Month: April 2019

Before Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, engulfed in flames on Monday, several heritage sites around the world have been either completely or partially destroyed by fires. Here are some examples.

Brazil’s National Museum 

Overnight Sept. 2-3, 2018, Brazil’s National Museum, north of Rio de Janeiro, was ravaged by a massive fire. 

Latin America’s largest natural history and anthropology museum held more than 20 million artifacts and 530,000 titles.

The museum was particularly reputed for the richness of its paleontology department with more than 26,000 fossils, including a dinosaur skeleton discovered in Brazil’s central Minas Gerais.

Several specimen of species that disappeared in the blaze included giant sloths and sabre-toothed tigers.

Venice opera house 

In 1996, Venice’s celebrated opera house La Fenice was gutted by fire.With its near-perfect acoustics, La Fenice, opened in 1792, was one of the most beautiful opera houses in the world and one of the most famous in the history of opera.

Two electricians were sentenced to six and seven years in prison on negligence charges.

It reopened in 2004.

Barcelona opera house 

In 1994, the Gran Teatre del Liceu, Barcelona’s world-famous opera house was destroyed by fire. 

One of Spain’s cultural jewels, the 150-year-old theater was gutted in a blaze in which only the foyer and the horseshoe arch over the auditorium were left standing. It has since been reconstructed.

Windsor Castle

A major fire at Windsor Castle, west of London, on Nov. 20, 1992, destroyed the northeastern part of the royal site, the queen’s weekend residence.

Nine of the rooms were left unrecognizable by the fire, which started in the former Chapel Royal when a lighting projector too close to a curtain started the blaze during routine maintenance work.

It took 250 firefighters working 15 hours and pumping more than 6.5 million liters (1.6 million gallons) of water to bring the blaze under control.

The Castle reopened to the public in 1997 after five years of restoration.

Bosnia’s National Library

Bosnia’s 19th century National Library was destroyed in the war-time siege of the city of Sarajevo, overnight on 25-26 Aug. 1992.

It had housed some two million books, old scripts, photographs and transcripts before it was shelled by Serb forces who kept Sarajevo under a three-and-a-half-year long siege.

Only some 10% of its resources were saved from the resulting fire.

Reconstruction works, part-financed by the European Union, began in 1996 and the new library was inaugurated in 2014.

Geneva’s Grand Theater

In 1951, the Grand Theater of Geneva in Switzerland, built in the 19th century, was devastated in a fire that began during the preparation for a performance of Richard Wagner’s “The Valkyrie.”

It reopened in 1962. 
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The submersible dropped from the ocean’s surface faster than I had expected. With a loud “psssssss” the air escaped from the ballast tanks and the small craft suddenly tilted forward.

Within seconds, aquanaut Robert Carmichael and I were enveloped by a vibrant shade of blue, watching streaks of sunlight pierce the water’s surface. Soon a large manta ray appeared from the darkness below, gently gliding toward our small craft before vanishing into the distance.

The dive took place off a coral atoll called St. Joseph in the outer islands of Seychelles on a mission to explore the Indian Ocean. This body of water is poorly studied and few scientists have ever ventured deeper than the maximum scuba depth of 100 feet.

For more than a month researchers from Nekton, a British-led scientific research charity, have been using submersibles to dive deep below the waves to document the ocean’s health.

We arrived at St. Joseph Island in the early hours of the morning, and this was the first submersible dive at the new site. The sea bed suddenly appeared beneath our craft, a landscape no one had ever seen before.

I quickly scribbled down in the mission report the depth and time at which we sighted the bottom: “165 feet, 1144 UTC.” Carmichael, a veteran of the sea, relayed the information to the surface via an underwater telephone. Its loud static noise would be a constant of our dive.

We moved across a seabed of rock and sand and scattered soft coral until a great darkness opened ahead. Carmichael lowered us over the side of an underwater cliff. Our target depth was 400 feet.

Oceans cover over two-thirds of the Earth’s surface but remain, for the most part, unexplored.

