The Weekly Lift - May 5, 2022

This week's selection of positive headlines and articles*:

Ukraine Crisis: They Refuse To Leave Kharkiv’s Worst-Hit Neighborhood. "We Believe In Our Victory"

The Los Angeles Times (US) reports that "at some point, all shelling sites look the same. There’s the jagged-edge crater with a spray-pattern of divots gouged out by shrapnel; the gap-toothed hole where ordnance punched through a wall; the scorched remains of automobiles that happened to be passing when a missile slammed into the road. You notice the dazed pedestrians, who barely believe they’re alive, looking at the corpses of the not-so-lucky, the blood pooling around them.

From the very first moments of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,?Kharkiv has been a target, its name almost at the top of the list of cities wronged in this war. Every day brings a fresh pummeling, more names and addresses in the growing litany of casualties and destruction. So far, more than 530 civilians have been killed and many more wounded, according to the United Nations. The municipality says some 2,100 buildings have been damaged.

But those terrible zoomed-out figures obscure a surprising close-up reality: namely, that the violence in this northeastern city is mostly localized, with some of the?heaviest bombardments in Europe?since World War II hitting one part of Kharkiv, a district called Saltivka, while just a few miles up the road people are out walking their dogs, lounging in the park or shopping.?

As long as you’re not in that district, you stand a reasonably good chance of having a relatively normal day. In other words, if Kharkiv is the target, Saltivka is the bull’s-eye.

Saltivka sits on Kharkiv’s northeast flank, the area closest to Russian troops deployed only a few miles away. Designed as a bedroom district, it housed anywhere from 500,000 to 800,000 people at its height, more than one-third of the city’s population.?

For those who remain, the constant back-and-forth between the Russian army and the Ukrainian artillery hidden among the brutalist Soviet-era high-rise towers has forced upon them a mostly subterranean existence, whose complications go well beyond?bedding down in a shelter. Everyday life — tasks such as cooking, showering — now resembles a macabre, never-ending camping trip that an artillery round could end at any moment.

“It’s very hard to live here, but where would I go?” said Natasha, a 62-year-old pensioner who only gave her first name for reasons of safety. Natasha, who has been living in the hard-hit neighborhood of Saltivka in Kharkiv, says that, after heavy shelling April 27, she has decided to leave.(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

She stood in a recessed corner outside her apartment building, wearing a dark gray coat and a white woolen cap and preparing lunch — rice and chicken — al fresco. A saucepan with no handle sat on the skeletal remains of an oven. A burning pile of wood she had culled from splintered window frames and shutters served in lieu of a gas flame.

For weeks there has been no water or electricity. Volunteers risk the shelling to deliver water bottles, food and power banks to charge up phones. Although she could sleep in the nearby subway station along with hundreds of others from the neighborhood, Natasha has preferred to stay at home.

“The buildings here are the newest and strongest in the city,” she said, pointing out the entrance to the basement. After another day of heavy shelling recently, however, she decided the time had come to pack up and go if possible.

Not so for 29-year-old Gennady Krasavtsev, a builder with the red eyes and alcohol-infused breath of a heavy drinker, standing outside a nearby residential tower whose front was entirely scorched. “The roughly 300 people still here —?they're going nowwhere,” he said as he sauntered back to a playground to watch a man silently stripping branches off a tree limb with a small ax. As for why he won’t move to a safer area just a mile away, he exhibits the fatalism common in Saltivka.?“Everywhere is dangerous. First they shoot here. Then they shoot the next square,” he said. “It’s all the same.”

Others had quit their homes but not the neighborhood. The last stop on Kharkiv’s northeastern metro line, Heroiv Pratsi, now houses about 800 people on the edge of Saltivka. Within its bowels, day and night blend together. A few people venture up periodically for a smoke, or to feed chunks of stale bread to pigeons by the station entrance, but they rush back inside the moment shelling resumes.

