Honor Monday: Army Maj Gen. Charles Calvin Rogers.” Below it are the words: “Army Maj Gen Charles Calvin Rogers served through all of it. As a Black man, he worked for gender and race equality while in the service.”

“Google his name and the entry below comes up. When you click, you’ll see the page has been deleted and the URL changed to include ‘DEI medal,’” Friedman wrote.

The Guardian has asked the defense department for comment.

Since taking office in January, Donald Trump has moved his administration to roll back DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion – efforts across the federal government.

One executive order sought to terminate all “mandates, policies, programs, preferences and activities in the federal government”, which the Trump administration deems “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility’ (DEIA) programs”.

In a win for the Trump administration on Friday, an appeals court lifted a block on executive orders that seek to end the federal government’s support for DEI programs.

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Careless People: A Story Of Where I Used to Work By Sarah Wynn-Williams Review – A Former Disciple Unfriends Facebook

Sarah Wynn-Williams. Photograph: Sarah Wynn-Williams

BY STUART JEFFRIES

Shortly after her waters broke, Sarah Wynn-Williams was lying in hospital with her feet in stirrups, typing a work memo on her laptop between contractions. Facebook’s director of global public policy needed to send talking points from her recent trip to oversee the tech giant’s bid to launch operations in Myanmar to her boss Sheryl Sandberg. Then she would give birth to her first child.

Wynn-Williams’s husband, a journalist called Tom, was livid but, as men tend to be in labour rooms, impotent. The doctor gently closed her laptop. “Please let me push send,” whimpered Sarah. “You should be pushing,” retorted the doctor with improbable timing. “But not ‘send’.”

This incident typifies how, in this 400-page memoir of her seven years at Facebook from 2011 – as it mutated from niche social network to global power able to swing elections, target body-shamed teens with beauty products and monetise millions of humans’ hitherto private data – Wynn-Williams had become part of what reads like a diabolical cult run by emotionally stunted men babies, institutionally enabled sexual harassers and hypocritical virtue-signalling narcissists.

The cult vibe of this birthing story is made stronger by Wynn-Williams channelling Sandberg’s 2013 book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. She quotes Sandberg’s injunction to pregnant working women – “Don’t leave before you leave” – taking its implication to be that she should work right up to the point that the baby’s head emerges into this fallen world. It doesn’t occur to her that Lean In feminism might serve as a fig leaf covering self-exploitation and soul-depleting workaholism.

A couple of pages earlier, Wynn-Williams writes like a wide-eyed convert: “It still feels exciting and important to spread this tool around the world and improve people’s lives.” An evidently clever former New Zealand diplomat, she was ideal fodder to help spread Facebook’s secular gospel, as her backstory reveals. After surviving a shark attack as a teenager, she resolved to spend her working life helping humanity. Upon witnessing how the nascent Facebook kept Kiwis connected in the aftermath of the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, she believed that Mark Zuckerberg’s company could make a difference – but in a good way – to social bonds, and that she could be part of that utopian project.

Her naive faith reminds me of what Jon Ronson wrote about in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed: at their inception both the internet and social media seemed, to some, unalloyed good things. It’s instructive for someone like me – who disdains social media and sees in tech giants the lucrative weaponising of hate masquerading as free speech, and the asphyxiation of democracy by the enabling of post-truth populists – to encounter such cockeyed optimism.

The “tool” Wynn-Williams talks about is not Facebook per se, but Zuckerberg’s cherished internet.org app (which has operated under the name Free Basics since 2015), devised to deliver the internet to connectivity-deprived countries, such as Myanmar, as part of what sounds like a system upgrade of Britain’s oxymoronic imperial mission to civilise black and brown persons.

What internet.org involves for countries that adopt it is a Facebook-controlled monopoly of access to the internet, whereby to get online at all you have to log in to a Facebook account. When the scales fall from Wynn-Williams’s eyes she realises there is nothing morally worthwhile in Zuckerberg’s initiative, nothing empowering to the most deprived of global citizens, but rather his tool involves “delivering a crap version of the internet to two-thirds of the world”.

But Facebook’s impact in the developing world proves worse than crap. In Myanmar, as Wynn-Williams recounts at the end of the book, Facebook facilitated the military junta to post hate speech, thereby fomenting sexual violence and attempted genocide of the country’s Muslim minority. “Myanmar,” she writes with a lapsed believer’s rue, “would have been a better place if Facebook had not arrived.” And what is true of Myanmar, you can’t help but reflect, applies globally.

Before she was disabused, Wynn-Williams fawningly adored Sandberg, as the pair crisscrossed the globe in private jets, bringing the good news of Facebook to foreign leaders. “The tears streaming down her face,” Wynn-Williams writes unctuously as she reports on Sandberg’s meeting with Shinzo Abe to convince the then Japanese premier to allow politicians to use Facebook in political campaigning, “somehow make her even more impossibly lovely.”

She approvingly quotes another Lean In message, that you should “bring your authentic self to work”. But what that means in Facebook reality becomes clear when, in her first performance review after giving birth, Wynn-Williams is told that co-workers are uneasy that her baby can be heard on business calls. The poor poppets. “Be smart and hire a Filipina nanny,” counsels Sandberg. Wynn-Williams does just that, but then something shocking happens. One day, Tom is checking the home camera when he notices a firefighter in their living room: the nanny has locked herself out and the baby inside the flat. But when Wynn-Williams later relates this disturbing event to colleagues, she feels as though she has made a faux pas – distracting them from their noble mission with personal guff. “The expectation of Facebook is that mothering is invisible,” she writes. Facebook cannot tolerate too much authenticity.

The book’s title comes from F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness.” For Wynn-Williams, Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” philosophy is just such entitled carelessness, leaving Facebook staff and their customers to sweep up the wreckage. But the Facebook she describes is not run by careless people, not really, but rather by wittingly amoral ones who use technical genius and business acumen to profit from human vulnerability. For instance, she claims Facebook – now Meta, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp – identified teenage girls who had deleted selfies on its platforms, and then supplied the data to companies to target them with ads for putatively tummy-flattening teas or beauty products.

Wynn-Williams’s shtick, often presenting herself as the only conscience in the room, does wear thin. I tired of reading of how shocked she was at some Facebook policy, while continuing to spread its values worldwide. “I’m astounded at the role money plays in elections in the US,” she writes at one point, as the 2016 Trump campaign gears up with political ads and targeted misinformation from which Facebook massively profited. Are you really so naive? I wrote in the margin. “I’m also against exporting this value system. But Facebook is effectively bringing this in globally by stealth.” And you’re part of it! I wrote in the margin. If only she’d taken to heart the critical messages of, say, David Fincher’s movie The Social Network or Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle, she might have leaned out earlier.