Their role in regulating our climate and the threats they face are underestimated by many people, so scientific missions are crucial to take stock of the health of underwater ecosystems.

Able to operate down to 1,000 feet, these manned submersibles give scientists a unique understanding of changes in habitats as sunlight diminishes through the different layers of ocean. We glided with the current as six cameras mounted around the craft recorded its journey. In the months to come, researchers at Oxford will comb through the footage frame by frame, noting each species encountered.

Suddenly a drop of cold water landed on my arm, triggering alarm. Water is best kept on the outside of a submersible. Carmichael quickly put me at ease: The difference in temperature between the water around us and our submersible had created a layer of condensation on the hatch. We quickly soaked it up with towels.

It was curiosity that drew Carmichael to the ocean. “I just wanted to know what was down here,” he said. “It’s stunning in so many ways.”

This curiosity has attracted mankind for centuries. “The human mind is naturally drawn to grandiose notions of supernatural beings, and the sea is the ideal medium for them,” wrote Jules Verne, author of “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” possibly the greatest submarine novel of all time, which opens with fears over a mysterious sea monster sinking ships and harvesting the lives of sailors.

Thirty years after reading the novel as a child, I’m sitting in a tiny glass bubble observing the underwater world like Captain Nemo on board the novel’s submarine, Nautilus. We are foreigners to this realm, objects of fascination for the reef shark that approaches us, as curious of us as we are of it.

Even in the 19th century, Verne feared the extinction of numerous species of marine life. The fears have been proven true. A WWF report found that marine vertebrate populations have declined by almost half since the 1970s.

Fishing is no longer the sole cause. Man-made pollution, global warming and the acidification of the oceans are new challenges.

As the oceans slowly soak up heat from the atmosphere, marine species will be affected in different ways. Some will adapt. Some will migrate to cooler waters. Others will disappear, leaving a gap in ecosystems that have existed for millennia.

“I came into the Indian Ocean hoping I’d see a giant Napoleon wrasse,” Carmichael said of one of the world’s largest reef fish. “Here we are, 35 days into the mission and I still haven’t seen one.”

Maybe we’re just not diving in the right places. Maybe the reality is bleaker.

As the surveys ended and the currents became too strong to fight, the surface vessel ordered our submersible to return to the surface.

With the lights off, we floated a few minutes in the semi-darkness before the sound of ballast tanks emptying marked our slow ascent. The dark blue water around us lightened.

“The oceans are all connected and important to the quality of life for all humans,” Carmichael said. “It’s worth protecting because the air we breathe and the food we eat and the oceans we swim in really do have a meaningful impact on everyone’s life.”

 
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Tiger Woods, one of the world’s best golfers, captured his fifth Masters championship Sunday, his 15th major professional victory after an 11-year drought from winning the sport’s biggest tournaments.

Woods shot a 2 under par 70 on a drizzly day at the Augusta National Golf Club in the southern U.S. state of Georgia to finish 13 under par for the tournament, a shot better than three other American golfers, Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka and Xander Schauffele.

Woods, with a big smile on his face, thrust both arms into the air as holed his final putt on the 18th green for a bogey. He hugged his mother, Kultida Woods, his two children, daughter Sam and son Charlie, and other well-wishers as he headed to the clubhouse to sign his scorecard.

At 43, Woods is the oldest Masters champion since Jack Nicklaus, who won the 1986 Masters at 46. The 79-year-old Nicklaus holds the record for most major golf championships with 18, with Woods now trailing the mark by three.

With Woods’ dearth of recent major championships, the Nicklaus mark appeared increasingly distant for the aging Woods. The last 11 years have marked a period of personal turmoil for Woods as he underwent several surgeries to repair back injuries that inhibited his performance or stopped him from playing at all. He also was divorced from his wife, Elin Nordegren, after a string of his highly publicized extramarital affairs.

Nicklaus tweeted his congratulations to Woods, saying, “A big ‘well done’ from me to @TigerWoods! I am so happy for him and for the game of golf. This is just fantastic!!!”