Sleeping arrangements are improvisatory and cover every spare space near the turnstiles, stairs, platforms and subway carriages. Some try for a level of privacy and bring tents, or set up bunkbeds with covers draped over them, or fashion a cove in a subway carriage. There are fledgling attempts at creating a home: a few Lego and toys arrayed on a carriage window frame, a stuffed animal among flower-patterned pillows.?

Then there are cats, such as Simba and Marek, who prowled around Katya Talpa, a 35-year-old sales agent, occasionally scratching a piece of cardboard she had brought for that purpose.

She and her husband, Yura, 42, a builder, lived nearby, and their apartment — so far — was still in good condition. But the shelling was too intense, and they’ve been sleeping in the subway?since the invasion began.

“We didn’t think we’d be here so long. But we’ll leave [eventually]. We believe in our victory,” Talpa said. Up by the ticket concourse, 36-year-old Vladimir Kravitz gave a que-sera-sera smile when asked about his home. “Eight times the building was hit, but my apartment is fine,” he said. So dangerous is his block that he doesn’t try to visit it. Instead, he seemed fully at ease with life in the metro, sitting with a gaggle of friends and eating helpings of chicken, kasha, soup and pickled shredded carrot.

The people here are well-served, with volunteers delivering freshly cooked food three times a day from less-affected parts of Kharkiv, which have become staging grounds?for a massive relief effort.

Alongside a highway approaching Kharkiv, around a half-constructed compound, Pastor Ilya Gerasim of the Holy Trinity Church oversees an aid operation that on that day was feeding upwards of 2,000 people. “They’re afraid, depressed, desperate,” Gerasim said. “And we understand it’s our duty to help them. And preach the Gospel.”

Inside the compound, volunteers prepared bags of rice, kasha, fruit and cleaning products in an assembly line and handed them out to waiting recipients, some of whom began standing in line at 4 a.m.

Gerasim swung into action Feb. 24, amid the shock of a war he never expected would happen. He fielded calls from parishioners and fellow believers in Romania and elsewhere in the world seeking to help. “We prayed, and I could see those people who know and need to do the job. I had a good team, so we prepared units for medicine, packaging, food and delivery,” Gerasim said.

Soon they were feeding well over 2,000 people three times a week. Since the beginning of the war, they’ve delivered tens of thousands of food packages, dispatched volunteers to cook meals in Saltivka (chefs wore flak jackets) and evacuated 11,000 people.

Another outfit is the World Central Kitchen, an aid group headed by?Spanish celebrity Jose Andres?that works in 30 Ukrainian cities. In Kharkiv, its headquarters are a bar, where Roxana “Roxy” Pavlenko, 44, manages a constantly shifting menu of dishes along with a cadre of cooks. Earlier in April, a shell landed one afternoon near the bar, injuring four of the staff, according to World Central Kitchen CEO Nate Mook. Everyone still wanted to continue working there.

Among the volunteers bringing meals to war-blighted areas are Roman Knaziev, a 33-year-old physics doctoral graduate, and Anastasia Dolhoshapko, 28, who works as a travel agent; together they form a sort of Batman and Batgirl of meal-delivery assistance.

Physicist Roman Knaziev delivers food and medicine in dangerous areas of Kharkiv, Ukraine.(Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)

One relatively quiet afternoon — shelling had eased right after Easter — Knaziev and Dolhoshapko ferried food and medicine around the city center. Some districts here showed battle scars caused by cruise missiles, their explosive strength capable of shearing the facade off an entire building, exposing the rooms inside like a life-size dollhouse. But Knaziev proudly pointed out the area’s relatively pristine condition under the circumstances, with municipal workers landscaping a public park, collecting detritus in a truck or fixing a light damaged in the blast.

“We lost electricity here for one or two days, and that’s because the city workers repair everything, even under fire,” he said. Such repairs wouldn’t have been done so quickly before the war, Dolhoshapko said. But the crucible-like conditions had left in Kharkiv only those who wanted to do something, to help.