And yet her memoir is valuable, not just as indictment of the Facebook cult but of bosses’ entitled behaviour that will resonate for many. She depicts Zuckerberg as a tech-bro Henry VIII, a thin-skinned angry child whose courtiers let win at the board game Settlers of Catan during flights on his private jet. She charges him with lying to Congress about the extent of Facebook’s compromises to woo China and allow it to operate there, suggesting that his company was developing technology and tools to meet Chinese requirements that would allow it to censor users’ content and access their data. He was, she claims, much more in cahoots with Xi Jinping’s authoritarian regime than he let on to US senators.

On another private jet, relates Wynn-Williams, Sandberg imperiously invited her to sleep in the same bed. Wynn-Williams declined, but thereafter worried that she had upset her boss by not yielding to a presumably sexual demand, which she depicts in the book as the ex-Facebook COO’s entitled modus operandi with several women subordinates.

And then there’s what Joel Kaplan, currently Meta’s chief global affairs officer, allegedly did to Wynn-Williams at a boozy corporate shindig in 2017. She claimed that he called her “sultry” and rubbed his body against hers on the dancefloor. This wasn’t a one-off incident, she claims: indeed, there was a group at Facebook called Feminist Fight Club, whose members compared notes on such reportedly prevalent cases of sexual harassment by execs. An internal investigation cleared Kaplan of impropriety and soon after Wynn-Williams was fired for making misleading harassment allegations.

Last week, Meta responded to this book, calling it “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives”. The company has denounced its former employee, claiming that she was not a whistleblower but a disgruntled activist trying to sell books. Most likely she is both.

Wynn-Williams notes that Facebook changed its name to Meta in 2021. “But leopards don’t change their spots. The DNA of the company remains the same. And the more power they grab, the less responsible they become.” That culture of irresponsibility and carelessness should worry us more than ever, she suggests at the end of the book, as Zuckerberg’s Meta is at the forefront of artificial intelligence, a technology even more potentially calamitous than the one he dreamed up in his Harvard dorm a couple of decades ago.

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‘We’ve Proved We Can Do Anything’: The Syrian Women Who Want A Say In Running The Country

BY RUTH MICHAELSON

The feminist activist Ghalia Rahhal recalls with wry laughter her visit to the “blue building” in Idlib three years ago, an office where the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) monitored civil society organisations such as hers. Her colleague at a women’s rights organisation was once called there to hear a list of issues they were banned from working on: child marriage, divorce, and anything related to gender equality.

Rahhal had already survived an assassination attempt in her home town of Kafranbel as well as the murder of her son in Aleppo, leaving her unfazed by pointed questions levelled at her by an official: we heard you were training women in the refugee camps about politics, about equality, he told her with suspicion.

Rahhal instead saw an opportunity for dialogue, wondering if she could capitalise on a chance to speak with the authority that back then ruled only the enclave of Idlib in Syria’s north-west. “Why are you angry that we are teaching them these things?” she asked him. “My goal is not to teach those women to fight you, it’s for women to become decision-makers. We can’t have a displacement camp full of women run by a man, to name just one example.”

She continued her work in secret, providing lectures and training to women so that they would be ready to participate in a transitional government if the opportunity ever presented itself. That opportunity suddenly and unexpectedly arrived last month, when former president Bashar al-Assad fled to Moscow as his fearsome regime crumbled.

The Islamist group HTS, which spearheaded the insurgency that ended Assad’s rule, is now the de-facto authority in Syria and has begun touting many of the same ideas it once chastised Rahhal for when she taught them to women displaced by Syria’s bloody civil war.

There is, so far, little clarity about how the new government will rule, particularly when it comes to women. Even so, many see this moment as one of boundless opportunity and say they are ready to dissent against any new authority wanting further control of their lives. Others, such as Rahhal, say they believe the transitional authority made up of HTS appointees simply doesn’t have the same means to crack down on women across the country in the same way they sometimes did when they ruled only a small mountainous enclave.

Many remain hopeful despite mounting unanswered questions, including how the reborn country might approach the sexual violence weaponised in Assad’s prisons, or whether thousands of exiled female activists, along with others who fled for fear of persecution over their gender expression or sexuality, could one day feel safe to return to the new Syria.

A few handpicked to serve in the transitional government have already drawn anger for their comments about women. Obaida Arnout, a spokesperson for the new authority, said women’s “biological and physiological nature” made them unfit for some government jobs.

And Aisha al-Dibs, the new minister for women, said she would not “give room” to any civil society organisations that disagree with her view, citing one “catastrophic” programme eight years ago that she claimed led to a rise in divorce rates.

Both statements sparked a fierce backlash, all of which appeared to chasten the new government. Days later, Maysaa Sabrine, a former deputy at the Syrian central bank, was appointed to head the institution, the first woman to do so in its history. Rahhal views this as part of a push-pull of draconian measures she said she was familiar with under HTS rule, with their repeal labelled as responsiveness to criticism.

Delal Albesh, who has run a centre providing vocational training for women in Idlib for years under HTS, said things in the city had improved and she hoped the new authority would take a similar approach nationwide. Her centre was one of a number of women’s empowerment facilities, providing opportunities to learn new skills so they could enter the job market or treat injuries caused by the Assad regime’s bombardments. She is now looking for an office in the capital, Damascus.

“Since many men were fighters, women didn’t sit back and wait – they worked,” she said. Women had taken on more roles across civil society, she said, particularly after the deadly earthquake that jolted northern Syria and southern Turkey in early 2023, killing an estimated 8,000 Syrians. Her organisation, Zumoruda, found that HTS’s pressure had eased after it registered with the local authorities, allowing it to expand its fieldwork and reach more women.

Her sister, Amina Albesh, who works with the Syrian civil defence group known as the White Helmets, said she didn’t want to talk politics as her organisation has long strived to remain neutral of any ruling authority. But she was confident that women would seize new roles in Syria.

“Many women lost their partners and have done a lot of hard work these past 14 years,” she said, estimating that 70% of the women living in Idlib had been working to provide for their families.

“They are tired,” she said. “But we are against all these statements that women can’t do this or that. We have proved we can do literally anything.” Both sisters said there had been few civil appointments open during HTS’s rule of Idlib, which they felt explained why no women had ever been appointed to leadership roles.

Rahhal remains sceptical about the transitional government’s promises of change. She described examining each new development from her exile in Berlin, comparing it with decisions that HTS took in the past, including when the group operated under the name Jabhat al-Nusra, an offshoot of al-Qaida. Then, she said, their violations were blatant, including a convoy of cars arriving to raid the Mazaya women’s centre she co-founded.

A year prior, an unknown assailant had set Mazaya’s offices on fire, and Rahhal was the target of a car bomb. The activist doesn’t know who planted the bomb, and is still seeking justice for the murder of her son, the journalist Khalid al-Issa, who was killed by an explosive device hidden in his home in Aleppo in 2016. Rahhal believes that some of those involved in his murder could now be in power.

“In general, I don’t trust HTS because I still don’t know whether they are truly changing or they just claim to have changed,” she said. “Are they really changing ideologically, or just for their own interests?”