U.S. President Donald Trump, himself an avid golfer who has occasionally played with Woods, said on Twitter, “Congratulations to @TigerWoods., a truly Great Champion!”
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Forty red dresses hang outside of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, a short distance from the U.S. Capitol.

They’re strategically placed near trees and waterfalls alongside the Riverwalk located in the museum’s Native landscape.

They’re present 24 hours a day, in all weather, to draw attention to the plight of missing and murdered indigenous women who experience violence at a much higher rate than non-indigenous women.

On this day, they snap furiously in a wicked wind, commanding attention.

The powerful installation is the creative brainchild of visual artist Jaime Black, whose goal is to raise awareness about the high rate of violence against native women.

“What I do is I put up empty red dresses in public spaces so that people can connect to the absence of these women, but also to the power and presence of the women through the red dress,” she says.

The color red

Her choice of the color red was deliberate.

“It’s our sacred life blood, it’s where vitality comes from, and our energy, and our power as human beings, but it’s also an allusion to the violence and the loss of that sacred life blood through violence,” she says.

Paying homage

On this freezing day outside the museum, Black honors the women the dresses represent — with a special performance.

As a Native American elder beats on a drum, the artist, barefoot and all in black except for a red silk scarf around her neck, kneels and rubs clay on the ground near the entrance to the museum. It’s been raining hard all morning. But it stops as Black starts her performance.

Spectators gather round as she clutches her pot of clay and walks slowly toward the dresses. She winds her way around the ledge of a curved pool and wades into the cool water, smearing some of the dresses with the mudlike substance.

“I really wanted to use my talents and my gifts to further the voices of a lot of people who are silenced,” she says, “and indigenous women are really facing this epidemic of silence.”

While Black’s work has focused mostly on Canadian women so far, she’s brought her project to the U.S. for the first time, to address an issue that spans the entire Western hemisphere.

REDress project

She calls her installation “The REDress Project,” or “The re-dress project.”

“Redress is a word that means to put right a wrong, and indigenous women have been facing injustice in North America for hundreds of years,” she says. “Ever since settlers came to North America, there’s been a violent relationship between settlers and indigenous people and I feel like that violent relationship carries on still today.”

She calls that systemic discrimination, The Colonial Project.

“The Colonial Project is basically interested in erasing certain voices in favor of a certain system,” she explains. “So the legal frameworks, the political frameworks, these things were built by non-indigenous people to silence indigenous people, and so all of these systems have created a space where indigenous women are erased.”

But more and more Native women are refusing to be silenced and are becoming proactive, leading movements, participating in protests and petitioning their governments for more recognition.

“I think in these ways and these movements, like Standing Rock and Idle No More movement, we see the strength of indigenous women to really maintain culture in the face of such colonial violence,” Black says.

Hope for change

Black — and other supporters, including Machel Monenerkit, deputy director of the museum — are also encouraged by the presence of two Native American women in Congress now; Debra Anne Haaland, serving as the U.S. Representative for New Mexico’s 1st congressional district, and Sharice Lynnette Davids, serving as the U.S. Representative for Kansas’s 3rd congressional district.

“I think the 2019 Congress for women was exceptional in the numbers that we now have in Congress, but for Native people having two indigenous women represent Kansas and New Mexico is obviously something we’ve not seen before, and hopefully we’ll be able to bring attention to Native issues,” Monenerkit says.

In the meantime, Black hopes the red dresses, all of which are donated, will have an impact on all who get to see them.

“What I think that the artwork and creativity can really do is really hit people in the heart, “she says. “People who walk by those dresses … they can’t unsee that. That’s going to sit in their memory for a very long time, and I think it has a really emotional impact on people even before they know what the dresses are even there for.”
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Forty red dresses hang outside of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. They’re present 24 hours a day, in all weather, to draw attention to the plight of missing and murdered indigenous women who experience violence at a much higher rate than non-indigenous women. The dresses are part of an exhibit being presented in the U.S. for the first time. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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