Besides, she added, the shelling stopped registering for most people. “The other day a rocket struck our neighbor’s garden and we had no idea until he told us,” she said, smiling. “We wouldn’t have noticed even if it hit our garden. We’re too busy.”

Many people in Kharkiv have become?unwilling experts on ordnance, like Lena Asachya, 59, and her husband, Oleh, 58, who live in Piatykhatky, a northern neighborhood also near the front line. “I can tell the difference between tanks, artillery, Grad [rocket launchers]. We’re all experts here,” Asachya said, as Knaziev and Dolhoshapko lugged boxes of supplies to her building’s backyard, where her husband was boiling water.

Asachya has become the caretaker for the abandoned pets on the block, feeding an assortment of cats, dogs and other animals that congregated in front of her when she fished out pet food from one of the boxes. A loud boom interrupted the conversation. Nobody flinched, not even the animals. “We know from the sound where it’s going. That’s not close,” she said.

It isn’t just the animals that make her and Oleh stay. A few dozen other people continue to live on their block, and they all support each other. Oleh, who worked as a chef, is in charge of fashioning a proper meal from the donated goods. Despite the danger, Lena and Oleg rarely sleep in the basement.

“We have kind of a community here,” she said. “I’m worried, of course. But it’s my home.”

Global Health: Senegal’s Viral Code Crackers Brave Mobs And Gunmen To Stay Ahead Of Deadly Diseases

The Telegraph (UK) reports that "the young Senegalese doctor carefully packed a suitcase full of genetic equipment and prepared for the toughest assignment of his life.

The next morning he traded the sunbaked western edge of Africa for the dense rainforest of eastern Congo. The rolling hills of North Kivu, though spectacularly beautiful, are known for being one of the most dangerous places on Earth.

It was August 2018 and the Ebola virus was?ripping through remote communities like a forest fire. Bandits and jihadists roamed the land as emergency response teams desperately tried to control a hemorrhagic fever that left children bleeding from their eyes.

When Dr Moussa Moise Diagne arrived he set up a white box in a tiny bush lab. It looked like a printer designed by Apple in California, but it was powerful enough to crack the deadly pathogen’s genetic code like a walnut.

“I was there to genetically contact trace the Ebola samples in real-time,” he says. “If you know what to do, you can genetically track each cluster of infections so that the Congolese know what is happening. That way they know how different clusters of infections are connected to each other. It's absolutely critical information.”

While few in the anglophone world have heard of the Institut Pasteur in Dakar, Senegal’s capital, their exploits are well known in scientific circles across the southern hemisphere. Researchers tucked behind the Institut’s 1930s art-deco facade in downtown Dakar have been plugging away at neglected health crises for almost a century, breaking a scientific pathway for the rest of Africa.

Much like the Cuban doctors who rushed to help Italy in its hour of need at the beginning of the pandemic, the Institut sends teams of doctors everywhere from Guinea and Angola to Brazil and Mexico to help local doctors fight epidemics.

“Our mission is very simple. We have to focus on doing the best research possible to inform public responses to health crises,” Dr Amadou Sall, the Institut’s chief, says in his utilitarian office.

Dr Moussa Diagne had spent almost a decade at universities like Harvard and MIT, mastering the science of decoding deadly pathogens’ DNA. Now he was in a region where gunmen and mobs of locals, fearful of the outsiders dressed like spacemen in protective equipment, regularly?attacked the health workers who came to take away their Ebola-infected dead.

One day, a Médecins Sans Frontières camp just 100m away from his small lab was destroyed by a mob. “It was very frightening but we had to carry on trying to sequence our samples,” says Dr Moussa Diagne. “We heard about World Health Organization staff being shot. It was incredibly scary. But ever since I was studying, we have had our credo – we need to be here for our people. That’s why I didn’t hesitate. We have to concentrate on doing our job.”