After she was questioned in the so-called blue building, she said, it didn’t end the pressure on women’s rights organisations, but things did shift. Just like when she was briefly detained by the Hisbah, a local authority for enforcing religious edicts, who accused her of not wearing appropriate clothing but was thereafter dissolved, her detention ended up “causing headaches” for HTS just as much as it bothered Rahhal’s group.

Pressure on women’s rights organisations had become “more politicised” before she left Idlib two years ago, she said. Imams aligned to HTS would preach against the women’s empowerment centres, accusing them of “spreading corruption”, and warning people to be careful around them. Women would be called in for warnings, she said, but the local authority run by HTS was also careful to foster supportive relationships with select female empowerment centres who they felt aligned with their aims.

Still, Rahhal continued her activities to train women to be ready for leadership roles in a future democratic society.

“They prevented this during their rule in Idlib, because without my doing these trainings in secret it would take many years to re-establish a space among women to discuss civil rights, transitional justice and equality,” she said.

“Because I did it in secret before, now I can build from this base – but their plan was to marginalise women so they don’t understand these things and get involved in government.”

She remains encouraged by a few statements from HTS leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, but feels the real tests lie ahead. Rahhal is keeping an eye on those attending the national dialogue where al-Sharaa is expected to dissolve HTS, although preparations have so far proved opaque.

“I don’t want to see 300 versions of Aisha al-Dibs attending, I want to see real representation,” she said.

Rahhal does not expect an invitation, but feels attendance is more than symbolic. “This is the first step towards having real female representation, to make real change,” she said.

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BOOK REVIEW: POLITICS WITH PRINCIPLES

The former US House speaker’s memoir includes powerful accounts of the Capitol assault and Trump’s instability, offering insights into the career of a formidable woman who still wields great influence

BY RACHEL COOKE

To use the hot political word of the moment, Nancy Pelosi’s The Art of Power is a pretty weird kind of memoir, neither fish nor fowl. It would, she tells us in her acknowledgments, take another book to relate her amazing rise from “housewife [and mother of five] to House member to House speaker”, her long journey “from Baltimore to San Francisco”. In this volume, one eye on posterity, she prefers to look mostly at the part she played in major political events during the more than two decades she spent at the top of the Democratic party. But fear not: it’s all (a bit) less dry than it sounds. If I struggled to stay awake during her painstaking description of the battle to pass the Affordable Care Act of 2010 – quiz me later! – I was gripped by her hour-by-hour account of the attack on the US Capitol in 2021.

Who knew that on that shocking day some representatives were so sure they were about to die, they rang their families to say goodbye? That those with military training fashioned pikes from the wooden stands that held anti-Covid hand sanitiser in case they had to physically defend themselves? Pelosi is a Catholic, and the riot, as she notes, took place on the feast of the Epiphany, which celebrates the visit of the wise men to the infant Christ. But for the Republicans, revelations came there none. In the fullness of time, Donald Trump, for many akin to the riot’s puppeteer, became the party’s candidate for the presidency in spite of what some of them had seen with their own eyes on 6 January: the “stunning” violence that was all around; the fact that politicians had to make use, for the first time, of the gas masks that have been kept under seats in the Capitol’s two chambers since 9/11; the lingering memory, once it was all over, that the building stank to high heaven of human defecation.

Pelosi’s book was, of course, written long before Joe Biden stood down as the Democratic candidate, a decision in which she is said to have played a crucial role. It feels, in some senses, tardy and ill-timed; for British readers particularly, the acreage devoted to the Troubled Asset Relief Programme (Tarp) that was instituted by the US treasury after the 2008 financial crisis will seem somewhat beside the point when all our present interest lies in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, and just how much they can wind Trump up.

But if I may permit myself such a violent analogy, Nancy chucks a few hand grenades in the direction of the election nonetheless. First, she holds Trump and his enablers responsible at one remove for the appalling attack on her husband, Paul. (In 2022, a far-right conspiracy theorist, David DePape, broke into the couple’s San Francisco house while Nancy, his target, was in Washington; Paul suffered three hammer blows to his head of such force that DePape later expressed surprise at his survival.) In recent years, she says, Republicans have spent millions of dollars on ads personally attacking her while, following the attack, Donald Trump Jr shared a meme of a hammer on social media that was captioned: “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”

Second, she makes no bones about the fact she believes Trump Sr to be both dangerous and unstable. Her book begins with an account of her religious faith: she was, she writes, raised to be a nun by her mother; she looks for the “spark of divinity” in every human being she meets. But in the case of Trump, the pilot light of numinosity, if it ever existed, was extinguished long, long ago. Expectations of him, she writes, can never be low enough. The first time she met him after his election as president, he served pigs in blankets to Senator Chuck Schumer, blithely reassuring him they were kosher.

She regarded the whiny and “stupid” Trump throughout his time in office as “an impostor – and on some level, he knew it”. He was apt “surreptitiously” to listen in to meetings she had with his staff. If he was there in person, he often stormed out. At a funeral for a distinguished doctor of her acquaintance, numerous medics told her, unsolicited, “that they were deeply concerned… that his mental and psychological health was in decline”. Much later, on 8 January, 2021 (two days after the insurrection at the Capitol), she found herself so concerned by Trump’s erratic behaviour – impeachment was on the cards; she feared for the constitution if he was allowed to stay in office – that she rang the head of the joint chiefs of staff, General Mark Milley, seemingly seeking reassurance that the military, if given an order by the president to conduct a strike overseas, including a nuclear strike, “was not going to do anything illegal or crazy”.

It may be true that, as some American reviewers have noted, Pelosi isn’t much interested in self-criticism; nor does her book explain, even slightly, how an 84-year-old woman continues to exert such influence on the Democratic party (in addition to whatever she told the ailing Biden, she’s also said to have stumped for Walz, the Minnesota governor, to be Harris’s choice as vice-presidential candidate). Like all politicians everywhere, she falls back on, at best, sophistry and, at worst, willed blindness when it suits her. To British eyes, she cuts a slightly parodic figure, with her helmet blow dry and a face, tight and waxy, that now gives her an appearance of permanent surprise.

But The Art of Power, so sober and detailed, has brought me to reassess her. Her early campaigning work on Aids; her opposition to George Bush’s war in Iraq (“the most destabilising event in recent US history”); even her ability to see what vice-president Mike Pence did right, as well as wrong (he preferred to cower in a loading bay on the day of the Capitol riots than to be seen to leave the building). She is so formidable and, in certain circumstances, principled. What happens next remains to be seen. Even as Trump loses his mind – as I write, he is indulging in wild fantasies online in which Biden tries to take back the nomination – he’s still in a punchy electoral position. He could yet win. But if he doesn’t, Pelosi will surely be able to take at least some of the credit.

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A Cycle Of Debt, Sex Work And Cocaine: The Women In West Africa Caught In Europe’s Drugs Trail

BY ELIZIA VOLKMANN AND TOM LEVITT

In recent years, women who have become trapped in sex work in the Niger city of Agadez have found a new way to blot of the pain of what their lives have become. Crack cocaine.