But emergency response is just one part of the Institut’s work fighting nasty diseases. Take yellow fever, which leaves patients’ skin a pallid, jaundiced yellow and killed millions during the 19th and 20th centuries. Now, the disease has largely slipped from our memories.

This is partly because scientists at the Institut Pasteur de Dakar developed an effective vaccine, first by injecting the pathogen into?mice brains and later by breeding it in sterilised chicken eggs. Today, they are one of only four places on earth to still produce the shot, keeping a watchful eye in case the sleeping epidemic rears its head again.

The Institut Pasteur also jumped to action when the Covid-19 emerged, shifting its focus to pandemic response. Suddenly Senegal was on the frontline, along with Africa’s most industrialised nation South Africa, frantically helping dozens of other countries in the region prepare for the virus.

The Institut trained more than two dozen African countries to identify the virus and within weeks they had developed a $1 rapid Covid-19 test.?

Today they are genetically sequencing Covid-19 samples for more than a dozen regional governments who do not have the know-how or technology to do it themselves, checking to see if a more dangerous variant emerges that could derail the world’s recovery.

They also sequence other viral samples from about 40 African countries as part of an effort to identify ‘Disease-X’, an as-yet-unknown pathogen that could trigger the next potential pandemic.

“There are not many institutions like the Institut Pasteur de Dakar,” says Joe Fitchett, a British-Senegalese doctor and senior adviser on biotechnology at the centre.

“We need to build more institutions like this. The talent here is really very high. Many members of our team could have worked in other countries. But they came back to Senegal because of a willingness to contribute to the new sector being built here.

“If we can develop capabilities here that are equal or better than elsewhere, you can detect new pathogens here, rather than waiting for it to spread,” Dr Fitchett adds. “New diseases can emerge from anywhere. So should solutions to control them. If we don’t do it, who does?”

The pandemic has been a strong wake-up call for many African politicians and scientists, who were shocked by their countries’ near-complete dependence on imported medical supplies and at how richer nations closed ranks to look after their own.

“I don't want to blame any government that wants to protect its own citizens. But despite all the political speech, I think that the lack of international solidarity during Covid-19 has been obvious,” Dr Sall says as diplomatically as he can.

The Institut is working to make Africa less dependent on the rich world – one key front is vaccines. Africa already consumes about a quarter of the world’s annual vaccine supply. This percentage is set to rocket as Africa’s population doubles, to an estimated 2.5 billion people by 2050.

The Institut is working with the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi) to build a facility on the outskirts of Dakar that will produce some 300m vaccines a year and could be tailored to fight any future outbreak in Africa.

Another division of the organisation, called diaTROPIX, is using the simple technology used in lateral flow tests to develop quick and accurate tests for diseases like meningitis, dengue fever, rubella and Marburg.

“Every time we go on deployments, we see that people are really struggling to diagnose diseases,” says Dr Cheikh Diagne who heads diaTROPIX.

“The diagnostics they use are very expensive and imported from Western countries. You often need clean water and have to be very well trained to use them, which makes them very difficult to use if you’re in the middle of nowhere.”

The ability to diagnose a disease almost instantly and cheaply on-site with minimal training using the same technology as a common pregnancy test has the potential to revolutionise emergency response.

Because many of these tropical diseases are not big money makers for international pharmaceutical and biomedical companies, simple solutions like these have been left on the sidelines, says Dr Cheikh Diagne.

Several members of the Institut Pasteur de Dakar also told?The Telegraphthat they regularly faced prejudice when trying to secure medical supplies for their work from UK or European suppliers. They added that they had evidence of several companies quoting prices that were 50 to 100 per cent higher than the same companies were quoting European organisations. “I am not sure why they do this. Maybe it's because they see Africa and automatically do not trust us to pay?” says one doctor.