Agadez has long been a transit point for people trying to pass through north Africa and across the Mediterranean to Europe. Now the Nigerien city is a hub for the flow of drugs heading towards Europe too.

For those such as Azizou Chehou, trying to provide support for the increasingly desperate migrants coming through the city, the impact of the greater availability of cocaine on the streets is clear. Agadez is in the grip of an addiction crisis and its biggest victims, says Chechou, are female migrants.

After being forced to pay for their transportation debt with sex work, he says, women are finding themselves trapped in a cycle of sex work, drugs and debt.

“Women are held by traffickers in houses where men pass by and use them,” says Chehou, who runs a Nigerien development organisation in Agadez. “When they have paid that debt these women are passed to another trafficker. Even after leaving a trafficker, the women are caught in a cycle of dependence on earning money from sex work and drug use to block out the nightmares.”

Chehou and others in Agadez say the recent increase in the amount of cocaine in Niger is to blame for the addiction crisis, which the local health system is ill-equipped to cope with.

Ibrahim*, a clinical psychologist who works at a support centre for migrants, says women caught up in sex trafficking or dealing with the frustration of not being able to get work to pay for their onward journey need long-term treatment and support to be able to quit cocaine use.

“Many are very stressed and deeply traumatised from their experiences of rape and trafficking while on the move, and seek escape through smoking crack cocaine,” he says.

While politicians in Europe obsess about stopping migrants, say observers, they have shown little interest in addressing the impacts of Europe’s own cocaine addiction on transit countries and communities such as Agadez.

“The whole debate is focused on how can we stop drug traffickers in European ports,” says Ulf Laessing, a Mali-based specialist in the Sahel region for the Konrad Adenauer Foundation. “There is not much awareness of the devastating impact the drug trade has on countries in Africa and how consumption and addiction have taken root in countries like Niger.

“It’s a big business driven by consumption in Europe. Every time I go to Niger, officials complain more about it.”

It is hard to estimate the total amount of cocaine flowing through Niger but the size of drug seizures in the Sahel region, which stretches across Africa from Senegal to Sudan, have risen rapidly since 2020, according to UN figures, from an average of 13kg a year seized between 2015 and 2020 to 1,466kg in 2022.

Brazilian drug cartels have wrested control of shipping the cocaine grown in Peru, Colombia and Bolivia, taking advantage of the relatively short distance to Africa’s Atlantic coast. Substantial amounts are then moved overland through Mali and Niger. From there it moves onwards to Libya, Tunisia and Europe, which can’t seem to get enough of it.

As well as being hidden on cargo ships, cocaine arrives in Africa via pleasure craft and is often dumped overboard for local fishers to pick up and land, says the Africa specialist Lucia Bird, from the criminal research group the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

The trans-Sahelian route has several advantages, as the region is “characterised by weak governance and lack of law enforcement, as well as the trafficking routes lying along ancient trade routes”, says Bird.

Once landed, shipments are divided between sea-bound and overland delivery, which is trucked out by a chain of traffickers. In Mali and Niger, movement is controlled by armed groups, and jihadist groups tax consignments at checkpoints along the route. The UN has warned that the involvement of armed groups is undermining peace and stability in the region.

Traffickers have been paying local transporters in cocaine, which they then have to monetise, usually by converting it into more affordable crack cocaine that they can then sell to local users. In 2020, officials in Niger reported the dismantlement of two clandestine drug laboratories producing crack cocaine destined for the local market.

Some people in Niger believe drug smugglers are also making transporters dependent on drugs to keep them involved in the trade.

Back in Agadez, Chehou says they are trying to support the women as best they can. They want to raise funds to build a centre to support drug addicts in the city, he says, but “don’t have the money” and the military government running Niger since last year’s coup “are not engaging”.

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Endgame 1944: How Stalin Won The War By Jonathan Dimbleby Review – The Red Army’s Advance Into History

Joseph Stalin

A fresh take on Operation Bagration, the colossal eastern front offensive in the second world war, is the author and broadcaster’s best book yet – and shows how next to the Soviets, the Germans’ worst enemy was Hitler

BY NEAL ASCHERSON

As a historian, Jonathan Dimbleby has written several good books about the second world war. But this is the most interesting. It is not about “turning points”, those diamonds of interpretation that authors love to dig up, sharpen and mount on an alluring book jackets. Instead, Endgame 1944 is about what happened after a turning point, about the gigantic consequences as the inevitable slouched out of the future into the present.

At the core of Dimbleby’s book is Operation Bagration, on the war’s eastern front. It was named after the famous Russian general who died of wounds in 1812, resisting the French invaders at the Battle of Borodino. In 1944, Bagration was the name given to “the mightiest onslaught of the second world war”, the offensive by five “fronts”, four Soviet armies and one Polish, numbering well over a million men who set off across a line stretching almost from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It began in June, timed to take advantage of the Normandy landings in the first week of that month, and by August the Red army had halted on the outskirts of Warsaw. The advance, in some places by as much as 600km, had driven the Nazi armies out of much of the Baltic lands, Belarus, all of eastern Poland, western Ukraine and the border regions of Romania and Hungary. It was no walkover. The Soviet armies suffered horrifying casualties. But in “the five months since the start of Operations Overlord [Normandy] and Bagration, a total of 1,460,000 [German] men had been killed, wounded or captured, 900,000 of these on the eastern front”. That and the devastating losses of German armour and equipment were unsustainable.

The turning points of Hitler’s war against Stalin are pretty familiar to British readers. We know about the Nazis’ rebuff outside Moscow in 1941, their catastrophe at Stalingrad in the winter of 1942-3, their defeat the following summer at Kursk (the biggest tank battle in history). In fact, many chroniclers think that Europe’s whole future in the second half of the 20th century was already preordained on 22 June 1941, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, his fatal invasion of the Soviet Union. That is why Sebastian Haffner (the Observer’s awe-inspiring commentator) used to say throughout the cold war that “We are living in Hitler’s Europe!”. Compared with those hinge-of-history events, Bagration is overlooked. But the story of 1944 is the story of how generals, statesmen and humble soldiers played the ghastly hand dealt out to them, from the Warsaw uprising and the siege of Budapest to the mass murder of Hungary’s Jews or the July plot to kill Hitler.

The first question raised by Dimbleby’s narrative, with all its military detail, is how on earth did the Wehrmacht manage to keep fighting for so long. By 1944, the German armies on the eastern front were massively outnumbered, and not just in men (“6.25 million troops as against the 2.46 million available” to German military command. The Soviet army groups “were equipped with more than twice as many tanks (5,800 versus 2,300) and four times as many aircraft …” As is becoming all too obvious in Ukraine today, Russia’s strength in war is not so much an inexhaustible supply of soldiers as a genius for mobilising resources. But in spite of these imbalances, the German retreat was a series of bitterly fought defensive battles rather than a rout. Dimbleby parallels his military story with often devastating extracts from Russian and German diaries and private letters (including pages by Vasily Grossman, surely the most gifted writer of the whole war). But the despairing outbursts of many German witnesses (“All is lost! The end is nigh!” was their tone) seem often misleading. They say more about the national taste for melodramatic self-pity than about the actual morale of the soldiers. British veterans of Normandy remembered the near-inhuman speed with which a defeated German unit would recover and launch a formidable counterattack. Almost to the end, the Wehrmacht on the eastern front retained grim courage and discipline.

Next to Konstantin Rokossovsky, a commander of Bagration, the Germans’ worst enemy was Adolf Hitler. Again and again, the Führer would declare towns feste Plätze (strongholds) and forbid timely retreat until whole divisions and even armies had been surrounded in a pocket. A lethal pattern kept recurring: the general flying to confront Hitler and plead with him, only to be accused of weakness; the decimation of the trapped forces; finally a doomed breakout ending in massacre. In contrast, Stalin kept in close contact with his field commanders but seldom interfered with their decisions. Rokossovsky even survived a stand-up row with Stalin over Bagration’s attack plan, and got his way.

Endgame 1944 sets the story of the great Russian offensive alongside the allied conferences and strategies developing at the same time. This means the stormy relationship between Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill as they tried to agree on Europe’s postwar future. Jonathan Dimbleby has concentrated – to intensely dramatic effect – on Churchill’s passionate struggles to square his own conscience about what would happen to Poland. He knew, as the Poles in 1944 did not, that the Tehran conference at the end of 1943 had already abandoned Poland to Soviet domination. Stalin’s armies had “liberated” half of Poland; nothing short of another world war could remove them. But this was the nation for whose sake Britain had gone to war, to whom Churchill had promised restored statehood, freedom, democracy. He raged, threatened and wept as he tried to make the exiled Polish leaders accept their fate. But they refused, incredulous that Churchill seemed to be betraying them. Something in his romantic heart broke, never quite to heal. But outside the ruins of Warsaw, the Red army was gathering strength for the next colossal offensive, which would take it to within an hour’s drive of Berlin. The end of the endgame was in sight.

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Moederland: Nine Daughters Of South Africa Review – My Ancestors’ Role In The Horror Of Apartheid

BY KAREN JENNINGS

On 29 May this year, South Africans will go to the polls to vote in their seventh democratic general election. Thirty years ago, the country’s first free and fair election saw the formal end of apartheid when, as Cato Pedder writes, “all night, all that day, all the next day, 19.5 million people, 85% of the electorate, queue[d] peacefully outside polling stations across the country … And each of them, as they receive[d] their ballot paper … [felt] this ritual [was] somehow holy.” With Nelson Mandela as the president of the new South Africa, the country was full of hope, but the ensuing decades have been troubled by blatant government corruption, nepotism, water and electricity crises, vast unemployment and social unrest. This year a record 27.72 million citizens are registered to vote (19,525 of those in London), a jump of almost 1 million since 2019. This increase suggests people’s frustrations; their desire to question those in power. Many new voters are women, and women make up the majority of registered voters (55.24%). However, analyses after previous elections have shown that women are often kept from voting by domestic duties, which is likely to occur again in May.

It is women and their role in South Africa’s past that form the subject of Moederland and through which Pedder attempts to understand herself and where or how she belongs. She lives in England, yet her name and blood irrevocably connect her to South Africa and a culture “freighted with shame”. Named after her grandmother, she has spent her life explaining that Cato is not pronounced “Kate-o” but “Cuh-too. It’s Afrikaans, short for Catharina”. Her great-grandfather was Jan Smuts, twice prime minister of South Africa, a man so revered by the British that a statue of him still stands in Parliament Square. Smuts is the only person in the world to have signed the peace treaties after both world wars; he was central to the creation of the League of Nations, and drafted the preamble to the UN charter. He was also a white supremacist who supported racial segregation and was involved in writing and promulgating the laws that paved the way to apartheid. Pedder struggles with her “place in all this”, her great-grandfather tying her “to the white male power that continues to saturate South Africa and further afield”.

It is no secret that women are often absent from history books, with historians blaming a lack of recorded information. But, as Pedder finds, the South African archives are full of the letters and journals of women, as well as opgaafrolle (tax censuses), the transcribing and analysing of which my own colleagues at Stellenbosch University are engaged in; revealing data about women, enslaved people and indigenous Khoikhoi people who were often forced into servitude. This data conveys details such as what they owned, where they lived, and family groupings. The information is there: it only has to be looked for.

Informed by impressively thorough research, Pedder follows nine of her female ancestors (family trees are included at the start of the book), from the 17th century when the Dutch first landed at the Cape, and moving through the centuries, via the “great trek” of settlers into the interior, the atrocities of the Boer war, and the shame and horror of apartheid. Exploring the past, bringing it to vivid life with wonderful prose, she intersects the lives of her ancestors with her own thoughts and experiences.

But this is not another whinging apologia by a white author. Pedder writes with perspicacity and sensitivityand is able to articulate her dismay at having laboured under “the misapprehension that in retelling the long-forgotten stories of women, [she would be] striking a righteous blow” not only for her own female ancestors but for women generally, such as her proto-Afrikaans forebear and seventh great-grandmother, Anna Siek, whose place in history books has been little more than “a footnote”. In reality, Pedder realises, writing about white women means writing about how they have participated in white domination. White and black women have had very different experiences, so while Pedder is horrified at her proximity in the family tree to a slave-owning torturer – Michiel Otto, second husband of Siek – she must also acknowledge the role his wife (and the wives of other white men) played in oppression. Or even someone like Isie, wife of Smuts, who was appalled by the thought of white women voting or having seats in parliament, let alone men of colour, or, heaven forbid, women of colour.

The first of the nine women in Moederland is a Khoikhoi girl whose real name we do not know, though she has become famous in South African history. The Dutch adopted her as a pet, a translator, a creature to civilise, and named her Eva (after the biblical first woman). Her Khoikhoi name is recorded by them as Krotoa, and so she has become known to us. Her role in the history of South Africa, her life caught between the Dutch and her own people, her eventual partial banishment to Robben Island with her white husband and mixed-race children, her alcoholism and death, have been revisited and imbued with various isms and significances in recent decades – she is part of colonialism, racism, post-colonialism, feminism, post-apartheid reparations, and historical rewriting and reclamation. Pedder is aware of the way Krotoa has been exploited over the centuries for various ends, and also that she represents a true connection to South Africa prior to the ill-effects of colonisation. Her own desire to find a connection with Krotoa does not sit comfortably with her, yet it is there, a wish to find some link that will legitimate her sense of belonging to South Africa. But what role can DNA really play, she asks. Does having a connection to Indigenous people remove you from guilt and responsibility? What percentage is enough to belong fully and wipe the slate clean? Her DNA results show that she is “European, but there are matches to another community, partial incomplete”. Yes, she is a colonialist, but she is also South African.