“Rather than spending time sitting here criticising the global system, let's make sure that what happened during Covid-19 never happens again. Let's make sure we can take care of our people,” adds Dr Sall. “It's really important to have local ability in Africa – to develop our own ecosystem. We should not be reliant on anyone.”

Environment: Amazon Tribes Turn The Tables On Intruders With Social Media

The Los Angeles Times (US) also reports that "it was dusk on April 14 when Francisco Kuruaya heard a boat approaching along the river near his village in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. He assumed it was the regular delivery boat, bringing gasoline for generators and outboard motors to remote settlements like his. Instead, what Kuruaya found was a barge dredging his people’s pristine river in search of gold.?

Kuruaya had never seen a dredge operating in this area of the Xipaia people’s territory, let alone one so massive that it resembled a floating factory.

Kuruaya, 47, motored out to the barge, boarded it and confronted the gold miners. They responded in harsh voices, and he retreated for fear they were armed. But so was he — with a phone, the first he’d ever had. Back in his village, Karimaa, his son Thaylewa Xipaia forwarded photos of the mining boat to the tribe’s WhatsApp chat groups.

“Guys, this is urgent!” he said to fellow tribe members in an audio message the Associated Press has reviewed. “There’s a barge here at Pigeons Island. It’s huge, and it’s destroying the whole island. My dad just went there, and they almost took his phone.”

Several days’ voyage away, in the nearest city, Altamira, Kuruaya’s daugher Juma Xipaia received the frantic messages. She recorded her own video, with choked voice and watery eyes, warning that armed conflict was imminent — then uploaded it to social media. In a matter of hours, word was out to the world.

The episode illustrates the advance of the internet into remote rainforest areas that, until recently, had no means of quickly sharing visual evidence of environmental crime. A fast-expanding network of antennae is empowering Indigenous groups to use phones, video cameras and social media to galvanize the public and pressure authorities to respond swiftly to threats from gold miners, landgrabbers and loggers.?

Until now, Indigenous communities in Brazil have relied on radio to transmit their distress calls. Environmental and Indigenous rights groups then relayed these to the media and the public. But the nonprofits have been maligned by far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who?advocates legalizing mining and land leasing in protected Indigenous territories.?He has castigated the organization as unreliable actors, out of touch with Indigenous people’s desires and on the payroll of global environmental do-gooders.

Video and photos coming directly from Indigenous people are harder to dismiss, and this is forcing authorities, as well as the public, to reckon with the reality on the ground.?

“When used properly, technology helps a lot in real-time monitoring and denouncing,” said Nara Baré, head of the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon, in a telephone interview. “The external pressure to make the federal government act in the Xipaia territory was very important. Technology has been the main tool for that.”

Connectivity is enabling whistleblowing beyond social media. Brazil’s federal prosecutor’s office has set up a website to register reported crimes and receive uploaded visual material. Previously, people in remote communities had to make the long, expensive trip to the nearest city that has a federal prosecutor’s office.

Xipaia territory is part of a pristine rainforest area known as Terra do Meio (Middle Earth) that is dotted with dozens of Indigenous and traditional river communities. Internet connection there was rare until mid-2020, when a group of nonprofits, including Health in Harmony and the Socio-Environmental Institute, financed the installation of 17 antennae throughout the vast region.

Priority was given to communities with either health centers or market hubs for the production and sale of forest products, such as Brazil nuts. The signal can be painfully slow, especially on rainy days, yet it has connected people who were previously off the grid and is enough for photos and videos to trickle out of the forest.?

“The strategy was to improve communication and avoid unnecessary trips to the city,” said Marcelo Salazar, Health in Harmony’s Brazil program coordinator. “The internet makes it easier for health, education and forest economy issues.” An added benefit, he said, was fighting environmental crime.

Four out of five Xipaia communities are now connected. Karimaa, the village where the barge was first spotted, has had internet since July 2020. Just three days after its installation, when a teenager injured his head, a city doctor was able to assess the boy’s condition using photos sent over WhatsApp; this avoided a costly, complicated medevac during the COVID-19 pandemic.?