In fact, Moederland provides more questions than answers, but that is not a flaw. It is the questioning that makes this book valuable, just as it is questioning that must become part of all our lives on a path to understanding ourselves and others today when too often cancel culture wants to delete and deny. Research enables us to explore, and it fuels our ability to interrogate ourselves, our pasts, our presents and futures. We need more books like this, we need more detailed research, more people allowing themselves to be uncomfortable and to question.

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Joe Biden’s Great-Great-Grandfather Was Pardoned By Abraham Lincoln

BY EDWARD HELMORE

Joe Biden’s great-great-grandfather was charged with attempted murder after a civil war-era brawl – but pardoned of any wrongdoing by Abraham Lincoln, a newspaper said on Monday, reviving on the US holiday of Presidents’ Day the often contentious issue of presidential powers to grant pardons.

Citing documents from the US national archives, the historian David J Gerleman wrote in the Washington Post that Biden’s paternal forebear Moses J Robinette was pardoned by Lincoln after Robinette got into a fight with a fellow Union army civilian employee, John J Alexander, in Virginia. Robinette drew a knife and sliced Alexander.

The newspaper reported that Robinette worked as an army veterinary surgeon for the army during the US’s war between the states. He was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to two years hard labor after failing to convince a court he had acted in self-defense.

Three army officers appealed the conviction to Lincoln, arguing it was too harsh. Biden’s long-ago White House predecessor agreed, and Robinette was pardoned on 1 September 1864, seven months before Lincoln was assassinated.

Gerleman wrote that the 22 pages of court martial transcript he found in the national archives helped to “fill in an unknown piece of Biden family history” – on a Presidents’ Day that fell a week after Lincoln’s 12 February birthday, to boot.

The historian said that Robinette’s trial transcript had been “unobtrusively squeezed among many hundreds of other routine court-martial cases” and revealed “the hidden link between the two men – and between two presidents across the centuries”.

Article II, section 2 of the US constitution authorizes American presidents “to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment”.

The power is rooted in the monarch’s prerogative to grant mercy under early English law, which later traveled across the Atlantic Ocean to the American colonies. US presidents typically use the power to pardon at the end of their terms.

Recent presidents have used the powers to differing degrees. George W Bush issued 200 acts of clemency; Barack Obama, 1,927: Donald Trump, 237; and Biden so far 14, excluding thousands pardoned for simple possession of marijuana.

Biden’s marijuana pardons only apply to those who were convicted of use and simple possession of marijuana on federal lands and in the District of Columbia.

Jimmy Carter issued 566 acts of clemency, excluding more than 200,000 for Vietnam war draft evasion.

Lincoln’s pardon to Robinette was of 343 acts of clemency he issued.

According to the Post, the fight between Robinette and Alexander took place on the evening of 21 March 1864, at the army of the Potomac’s winter camp near Beverly Ford, Virginia.

Alexander, a brigade wagon master, had overheard Robinette saying something about him to the female cook. An argument ensued, and Alexander was left bleeding. Robinette’s charges included attempted murder. Though he was not found guilty on that charge, he was convicted on the others and imprisoned on the Dry Tortugas island near Florida.

Three army officers who knew Robinette later petitioned Lincoln to overturn his conviction, writing that the sentence was unduly harsh for “defending himself and cutting with a penknife a teamster much his superior in strength and size, all under the impulse of the excitement of the moment”.

The request went through a West Virginia senator, who described Robinette’s punishment as “a hard sentence on the case as stated”. Then it went to Lincoln’s private secretary, who requested a judicial report and the trial transcripts.

When the letter eventually reached Lincoln, he issued a pardon “for unexecuted part of punishment”. The then-president signed it: “A. Lincoln. Sep. 1. 1864.”

Robinette was released from prison and returned to his family in Maryland to resume farming.

A brief obituary following Robinette’s death in 1903 eulogized him as a “man of education and gentlemanly attainments”.

The obituary made no mention of Robinette’s wartime court-martial or his connection to Lincoln, the Post said.

Robinette died about 12 years before Biden’s late father – his great-grandson – was born.

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Africa Is The World’s Youngest Continent – Education Is Key To Unlocking Its Potential -- Nana Akufo-Addo And Jakaya Kikwete

THE GUARDIAN

With 40% of all Africans aged under 15, smarter funding for schools can help young Africans fuel a colossal powerhouse

The African Union (AU) is marking 2024 as its first Year of Education. This could not have come at a better time. Commitment to education has marked the continent’s progress since the 1960s era of independence. Now more than ever, this resolve must transform Africa into the world’s powerhouse for the 21st century.

In 60 years Africa has made considerable progress in education, with more children finishing school. Primary school completion rates across the region between 2000 and 2022 rose from 52% to 67%. High school dropout rates slowed too, with 50% of pupils completing lower secondary, up from 35%, and 33% in upper secondary education, up from 23%, while the number of tertiary education students has risen from fewer than 800,000 in 1970 to above 17 million today. More girls are in school than ever before.

But as we usher in this year of education, we must acknowledge that any hard-won gains fall short of preparing for tomorrow’s opportunities and risks.

After the Covid pandemic, millions of children, adolescents and youth were out of school across sub-Saharan Africa. Only one in five children achieve the minimum proficiency level in reading by the end of primary education. Girls are particularly disadvantaged in the only region in the world not to have achieved gender parity in enrolment at any level in the education system, with one in three girls married before they turn 18. This trend, while troubling, is not irreversible.

To build the Africa we want, we must finance quality education that equips all our children with the knowledge and skills to succeed in the labour market of tomorrow, and to secure a peaceful, prosperous and stable future.

National budgets remain the principal source of education funding, but these often struggle to cover essentials such as teacher training, salaries, books and administrative costs.

Since 2020, education budgets in nearly half of low-income countries diminished by an average of 14%. At the same time, more than 20%of total spending went to servicing debt. While the pandemic affected education budgets, before the crisis only about 20% of governments on the continent met international benchmarks for spending between 2017 and 2019.

While trimming education spending might relieve budgets in the short term, it is depriving economies of long-term prosperity.

To support domestic financing of education and prevent this backsliding, donors, multilateral institutions and the private sector can step up, pursuing all possible means – including debt relief – to help finance the quality education that African children need. For African governments, spending smarter is also imperative.

Without it, our continent’s development will stagnate when it should be racing ahead, powered by its youth, natural resources and green energy. Africa is the world’s youngest and fastest-growing continent. It currently accounts for 14% of the world’s working-age population. That is set to rise to 42% by the end of the century.

Today, 40% of all Africans are under 15. Another 100 million children will be born here by 2050.With education, young Africans can fuel a colossal powerhouse. Yet, of the 1 million Africans entering the labour market every month, fewer than 25% find a job in the formal economy.

Since the Global Education Summit in 2021, 21 African heads of state have signed the Declaration on Education Financing that demands exemplary levels of investment. The AU year of education can re-energise members in committing to adequate domestic financing.

Multilateralism is essential to finance transformative education, which is why we support multi-stakeholder collaborations such as the Global Partnership for Education (GPE). Over 20 years, GPE has contributed $6bn (£4.8bn) to support education funding in sub-Saharan Africa.