But the case of the mining dredge marked the first time the Xipaia used the internet to protect their territory. In addition to sounding the alarm, four villages used WhatsApp to quickly organize a party of warriors to confront the miners. Painted with urucum, a local fruit that produces red ink, and armed with bows, arrows and hunting rifles, they crammed into a small boat, according to Juma Xipaia. But by the time they reached the location where the barge had been, it was gone.?

Some 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) to the west, in the Amazonian state of Rondonia, internet access enabled the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau people to take classes in photography and video online so they could chronicle deforestation by landgrabbers. The three-day training session in 2020 was held via Zoom.

That effort produced the documentary “The Territory,” which won awards at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival and others. Throughout the film’s production, American director Alex Pritz relied on WhatsApp to communicate with his newly trained camera operators.?

Tanga?i Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau is a teacher-turned-cameraman who traveled to the Danish festival and later spoke with the AP via WhatsApp from his remote village. He said the film is changing people’s perception of Brazil’s indigenous people.?

“In Copenhagen ... I received many questions. They knew about Brazil’s natural wonders but didn’t know about Indigenous peoples who fight for their territories.”?

Elsewhere in the Amazon, the internet has yet to arrive. So when illegal gold miners killed two Yanomami tribe members in June 2020, news of the crime?took two weeks to arrive to the rest of the world due to the area's remoteness. To avoid a repeat of that situation, Yanomami organizations have been seeking better connectivity. After the Palimiu village along the Uraricoera River?suffered a series of attacks?by miners in May 2021, the Yanomami managed to install an antenna there. Since then, the violence has eased.

Bolsonaro’s repeated promises to legalize mining and other activities on Indigenous lands have fueled invasions of territories, which are often islands of forest amid sprawling ranches. Indigenous and environmental groups estimate that there are 20,000 illegal miners in Yanomami territory, which is roughly the size of Portugal. Bolsonaro’s government claims there are 3,500.

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon surged 76% in 2021 compared with 2018, the year before Bolsonaro took office, according to official data from Brazil’s space agency, which uses satellites to monitor forest loss.?

Most internet connections in the Amazon remain slow, even in midsize cities. That may soon change. Last November, Brazilian Communications Minister Fábio Faria held a meeting with billionaire Elon Musk to discuss a partnership to improve connectivity in rural areas of the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

The ministry, however, says the talks have not evolved. Musk’s company SpaceX did not respond to emailed requests for comment.?

Some worry that Indigenous groups like the Xipaia won’t be the only beneficiaries of greater internet penetration in the Amazon region. Illegal miners often coopt Indigenous leaders, communicating surreptitiously on messaging apps. The conversations, sometimes aided by clandestine networks, can enable miners to hide heavy machinery or tip them off to impending raids by authorities, allowing them to flee.

In Roraima state, where most of the Yanomami territory lies, the AP contacted one internet provider that offers Wi-Fi to an illegal gold mine for $2,600, plus $690 per month. Clandestine small craft fly the equipment in for installation. “It’s a double-edged sword,” Health in Harmony’s Salazar said of increased connectivity.?

But for Juma Xipaia, the connection means protection and visibility for her people. After she posted her tearful video, it was picked up by local and international media. Within two days, an airborne operation involving the Federal Police of Brazil, National Guard and environmental agencies swooped in. They located the dredge hidden behind vegetation on the banks of the Iriri River, with seven miners aboard.?

In a country where environmental crime in the Amazon usually goes unchecked, the speedy, successful response underscored the power of Indigenous networks. “After making a lot of calls for help, I decided to do the video. Then it worked. The telephone didn’t stop ringing,” Juma Xipaia said by phone. “It was very fast after the video.”

Gender Development: Italy’s Highest Court Rules Children to Be Given Mother’s and Father’s Surnames

The New York Times (US) reports that "Italy’s top court ruled on Wednesday that children born in the country will be given their mother’s and father’s surnames at birth, declaring the automatic practice of only giving children their father’s surname “constitutionally illegitimate.”

Parents will be able to choose the order of surnames or decide to use only one, a statement on the ruling from Italy’s Constitutional Court read, citing principles of equality and the children’s interest. Except in certain circumstances, Italian families have been unable to give their children their mother’s surname alone.

“Both parents should be able to share the choice of a surname, which is a fundamental element for one’s personal identity,” the court wrote.

Compared with other European countries where both surnames can be used for children, like France, Germany and Spain, Italy has been slow in embracing the recognition of the mother’s family name.

“The Constitutional Court canceled the last patriarchal legacy in family law,” Cecilia D’Elia, a member of Parliament and a leader on women’s issues in the Democratic Party, wrote on Twitter. “The mother’s name will have the same dignity as the father’s, a sign of civilization.”

Giulia Crivellini of the leftist Radical Party echoed Ms. D’Elia’s comments, calling it a “historical day” for Italy. The court’s decision shed light on the issues that came with automatically giving children only their father’s surname.?

One of the two cases the court was reviewing was that of a family from the southern city of Potenza who had three children with different last names. Two of them carried their mother’s last name because they were initially not recognized by their father, but the youngest one, born after the couple had married, could not be given the same surname as her siblings.

“For them it was a matter of family identity,” Giampaolo Brienza, one of the family’s lawyers, said in a phone interview. “One of the eldest siblings is 14, she could not take a different surname all of a sudden.”

Parliament will now have to pass corresponding legislation that includes changes to succession law and outlines how the surnames will pass from generation to generation.

Since 2016, parents in Italy have been able to choose to keep both surnames on their children’s birth certificates and identity cards, but having only the mother’s surname was an option only for children of single mothers or in cases where fathers were unwilling to participate in the children’s lives. It was not a choice that mothers could make independently.

Chronicling the history of the naming practice?in a podcast that aired in February,?a judge from the Constitutional Court, Daria de Pretis, explained that the court has dealt with the issue since the 1980s and has often urged Parliament to draft new legislation in accordance with the changed sensibilities within Italian society and grant equal rights to both parents.

In Italy, wives used to take their husbands’ names and be solely responsible for children before the law. Though norms have since changed, the law automatically giving children their father’s surname has stayed, causing the European Court of Human Rights to?rebuke Italy's for discrimination."

Society: Eid-el-Fitr Again Celebrated In The White House

Le Monde (France) writes that "this is an essential date in the Muslim calendar. Eid-el-Fitr, or Eid festival, celebrates the breaking of Ramadan's fast. This is often the time to pray and spend time with loved ones.

In the "East Room",?Joe Biden received hundreds of people on Monday May 2nd. He promised, when he was running, that he would put the Eid festival back in place in the presidential residence, but in 2021 he was forced to organize a virtual celebration because of the health situation.

"Today, around the world, we see so many Muslims who have been targets of acts of violence. No one should discriminate, or be forced, forced, for religious reasons," said Joe Biden. "We know that there is still a lot of work to be done, abroad but also in the United States. Muslims make our nation stronger every day, even if they face serious challenges and threats from our society, such as targeted acts of violence, and Islamophobia. ?

Talib Shareef, imam of the Masjid Muhammad Mosque in Washington, said that "being received here is an important message sent to our nation and the world. Islam is a welcome component of our country, like all other beliefs. The most important establishment in our country is in line with the fundamental values of our nation, and the laws that protect the free exercise of religions".

All American presidents have held the annual Eid ceremonies since the implementation of this protocol under the Clinton administration at the end of the 20th?century, except Donald Trump (2017-2021). Instead, the latter published press releases, such as, in 2020, this one: "We hope that they?[Muslims]?find both comfort and strength thanks to the powers of prayer and faith."

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