Today, African influence is asserting itself globally – the AU has a seat at the G20. This influence can expand with its growing young population if matched with a quality education that unlocks the potential of every girl and boy.

Nelson Mandela recognised the foundational importance of learning when he said: “It is not beyond our power to create a world in which all children have access to a good education. Those who do not believe this have small imaginations.”

Nana Akufo-Addo is the president of Ghana and Jakaya Kikwete is the former president of Tanzania and chair of the board of directors of the Global Partnership for Education.

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Franz Beckenbauer Was A Player Out Of Time Who Made Football Evolve With Him

West German captain Franz Beckenbauer raises his arms in celebration as they become World Champions for the second time in history, beating Holland 2-1 in the 1974 World Cup Final in Munich, West Germany. Image: Popperfoto via Getty Images.

BY JONATHAN WILSON

Germany and Bayern Munich could not quite fathom where to play the young Beckenbauer, so he effectively invented a role for himself

“For me,” Helmut Schön said of Franz Beckenbauer in February 1965 after calling him up to the West Germany team for the first time, “he is the player of the future. Maybe not in midfield, perhaps up front.”

People were always looking at Beckenbauer and seeing in him a being from another age, and that meant that, for a long time, nobody really knew what to make of him. He was handsome, charismatic and languid, a player of effortless elegance guaranteed to enrage those who believed the game was about industry, sweat and graft. He was technically gifted. He saw things others didn’t. He had grace and intelligence.

From his teens it was obvious Beckenbauer would be a player of the highest level. But in what position? Nobody could work it out. And so he effectively invented a role for himself. Beckenbauer is now considered the great example of the libero, but he was not a libero in the Italian sense, sitting behind a tough-man marker and initiating attacks with long-range passes. As he himself said, if he resembled anybody in Helenio Herrera’s great Internazionale side that popularised the idea of a libero by winning two European Cups with their catenaccio, it was the left-back Giacinto Facchetti, a fine defender who would surge forward to create angles in midfield and join the attack.

Beckenbauer’s early career was a tale of a player seeking a role. When he made his Bayern debut in 1964 as an 18-year-old, in the promotion playoffs against St Pauli, he operated on the left wing. In his next game, against Tasmania Berlin, he dropped back to play as a centre-half when Rainer Ohlhauser was pushed up front as Bayern chased an equaliser and did well enough to play there again against Borussia Neunkirchen. In the second group game against St Pauli, he started as a half, then dropped in to the defence to help deal with the threat of Guy Acolatse, and ended up as a forward as Bayern chased a winner.

West German sides in those days tended play an adaptation of the W-M, in which one of the halves would drop back behind the centre-half to play as an Ausputzer – literally, a cleaner – but he had no creative brief as he would have done in Italy. Rather, the centre-half picked up the opposing centre-forward but had a limited licence to step forward, knowing he had cover behind him. Beckenbauer took that far further than anybody had before.

Bayern missed out on promotion by a point that season, but cruised into the Bundesliga the following campaign with Beckenbauer as the regular centre-half despite constant newspaper talk that he might be better deployed as one of the more creative midfielders.

Zlatko Cajkovski, the Bayern coach, seemingly had similar doubts and, that summer, signed the combative Dieter Danzberg to operate as his centre-half, allowing Beckenbauer to move further forward. But Danzberg was sent off in the opening game of the following season, a derby against 1860 Munich, and banned for eight weeks. Beckenbauer stepped into his position and never left it, the crowning glory of a fine first top-flight campaign coming against SV Meiderich in the 1966 German Cup final.

Beckenbauer’s forward surges had been restricted by having to deal with centre-forward Rüdiger Mielke, but with eight minutes remaining and Bayern leading 3-2, Ohlhauser won the ball back and suddenly became aware Beckenbauer had set off. He picked him out, Beckenbauer ran on and scored the decisive goal from the edge of the box. His role as a libero was confirmed and, with Georg Schwarzenbeck an essential but largely unsung stopper alongside him, would go on to underpin all Bayern’s success in the 1970s.

For the national team, Beckenbauer’s role was more contested. For that first game, in February 1965, an unofficial friendly against Chelsea, Beckenbauer operated in midfield as Schön experimented with a back four. Other than two games on a tour of South and Central America in 1968, when Willi Schulz was used as a man-marker and Beckenbauer had to take his role in the back four, that was where he remained until 1971 when Schön finally agreed to allow Beckenbauer to play as the libero.

The following year, Beckenbauer was at the heart of the West Germany side that, in beating England 3-1 at Wembley in the first leg of the Euro ‘72 quarter-final, produced a mesmerisingly brilliant half hour. It was, L’Équipe said, “football from the year 2000”. This, at last, was Beckenbauer’s age.

The truth, though, was however advanced West Germany appeared by comparison with Alf Ramsey’s fading England, it was football of the early 70s. Trying to keep the game in the shade of the main stand in the heat of Léon during the 1970 World Cup, it’s said, had taught West Germany how possession could be manipulated, and the freedom Beckenbauer had in stepping out of the backline, offering an extra man, was critical in allowing them to operate like that. The style, a sort of Total Football without the pressing, brought both the 1972 Euros and the 1974 World Cup.

Time eventually caught up with the man from the future. As a coach Beckenbauer was a conservative. “A defensive stance,” he said, “corresponds to Germany nature ... we get stuck in, we story the opponent’s game and the force our game onto him.”

When Klaus Augenthaler suggested switching to a back four, Beckenbauer insisted “our character, our system” was a libero plus markers. It brought two World Cup finals in 1986 and 1990, the latter of them won, but probably delayed the advent of pressing, leading to the lost decade of the 90s (the weird outlier of winning Euro 96 notwithstanding) and subsequent reboot.

But why would Beckenbauer have been a great theorist? Why would he, as a manager, have been part among the tactical avant garde? As a player, by being who he was, without having to conceptualise it, he had changed the way the game was played. He emerged as a player out of time, and made football conform to him.

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‘It’s Totally Unhinged’: Is The Book World Turning Against Goodreads?

(Goodreads)

BY DAVID SMITH

The influential user review site has suffered a year of controversies, from cancelled book deals to review-bombing, and exposed a dark side to the industry

For Bethany Baptiste, Molly X Chang, KM Enright, Thea Guanzon, Danielle L Jensen, Akure Phénix, RM Virtues and Frances White, it must have been brutal reading. All received scathing reviews on Goodreads, an online platform that reputedly has the power to make or break new authors.

But the verdicts were not delivered by an esteemed literary critic. They were the work of Cait Corrain, a debut author who used fake accounts to “review bomb” her perceived rivals. The literary scandal led to Corrain posting an apology, being dropped by her agent and having her book deal cancelled.

It also uncovered deeper questions about Goodreads, arguably the most popular site on which readers post book reviews, and its outsized impact on the publishing industry. Its members had produced 26m book reviews and 300m ratings over the past year, the site reported in October. But for some authors, it has become a toxic work environment that can sink a book before it is even published

“It has a lot of influence because there are so many people now who are not in the New York ecosystem of publishing,” says Bethanne Patrick, a critic, author and podcaster. “Publishers and agents and authors and readers go to Goodreads to see what is everybody else looking at, what’s everyone else interested in? It has a tremendous amount of influence in the United States book world and reading world and probably more than some people wish it had.”

Goodreads allows users to review unpublished titles. Publishers frequently send advance copies to readers in exchange for online reviews that they hope will generate buzz. But in October, Goodreads acknowledged a need to protect the “authenticity” of ratings and reviews, encouraging users to report content or behaviour that breaches its guidelines.

Goodreads said: “Earlier this year, we launched the ability to temporarily limit submission of ratings and reviews on a book during times of unusual activity that violate our guidelines, including instances of ‘review bombing’. This kind of activity is not tolerated on Goodreads and it diminishes the community’s trust in people who participate.”

The platform has been involved in previous controversies over online comments. Last summer the author Elizabeth Gilbert postponed a historical novel set in Siberia after hundreds of users criticised the book, which had yet to be published, as insensitive amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The author Sarah Stusek appeared to take offence when a Goodreads user, Karleigh Kebartas, gave her debut novel Three Rivers four stars instead of five and commented that the “ending was kind of predictable, but other than that it was incredible”. Stusek berated Kebartas on TikTok, drawing widespread criticism and ultimately losing her publisher.or Bethany Baptiste, Molly X Chang, KM Enright, Thea Guanzon, Danielle L Jensen, Akure Phénix, RM Virtues and Frances White, it must have been brutal reading. All received scathing reviews on Goodreads, an online platform that reputedly has the power to make or break new authors.Corrain acknowledged using multiple pseudonyms to trash novels on Goodreads. She posted an apology on Instagram, attributing her actions in part to struggles with mental health and substance abuse.

Corrain’s own novel Crown of Starlight had been scheduled to come out next year through Del Rey, a science fiction and fantasy imprint of Penguin Random House. Both Del Rey and Corrain’s agent, Becca Podos, announced last week that they would no longer work with Corrain, who had a two-book deal.

Speaking from McLean, Virginia, Patrick comments: “She was lying, she was being deliberately cruel. This is not just crossing ethical boundaries. This is crossing the boundaries of healthy behaviour.”

Publications such as the Guardian, the New York Times and the Washington Post hold journalists and reviewers to professional standards, Patrick argues, whereas Goodreads lacks such oversight. “The interesting thing about this current problem – tied in to some of the ongoing long-running problems – is that it shows why Goodreads has a terrible reputation with critics and why people like me shy away from it.

“I don’t know anyone who spends a lot of time on Goodreads and I know that my other writer friends all actively try to stay away because no one wants to see some of the ugly stuff that people are putting up there. It seems very careless and mean spirited. There are also mean things on Amazon but there’s something about Goodreads over the past five to seven years that has burst out of its cage.”

When Patrick published a memoir, Life B: Overcoming Double Depression, earlier this year, she gave Goodreads a wide berth. She recalls: “My memoir is about mental illness and mental health and so I have done a lot of work and did a great job of keeping myself stable and healthy through my book launch. And part of keeping myself stable and healthy was staying away from Goodreads.

“But I know many people who do have six months of horrible anxiety or depression or spinning out of control, just trying to be frantic getting every single thing right. Everything’s a tool and Goodreads, the way it is built and used now, can allow someone to use it in a very unhealthy way. That’s why I think it would be a great idea for there to be more oversight of the platform.”

The founders of Goodreads did not come from a background of literary criticism. The site was launched in 2007 by Otis Chandler, a computer programmer, and Elizabeth Khuri, assistant style editor for the Los Angeles Times’s Sunday magazine (the couple married in 2008). Goodreads was bought by Amazon in 2013 and now claims to be the world’s biggest site for readers and book recommendations.

But as in many other corners of the web, the removal of gatekeepers is both liberating and frightening, promising the wisdom of crowds but delivering the wild west. Concerns about the manipulation of Goodreads, and its ability to end careers before they begin, have been growing.

Shelly Romero, a freelance editor and writer based in New York, points out that most of the debut authors whose books that Corrain disparaged on Goodreads were people of colour, who already have an uphill struggle to get their work published.

Romero, 29, says: “The lack of moderation opens up a door to the review bombing. Any review can go up, which in the grand scheme of things is great because you have all sorts of opinions, you see all these different viewpoints. But like with everything, the lack of this moderation allows it to be abused in a way that impacts Bipoc authors especially and also queer authors.”

She continues: “If it’s a queer author, they say this book is inappropriate because it talks about homosexuality and sex and it’s a middle grade book and so it’s not appropriate for a 12-year-old. Books by Black authors in particular seem to get targeted just for the sole fact that their authors are Black and their main characters are Black. They’re called political or woke or that they’re too grown up and it could very well just be like a normal fantasy story.

“These types of targeted campaigns on Goodreads do not give a majority of people within the industry a lot of causation to trust Goodreads or to even give a lot of weight to it. I’ve seen it called the necessary evil and I kind of agree, though we could probably steer away from it more.”

Goodreads denies that it is turning a blind eye to the challenges. It says in a statement: “Goodreads takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously. We have clear reviews and community guidelines, and we remove reviews and/or accounts that violate these guidelines.”

But the drumbeat of controversies and scandals could be taking a toll. Some in the publishing world detect that Goodreads’ influence is on the wane.

Courtney Maum, author of Before and After the Book Deal, says: “I’ve published five books traditionally and when I started there was, if not pressure, definitely a lot of energy from my publisher around getting solid reviews on Goodreads and making sure people were interacting on Goodreads giving away tons and tons of ARCs [advance review copies] and galleys on Goodreads.

“I thought, oh well, this is another sector of the publishing industry that I don’t understand. I joined it when my first book came out in 2013-14 and frankly didn’t find it a pleasant place to dwell. I also think aesthetically the platform is very unattractive and has kind of a Dell computer vibe when we’re living in an Apple universe.”

Speaking from Litchfield, Connecticut, Maum, 45, adds that she never read Goodreads reviews of her books. “It’s like an Armageddon energy there that is destructive and devoid of value. I can’t imagine that publishers going forward in 2024 are going to keep putting tons of stock into Goodreads because it’s got a lot of garbage in the room.

“In the last couple of years, because there’s been so many dumpster fires on Goodreads, it’s pretty evident now to publishers that this isn’t a platform that they can trust 100%. A lot of people that I know were suffering some serious abuse through Goodreads. Whether it was stalkers hellbent on ‘review bombing’ them at every turn or their nemeses – jilted ex-lovers, whatever – it was very easy for trolls to pan people on Goodreads.

“The agents and publishers up until maybe this year have put tremendous stock in it but authors for a very long time have been trying to get the word out that hey, this is not a safe place for us. We have no protection. It’s totally unhinged.”

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